I was trying to find out if you were fine with others invading Russia the same way Russian expansionism continues to squeeze out Russia's historical neighbours, but no one can argue with the logic of FSB-TV.
No, I am not fine with that. I also don't see how this is relevant to the original discussion. The Russian migration to places you are referring to happened a long time ago. There is no way to reverse it without people's own will to leave.
I do find it more than a little ironic that while the FSB-loving crowd cries and demands "human rights" (i.e. the right to remain 100% Russian without any degree of integration) for the implanted Russian masses on other nations' lands, that same crowd is fearing the mass migration of Chinese onto the far-eastern parts of the Russian empire (although that is nothing compared to squeezing people out of their historical homelands).
I don't see how the immigration policy is violating anyone's basic rights here.
Would you accept this form of linguistic, cultural and political expansionism if it affected a large part of your remaining national space (try imagining that you weren't slavic but from a peace-loving nation whose living space had been invaded by Russians time and again over the centuries)?
Even if I was unhappy with the Russian cultural expansionism, I still don't think that deporting the Russians or forcing/expecting them to leave on their own is the right thing to do after they had been there for several generations. This does not fit into any human rights standards of our times. Should Jews be forced to leave Israel? Should Arabs be forced to leave Israel? Should all whites leave USA because they are occupying the native american land? Should 20 million or so Russians living Siberia go home to Estern Europe because their ancestors moved to Siberia at some point centuries ago? Just think pragmatically. This won't happen without resotring to some form of ethnic cleansing. These peoples were born there and have no more and no less rights to be there than anyone else.
PS. Please explain to me why the Chechen people and their lands should be controlled by Kremlin and not by the Chechens themselves? Whether they choose to be Wahhabis or buddhists, what does it matter to you?
Simple, they can't rule themselves without destabilizing the politics of the whole Caucasus region. Chechens were granted a de facto independence between 1996 and 1999 and if not for their own foolish actions, they'd still be independent. During 1996-1999 period, their republic became a lawless land somewhat resembling those Afghan or Pakistan regions where the rule of law does not apply. A place that welcomed criminals from all of ex-USSR and middle-eastern terrorists of all sorts. During that time Chechens had resorted to their ages old national crafts, kidnaping and banditism. Their republic was a place where people, money, and arms would disappear without a trace. Their own president seemed to be incapable of stopping some of his warlords from invading the neighboring Russian republic of Dagestan in order to 'liberate' it from the Russian 'occupation' (Those chechen fighters were probably shocked to see all those multi-ethnic, predominantly muslim peoples of Dagestan rise and fight this invasion side by side with Federal troops). Russians couldn't tolerate this lawlessness at their borders forever.
OTOH many of the countries occupied by Soviet Russia can't seem to get their russian-born former masters to leave their newly independent nations. The current Kremlin regime is extremely hostile in its insistance that all these fifth column russians must be allowed to stay on (and yet again give the Russian empire an excuse to intervene in the future...).
There are large Russian minoroties in places like Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Blatic states, etc but most of them are NOT Russian born. Most of those peoples had been there for three or more generations. Are you proposing that they are just supposed to leave the place where they and their fathers were born and had spent their whole lives? No one is actually forcing them to leave although Kremlin has clashed with the Baltic states on the issue of human rights of the Russian minority living there (for examle, the Blatic republics basically banned recently all russian language schools despite having a +30% Russian speaking population) The usually politically correct European Union somehow fails to notice those anti-Russian abuses.
Well, do the minorities really want to stay under Russian domination and continue playing minor roles even in their homelands, that is, when they're not being outright persecuted. Think for a moment: why are there so many "minorities" "within Russia" in the first place?
Russia is a federation. Most "ethnic" provinces are autonomous republics with their own local governments with their own constitutions, presidents, and legislatures. Yes, those minorities have a fair share of power in their own provinces and they also participate in the politics at federal level. I'd say most minorities want to remain part of Russia. It's a mutually benefitial relationship for both sides. Don't let a small bunch of Chechen bandits and thugs who also pretend to be Wahabi fundamentalists (but who somehow often don't mind to drink vodka or rape a Russian girl) to milk money from Saudi Sheikhs to make you believe otherwise.
