I tried to suggest PDF as a portable, cross-platform alternative and they hadn't even heard of it.
I would hardly call PDF cross-platform when you can't even gets the specs of the PDF format so that it can easily be ported to new platforms. And if you think it is cross-platform, find me a search engine that can catalog both html and pdf documents that will run under any variant of unix.
The above suggestions are good, although I've found that it can be more then the vcr and stereo/amp that causes it. Get yourself one of those adaptors that allows you to plug 3 prong grounded plugs into a 2 prong non-grounded outlet and use that to disconnect the ground of every grounded appliance on that electrical outlet/circuit. When the hum goes away, you've found what's inserting the ground hum. You can then leave things that way without worrying too much about anything blowing (I know guys who did professional audio that used that trick, and actually did that with my roommate's amp because we had the exact same problem).
Do you happen to know why the courts ruled as they did? It doesn't seem to make any sense to me.
You can thank the large cable and broadcast lobby for that one. Basically they lobbied to keep a monopoly on TV and won a fairly large issue for the majority of people (Network TV). So for now, if you live where you can recieve a grade B signal (What a nightmare to determine. It's all subjective, but basically means an ok (some fuzz) picture) from a local station, you can't pick up the equivilent station from out of your market via satellite. Just to throw another way for them to cut off your service to locals, they also threw in the 90 day waiting period if you've had cable. But that one isn't ever checked anyway.
Of course, is all most likely unconstitutional (but IANAL) and won't stand up to a supreme court test (Stifling competition and all, when they've been promoting competition) but for now we just have to play the game and bend the rules whenever possible.
Who sued? The cable companies or the local networks that were getting screwed by the dish owners.
If I recall correctly, it was a group of broadcasters that got together to sue Primetime 24 (A company that supplies the networks to DirecTV, Dish Network, and the majority of C-band (large) dish owners with out of market networks) because they weren't being very strict with their checks, and continued to supply a lot of people they suposedly knew didn't qualify. Hopefully this will all be sorted out soon and the DTH providers will be able to compete on a level playing field without having extra BS due to network tv.
It's about time someone decided to ban AOL. Maybe if those of us in the US decided to ban them too, AOL would clean up their act. Ah well, there's always Usenet2.
Personally, I do not care too much about what they do for hunting terrorists, because I am not making bombs or selling illegal drugs in my spare time and I do not think that I would get caught for any illegal activities (although I can never be too sure about that).
When they took the 2nd amendment, I was quiet because I didn't own a gun.
When they took the 4th amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs.
When they took the 5th amendment, I was quiet because I was innocent.
Now they've taken the 1st amendment, and I can't say anything at all.
(With apologies to whoever wrote that that I didn't credit).
You should care how they hunt down terrorists, as those same tactics may be used against you some day. Remember 1984? Well, we may not be there yet, but slowly and surely we're heading there. For every law passed that takes freedom from us for doing something that hurts no one else, the hope of staying free dies a little more. Personally, if this type of thing keeps up (the Australian government doing this will encourage the US government to also) I'm going to gather a bunch of people together and we'll go find an island and start our own country.
Huh? As if satellite feeds (pay-TV programming) would not already be pirated... what makes anyone to think this would not be the case with movies, too?
As I said in my previous post, if they used an analog rather then digital signal, it would be very easy to guard against piracy. Videocipher scrambling was not broken until an engineer at General Instruments leaked information on how to descramble it. Analog, having an infinite range, is much harder to break then digital, where you have a fixed size. It's equivilent to the time difference between knowing a password is exactly 8 characters and a password is as few as 3 or as many as 8 characters.
DBS (DSS, EchoStar...) would be perfect for it. It has HDTV capability, MPEG-1 Transmisson and can handle Dolby 5.1. All is needed is a upgrade to Mpeg-2 (In the works), and massive encryption, and you would have a pretty reliable system for delivery.
