Why do you need normal users to be able to set the clock? They can't do that without admin priveleges on Windows or Macs either. Clock should be set only one, by the sysadmin, and it better synchronize over the network after that.
How many of those application are actual enterprise type of applications as opposed to some badly written consumer written software such as games or DVD players.
For some reason the apt that's distributed with by the Fedora Legacy project can't install the updated kernel rpms which pretty much made me switch back to using yum. Does apt4rpm you're talking about have the same limitation?
Will we have this old mozilla feature back? I want the URLs to be sorted based on the time they were last typed in the address bar as opposed to whatever sorting scheme that's being used right now in Firefox 1.0.x.
Can someone exlain me why we spending tens of billions of dollars, the amount comparable to GDPs of many smaller countries, on this project? Does it have any science value that's worth the money being spent? Why not work on projects like space telescopes or exploration robots ala Mars rovers both of which had created a real research value that dwarfs that of the ~100B ISS. Is this just to maintain all the burocracy at NASA as well as contractors like Lockhead?
A grovestand of apples maybe. Between tax breaks and grants from Washington, Kansas, the Japanese Government (for subcontractors) and Defence Contractor preference status (as an American company) things work out about even.
Really? Things work out about even? Can you provide us a reference (preferably in an established scholarly publication) that supports your claim?
And what makes you think that Boeing is being somewhat more preferred to the the other two major US defence contractors?
Chinese MiG clones are based on the ancient MiG-21 design which is totally obsolete by all standards. But note that the Chinese and Indian airforces now also include the top notch Russian Sukhoi fighter jets which they have been buying throughout the last decade or so.
But what are the airlines going to do when jet fuel becomes so expensive (due to increasing demand) that non-business travel necessarily gets priced out of reach of most consumers?
You're making it sound like the conclussion of your argument is so obvious as 1+1=2? How do you know that with expensive oil non-business travel gets priced out of reach of most customers? Oil might become more expensive but airplanes are also getting more efficient. The per passenger fuel cost of A380 is 20% or more lower than than of B747. In addition, Airbus designed A380 so that they could streach it even more and thus make it even more efficient. Also, I suspect that if non-business travel is too expensive, then business travel will also either either end or it will continue existing only on the few very popular routes. Try to count how many economy vs business seats are in a typical flight in the US. The vast amount of revenue is coming from the economy class customers. Without them, most flights simply wouldn't exist.
Modern Russian-made airplanes come with Russian and Western-made engines that meet the European noise and emissions requirements (e.g. IL-96, Tu-204/214, modernized IL-76, the upcoming TU-334, etc)
Yes, there exist statistics that show that Russian-made planes can and often are operating just as safely as the western-made planes. As for Brasil, are you kidding me? Brasil's Embraer is one of world's two leading companies in the market for passenger jets with less than 100 seats (the other one is a Canadian firm), with Embraer planes being widely used in the US and Europe. Yes, you are a baby.
They didn't design it themselves (and could never have done it).
Huh, a country that launched into the space on its own the first satelite, the first man, and the first space station (MIR, which at its height was bigger than ISS currently is) and which has built the largest cargo planes in the world couldn't have designed a supersonic passenger jet on its own? Please.
The largest commercial plane, AN-124, is not Russian. It's made by the Antonov design bureau in Ukraine (although it might contain a significant number of Russian-made parts). BTW, Russia is already producing the wide-body IL-96 which is roughly in Boeing 767 to 777 class. As for making a passenger plane that matches the size of A380, I don't think that anyone else will follow that suit, not even Boeing, because lots of industry experts claim that the economies of scale and the demand in the superjumbo jet market are such that only one model can survive on that market profitably and Airbus came first.
Many enterprise software companies have a considerable market power, even when they have competitors, and so they act accordingly. One thing such companies do is price discrimination. There is no one price. Witness Oracle. They won't tell you the price outright on their web site (when they do it's usually an upper bound, above the price many companies pay). They'll look at you and then try to estimate how much cash you have. They won't attempt to have the cash that you don't have but they WILL try to extract as much of your cash as possible through licensing and support fees.