PS. Isn' the term "minorities native to Russian territories" somewhat of an oxymoron?
No it is not. For examle, there are sizable Ukrainian, Jewish, Georgian, and Armenian minorities living in Russia but their historic homelands are outside of Russia. I have used this term to distinguish them from peoples like Chechens or Tartars who are living in Russia and who indeed are living on their historic homelands there.
FreeBSD's ports are fine though I find three problems with FreeBSD's system. 1) The latest versions of packages for which there are ports make files are often not available through pkg_add -r because no one bothered compiling the binary. 2) Compiling all this crap can be slow, specially if your box is say Pentium II-class PC. 3) The ports tree is changing all the time (in other words, it is still sort of unstable..). I prefer RedHat/Fedora/Debian way of maintaining the packages on released distributions. When there is a security problem or some other severe bug in a package, they patch the same version of package that they released originally and then release that as an update. On FreeBSD, I often feel that many packages are being needlessly updated from a sysadmin's point of view.
.deb does not handle the depedencies automatically. It's just a package format. apt-get does and you can have apt-get, up2date, and similar tools running on top of rpm based distributions just fine. In fact, if I wasn't afraid to be murdered in my sleep, I'd say rpm is a better package manager for its ease of use and some features which seem to be either absent from dpkg or not properly documented the (like, something similar to rpm s -V, the verify mode).
Nonsense. Yes, less users and developers use Linux on PPC. But you also need to remember that the hardware on non-x86 platforms is a lot more uniform than what you have in the x86 arena. Therefore, driver availability and support for PPC platform does not necessarily need to depend on a large userbase.
.. after six years of development, Gnome 2.x (as shipped with RedHat Enterprise Linux 3) still comes with the Nautilus file manager and the control-panel application that regularly crash on login (we use NFS mounted home dirs but that's not a good excuse). And how come I started to get this stupid message that warns me when I login from a second computer telling me I have logged in from some other place? The are plenty of desktop environment (e.g. CDE..) that work just fine regardless of how many terminals you're logged in from.
Anyone born in the Soviet union could become a Russian citizen with relative ease. Besides, I am sure he was already spending much of his time in Russia before the breakup of the soviet union. Also Baku was a fairly cosmopolitan city before the break up of the soviet union with very large Armenian and Jewish communities living in it. After break up of the soviet union, most of the Jews left to Israel and nearly all of 200.000 Baku Armenians had been forced to leave Azerbaijan because of government sponsored pogroms against them. And I don't see why the ethnicity should be a factor that determines whether someone should or should not involve in politics in such a diverse country as Russia. It might not be well known outside but in many parts of Russia there are fairly large numbers of Ukrainians, Jews, Georgian, Armenians, and others living there (in addition to minorities native to Russian therritories such as those from north caucasus.)
How the sales of software or other digital products that can be simply downloaded are different from the sales of tangible goods that get shipped by snail mail? I think he probably has a good point.
Solaris on x86 is supposed to come from the same source tree as Solaris for SPARC with only x86 bits being different. Given my previous experience with Solaris installer on sparc, I don't find the op's experience too surprising. Try a new feature or do something "non-standard" and it often blows up in your face.
I don't quite understand what you're complainig about. You tried RHEL but you found its packages a little bit dated, so instead you have switched to Debian which is based on packages that are at least a year older than what RHEL is based on?
BTW, which version of matlab are you using? I have no problems running the latest version of Matlab (7) on either RHEL or Fedora Core 3.
So go buy a console server (a rack mountable LCD with a bunch of VGA cables connecting to multiple hosts). No server was designed to run in a compeltely headless mode (even Suns and such, still need a serial console, etc). How do you do right now things like run hardware diagnostics or do bios upgrades?
I did. I switched the machines at work to RHEL and upgraded my PCs at home to Fedora. Not a big deal. I think RHEL and Fedora meet very well the needs of their intended audiences. Yes, it can be annoying that you can't just upgrade the old RedHat system to RHEL without reinstalling but RHEL gives you many benefits over the old RedHat (7/8/9). I would certainly prefer RHEL for use at work for a number of reasons. Fedora seems pretty nice too and it more closely resembles what you used to get with RedHat (faster release cycle, short support cycle for updates, lots of new packages, relatively high quality packaging, ease of use, etc)
Live upgrades are overrated anyways. Why not just take down the system for an hour to do a proper upgrade using the supported and hassle free way? If you're so proud of Debian, nothing is preventing you from switching back to their three year old "stable" distro. I personally don't find Debian to be more compelling and RHEL for enterprise use or Fedora for home user. rpm is at least as good as dpkg and up2date and yum are roughly comparable to apt-get but you at least get a reasonably recent package selection and with RHEL pretty good support which is on par with Solaris and similar systems.
