With newsgroups, IRC, and the myriad "Linux help" sites that have been popping up all over the place, Linux has, at least in my experience, much more support than Windows.
For someone like you or me with time to spend, yes, I agree. Everything's out there, and usually of high quality. But, you've got to track it down. Compared with calling a free phone number or surfing over to support.microsoft.com, I think there is still a big issue which the Linux community hasn't grasped, and which the open-source model will find it much more difficult to tackle than the corporate one.
This article is rather misleading, He doesn't actually say that Windows 2000 is playing catchup with Linux as a whole. He says that in certain areas (specifically security and BSOD) Windows is trying to catch up. I'm sure there are areas in which each is trying to catch up with the other.
At the risk of stating the obvious, employing Torvalds was the best move Transmeta could have made. How many millions must he be worth to them in free advertising, before they even have a product?
I have to be careful here, because I work in the next building to him!
But I wonder why people feel it's useful to ask Prof. Hawking these type of questions. Of course he's phenomenally intelligent. But he's a theoretical physicist. Are his opinions on space travel, genetic engineering etc. really of more worth than any other highly intelligent non-expert's?
No, I fear that people only ask him because he's a celebrity. And I fear that he's mainly a celebrity because of his illness. But that's a whole nother rant...
Whenever a legal question comes up on slashdot, I see most posts arguing what should or should not happen in this particular case. Very few posters seem to want to get to grips with what the law actually says.
Of course, there is a place for arguing about whether a particular law is good or bad. But I see too many people who don't even realise there's a question about what the law actually is, and who seem to want to argue about what should happen on a case-by-case basis, with no concept of the overall structure of the law.
<gripe> Although judging by the leaflet every home in the country got sent, they may be more into the business of reassurance than information. Choice extract from that leaflet (paraphrased from memory): Q. Will nuclear weapons go off because of the Y2K bug? A. Don't worry! All of the UK's nuclear missiles have been tested and found to be safe. Phew. </gripe>
Why is the Y2K problem known as the millennium bug? Leaving aside the issue of when the millennium begins, it's still only a centenary bug!
It's to do with the second digit of the year changing, not the first. It would only have been a millennium bug if programmers had used the last three digits to represent the year!
They said Corel didn't come with much software. But as it's based on Debian, can't you just apt-get everything you ever want? How do they handle getting new software after installation?
The release history seems to suck, but isnt that fixed by using something like apt to update all of your packages?
To some extent. In theory one ought to be able to upgrade one package at a time. But there's a particular problem at the moment as stable uses libc 2.0.7 but the packages in unstable use libc 2.1, and so won't run on a "stable" system.
Kudos to their webmaster for taking the trouble to write his configuration down. It's great that someone is prepared to share his experience with the world in this way.
There are many packages and they are getting more and more. ("What? There is a new window manager? - Package it!") - I don't think this is the responsibility of a distribution.
A distribution should be the base system to run linux. Every more advanced system should be installed by the unix administrator.
I strongly disagree with this. To me the joy of Debian is that any program I want is already available, correctly configured for my system, and I don't have to do any more than apt-get install package_name to install it.
To my mind, the main problem that Debian has to sort out is its release cycle. It's one thing to have a well-tested distribution by the time it's released, but it's going too far to have packages a year or more out of date still in the current release. What steps are being taken to address this? Or is there an expectation that everyone is happy to use unstable?
I'm a bit confused about some issues. Maybe someone can set me straight.
How much difference will it make which kernel is used? (I mean technical, not licencing, issues). How much variation is there in the performance of different kernels? Is it noticeable in daily usage?
Also, how different are the kernels that the various *BSD's use? For example, OpenBSD has a reputation for being very secure. Is that due to kernel design, or more to the way the whole distribution and its packages are configured on top of that?
This sounds like a load of FUD to me. In fact the article just about admits as much. As it says at the end (and keeps emphasising in other words all the way through)
"So, in theory, there may be a problem. In reality, nothing to get agitated about, at least not yet."
So they know there isn't a problem, but they wanted to write a story with a new angle on the takeover anyway?
Slashdot Mirror
This article is rather misleading, He doesn't actually say that Windows 2000 is playing catchup with Linux as a whole. He says that in certain areas (specifically security and BSOD) Windows is trying to catch up. I'm sure there are areas in which each is trying to catch up with the other.
At the risk of stating the obvious, employing Torvalds was the best move Transmeta could have made. How many millions must he be worth to them in free advertising, before they even have a product?
I have to be careful here, because I work in the next building to him!
But I wonder why people feel it's useful to ask Prof. Hawking these type of questions. Of course he's phenomenally intelligent. But he's a theoretical physicist. Are his opinions on space travel, genetic engineering etc. really of more worth than any other highly intelligent non-expert's?
No, I fear that people only ask him because he's a celebrity. And I fear that he's mainly a celebrity because of his illness. But that's a whole nother rant...
Will one have to submit a portfolio of previous cracking work?
Of course, there is a place for arguing about whether a particular law is good or bad. But I see too many people who don't even realise there's a question about what the law actually is, and who seem to want to argue about what should happen on a case-by-case basis, with no concept of the overall structure of the law.
<gripe>
Although judging by the leaflet every home in the country got sent, they may be more into the business of reassurance than information. Choice extract from that leaflet (paraphrased from memory): Q. Will nuclear weapons go off because of the Y2K bug? A. Don't worry! All of the UK's nuclear missiles have been tested and found to be safe. Phew.
</gripe>
It's to do with the second digit of the year changing, not the first. It would only have been a millennium bug if programmers had used the last three digits to represent the year!
They said Corel didn't come with much software. But as it's based on Debian, can't you just apt-get everything you ever want? How do they handle getting new software after installation?
Kudos to their webmaster for taking the trouble to write his configuration down. It's great that someone is prepared to share his experience with the world in this way.
Give us a break. It's December 1st, not April 1st.
I strongly disagree with this. To me the joy of Debian is that any program I want is already available, correctly configured for my system, and I don't have to do any more than
apt-get install package_name
to install it.
To my mind, the main problem that Debian has to sort out is its release cycle. It's one thing to have a well-tested distribution by the time it's released, but it's going too far to have packages a year or more out of date still in the current release. What steps are being taken to address this? Or is there an expectation that everyone is happy to use unstable?
From the my-city's-better-than-your-city department:
No, no, Cambridge is the IT capital of Europe.
But I guess the real question is, does the mall have the right to do this under the terms of the tenants' leases?
Yeah, and freshman economics also assumes that all consumers behave rationally. Go figure.
I'm a bit confused about some issues. Maybe someone can set me straight.
How much difference will it make which kernel is used? (I mean technical, not licencing, issues). How much variation is there in the performance of different kernels? Is it noticeable in daily usage?
Also, how different are the kernels that the various *BSD's use? For example, OpenBSD has a reputation for being very secure. Is that due to kernel design, or more to the way the whole distribution and its packages are configured on top of that?
All of them... apart from the 2.
Surely if it were GPL, I wouldn't be allowed to quote even a sentence from it without making my work GPL as well.
The Ethnologue (which is the definitive reference on such matters) reports 148,530 speakers including 7,616 monolinguals out of 219,198 ethnic Navaho (1990).