The current DBS satellites would not be perfect for this. DirecTV's satellite still uses mpgeg1 and is currently full. Echosphere's satellite is using mpeg2 already, but they only have 21 transponders to work with instead of all 32 (News Corp (Fox) owns the other 10 transponders). That's why Echosphere bought slots over the pacific and atlantic that are useless for national broadcasting, but perfect for regional broadcasting. If Lucas was going to use satellite transmission, he'd be much better off using a standard C Band satellite and require all the theaters to use high quality professional equipment. Of course, this would mean 10ft+ solid fiberglass dishes at each theater that wanted to show Ep2+3. Still, it would be better quality then compressing it using mpeg2 (Remember: All compression introduces loss, the better compression schemes just introduce less), and you would have no need to worry about rain fade (I've seen consumer level c-band operate perfectly in rain that completly knocked out a DSS. Now apply this to professional level c-band equipment).
As to prevent people with dishes viewing it at home without paying, there are many video encryption schemes that can be used, many with lower video quality loss then mpeg2. I still don't get why people are so eager to switch to digital for high quality stuff when analog done correctly will always be better quality. The world isn't digitally rendered, so it makes sense that an analog picture of the world will look better then a digital picture of the world.
And since what constitutes a crime is so vague, it is next to impossible to defend themselves. They are essentially required to prove that they did not attempt to reduce the market share of their competitors in "unfair" ways.
Much in the same way anyone even accused of having drugs must prove they don't. In that particular section of criminal law, the burden of proof seems to be on the accused rather then the accusor. However, even if it is still a bad law, it must be enforced. Work to change bad laws, don't complain when they're used.
It does, but the non-linux world calls it NAT (Network Address Translation). Both fbsd and obsd have NAT capabilities, although I'm not sure how well it works as I haven't tried it yet. You can even get NAT for 95 and MacOS.
But of course, you probably tried quaking with a keyboard only.
I beg to differ there. I've always been a keyboard only player, never used a mouse. Sure, I can't aim as accuratly, but I move so fast you'll never hit me. But when I can rotate around you, while shooting my super nailgun and never missing, then you'll see the true benefit of the keyboard. All it takes is setting it up properly.....
Unless they outlaw anal sex, I won't be doing anything illegal in my house so I'm not worried.
When they took the second ammendemnt, I was quiet because I didn't own a gun. When they took the fourth ammendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs. When they took the fifth ammendment, I was quiet because I was innocent. Now they've taken the 1st ammendment, and I can't say anything at all.
/* Apologies if I've confused any part of the quote, I don't have a copy handy */
Mine brain has meditated on the spinning of the chao! It is hovering o'er the table where the Chiefs of Staff are now! Gathered in discussion of the dropping of The Bomb! Her Apple Corps is strong!
Grand (and gory) Old Discordja! Grand (and gory) Old Discordja! Grand (and gory) Old Discordja! Her Apple Corps is strong!
Yeah, that's what happened 90 some years ago with the automobile, in America at least.
But then again, look where we're at today. Does a day go by when you drive on the highway and don't see many people that have done stupid things on the road? Sure, cars are better and safer now, but is it any safer to drive on our roads then it was 50 years ago?
Try this, remove all GNU tools from your "Linux" system, maybe then you will give some credit to GNU for what it actually does.
Actually, that's exactly what the Daemon Linux project is setting out to do. Of course, the people working on it have a variety of reasons. Some are doing it because of RMS and how he forcibly corrects people in person (from accounts in this very forum). Others, like myself, have other reasons for working on the project. Personally, I prefer BSD tools and the way BSD generally does things, however the BSD kernels don't seem to incorporate support for newer devices as quickly as the Linux kernel does. Hence, a hybrid system where I can use the Linux Kernel with the BSD tools is in order. And frankly, trying to what most of the world calls Linux is tantamount to Eisner insisting that Disney Land doesn't give proper credit to the current person in charge of the company, and instead should be called Eisner Land. It's very unlikely it will happen.