RedHat Enterprise, SuSE, Fedora Core, and Mandrake - the four distributions that the vast majority of rpm-based distro users use - have had automated package management for a while. So, I think it is wrong to say "rpm based = sucks". So, please stop spreading FUD.
I think the root of the problem is that most Windows systems (unless centrally managed) are usually setup so that normal users are logged in with elevated priveleges. If they were logged in without supernatural priveleges then the damage done by the spyware, viruses, and trojans, would be limited just to your account and files (e.g. the rest of the system, and certainly the kernel, would be unaffected). So, it seems like the best strategy to fight spyware is to end the current practice of using the administrator account. I am sure that microsoft could even do something to discourage its use.
RHEL is the leading enterprise Linux distribution and RHEL 4 release is a _big_ news for most RHEL users but somehow Slashdot editors didn't deem it to be important enough to put the story on the slashdot front page. Coincidence? I think not..
The difference between Centos and Madrake though, is that Mandrake forked RedHat and then they diverged as completely independent distributions. but the purpose of Centos is to remain a clone of the current and upcoming RedHat distributions.
Ugh, actually many of their popular stand-alone software packages have been ported to other OSes. Java, iPlanet suite, etc. As for DTreace, I don't think it's just a matter of taking it and recompiling it on Linux with some minor porting. This is a very low level tool that probably depends on very low-level API in the Solaris kernel. If Linux ever supported with same API, then maybe it could be ported.
Airbus has to sell approx. 300 A380s to break even. They already have pre-orders for over 150. I think it can be considered as a great success already. I don't think it'll be _that_ though to find additional customers for the other 150 units. We have a new modern plane with virtually no competition (747 is older and is not really in A380s class. THere exist rumors that Boeing might shut down 747 production soon).
Well, the Beslan school crisis was not the first act of terrorism in moderm Russia. Just a few months ago two medium sized airplanes were blown up and before that the (russian backed) president of Chechnia was assassinated. We all still remember the horrendous Moscow theather hostage crisis from a couple of years ago and the pictures of the blown up metro. I don't think all of this had to do with the Russian policy towards Ukraine, ISS, or China. All three are separate issues.
I can add that Russia has been for many many years interfering in Ukrainian politics because most Russians and Ukraine's large ethnic Russian population think that Ukraine is nothing more but a Russian province. This thinking has been prevalent for decades if not for centuries, so it should not be surprising that Russians were trying to meddle in their politics during the election year, specially if the opposition candidate is more likely to make the country join such western clubs as NATO or EU distancing the country further from its Russian brethren.
As for Russia and China, they aren't friends at all. However, Russian military industrial complex has been facing a dilema: Either sell the best of your best weapons to your potential enemy (China) and use the cash to continue developing even better weapons or.. simply stop existing. For the last decade or so, Chinese airforce got aircraft that's more modern and is just plain better than what the Russian cash strapped airforce has. Again, this does have to do with the Beslan school crisit. They have been signing multibillion military contracts with China throughout the 90s (much to dismay of western poticians as well as the western weapon makers who would love to sell some of their stuff to China but can't because of weapons trade embargo with China)
Finanlly, that the Russians are asking Americans to contribute to their ISS efforts is not surprising at all. It is not like the Russians suddenly asked for money because of politics or something. Not at all. They simply don't have cash to operate so many Soyuz and Progress ship flights. Two years ago Russian space program budget had less than $300M/year. I suppose it is not much better right now. Sorry for bad spelling if there was any. My $0.02
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I was trying to find out if you were fine with others invading Russia the same way Russian expansionism continues to squeeze out Russia's historical neighbours, but no one can argue with the logic of FSB-TV.
