You always could use a multi-button mouse with OS X
Which is not convenient at all on the portables which constitute a huge share of apple's sales. I am not buying one until Apple puts proper mouse buttons on its portables.
Complaining aobut software is what you do to closed source vendors. You have the ability to change this stuff, so dont complain about it, hire someone to fix it, and while you are at it, appreciate the free work that people put into this frankly, astoundingly robust stuff.
Well, I agree that you can't demand that developers fix something or add features when they don't want to do it but there is nothing in the fact that someone decides to work on OSS project for free that prohibits others from saying to others: "Free or not, this software is still a piece of crap." If users find problems with something, most of them will whine but won't fix it unless they have the skills and really enjoy messing with things. The opportunity costs are just way too high. It's much easier to just move on to some other piece of software unless you're talking about about projects that don't really have competitions (like samba maybe).
I think the biggest selling point of Java was the cross-platform compatibility. However, 10 years later, I think that it is clear that this promise was largely a fraud. Java was a perhaps a good new platform for writing enterprise applications and applications for certain consumer niches for those developers who didn't want to deal with the unsafe languages like C or C++ or those who were fooled by Sun into believing that Java is the best thing since whatever, but cross-platform compatibility for large applications still remains problematic. For example, most vendors of fairly complex java applications I have seen, not only require you to use a certain version of OS and a web browser (if that's an applet) but also they demand a certain version of the java virtual machine is used and with certain patches on some operating systems. And if you don't meet their requirements, you often run into problems. I bet a python or a perl script would have fared much better in many of those settings as far as portability is concerned.
The current globalization only benefits shareholders from large corporations.
That's bullshit. Some day, take a look at all manufactured goods that you bought recently. Where was the majority of them made? Probably outside of US. Without global trade you'd end up with lower quality AND more expensive goods. Anyone who took economics 101 will tell you that free trade is good because it generally tends to benefit all participats but there WILL be certainly losers too. Consumers will certainly benefit but some people will lose their jobs. The reason there will be big time losers is because the world economy hasn't made this step a long time ago creating all sorts of economic inefficiencies around the world. Neither I can see what's morally wrong with moving jobs overseas? Why is a GM worker entitled to $40/hour pay (with benefits) when a Chinese worker will be HAPPY too do that work for $2 an hour? And I bet most USA consumers will have no reservations about buying a Chinese or Korean-made car (other things being equal) unless they live in Detroit.
Sounds like a fun hobby for hackers to do on their spare time, as an alternative to Linux driver devlopment.
Solaris for Intel has existed for a decade. Yet, for some reason we haven't seen an explossive growth in third-party driver support. I don't think OpenSolaris is going to change that.
I don't mind seeing the ads as long as they don't distract me from looking at the site content. Usually, such sites are news web sites. It's really distracting to see an animated gif or a flash ad while you're trying to read the text an inch away from it on the screen. If they used just plain non-animated ads, then I'd never start blocking them.
Can someone explain me once again what makes MacOS X running on Intel-based Apple hardware any more of a threat to Linux compared to MacOS X running on PPC-based Apple hardware?
You know exactly what the OS contains--- "Solaris 5.9 build 100041-23" contains Kernel version X.Y.Z, C compiler X.Y.Z, C libraries X.Y.Z.
No, you don't know that. 100041-23 is only the kernel patch version. What about other patches? Did you install it through the recommeneded patch cluster? Or the security patch cluster? Or was it the Solaris update cluster? Or maybe you installed this kernel patch as a part of the "Java" patch cluster? There is no such way as patch level on Solaris for overall system.
I think the argument is that there are lots of Windows users who hate it (no argument there) but who won't make the jump to Mac because of the price/performance difference.
Maybe, but how does that affect the Linux users? Do they use Linux as opposed to Mac OS X because of price/performance too? They might be disappointed when they find out that an Intel-based Mac is still more expensive than a comparable Dell or a build-your-own kit (which is not an unreasonable thing to assume about Apple pricing)
Can someone explain me what makes MacOS X running on Intel-based Apple hardware any more of a threat to Linux compared to MacOS X running on PPC-based Apple hardware?
