While it's nice that this guy wrote a paper about this, I already know of one company that is putting it into practice (obviously because they're not done with it yet, I can't give you a link - but I can tell you that I heard about the project three years ago). Considering that this is already in the hands of a corporation, it's been in the academic world for quite a lot longer.
In fact, I had a prof who wrote a paper about that. In fact, he got accepted as a professor at my old school because of his network knowledge in that area (that was five years ago). Can anybody point out why this guy's writing isn't redundant?
May I refer you to the history of that quote? I'm afraid the original is actually "KLAATU BARADA NIKTO." If you listen real carefully, you can tell that he's making a "B" and not a "V."
I saw that movie. It's a generic version of the book "1984." A duplicate of the storyline but with their own twists. In the book 1984, controlling information was everything, and it came out well before this movie. They both also paint a bleak picture of reality and both end with the main character becoming satisfied with his horrible world by way of torture.
Except that Brazil isn't as good at illustrating the point.
When I think of one, I think of the other. And then I think "heaven forbid!" Why would I want to watch a movie about how bad the world could suck MORE? Isn't it bad enough? Sure, the movie was trying to make a point, but it was already made! In fact it was made so clearly, that we call places with too little individual freedom "Orwellian" after the author!
I guess I'll leave it to all of you who just can't get enough of seeing the world as a hollow empty place devoid of happiness. Me, I prefer to learn that lesson the first time and move on to more uplifting pursuits.
No, it is illegal for a contract to contradict the law. Since the law states that the right to rent console games is specifically given to the copy owner, this cannot be taken away by a contract.
However, there's nothing preventing the copyright owners from putting whatever stupid clauses they want on the shrink wrap to scare people into giving them more power.
As they pointed out, text based gaming isn't gone, and it's probably not going to go away. It's just not mainstream anymore.
And I would say that I have failed to find any game that satisfies me the way that a good text adventure does, except for maybe playing a game while reading a book (which is much harder to do). Also, what "technical capabilities" are you talking about? Hardly anything has changed since the infocom days; the same technology is used (albiet SLIGHTLY more advanced with the introduction of a few new engines - TADS, advent, etc). If you're talking about the addition of graphics, then you're not talking about a text adventure.
My imagination kicks the crap out of a graphics engine any day, and so I'll continue to prefer a good text adventure, and that's *exactly* what I've got. Incidently, I keep some of them here.
Still...it would be nice if there where more epic text adventures - ones that take a year or so to play. But that's probably way more than I can expect.
Pacemaker + powerful EM field = powerful EM field + corpse
All Necromantic experiments should certainly involve a pacemaker, since pacemakers can turn into corpses. Do you suppose that Dr. Frankenstein used a pacemaker and lightning to produce the monster? It was probably a BIG pacemaker, since it turned into such a big monster.
At the very least, the medical industry should stop asking people to donate their bodies to science, since bodies can be generated by merely applying a powerful enough field to pacemakers. REAL people can then be buried in peace.
While it is true that the group containing all women is not the same as the media conglomerates, the two sets that I was talking about are completely disjoint, and not the ones that you are considering. I'm fairly certain that Hillary Rosen was not part of the women's sufferage movement around the 1920's. Everyone who was must be about 100 years old by now.
The post that I was objecting to was insinuating that a vocal minority caused prohibition just as a vocal minority will cause the restriction of file trading.
And of course, if you look at my context, I was speaking specifically of "women who where for sufferage" when I was speaking of women in America. I'm sure that there were plenty of women who weren't involved in this movement, but that is STILL irrelevant. I was pointing out that this was a very LARGE group, not a small minority, as the media conglomerates are. It doesn't specifically matter that these are women. They could have been martians. The importance is that they are a large group, and thats why they changed things.
In short, when gender politics has been an issue, it should be observed, and one's mind should not be clouded by preconceptions that any gender-related statements are inherenly sexist.
As far as dividing the world into opposing camps of "corporations" and "everyone else," since your argument doesn't make sense in light of mine, I fail to see your reasoning, especially because you have not adequetely shown why the fact that the set containing women and the set containing members of conglomerates is not disjoint is relevant. Sometimes it is "corporations" versus "everyone else," where everyone else contains all those who are opressed by corporate politics. Otherwise, we would never have started using expressions like "Robber Barons" to describe "Captians of Industry."