No, I am not fine with that. I also don't see how this is relevant to the original discussion. The Russian migration to places you are referring to happened a long time ago. There is no way to reverse it without people's own will to leave.
I do find it more than a little ironic that while the FSB-loving crowd cries and demands "human rights" (i.e. the right to remain 100% Russian without any degree of integration) for the implanted Russian masses on other nations' lands, that same crowd is fearing the mass migration of Chinese onto the far-eastern parts of the Russian empire (although that is nothing compared to squeezing people out of their historical homelands).
I don't see how the immigration policy is violating anyone's basic rights here.
Would you accept this form of linguistic, cultural and political expansionism if it affected a large part of your remaining national space (try imagining that you weren't slavic but from a peace-loving nation whose living space had been invaded by Russians time and again over the centuries)?
Even if I was unhappy with the Russian cultural expansionism, I still don't think that deporting the Russians or forcing/expecting them to leave on their own is the right thing to do after they had been there for several generations. This does not fit into any human rights standards of our times. Should Jews be forced to leave Israel? Should Arabs be forced to leave Israel? Should all whites leave USA because they are occupying the native american land? Should 20 million or so Russians living Siberia go home to Estern Europe because their ancestors moved to Siberia at some point centuries ago? Just think pragmatically. This won't happen without resotring to some form of ethnic cleansing. These peoples were born there and have no more and no less rights to be there than anyone else.
PS. Please explain to me why the Chechen people and their lands should be controlled by Kremlin and not by the Chechens themselves? Whether they choose to be Wahhabis or buddhists, what does it matter to you?
Simple, they can't rule themselves without destabilizing the politics of the whole Caucasus region. Chechens were granted a de facto independence between 1996 and 1999 and if not for their own foolish actions, they'd still be independent. During 1996-1999 period, their republic became a lawless land somewhat resembling those Afghan or Pakistan regions where the rule of law does not apply. A place that welcomed criminals from all of ex-USSR and middle-eastern terrorists of all sorts. During that time Chechens had resorted to their ages old national crafts, kidnaping and banditism. Their republic was a place where people, money, and arms would disappear without a trace. Their own president seemed to be incapable of stopping some of his warlords from invading the neighboring Russian republic of Dagestan in order to 'liberate' it from the Russian 'occupation' (Those chechen fighters were probably shocked to see all those multi-ethnic, predominantly muslim peoples of Dagestan rise and fight this invasion side by side with Federal troops). Russians couldn't tolerate this lawlessness at their borders forever.
OTOH many of the countries occupied by Soviet Russia can't seem to get their russian-born former masters to leave their newly independent nations. The current Kremlin regime is extremely hostile in its insistance that all these fifth column russians must be allowed to stay on (and yet again give the Russian empire an excuse to intervene in the future...).
There are large Russian minoroties in places like Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Blatic states, etc but most of them are NOT Russian born. Most of those peoples had been there for three or more generations. Are you proposing that they are just supposed to leave the place where they and their fathers were born and had spent their whole lives? No one is actually forcing them to leave although Kremlin has clashed with the Baltic states on the issue of human rights of the Russian minority living there (for examle, the Blatic republics basically banned recently all russian language schools despite having a +30% Russian speaking population) The usually politically correct European Union somehow fails to notice those anti-Russian abuses.
Well, do the minorities really want to stay under Russian domination and continue playing minor roles even in their homelands, that is, when they're not being outright persecuted. Think for a moment: why are there so many "minorities" "within Russia" in the first place?
Russia is a federation. Most "ethnic" provinces are autonomous republics with their own local governments with their own constitutions, presidents, and legislatures. Yes, those minorities have a fair share of power in their own provinces and they also participate in the politics at federal level. I'd say most minorities want to remain part of Russia. It's a mutually benefitial relationship for both sides. Don't let a small bunch of Chechen bandits and thugs who also pretend to be Wahabi fundamentalists (but who somehow often don't mind to drink vodka or rape a Russian girl) to milk money from Saudi Sheikhs to make you believe otherwise.
PS. Isn' the term "minorities native to Russian territories" somewhat of an oxymoron?
No it is not. For examle, there are sizable Ukrainian, Jewish, Georgian, and Armenian minorities living in Russia but their historic homelands are outside of Russia. I have used this term to distinguish them from peoples like Chechens or Tartars who are living in Russia and who indeed are living on their historic homelands there.