Not entirely true. Some distributions use better optimizations than i386. For example, according to release notes RedHat and Fedora are optimized for Pentium 4 (but still run fine on older machines).
Distributing binaries would mean compiling for every single Linux distro out there.
I think the rumors of binary incompatibility between Linux distributions are somewhat overblown. Just find the least common denominator in the list Linux of distributions you want to support (that is, the one with the oldest set of toolkit libraries, glibc, kernel, etc). In theory, the newer distributions would run binaries compiled for older distributions just fine. Witness software vendors like Wolfram Research or Adobe. Their software runs on all or most of the mainstream Linux distributions without any modifications.
The idea makes lots of sense: Adopt a standard which will ensure that if some piece of software is compiled on one LSB-compliant system, it will run on any other LSB-compliant system.
Please forgive me if I am wrong, but I think that statement not true due to multitudes of incompatible library versions and such, although I do think LSB is a step in the right direction. The best we can hope is that LSB compliance will guaratee source level compatibility (and even that is probably unattainable goal due to differences in gcc versions)
We are not interested in the game drivers and music drivers that are being added to the kernel.
He might or might not have a point but things like music and game drivers do not make a good example of kernel bloat. It's not like it hurts that those drivers exist in the kenrel. Such drivers are usually shipped as loadable kernel modules. If you don't need them, they won't be loaded. They're only using up your disk space (which shouldn't be a concern these days)
Where did you get the idea that Centos (or RHEL it is based on) is not a good desktop OS? It seems to run the desktop environment just fine, web browser, office suite, and tons of commercial software that's certified to run on RHEL. Plus you get other benefits like installers updated for new hardware, updates for years to come, etc. What else do you need? Seems like a fairly good setup for a workstation OS. I wouldn't expect more (in fact, I would expect a lot less) from a typical Windows XP machine in a university lab.
I wont agree with you on Dell support. I have had plenty of experience with the tech support at both companies. My typical converstation with Sun support is as follows:
Sun - "Me: I think I have a bad disk/controller/whatever because of (some obvious reason). Them: Ok, what's your sysstem's serial number? We're sending you the part tomorrow." In case if I have a silver contract for the machine, they actually come up here to fix things.
But with Dell support I have had plenty of bad experiences trying to get them to replace a fucking hard drive or a $100 memory strick on server-class hardware whenever their diagnostics software fails to show that there is a problem. I don't think they do it on purpose. It just happens that Dell's tech support is so dumb that when they don't find an answer for you in their scripted book of tech support answers they'll make you to jump through some hoops to prove that their hardware is indeed broken and needs a replacement.
Are other universities eliminating Solaris in favor of a Linux distribution?
As a Unix system administrator at a major US research university who administers large Linux and Solaris installations for academic/research use, I can assert that the answer is a resounding YES. In fact, this process has started a long time ago, in late 90s and it is still ongoing. I have seen lots of labs switch from Solaris to Linux. I have never seen a switch happen in the other direction. The reasons are obvious. Sun is fighting an uphill battle here. Solaris on SPARC is losing because SPARC lost its competitive edge a very long time ago while Solaris on x86 is definitely being frowned upon for having a poor hardware and software support.
I don't think his comparison with RPM is completely apropos. RPM was poorly designed from the start, and was probably designed from the start as a tool for vendor lock-in. Apt-get, AFAICT, is well designed.
Bah. Yet another of those Linux "experts" who classify apt-get and rpm into the same class of tools. Hint: apt-get runs on top of dpkg, the low-level package manager and Debian's equivalent of rpm, just like it (or yum or up2date) can be made to (and is being) run on top of rpm.
What's up with Adobe? Solaris workstations are still used a lot in the academia and industry where good compatibility with PDF documents is a must. With only three platforms supported and with Linux obviously getting a third-rate support, it seems like we'll soon have to remove "Portable" from PDF.
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Releasing Sarge will be hugely cathartic for Debian, it will get a monkey off of their back so they can move forward on the reduced platform list.
Did I miss something? Are they going to support less platforms in future?