Supposedly Intel processor makes Apple somehow better? What is it, speed? What else? But then, does this mean that the Linux community is filled with people who don't use MacOS X ONLY because Apple isn't making Intel-based Macs? I somehow find this to be hard to believe.
Does anyone know what Mr. Debian is going to do with all the money generated by CD sales? Is he going to contribute some of the profits to open source projects that made this Linux distribution so popular?
I (boldly/foolishly) predict the administration tools won't get open-sourced. Because there is way more value (to PHB's) in delivering point-and-click GUI admin than just foo.conf admin.
If this was the case, then we should have seen, by now, major Linux vendors distributing closed source OpenLDAP, Samba, Apache, etc configuration tools.
I am using fedoralegacy. They were slow to get things moving at first but now they seem to provide updates reasonably fast. They did drop support for RedHat 7.2 and 8 due to lack of interest among the developers but they still are supporting 7.3 and 9 as well as Fedora Core 1 and 2.
So someone else other than Apple will write a driver. This strategy won't work. What Apple is likely going to do is to make the OS depend on a proprietary firmware.
What do you mean by "very, very stable"? Debian unstable is a development version. New packages are being uploaded all the time. Therefore it is unstable by definition because it's changing all the time.
Compared to Debian fossilized^H^H^H^Hstable, Fedora has a much lively release cycle, every 6 to 8 months so that you can enjoy very recent versions of many popular packages and improved hardware support. Debian on the other hand as a lot more packages and you have many alternatives to choose from (e.g. Don't want to use cups? Try LPRng. Don't want to use postfix? Then try exim. Want to use some obscure scheme interpreter? It's probably there).
Actually, it sounds to me more like simply an attempt to break into the lucrative storage market. It has been estimated that companies are already spending as much money on storage hardware/support/software as on their servers. So, even though they pay big bucks to Sun, they still spend on equal amount on storage. Amazingly, even though Sun has been trying to become a major storage player for the last decade, they couldn't, even after buying up a whole lot of minor storage companies and developing a bunch of storage products on its own. More recently, they tried to take on EMC with their Sun T3 storage array and this strategy seems to have failed. Next they teamed up with Hitachi to sell rebadged Hitachi disk systems as "Sun StorEdge". It seems like this aquisition is just another step in Sun's troubled quest for more storage customers.
Debian unstable for me has been more stable than either Fedora (both 2 and 3), and Mandrake.
I think you're confused about the meaning of the word "Debian unstable". The unstable distribution is called so because it is changing, it is work a progress. In this sense Debian unstable is indeed unstable and Fedora Core is stable. Only bug fixes and security updates are making into Fedora while with Debian unstable new versions of packages are making into distribution all the time. Maybe that's fine for a developer/tinkered box but running an 'unstable' distribution is unacceptable in most environments when the users and/or sysadmins care about having a working system and doing their work instead of tracking the package of the week.
The stable distribution has a quite slow release cycle, but there is no reason for a desktop user to run the stable distribution.
I still wouldn't put the Debian unstable or testing in a computer lab environment or other desktop setting. There is just too much unpredictable change to deal with. I as a sysadmin can spend my time on more productive endeavors than try to figure out why this or that package started working differently this week. At the same time, I don't want to deal with the Debian stable either due to its terrible hardware support (even after sarge, where is a proof the future releases will come in a timely manner?).
If you add this one year to the other three years of woody's existence, this OS will have at least 4 years of updates behind it when all support is finally retired. Not too bad for a completely volunteer driven project (granted, I suspect the amount of time that it took to come up with a replacement for woody probably wasn't intentional or desirable).
Slashdot Mirror
You always could use a multi-button mouse with OS X
Which is not convenient at all on the portables which constitute a huge share of apple's sales. I am not buying one until Apple puts proper mouse buttons on its portables.
I think you're confusing coding and computer science.
