First off, your Ubuntu experience is very strange. I've never had a machine suddenly decide mkinitrd isn't needed.
But ignoring that, I wasn't talking about dependency resolution. I was talking about RPM crapping all over its databases periodically, even to the point of refusing to rebuild them and needing a full reinstall. Something that continues to happen to me with the RPM-based distributions I have to use at work.
Oh, that and the truly horrible UI for RPM, that necessitates keeping a cheat sheet around for the bizarre incantations.
Combining "refined sensibilities" with "you prefer Arial" tends to provoke howls of derisive laughter, rather detracting from your otherwise sensible response.
It's more that Mandriva has something Ubuntu doesn't, something that drives people away. RPM-based distributions are not popular with users. That's because in spite of band-aids like Yum, the user experience for RPM still sucks.
Lots of people have been saying so for years, but the denial in the RPM camp is amazing.
It also seems that HD-DVD will be amenable to home movie makers, while Blu-ray won't. Given that Apple already has HD editing, it would make sense for them to have a way to burn the edited movie to an HD disc. If they can't support Blu-ray...
Right now, ReiserFS is unsupported by many distributions because it's legacy "maintenance only" code. JFS is also not supported by many distributions (e.g. Kubuntu), I don't know why. And XFS is problematic. I resorted to using ext3, which is just horrible from a performance point of view.
What I really wish is that we could have ZFS or Reiser4. However, those are unlikely for obvious reasons.
Lots of people have pointed out why this "solution" won't work, so I'll point out what the actual problem is.
Like spam, it's a problem of economics. Technical fixes will not work.
The core problem is that patent offices are paid when they issue patents. They are not paid when they deny patents. Therefore, it is in their interest to issue as many stupid patents as they can get away with.
In addition, even if the patent isn't totally stupid, looking for prior art is a cost center. The more time they spend looking for prior art, the less profit they make. So it's not in their interest to spend time checking the Internet for prior art, even if they recognized the Internet as a valid source of information.
Thirdly, people knowledgeable in computer science cost money, so they aren't employed by the patent office. Hence all the "obvious" patents.
Until the law is changed or the way the patent office is funded is changed, we'll be stuck with software patents.
Anything without government involvement is not censorship.
That may be your own weird little definition of the word, but if you check a reputable dictionary, you'll find that "censorship" does not require that the censoring be performed by a government entity.
Telemarketers wanted "privacy". They got it, by having the option to not send any caller ID. Result: nobody picks up the phone if there's no caller ID. So telemarketers started spoofing caller ID.
It's important to understand that "the community" by and large doesn't run Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SuSE Linux Enterprise (Server|Desktop), so Novell and RedHat license agreements simply don't affect them. Perhaps a RedHat agreement with Microsoft would have caused yet more ill will and sped up the decline of Fedora, but that's about it.
Now, what would really impact the community would be if Ubuntu signed a Microsoft deal. But fortunately, that's not gonna happen. And even if it did, we'd still have Debian.
And the problem with the NRA is that people say "Yeah! We should all have guns so that we can fight off tyranny!"
And then when innocent people are being sent to concentration camps, the president declares himself above the law, habeas corpus is suspended, free speech is corralled into "zones", and protestors are illegally rounded up, all these blowhard defenders of freedom sit around drinking beer and polishing their useless firearms.
It's kind of sad that a company who powers its hundreds of thousands of computers [redhat.com] in clusters with a trimmed down RedHat puts Linux second on the list of operating systems to support with its software.
Third. The Mac version of Google Desktop was released some time ago.
That's nothing to do with Linux, that's the ugly fonts his web browser was set up with when he took the screenshot. Google Desktop search results look fine on my system.
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Yeah, I mean it's not like you could write a 3D FPS in Java and get performance comparable to C, is it?
Try Super Paper Mario on the Wii.
First off, your Ubuntu experience is very strange. I've never had a machine suddenly decide mkinitrd isn't needed.
But ignoring that, I wasn't talking about dependency resolution. I was talking about RPM crapping all over its databases periodically, even to the point of refusing to rebuild them and needing a full reinstall. Something that continues to happen to me with the RPM-based distributions I have to use at work.
Oh, that and the truly horrible UI for RPM, that necessitates keeping a cheat sheet around for the bizarre incantations.