Why do you need normal users to be able to set the clock? They can't do that without admin priveleges on Windows or Macs either. Clock should be set only one, by the sysadmin, and it better synchronize over the network after that.
How many of those application are actual enterprise type of applications as opposed to some badly written consumer written software such as games or DVD players.
For some reason the apt that's distributed with by the Fedora Legacy project can't install the updated kernel rpms which pretty much made me switch back to using yum. Does apt4rpm you're talking about have the same limitation?
Will we have this old mozilla feature back? I want the URLs to be sorted based on the time they were last typed in the address bar as opposed to whatever sorting scheme that's being used right now in Firefox 1.0.x.
Can someone exlain me why we spending tens of billions of dollars, the amount comparable to GDPs of many smaller countries, on this project? Does it have any science value that's worth the money being spent? Why not work on projects like space telescopes or exploration robots ala Mars rovers both of which had created a real research value that dwarfs that of the ~100B ISS. Is this just to maintain all the burocracy at NASA as well as contractors like Lockhead?
A grovestand of apples maybe. Between tax breaks and grants from Washington, Kansas, the Japanese Government (for subcontractors) and Defence Contractor preference status (as an American company) things work out about even.
Really? Things work out about even? Can you provide us a reference (preferably in an established scholarly publication) that supports your claim?
And what makes you think that Boeing is being somewhat more preferred to the the other two major US defence contractors?
SFO, LAX, and JFK are already making plans to accomodate A380
Chinese MiG clones are based on the ancient MiG-21 design which is totally obsolete by all standards. But note that the Chinese and Indian airforces now also include the top notch Russian Sukhoi fighter jets which they have been buying throughout the last decade or so.
But what are the airlines going to do when jet fuel becomes so expensive (due to increasing demand) that non-business travel necessarily gets priced out of reach of most consumers?
You're making it sound like the conclussion of your argument is so obvious as 1+1=2? How do you know that with expensive oil non-business travel gets priced out of reach of most customers? Oil might become more expensive but airplanes are also getting more efficient. The per passenger fuel cost of A380 is 20% or more lower than than of B747. In addition, Airbus designed A380 so that they could streach it even more and thus make it even more efficient. Also, I suspect that if non-business travel is too expensive, then business travel will also either either end or it will continue existing only on the few very popular routes. Try to count how many economy vs business seats are in a typical flight in the US. The vast amount of revenue is coming from the economy class customers. Without them, most flights simply wouldn't exist.
Modern Russian-made airplanes come with Russian and Western-made engines that meet the European noise and emissions requirements (e.g. IL-96, Tu-204/214, modernized IL-76, the upcoming TU-334, etc)
Yes, there exist statistics that show that Russian-made planes can and often are operating just as safely as the western-made planes. As for Brasil, are you kidding me? Brasil's Embraer is one of world's two leading companies in the market for passenger jets with less than 100 seats (the other one is a Canadian firm), with Embraer planes being widely used in the US and Europe. Yes, you are a baby.
They didn't design it themselves (and could never have done it).
Huh, a country that launched into the space on its own the first satelite, the first man, and the first space station (MIR, which at its height was bigger than ISS currently is) and which has built the largest cargo planes in the world couldn't have designed a supersonic passenger jet on its own? Please.
The largest commercial plane, AN-124, is not Russian. It's made by the Antonov design bureau in Ukraine (although it might contain a significant number of Russian-made parts). BTW, Russia is already producing the wide-body IL-96 which is roughly in Boeing 767 to 777 class. As for making a passenger plane that matches the size of A380, I don't think that anyone else will follow that suit, not even Boeing, because lots of industry experts claim that the economies of scale and the demand in the superjumbo jet market are such that only one model can survive on that market profitably and Airbus came first.
Many enterprise software companies have a considerable market power, even when they have competitors, and so they act accordingly. One thing such companies do is price discrimination. There is no one price. Witness Oracle. They won't tell you the price outright on their web site (when they do it's usually an upper bound, above the price many companies pay). They'll look at you and then try to estimate how much cash you have. They won't attempt to have the cash that you don't have but they WILL try to extract as much of your cash as possible through licensing and support fees.