Why is this story not linked from slashdot's front page? Is the Firefox multi-link store that a lot more relevant or interesting than this?
Complaining aobut software is what you do to closed source vendors. You have the ability to change this stuff, so dont complain about it, hire someone to fix it, and while you are at it, appreciate the free work that people put into this frankly, astoundingly robust stuff.
Well, I agree that you can't demand that developers fix something or add features when they don't want to do it but there is nothing in the fact that someone decides to work on OSS project for free that prohibits others from saying to others: "Free or not, this software is still a piece of crap." If users find problems with something, most of them will whine but won't fix it unless they have the skills and really enjoy messing with things. The opportunity costs are just way too high. It's much easier to just move on to some other piece of software unless you're talking about about projects that don't really have competitions (like samba maybe).
I think the biggest selling point of Java was the cross-platform compatibility. However, 10 years later, I think that it is clear that this promise was largely a fraud. Java was a perhaps a good new platform for writing enterprise applications and applications for certain consumer niches for those developers who didn't want to deal with the unsafe languages like C or C++ or those who were fooled by Sun into believing that Java is the best thing since whatever, but cross-platform compatibility for large applications still remains problematic. For example, most vendors of fairly complex java applications I have seen, not only require you to use a certain version of OS and a web browser (if that's an applet) but also they demand a certain version of the java virtual machine is used and with certain patches on some operating systems. And if you don't meet their requirements, you often run into problems. I bet a python or a perl script would have fared much better in many of those settings as far as portability is concerned.
The current globalization only benefits shareholders from large corporations.
That's bullshit. Some day, take a look at all manufactured goods that you bought recently. Where was the majority of them made? Probably outside of US. Without global trade you'd end up with lower quality AND more expensive goods. Anyone who took economics 101 will tell you that free trade is good because it generally tends to benefit all participats but there WILL be certainly losers too. Consumers will certainly benefit but some people will lose their jobs. The reason there will be big time losers is because the world economy hasn't made this step a long time ago creating all sorts of economic inefficiencies around the world. Neither I can see what's morally wrong with moving jobs overseas? Why is a GM worker entitled to $40/hour pay (with benefits) when a Chinese worker will be HAPPY too do that work for $2 an hour? And I bet most USA consumers will have no reservations about buying a Chinese or Korean-made car (other things being equal) unless they live in Detroit.
Your agrument has absolutely no economic base and I still don't see what's morally wrong with sending jobs that serve domestic customers to overseas.
Solaris 10 and FreeBSD serve different needs and user bases, so you gennerally, wouldn't need to ask that question.
Sounds like a fun hobby for hackers to do on their spare time, as an alternative to Linux driver devlopment.
Solaris for Intel has existed for a decade. Yet, for some reason we haven't seen an explossive growth in third-party driver support. I don't think OpenSolaris is going to change that.
I don't mind seeing the ads as long as they don't distract me from looking at the site content. Usually, such sites are news web sites. It's really distracting to see an animated gif or a flash ad while you're trying to read the text an inch away from it on the screen. If they used just plain non-animated ads, then I'd never start blocking them.
Can someone explain me once again what makes MacOS X running on Intel-based Apple hardware any more of a threat to Linux compared to MacOS X running on PPC-based Apple hardware?
.. as I am having significant education related expenses this year unless they have a way to account for that without additional forms.
You know exactly what the OS contains--- "Solaris 5.9 build 100041-23" contains Kernel version X.Y.Z, C compiler X.Y.Z, C libraries X.Y.Z.
No, you don't know that. 100041-23 is only the kernel patch version. What about other patches? Did you install it through the recommeneded patch cluster? Or the security patch cluster? Or was it the Solaris update cluster? Or maybe you installed this kernel patch as a part of the "Java" patch cluster? There is no such way as patch level on Solaris for overall system.
I think the argument is that there are lots of Windows users who hate it (no argument there) but who won't make the jump to Mac because of the price/performance difference.