Erh... No, it was actually named after Amerigo Vespucci, who didn't discover America, but (IIRC) funded Columbus:-))
Hmm, that's not how I remember learning it from my 5th grade history teacher. As I remember, Amerigo Vespucci was the one who figured out that it really was a seperate continent rather then the East side of Asia as originally thought, and he then named it after himself and convinced everyone else to call it America. Of course, that was several years ago, and although I'm a slight history buff, I'm much better at 19th and 20th centrury history then I am at 16th century history.
About cable TV, though, I was wondering exactly how much bandwidth my 70 or so channels are using in comparison to the total theoretical bandwidth of coaxial cable. I don't think much, considering Satellite services offer more channels but I am fairly certain a satilite only has ~1/10 the bandwidth. ..correct me if I am horrible wrong:).
That really depends on which type of satellite you're talking about. If you're talking about C-Band (The big dish, generally 7' or 10' center focused parabolic dishes) then you don't have much bandwidth at all. You have to move the dish from one satellite to another, and each satellite has 12 transponders * 2 polarities for a total of 24 uncompressed TV channels per satellite. The satellite itself usually has less then 50 watts of power. Using compression such as mpeg2 this number goes up by a factor of 10-12 (I'm a little fuzzy on this number).
Whereas if you're talking about DBS (The little dish, generally 18" off-center parabolic dishes) then you get a little more raw bandwidth. The satellite itself broadcasts at >= 250 watts of power, with 16 transponders * 2 polarities. The way they get some 200 channels on these beasts is by compressing everything. DirecTV/USSB uses mpeg1 while Dish Network uses mpeg2.
Getting back to the original point, I'm not sure how much b/w standard rg6 or rg59 coax has, but the DBS satellites themselves have roughly 32mb/s of bandwidth, making a single satellite useful only to mid-sized ISP's and those for whom running cable to would be more expensive then using satellite.
Incidentally, the way most cable companies do digital cable is by compressing several cable channels onto one channel, so you don't get the full picture quality you otherwise would have if you were watching the same channel on a c-band system.
The Amtrack station here in Sacramento has one of those fry machines too. I haven't tried em yet, but maybe the next time I head down to Berkeley I'll check it out. I suspect that there are probably Amtrack stations elsewhere with one of these machines.
But I would not run it in a production environment.
That's too bad. Your arguments aren't valid either. Let's go through and figure out why:
1) It lacks real package manager (ok, do slackware packages ever get updated after the distribution has been released or can I find "slackware packages" from freshmeat.net somewehere),
Well, there's pkgtool, which works quite well. It removes all files associated with the package, even tells you what files were removed via/var/log/packages so you can see if something got deleted that shouldn't have been (Maybe a shared file). But really, tar xvzf package.tar.gz;cd package;./configure;make;make install is not that hard, and gives you the chance to tweak things if needed (Ever use qmail with qpopper?)
And if you have no other option then to download a redhat or debian rpm, there's rpm2tgz, included with slackware 3.6, that converts an rpm package to a tgz package suitable for installation using installpkg or pkgtool.
2) 0% support (on Debian I am sure everything is up to date thanks to apt, on redhat there is at least an erratas webpage that lists fixes and updates)
Although by reading your message, it looks like you mean not support, but a way to see if everything's current. Well, you can just check the Changelog to see what he changed. You can find the changelog at ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/linux/slackware/ChangeLog.txt. Not only does that notify you of security updates, but general updates as well.
3) It cannot be upgraded without trashing your system (when it is a 30 minute process on other distributions)
Really? I guess that my having upgraded from 3.4->3.5->3.6 without ever formatting must be a halucination. You have two choices. 1- Just install over the top. 2- Use pkgtool to remove your packages first, then run the install program. Takes me only 30-40mins to upgrade my system.
4) Never up to date (glibc2 ?)