The "minority" you speak of that caused prohibition was primarily women stretching their political muscles.
As near as I can figure, the argument is something like this: Women's Sufferage movement: WE NEED TO VOTE! Everyone else: Why? Aren't things going okay for you? Women's Sufferage movement: WE ARE MORALLY OPPOSED TO ALCOHOL! Everyone else: I guess you've got your convictions (and a few mumbles of approval that win support to the sufferage movement)
When it came down to it, the reason was mostly just an excuse to allow women to take the power they should have already had.
The prohibition movement was a small push that turned the tide.
I'd like to think that all of the women in America hold a lot more political power than media conglomerates, and unlike perhaps Christian moral law, women have *not* been completely replaced by money and corporate interests. But enough about that...
The primary goal of politicians is to stay in office - which means convincing the majority of the public that they are helped, or at least not hindered by this politician, since politicians are elected. If they don't, they won't get reelected.
The secondary goal of a politician is to make lots and lots of money - which is often in opposition to the first goal, since doing that may require that a politician attempt to legalize corporate crimes against his constituents.
As I see it the fine line they walk is to pass all the laws they can which legalize crimes against the constituents, while enforcing as few of these laws as possible, so that said constituents will not find out, get mad, and boot them from office. Then the new guy will have to repeal the "crime is legal" law before he starts writing his own.
Seems to me Congress is doing exactly that and will continue to do so as long as possible until they really anger the voters. Then they'll change whatever law made us the angriest, wait a few years, and write it again.
I have a theory that this perturbation process actually results in corrections becoming more major as time goes by (because the problem gets worse at a more fundamental level). If I'm right, one day income tax will be repealed.:)
Note to anyone arguing against this theory (a little note to help the argument-impaired here on/.): I did not substantiate it in any way, so you can't argue it's truth by presenting any flaw in its conception. The only thing that you might argue is that income tax is not a bad thing than angers voters.
So...he's talking about using the spectrum more efficiently.
But more than that, I think. Consider that the spectrum itself is not quantized. We quantize it with different radio stations, but this is not really absolutely necessary. If our recievers/transmitters where all spread spectrum, and they could all recieve/transmit at nearly any frequency we wanted, then there really wouldn't be much problem with interference. Sure, you might get signal degradation in one frequency band because someone else was using it, but you'd get less in another band that would make up for it.
To make sure that the spectrum doesn't become completely unusable wouldn't require government regulation of WHO uses it as much as it would require regulation on HOW they use it. If people used the spectrum the way that broadcasting companies do now, we would certainly have a problem.
But it is unlikely that anyone would be able to completely use all of the spectrum because of the unbelievable energy requirements that this would need.
In short, with the appropriate scheme, there really is enough bandwidth for everybody (that is, bandwidth would be limited by power, not by regulation).
A lot of the latest games come with the ability to write subgames using their engines.
There are even a few previously released games that are freeware now with such an engine. Dink Smallwood comes to mind.
And for RPGs or interactive fiction a single individual can surely still do their thing. It's even possible to put them on the web.
Not polished? That's crap. To me, polished means no bugs, and an excellent storyline that makes sense. My old games don't crash, and the whole game isn't "go kill the monster and level up." The new ones I've got seem to crash much more often, and I haven't found much BESIDES go kill the monster.
Nearly all of my old games where made by six people or less, but the new ones...
I would also like to note that the best game I've ever played was an independant one.
Yeah...then we'll finally get a zip program called Winzip, and a media player called Winamp... Maybeevenafew that include the whole word!
IANAL, but don't you think that some of these would have been sued already if they had a copyright on Windows? Copyrights, like everything else, are domain specific. VERY domain specific. Also, I'm fairly certain they don't have a copyright on Windows, but rather a copyright on "Microsoft Windows."
If someone knows different and has a link, please let me know...
Did you learn how to use the turn signals in your car? Same basic principal.
You just have to use it about four times.
We're not talking about using ALL of vi here. Just the navigation stuff and the search function (which is '/'). Take five minutes and learn the bindings. There's no "getting the hang of it," that's really all the time it takes.