Maybe, but how does that affect the Linux users? Do they use Linux as opposed to Mac OS X because of price/performance too? They might be disappointed when they find out that an Intel-based Mac is still more expensive than a comparable Dell or a build-your-own kit (which is not an unreasonable thing to assume about Apple pricing)
Can someone explain me what makes MacOS X running on Intel-based Apple hardware any more of a threat to Linux compared to MacOS X running on PPC-based Apple hardware?
Supposedly Intel processor makes Apple somehow better? What is it, speed? What else? But then, does this mean that the Linux community is filled with people who don't use MacOS X ONLY because Apple isn't making Intel-based Macs? I somehow find this to be hard to believe.
Does anyone know what Mr. Debian is going to do with all the money generated by CD sales? Is he going to contribute some of the profits to open source projects that made this Linux distribution so popular?
I (boldly/foolishly) predict the administration tools won't get open-sourced. Because there is way more value (to PHB's) in delivering point-and-click GUI admin than just foo.conf admin.
If this was the case, then we should have seen, by now, major Linux vendors distributing closed source OpenLDAP, Samba, Apache, etc configuration tools.
I am using fedoralegacy. They were slow to get things moving at first but now they seem to provide updates reasonably fast. They did drop support for RedHat 7.2 and 8 due to lack of interest among the developers but they still are supporting 7.3 and 9 as well as Fedora Core 1 and 2.
So someone else other than Apple will write a driver. This strategy won't work. What Apple is likely going to do is to make the OS depend on a proprietary firmware.
What do you mean by "very, very stable"? Debian unstable is a development version. New packages are being uploaded all the time. Therefore it is unstable by definition because it's changing all the time.
Compared to Debian fossilized^H^H^H^Hstable, Fedora has a much lively release cycle, every 6 to 8 months so that you can enjoy very recent versions of many popular packages and improved hardware support. Debian on the other hand as a lot more packages and you have many alternatives to choose from (e.g. Don't want to use cups? Try LPRng. Don't want to use postfix? Then try exim. Want to use some obscure scheme interpreter? It's probably there).
Actually, it sounds to me more like simply an attempt to break into the lucrative storage market. It has been estimated that companies are already spending as much money on storage hardware/support/software as on their servers. So, even though they pay big bucks to Sun, they still spend on equal amount on storage. Amazingly, even though Sun has been trying to become a major storage player for the last decade, they couldn't, even after buying up a whole lot of minor storage companies and developing a bunch of storage products on its own. More recently, they tried to take on EMC with their Sun T3 storage array and this strategy seems to have failed. Next they teamed up with Hitachi to sell rebadged Hitachi disk systems as "Sun StorEdge". It seems like this aquisition is just another step in Sun's troubled quest for more storage customers.
Debian unstable for me has been more stable than either Fedora (both 2 and 3), and Mandrake.
I think you're confused about the meaning of the word "Debian unstable". The unstable distribution is called so because it is changing, it is work a progress. In this sense Debian unstable is indeed unstable and Fedora Core is stable. Only bug fixes and security updates are making into Fedora while with Debian unstable new versions of packages are making into distribution all the time. Maybe that's fine for a developer/tinkered box but running an 'unstable' distribution is unacceptable in most environments when the users and/or sysadmins care about having a working system and doing their work instead of tracking the package of the week.
The stable distribution has a quite slow release cycle, but there is no reason for a desktop user to run the stable distribution.
I still wouldn't put the Debian unstable or testing in a computer lab environment or other desktop setting. There is just too much unpredictable change to deal with. I as a sysadmin can spend my time on more productive endeavors than try to figure out why this or that package started working differently this week. At the same time, I don't want to deal with the Debian stable either due to its terrible hardware support (even after sarge, where is a proof the future releases will come in a timely manner?).
If you add this one year to the other three years of woody's existence, this OS will have at least 4 years of updates behind it when all support is finally retired. Not too bad for a completely volunteer driven project (granted, I suspect the amount of time that it took to come up with a replacement for woody probably wasn't intentional or desirable).