Up to date is a relative term. If by up to date you mean the latest cutting edge beta libs and programs that haven't been tested thouroughly yet, well, I guess you're right. But OTOH, if you mean the latest stable libs and programs that have been tested, you're wrong. Remember, glibc2.0 won't be around long, and glibc2.1 is still beta, and still unstable. It hurts the linux community when a company puts out a distro that contains buggy software, as that pulls the general public's view of linux down to that of Microsoft. Just another company shipping products with bugs to get it on the marketplace rather then excercising a little patience and releasing a quality product.
5) It is a nightmare to maintain compared to other distributions.
I don't know how you maintain a box, but when I was working for a midsize ISP (Midsize for the area, about 1300 dialups) we used Slackware on all our machines. Rarely were upgrades needed, and when they were, we simply configured it on one machine, tar'd up the dir, and copied it to the others. We even got fancy and wrote a script to untar it, make it, then make install it. No need to worry about having dependancies, and no need to fuss with someone's precompiled binary.
Fact of the matter is, when you're running in most corporate environments, control of the box is an issue. With Slackware I just install and go. The times I've tried to use redhat, I ended up having to install several key components by hand because the rpm's didn't use the compile options we needed. Although as someone said earlier, FreeBSD is also a good option (Although I personally prefer OpenBSD as Theo is a security god).
Here here! I've been using slackware since the linux kernel was at 1.2.8 (Found an old bootdisk I had made from my first install. It still boots, too!) and upgrading is not difficult or time consuming at all. As for what's open by default, no one should trust their distrobution to be secure. Any time I install a new box, I immediatly check inetd.conf and all the rc scripts so I know what's installed and what's not.
As for glibc2 vs. glibc1 (aka libc5 vs. libc6, it's all glibc), last I checked glibc still had numerous problems, and even with all the current packages getting it compiled was difficult at best. I know many people using various distros that had to use rescue disks because they decided to try glibc2. Volkerding should be praised for not jumping on the glibc2 bandwagon before the wheels are completly on.
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I tried to suggest PDF as a portable, cross-platform alternative and they hadn't even heard of it.
I would hardly call PDF cross-platform when you can't even gets the specs of the PDF format so that it can easily be ported to new platforms. And if you think it is cross-platform, find me a search engine that can catalog both html and pdf documents that will run under any variant of unix.
>Correct. The Mac was introduced in 1984. However Windows 3.0 wasn't introduced until like 1990. The first couple versions sucked pretty hard.
;)
the next couple, too
You mean it still doesn't suck?
The above suggestions are good, although I've found that it can be more then the vcr and stereo/amp that causes it. Get yourself one of those adaptors that allows you to plug 3 prong grounded plugs into a 2 prong non-grounded outlet and use that to disconnect the ground of every grounded appliance on that electrical outlet/circuit. When the hum goes away, you've found what's inserting the ground hum. You can then leave things that way without worrying too much about anything blowing (I know guys who did professional audio that used that trick, and actually did that with my roommate's amp because we had the exact same problem).
Do you happen to know why the courts ruled as they did? It doesn't seem to make any sense to me.
You can thank the large cable and broadcast lobby for that one. Basically they lobbied to keep a monopoly on TV and won a fairly large issue for the majority of people (Network TV). So for now, if you live where you can recieve a grade B signal (What a nightmare to determine. It's all subjective, but basically means an ok (some fuzz) picture) from a local station, you can't pick up the equivilent station from out of your market via satellite. Just to throw another way for them to cut off your service to locals, they also threw in the 90 day waiting period if you've had cable. But that one isn't ever checked anyway.
Of course, is all most likely unconstitutional (but IANAL) and won't stand up to a supreme court test (Stifling competition and all, when they've been promoting competition) but for now we just have to play the game and bend the rules whenever possible.
Who sued? The cable companies or the local networks that were getting screwed by the dish owners.
If I recall correctly, it was a group of broadcasters that got together to sue Primetime 24 (A company that supplies the networks to DirecTV, Dish Network, and the majority of C-band (large) dish owners with out of market networks) because they weren't being very strict with their checks, and continued to supply a lot of people they suposedly knew didn't qualify. Hopefully this will all be sorted out soon and the DTH providers will be able to compete on a level playing field without having extra BS due to network tv.