Yeah, but Ubuntu say they don't support apt-based dist-upgrades.
Maybe he'll start offering people a way to pay money for it? It seems odd that it's easier to request a free CD than to buy one.
Combining "refined sensibilities" with "you prefer Arial" tends to provoke howls of derisive laughter, rather detracting from your otherwise sensible response.
You won't like the answer, but it's in TFA.
It's more that Mandriva has something Ubuntu doesn't, something that drives people away. RPM-based distributions are not popular with users. That's because in spite of band-aids like Yum, the user experience for RPM still sucks.
Lots of people have been saying so for years, but the denial in the RPM camp is amazing.
Ah, but does it apply to movies burnt on Blu-ray discs? Just because you can burn data on a Blu-ray disc doesn't mean you can burn a movie on one.
It also seems that HD-DVD will be amenable to home movie makers, while Blu-ray won't. Given that Apple already has HD editing, it would make sense for them to have a way to burn the edited movie to an HD disc. If they can't support Blu-ray...
The problem is, it's a bit of a pain upgrading Kubuntu when the boot CD doesn't recognize any of your partitions because they're JFS.
A decent filesystem.
Right now, ReiserFS is unsupported by many distributions because it's legacy "maintenance only" code. JFS is also not supported by many distributions (e.g. Kubuntu), I don't know why. And XFS is problematic. I resorted to using ext3, which is just horrible from a performance point of view.
What I really wish is that we could have ZFS or Reiser4. However, those are unlikely for obvious reasons.
Oh, you should read about some of the crackpottery the US government has invested money in. Try The Men Who Stare At Goats by Jon Ronson.
Lots of people have pointed out why this "solution" won't work, so I'll point out what the actual problem is.
Like spam, it's a problem of economics. Technical fixes will not work.
The core problem is that patent offices are paid when they issue patents. They are not paid when they deny patents. Therefore, it is in their interest to issue as many stupid patents as they can get away with.
In addition, even if the patent isn't totally stupid, looking for prior art is a cost center. The more time they spend looking for prior art, the less profit they make. So it's not in their interest to spend time checking the Internet for prior art, even if they recognized the Internet as a valid source of information.
Thirdly, people knowledgeable in computer science cost money, so they aren't employed by the patent office. Hence all the "obvious" patents.
Until the law is changed or the way the patent office is funded is changed, we'll be stuck with software patents.
That may be your own weird little definition of the word, but if you check a reputable dictionary, you'll find that "censorship" does not require that the censoring be performed by a government entity.
Right, which is exactly the point.
Telemarketers wanted "privacy". They got it, by having the option to not send any caller ID. Result: nobody picks up the phone if there's no caller ID. So telemarketers started spoofing caller ID.
It's important to understand that "the community" by and large doesn't run Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SuSE Linux Enterprise (Server|Desktop), so Novell and RedHat license agreements simply don't affect them. Perhaps a RedHat agreement with Microsoft would have caused yet more ill will and sped up the decline of Fedora, but that's about it.
Now, what would really impact the community would be if Ubuntu signed a Microsoft deal. But fortunately, that's not gonna happen. And even if it did, we'd still have Debian.
And the problem with the NRA is that people say "Yeah! We should all have guns so that we can fight off tyranny!"
And then when innocent people are being sent to concentration camps, the president declares himself above the law, habeas corpus is suspended, free speech is corralled into "zones", and protestors are illegally rounded up, all these blowhard defenders of freedom sit around drinking beer and polishing their useless firearms.
Argument #4 is really weak. You can always not send caller ID if you want privacy.
Apple updated the MacBook Pro by switching to nVidia. ATI's Mac drivers are almost as horrible as their Linux drivers.
I'd prefer an open-source non-mono-infected search over either. Let us know when there's a KDE Xesam implementation packaged for Ubuntu, OK?
Third. The Mac version of Google Desktop was released some time ago.
That's nothing to do with Linux, that's the ugly fonts his web browser was set up with when he took the screenshot. Google Desktop search results look fine on my system.
He maintained fetchmail from 1996 to 2004, and... er... see for yourself.
Yeah, he loves those bondage-and-discipline programming languages. "Pascal me harder! Tell me I'm Wirthless!"
Yeah, surely ESR must have committed some crime we can get him locked away for...