If you don't like the mirrors that up2date chooses for you, feel free to put your favorite mirror into /etc/sysconfig/sources.
FreeBSD's ports are fine though I find three problems with FreeBSD's system. 1) The latest versions of packages for which there are ports make files are often not available through pkg_add -r because no one bothered compiling the binary. 2) Compiling all this crap can be slow, specially if your box is say Pentium II-class PC. 3) The ports tree is changing all the time (in other words, it is still sort of unstable..). I prefer RedHat/Fedora/Debian way of maintaining the packages on released distributions. When there is a security problem or some other severe bug in a package, they patch the same version of package that they released originally and then release that as an update. On FreeBSD, I often feel that many packages are being needlessly updated from a sysadmin's point of view.
Nothing? Not even up2date, yum, and this other tool that mandrake has?
.deb does not handle the depedencies automatically. It's just a package format. apt-get does and you can have apt-get, up2date, and similar tools running on top of rpm based distributions just fine. In fact, if I wasn't afraid to be murdered in my sleep, I'd say rpm is a better package manager for its ease of use and some features which seem to be either absent from dpkg or not properly documented the (like, something similar to rpm
s -V, the verify mode).
Nonsense. Yes, less users and developers use Linux on PPC. But you also need to remember that the hardware on non-x86 platforms is a lot more uniform than what you have in the x86 arena. Therefore, driver availability and support for PPC platform does not necessarily need to depend on a large userbase.
.. after six years of development, Gnome 2.x (as shipped with RedHat Enterprise Linux 3) still comes with the Nautilus file manager and the control-panel application that regularly crash on login (we use NFS mounted home dirs but that's not a good excuse). And how come I started to get this stupid message that warns me when I login from a second computer telling me I have logged in from some other place? The are plenty of desktop environment (e.g. CDE..) that work just fine regardless of how many terminals you're logged in from.
Anyone born in the Soviet union could become a Russian citizen with relative ease. Besides, I am sure he was already spending much of his time in Russia before the breakup of the soviet union. Also Baku was a fairly cosmopolitan city before the break up of the soviet union with very large Armenian and Jewish communities living in it. After break up of the soviet union, most of the Jews left to Israel and nearly all of 200.000 Baku Armenians had been forced to leave Azerbaijan because of government sponsored pogroms against them. And I don't see why the ethnicity should be a factor that determines whether someone should or should not involve in politics in such a diverse country as Russia. It might not be well known outside but in many parts of Russia there are fairly large numbers of Ukrainians, Jews, Georgian, Armenians, and others living there (in addition to minorities native to Russian therritories such as those from north caucasus.)
How the sales of software or other digital products that can be simply downloaded are different from the sales of tangible goods that get shipped by snail mail? I think he probably has a good point.
Solaris on x86 is supposed to come from the same source tree as Solaris for SPARC with only x86 bits being different. Given my previous experience with Solaris installer on sparc, I don't find the op's experience too surprising. Try a new feature or do something "non-standard" and it often blows up in your face.
I don't quite understand what you're complainig about. You tried RHEL but you found its packages a little bit dated, so instead you have switched to Debian which is based on packages that are at least a year older than what RHEL is based on?
BTW, which version of matlab are you using? I have no problems running the latest version of Matlab (7) on either RHEL or Fedora Core 3.
So go buy a console server (a rack mountable LCD with a bunch of VGA cables connecting to multiple hosts). No server was designed to run in a compeltely headless mode (even Suns and such, still need a serial console, etc). How do you do right now things like run hardware diagnostics or do bios upgrades?
I did. I switched the machines at work to RHEL and upgraded my PCs at home to Fedora. Not a big deal. I think RHEL and Fedora meet very well the needs of their intended audiences. Yes, it can be annoying that you can't just upgrade the old RedHat system to RHEL without reinstalling but RHEL gives you many benefits over the old RedHat (7/8/9). I would certainly prefer RHEL for use at work for a number of reasons. Fedora seems pretty nice too and it more closely resembles what you used to get with RedHat (faster release cycle, short support cycle for updates, lots of new packages, relatively high quality packaging, ease of use, etc)
Live upgrades are overrated anyways. Why not just take down the system for an hour to do a proper upgrade using the supported and hassle free way? If you're so proud of Debian, nothing is preventing you from switching back to their three year old "stable" distro. I personally don't find Debian to be more compelling and RHEL for enterprise use or Fedora for home user. rpm is at least as good as dpkg and up2date and yum are roughly comparable to apt-get but you at least get a reasonably recent package selection and with RHEL pretty good support which is on par with Solaris and similar systems.