It's about time someone decided to ban AOL. Maybe if those of us in the US decided to ban them too, AOL would clean up their act. Ah well, there's always Usenet2.
Personally, I do not care too much about what they do for hunting terrorists, because I am not making bombs or selling illegal drugs in my spare time and I do not think that I would get caught for any illegal activities (although I can never be too sure about that).
When they took the 2nd amendment, I was quiet because I didn't own a gun.
When they took the 4th amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs.
When they took the 5th amendment, I was quiet because I was innocent.
Now they've taken the 1st amendment, and I can't say anything at all.
(With apologies to whoever wrote that that I didn't credit).
You should care how they hunt down terrorists, as those same tactics may be used against you some day. Remember 1984? Well, we may not be there yet, but slowly and surely we're heading there. For every law passed that takes freedom from us for doing something that hurts no one else, the hope of staying free dies a little more. Personally, if this type of thing keeps up (the Australian government doing this will encourage the US government to also) I'm going to gather a bunch of people together and we'll go find an island and start our own country.
Huh? As if satellite feeds (pay-TV programming) would not already be pirated...
what makes anyone to think this would not be the case with movies, too?
As I said in my previous post, if they used an analog rather then digital signal, it would be very easy to guard against piracy. Videocipher scrambling was not broken until an engineer at General Instruments leaked information on how to descramble it. Analog, having an infinite range, is much harder to break then digital, where you have a fixed size. It's equivilent to the time difference between knowing a password is exactly 8 characters and a password is as few as 3 or as many as 8 characters.
DBS (DSS, EchoStar...) would be perfect for it. It has HDTV capability, MPEG-1
Transmisson and can handle Dolby 5.1. All is needed is a upgrade to Mpeg-2 (In
the works), and massive encryption, and you would have a pretty reliable system
for delivery.
The current DBS satellites would not be perfect for this. DirecTV's satellite still uses mpgeg1 and is currently full. Echosphere's satellite is using mpeg2 already, but they only have 21 transponders to work with instead of all 32 (News Corp (Fox) owns the other 10 transponders). That's why Echosphere bought slots over the pacific and atlantic that are useless for national broadcasting, but perfect for regional broadcasting. If Lucas was going to use satellite transmission, he'd be much better off using a standard C Band satellite and require all the theaters to use high quality professional equipment. Of course, this would mean 10ft+ solid fiberglass dishes at each theater that wanted to show Ep2+3. Still, it would be better quality then compressing it using mpeg2 (Remember: All compression introduces loss, the better compression schemes just introduce less), and you would have no need to worry about rain fade (I've seen consumer level c-band operate perfectly in rain that completly knocked out a DSS. Now apply this to professional level c-band equipment).
As to prevent people with dishes viewing it at home without paying, there are many video encryption schemes that can be used, many with lower video quality loss then mpeg2. I still don't get why people are so eager to switch to digital for high quality stuff when analog done correctly will always be better quality. The world isn't digitally rendered, so it makes sense that an analog picture of the world will look better then a digital picture of the world.
And since what constitutes a crime is so vague, it is next to impossible to defend themselves. They are essentially required to prove that they did not attempt to reduce the market share of their competitors in "unfair" ways.
Much in the same way anyone even accused of having drugs must prove they don't. In that particular section of criminal law, the burden of proof seems to be on the accused rather then the accusor. However, even if it is still a bad law, it must be enforced. Work to change bad laws, don't complain when they're used.
I don't know if OpenBSD does ip-masq or not.
It does, but the non-linux world calls it NAT (Network Address Translation). Both fbsd and obsd have NAT capabilities, although I'm not sure how well it works as I haven't tried it yet. You can even get NAT for 95 and MacOS.
But of course, you probably tried quaking with a keyboard only.