Not entirely true. Some distributions use better optimizations than i386. For example, according to release notes RedHat and Fedora are optimized for Pentium 4 (but still run fine on older machines).
Distributing binaries would mean compiling for every single Linux distro out there.
I think the rumors of binary incompatibility between Linux distributions are somewhat overblown. Just find the least common denominator in the list Linux of distributions you want to support (that is, the one with the oldest set of toolkit libraries, glibc, kernel, etc). In theory, the newer distributions would run binaries compiled for older distributions just fine. Witness software vendors like Wolfram Research or Adobe. Their software runs on all or most of the mainstream Linux distributions without any modifications.
The idea makes lots of sense: Adopt a standard which will ensure that if some piece of software is compiled on one LSB-compliant system, it will run on any other LSB-compliant system.
Please forgive me if I am wrong, but I think that statement not true due to multitudes of incompatible library versions and such, although I do think LSB is a step in the right direction. The best we can hope is that LSB compliance will guaratee source level compatibility (and even that is probably unattainable goal due to differences in gcc versions)
We are not interested in the game drivers and music drivers that are being added to the kernel.
He might or might not have a point but things like music and game drivers do not make a good example of kernel bloat. It's not like it hurts that those drivers exist in the kenrel. Such drivers are usually shipped as loadable kernel modules. If you don't need them, they won't be loaded. They're only using up your disk space (which shouldn't be a concern these days)
Where did you get the idea that Centos (or RHEL it is based on) is not a good desktop OS? It seems to run the desktop environment just fine, web browser, office suite, and tons of commercial software that's certified to run on RHEL. Plus you get other benefits like installers updated for new hardware, updates for years to come, etc. What else do you need? Seems like a fairly good setup for a workstation OS. I wouldn't expect more (in fact, I would expect a lot less) from a typical Windows XP machine in a university lab.
I wont agree with you on Dell support. I have had plenty of experience with the tech support at both companies. My typical converstation with Sun support is as follows:
Sun - "Me: I think I have a bad disk/controller/whatever because of (some obvious reason). Them: Ok, what's your sysstem's serial number? We're sending you the part tomorrow." In case if I have a silver contract for the machine, they actually come up here to fix things.
But with Dell support I have had plenty of bad experiences trying to get them to replace a fucking hard drive or a $100 memory strick on server-class hardware whenever their diagnostics software fails to show that there is a problem. I don't think they do it on purpose. It just happens that Dell's tech support is so dumb that when they don't find an answer for you in their scripted book of tech support answers they'll make you to jump through some hoops to prove that their hardware is indeed broken and needs a replacement.
Are other universities eliminating Solaris in favor of a Linux distribution?
As a Unix system administrator at a major US research university who administers large Linux and Solaris installations for academic/research use, I can assert that the answer is a resounding YES. In fact, this process has started a long time ago, in late 90s and it is still ongoing. I have seen lots of labs switch from Solaris to Linux. I have never seen a switch happen in the other direction. The reasons are obvious. Sun is fighting an uphill battle here. Solaris on SPARC is losing because SPARC lost its competitive edge a very long time ago while Solaris on x86 is definitely being frowned upon for having a poor hardware and software support.
I don't think his comparison with RPM is completely apropos. RPM was poorly designed from the start, and was probably designed from the start as a tool for vendor lock-in. Apt-get, AFAICT, is well designed.
Bah. Yet another of those Linux "experts" who classify apt-get and rpm into the same class of tools. Hint: apt-get runs on top of dpkg, the low-level package manager and Debian's equivalent of rpm, just like it (or yum or up2date) can be made to (and is being) run on top of rpm.
What's up with Adobe? Solaris workstations are still used a lot in the academia and industry where good compatibility with PDF documents is a must. With only three platforms supported and with Linux obviously getting a third-rate support, it seems like we'll soon have to remove "Portable" from PDF.
Yeah! I just saw those screenshots and they totally convinced me that CentOS is a much better OS than RHEL and WhiteBox Linux.