See previous thread. "pinfo" works a lot like vi - you can use the same navigation commands, along with the standard info commands (up, next, prev).
Strange that this wasn't used as a standard for info to begin with. VI makes the assumption that mostly you aren't editing while you're moving about the file, while emacs doesn't.
It's a lot less trouble to navigate with just 'j' and 'k' than with 'ctrl+n', 'ctrl+p'. If I'm going to have to use both hands all of the time, I might as well just use the mouse. I suppose its due to who made info...
You might have a point there to some degree... but it looks like AFS is good for architectures that NFS isn't - specifically, it looks like its designed for when you want to have lots of different distributed network components.
All the situations that I would use AFS/NFS are such that each individual would really want or already have all of their data locally, and AFS/NFS would just be an additional feature I could provide (perhaps) if technically feasible. They wouldn't like having the system distributed much.
So...yeah, I guess I might be trading one hell for another. My big thing is that in AFS "hell" when one node goes down, the whole system doesn't (unless it's the main one). It would just mean that whoever owned that machine wouldn't be able to serve up their stuff.
Still, you are left with implementation, configuration and maintenance yourself, though I tend to think that the third of these is easier with AFS because the first and second are so much more complex.
Let me close in saying that when I think of NFS hell, I think of the inevitably of servers thrashing out of control when peak usage is reached; systems hanging and never coming back up without user intervention, a large degree of interdependance of components, and no way of changing these problems without restarting everything. And when I think of AFS, I think of how the general design (i.e. the proposal for how it should work) includes solutions to these problems.
That doesn't mean its a magic bullet for doing networking when you don't know what you're doing any more than the Discrete Cosine Transform is the magic bullet for image compression. However, when you know what you're doing, I'd say you can get better results with better tools, and with a greater tolerance for error on your part.
Not to be one of those "just do it a different way" guys, but don't use NFS. Obviously its NFS that's the problem.
Distributed file servers are better from a technical point of view because it protects your data by physical separateness. What if that one machine dies? Then EVERYBODY is without their data.
Today there are several different architectures available for distributing data. I'm rather partial to AFS myself.
Wrong, many mirrors keep old versions, otherwise you can mirror internally (as we do). Try ftp://mandrake.redbox.cz I spent about three hours back when I had 8.2 looking for one. If they're that hard to find, I'd rather switch distros. And yes, I did look in contrib. I'm not going to mirror internally. That's too much data for my little hard disc.
Either that, or you are competent enough to package software properly (rpm is good at enforcing discipline in software management), and if suiteable, submit it to contribs.
If I can't get the packages to compile, I can't make an RPM, can I? Besides, I don't *want* to have to make an rpm to include it in my package management system. I want it to be easy (not necessarily easy to learn - easy to use). It's a distro-breaker for me.
(you probably left out the mrpoper target, which is documented in the readme...) No I didn't. I read, and reread the readme, and tried different stuff to get it to work, including that. I thought there was something wrong with me. The thing that finally worked was "upgrading" the version of gcc using an rpm from redhat. Unfortunately, that broke a lot of other stuff on my system.
Mandrake has not been a developer's distro in the past. Perhaps it is now, but that's why I switched.
How many people have you read that are criticizing Mandrake because of it's ease of use?
THINK!
I personally don't use Mandrake because of all of the problems I had getting it to install new versions of stuff that wasn't part of Mandrake's distribution page. Moreover, I noticed that you can't use the repositories for the previous version when the next version comes out - you have to upgrade when Mandrake does, or else you can't install any new packages without violating the dependencies. Obviously, this isn't going to be a problem for anyone that thinks that Mandrake has every package they will ever need, so for them it probably is a walk in the park to use.
I'm sorry, but that's just not easy enough for me to use. Plus, the compiler version they've been shipping with blows, in my experience (maybe they've upgraded by now and it works - haven't given it another chance). It failed most of the time when compiling new packages for me (I couldn't even get the kernel to compile with the default options that Mandrake had on it). I switched because I wanted a distro that was flexible when it came to changing the dependencies, and which I could easily add take advantage of the package system to add my own very quickly.