I beg to differ there. I've always been a keyboard only player, never used a mouse. Sure, I can't aim as accuratly, but I move so fast you'll never hit me. But when I can rotate around you, while shooting my super nailgun and never missing, then you'll see the true benefit of the keyboard. All it takes is setting it up properly.....
When they took the second ammendemnt, I was quiet because I didn't own a gun.
When they took the fourth ammendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs.
When they took the fifth ammendment, I was quiet because I was innocent.
Now they've taken the 1st ammendment, and I can't say anything at all.
Mine brain has meditated on the spinning of the chao!
It is hovering o'er the table where the Chiefs of Staff are now!
Gathered in discussion of the dropping of The Bomb!
Her Apple Corps is strong!
Grand (and gory) Old Discordja!
Grand (and gory) Old Discordja!
Grand (and gory) Old Discordja!
Her Apple Corps is strong!
Yeah, that's what happened 90 some years ago with
the automobile, in America at least.
But then again, look where we're at today. Does a
day go by when you drive on the highway and don't
see many people that have done stupid things on
the road? Sure, cars are better and safer now, but
is it any safer to drive on our roads then it was
50 years ago?
Try this, remove all GNU tools from your "Linux" system, maybe then you will give some credit to GNU for what it actually does.
Actually, that's exactly what the Daemon Linux project is setting out to do. Of course, the people working on it have a variety of reasons. Some are doing it because of RMS and how he forcibly corrects people in person (from accounts in this very forum). Others, like myself, have other reasons for working on the project. Personally, I prefer BSD tools and the way BSD generally does things, however the BSD kernels don't seem to incorporate support for newer devices as quickly as the Linux kernel does. Hence, a hybrid system where I can use the Linux Kernel with the BSD tools is in order. And frankly, trying to what most of the world calls Linux is tantamount to Eisner insisting that Disney Land doesn't give proper credit to the current person in charge of the company, and instead should be called Eisner Land. It's very unlikely it will happen.
Hmm, that's not how I remember learning it from my 5th grade history teacher. As I remember, Amerigo Vespucci was the one who figured out that it really was a seperate continent rather then the East side of Asia as originally thought, and he then named it after himself and convinced everyone else to call it America. Of course, that was several years ago, and although I'm a slight history buff, I'm much better at 19th and 20th centrury history then I am at 16th century history.
-skullY
About cable TV, though, I was wondering exactly how much bandwidth my 70 or so channels are using in comparison to the total theoretical bandwidth of coaxial cable. I don't think much, considering Satellite services offer more channels but I am fairly certain a satilite only has ~1/10 the bandwidth. . .correct me if I am horrible wrong :).
That really depends on which type of satellite you're talking about. If you're talking about C-Band (The big dish, generally 7' or 10' center focused parabolic dishes) then you don't have much bandwidth at all. You have to move the dish from one satellite to another, and each satellite has 12 transponders * 2 polarities for a total of 24 uncompressed TV channels per satellite. The satellite itself usually has less then 50 watts of power. Using compression such as mpeg2 this number goes up by a factor of 10-12 (I'm a little fuzzy on this number).
Whereas if you're talking about DBS (The little dish, generally 18" off-center parabolic dishes) then you get a little more raw bandwidth. The satellite itself broadcasts at >= 250 watts of power, with 16 transponders * 2 polarities. The way they get some 200 channels on these beasts is by compressing everything. DirecTV/USSB uses mpeg1 while Dish Network uses mpeg2.
Getting back to the original point, I'm not sure how much b/w standard rg6 or rg59 coax has, but the DBS satellites themselves have roughly 32mb/s of bandwidth, making a single satellite useful only to mid-sized ISP's and those for whom running cable to would be more expensive then using satellite.
Incidentally, the way most cable companies do digital cable is by compressing several cable channels onto one channel, so you don't get the full picture quality you otherwise would have if you were watching the same channel on a c-band system.