RedHat Enterprise, SuSE, Fedora Core, and Mandrake - the four distributions that the vast majority of rpm-based distro users use - have had automated package management for a while. So, I think it is wrong to say "rpm based = sucks". So, please stop spreading FUD.
I think the root of the problem is that most Windows systems (unless centrally managed) are usually setup so that normal users are logged in with elevated priveleges. If they were logged in without supernatural priveleges then the damage done by the spyware, viruses, and trojans, would be limited just to your account and files (e.g. the rest of the system, and certainly the kernel, would be unaffected). So, it seems like the best strategy to fight spyware is to end the current practice of using the administrator account. I am sure that microsoft could even do something to discourage its use.
RHEL is the leading enterprise Linux distribution and RHEL 4 release is a _big_ news for most RHEL users but somehow Slashdot editors didn't deem it to be important enough to put the story on the slashdot front page. Coincidence? I think not..
The difference between Centos and Madrake though, is that Mandrake forked RedHat and then they diverged as completely independent distributions. but the purpose of Centos is to remain a clone of the current and upcoming RedHat distributions.
Ugh, actually many of their popular stand-alone software packages have been ported to other OSes. Java, iPlanet suite, etc. As for DTreace, I don't think it's just a matter of taking it and recompiling it on Linux with some minor porting. This is a very low level tool that probably depends on very low-level API in the Solaris kernel. If Linux ever supported with same API, then maybe it could be ported.
Airbus has to sell approx. 300 A380s to break even. They already have pre-orders for over 150. I think it can be considered as a great success already. I don't think it'll be _that_ though to find additional customers for the other 150 units. We have a new modern plane with virtually no competition (747 is older and is not really in A380s class. THere exist rumors that Boeing might shut down 747 production soon).
You can keep your /opt with one hundred thousand separate package directories in it to yourself, thank you very much.
Well, the Beslan school crisis was not the first act of terrorism in moderm Russia. Just a few months ago two medium sized airplanes were blown up and before that the (russian backed) president of Chechnia was assassinated. We all still remember the horrendous Moscow theather hostage crisis from a couple of years ago and the pictures of the blown up metro. I don't think all of this had to do with the Russian policy towards Ukraine, ISS, or China. All three are separate issues.
m l
For the updates on Ukraine you can read http://exile.ru/2004-December-10/feature_story.ht
I think exile.ru is pretty good as far as English language coverage goes.
I can add that Russia has been for many many years interfering in Ukrainian politics because most Russians and Ukraine's large ethnic Russian population think that Ukraine is nothing more but a Russian province. This thinking has been prevalent for decades if not for centuries, so it should not be surprising that Russians were trying to meddle in their politics during the election year, specially if the opposition candidate is more likely to make the country join such western clubs as NATO or EU distancing the country further from its Russian brethren.
As for Russia and China, they aren't friends at all. However, Russian military industrial complex has been facing a dilema: Either sell the best of your best weapons to your potential enemy (China) and use the cash to continue developing even better weapons or.. simply stop existing. For the last decade or so, Chinese airforce got aircraft that's more modern and is just plain better than what the Russian cash strapped airforce has. Again, this does have to do with the Beslan school crisit. They have been signing multibillion military contracts with China throughout the 90s (much to dismay of western poticians as well as the western weapon makers who would love to sell some of their stuff to China but can't because of weapons trade embargo with China)
Finanlly, that the Russians are asking Americans to contribute to their ISS efforts is not surprising at all. It is not like the Russians suddenly asked for money because of politics or something. Not at all. They simply don't have cash to operate so many Soyuz and Progress ship flights. Two years ago Russian space program budget had less than $300M/year. I suppose it is not much better right now. Sorry for bad spelling if there was any.
My $0.02