My experience has been the same. It's not been the processor that has been the problem EVER, it's been the memory.
A while ago I was running Mandrake 8.0 on my 200Mhz K6 (I have since given it to my sisters, who will only run Win98 on it). X was plenty fast enough.
There where some problems with KDE - all of it's transition animations took loads of CPU time, and thsi machine also only had 64MB of memory. So I switched to icewm and the memory and CPU problems went away completely; it was as fast as the windows machine, and with a WAY underpowered system.
If you're having trouble with a Celeron 500 you're doing something seriously wrong.
Losing. Market. Share. Is. An. Indication. Of. A. Company's. Failure.
Why can't you understand this? If Apple loses all of its market, it will no longer be in business. Profit isn't some magical thing that comes from the profit fairy, it's produced by doing business. If Apple stops selling stuff, it will go under.
They can't make a profit otherwise. Furthermore, there is a limit to the minimum profit a company can have in the computer industry because expenditures aren't zero, so there is a minimum market share.
The question, as always, is how close Apple is coming to that line such that they will no longer have the funds to compete?
I personally think it's closer to.5% or even lower, but that doesn't make it a non-issue.
Also, there's the question of third-party support which is invariably tied to market share, except for in a few cases. Take Linux, for example. How many software manufacturers put out a Linux version? Very few because there is a negligable market share in Linux, but its usually the apps that make the system desirable.
They don't? Enlighten me, then, what constitutes owning the lines?
I suppose they don't own the cable running into my home, but don't they own the switches that make it possible? Isn't it the switches that are expensive, and also something that we can only have so many of?
Maybe I'm wrong and the ultimate control of the hardware isn't up to Bell...but then why would they be doing this push? I think you're wrong here.
Slashdot Mirror
While it's nice that this guy wrote a paper about this, I already know of one company that is putting it into practice (obviously because they're not done with it yet, I can't give you a link - but I can tell you that I heard about the project three years ago). Considering that this is already in the hands of a corporation, it's been in the academic world for quite a lot longer.
In fact, I had a prof who wrote a paper about that. In fact, he got accepted as a professor at my old school because of his network knowledge in that area (that was five years ago). Can anybody point out why this guy's writing isn't redundant?
No it's not.
Go watch the movie again.
"I am here to chew bubble gum and kick ass. (pause)
And I'm all out of bubble gum"
I think that maybe Duke Nukem changed it a bit, but that's the original quote.
May I refer you to the history of that quote? I'm afraid the original is actually "KLAATU BARADA NIKTO." If you listen real carefully, you can tell that he's making a "B" and not a "V."
I saw that movie. It's a generic version of the book "1984." A duplicate of the storyline but with their own twists. In the book 1984, controlling information was everything, and it came out well before this movie. They both also paint a bleak picture of reality and both end with the main character becoming satisfied with his horrible world by way of torture.
Except that Brazil isn't as good at illustrating the point.
When I think of one, I think of the other. And then I think "heaven forbid!" Why would I want to watch a movie about how bad the world could suck MORE? Isn't it bad enough? Sure, the movie was trying to make a point, but it was already made! In fact it was made so clearly, that we call places with too little individual freedom "Orwellian" after the author!
I guess I'll leave it to all of you who just can't get enough of seeing the world as a hollow empty place devoid of happiness. Me, I prefer to learn that lesson the first time and move on to more uplifting pursuits.
and repeat the greatest one-liner of all time...
And I'm all out of bubble gum!
Plus I got it wrong. Not that it matters. You all know how it goes.
Actually, as far as one liners go, that's a classic, but most of the good one liners are in Army of Darkness.
"First you want to kill me, then you want to kiss me. Blow."
"Give me some sugar, baby."
"Who wants some? You? You want a little?"
"Good. Bad. I'm the guy with the gun."
"Klatu Berata Necktie!"
"You loved me once. Honey, you got REAL ugly."
"Hail to the king, baby."
I think the true test of a movie's one liners is how many of them made it into a Duke Nukem game.
No, it is illegal for a contract to contradict the law. Since the law states that the right to rent console games is specifically given to the copy owner, this cannot be taken away by a contract.