-skullY
The Amtrack station here in Sacramento has one of those fry machines too. I haven't tried em yet, but maybe the next time I head down to Berkeley I'll check it out. I suspect that there are probably Amtrack stations elsewhere with one of these machines.
That's too bad. Your arguments aren't valid either. Let's go through and figure out why:
1) It lacks real package manager (ok, do slackware packages ever get updated after the distribution has been released or can I find "slackware packages" from freshmeat.net somewehere),
Well, there's pkgtool, which works quite well. It removes all files associated with the package, even tells you what files were removed via /var/log/packages so you can see if something got deleted that shouldn't have been (Maybe a shared file). But really, tar xvzf package.tar.gz;cd package;./configure;make;make install is not that hard, and gives you the chance to tweak things if needed (Ever use qmail with qpopper?)
There's also the slackware contrib directory, included on the cd and via ftp at ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/linux/slac kware/contrib/.
And if you have no other option then to download a redhat or debian rpm, there's rpm2tgz, included with slackware 3.6, that converts an rpm package to a tgz package suitable for installation using installpkg or pkgtool.
2) 0% support (on Debian I am sure everything is up to date thanks to apt, on redhat there is at least an erratas webpage that lists fixes and updates)
Wrong again. Looking at http://www.slackware.com"> there is a lot of support there. They have a message board for technical questions, Install Help, a list of updated packages, etc. You can even email Volkerding and he'll reply.
Although by reading your message, it looks like you mean not support, but a way to see if everything's current. Well, you can just check the Changelog to see what he changed. You can find the changelog at ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/linux /slackware/ChangeLog.txt. Not only does that notify you of security updates, but general updates as well.
3) It cannot be upgraded without trashing your system (when it is a 30 minute process on other distributions)
Really? I guess that my having upgraded from 3.4->3.5->3.6 without ever formatting must be a halucination. You have two choices. 1- Just install over the top. 2- Use pkgtool to remove your packages first, then run the install program. Takes me only 30-40mins to upgrade my system.
4) Never up to date (glibc2 ?)
Up to date is a relative term. If by up to date you mean the latest cutting edge beta libs and programs that haven't been tested thouroughly yet, well, I guess you're right. But OTOH, if you mean the latest stable libs and programs that have been tested, you're wrong. Remember, glibc2.0 won't be around long, and glibc2.1 is still beta, and still unstable. It hurts the linux community when a company puts out a distro that contains buggy software, as that pulls the general public's view of linux down to that of Microsoft. Just another company shipping products with bugs to get it on the marketplace rather then excercising a little patience and releasing a quality product.
5) It is a nightmare to maintain compared to other distributions.
I don't know how you maintain a box, but when I was working for a midsize ISP (Midsize for the area, about 1300 dialups) we used Slackware on all our machines. Rarely were upgrades needed, and when they were, we simply configured it on one machine, tar'd up the dir, and copied it to the others. We even got fancy and wrote a script to untar it, make it, then make install it. No need to worry about having dependancies, and no need to fuss with someone's precompiled binary.
Fact of the matter is, when you're running in most corporate environments, control of the box is an issue. With Slackware I just install and go. The times I've tried to use redhat, I ended up having to install several key components by hand because the rpm's didn't use the compile options we needed. Although as someone said earlier, FreeBSD is also a good option (Although I personally prefer OpenBSD as Theo is a security god).
Here here! I've been using slackware since the linux kernel was at 1.2.8 (Found an old bootdisk I had made from my first install. It still boots, too!) and upgrading is not difficult or time consuming at all. As for what's open by default, no one should trust their distrobution to be secure. Any time I install a new box, I immediatly check inetd.conf and all the rc scripts so I know what's installed and what's not.
As for glibc2 vs. glibc1 (aka libc5 vs. libc6, it's all glibc), last I checked glibc still had numerous problems, and even with all the current packages getting it compiled was difficult at best. I know many people using various distros that had to use rescue disks because they decided to try glibc2. Volkerding should be praised for not jumping on the glibc2 bandwagon before the wheels are completly on.
-skullY