However, there's nothing preventing the copyright owners from putting whatever stupid clauses they want on the shrink wrap to scare people into giving them more power.
As they pointed out, text based gaming isn't gone, and it's probably not going to go away. It's just not mainstream anymore.
And I would say that I have failed to find any game that satisfies me the way that a good text adventure does, except for maybe playing a game while reading a book (which is much harder to do). Also, what "technical capabilities" are you talking about? Hardly anything has changed since the infocom days; the same technology is used (albiet SLIGHTLY more advanced with the introduction of a few new engines - TADS, advent, etc). If you're talking about the addition of graphics, then you're not talking about a text adventure.
My imagination kicks the crap out of a graphics engine any day, and so I'll continue to prefer a good text adventure, and that's *exactly* what I've got. Incidently, I keep some of them here.
Still...it would be nice if there where more epic text adventures - ones that take a year or so to play. But that's probably way more than I can expect.
You raise a very important point: the SMTP system is inherently flawed.
Why should any mail server be allowed to send you mail? There should be a whitelist for *that*.
Pacemaker + powerful EM field = powerful EM field + corpse
All Necromantic experiments should certainly involve a pacemaker, since pacemakers can turn into corpses. Do you suppose that Dr. Frankenstein used a pacemaker and lightning to produce the monster? It was probably a BIG pacemaker, since it turned into such a big monster.
At the very least, the medical industry should stop asking people to donate their bodies to science, since bodies can be generated by merely applying a powerful enough field to pacemakers. REAL people can then be buried in peace.
While it is true that the group containing all women is not the same as the media conglomerates, the two sets that I was talking about are completely disjoint, and not the ones that you are considering. I'm fairly certain that Hillary Rosen was not part of the women's sufferage movement around the 1920's. Everyone who was must be about 100 years old by now.
The post that I was objecting to was insinuating that a vocal minority caused prohibition just as a vocal minority will cause the restriction of file trading.
And of course, if you look at my context, I was speaking specifically of "women who where for sufferage" when I was speaking of women in America. I'm sure that there were plenty of women who weren't involved in this movement, but that is STILL irrelevant. I was pointing out that this was a very LARGE group, not a small minority, as the media conglomerates are. It doesn't specifically matter that these are women. They could have been martians. The importance is that they are a large group, and thats why they changed things.
In short, when gender politics has been an issue, it should be observed, and one's mind should not be clouded by preconceptions that any gender-related statements are inherenly sexist.
As far as dividing the world into opposing camps of "corporations" and "everyone else," since your argument doesn't make sense in light of mine, I fail to see your reasoning, especially because you have not adequetely shown why the fact that the set containing women and the set containing members of conglomerates is not disjoint is relevant. Sometimes it is "corporations" versus "everyone else," where everyone else contains all those who are opressed by corporate politics. Otherwise, we would never have started using expressions like "Robber Barons" to describe "Captians of Industry."
The "minority" you speak of that caused prohibition was primarily women stretching their political muscles.
:)
/.): I did not substantiate it in any way, so you can't argue it's truth by presenting any flaw in its conception. The only thing that you might argue is that income tax is not a bad thing than angers voters.
As near as I can figure, the argument is something like this:
Women's Sufferage movement: WE NEED TO VOTE!
Everyone else: Why? Aren't things going okay for you?
Women's Sufferage movement: WE ARE MORALLY OPPOSED TO ALCOHOL!
Everyone else: I guess you've got your convictions (and a few mumbles of approval that win support to the sufferage movement)
When it came down to it, the reason was mostly just an excuse to allow women to take the power they should have already had.
The prohibition movement was a small push that turned the tide.
I'd like to think that all of the women in America hold a lot more political power than media conglomerates, and unlike perhaps Christian moral law, women have *not* been completely replaced by money and corporate interests. But enough about that...
The primary goal of politicians is to stay in office - which means convincing the majority of the public that they are helped, or at least not hindered by this politician, since politicians are elected. If they don't, they won't get reelected.
The secondary goal of a politician is to make lots and lots of money - which is often in opposition to the first goal, since doing that may require that a politician attempt to legalize corporate crimes against his constituents.
As I see it the fine line they walk is to pass all the laws they can which legalize crimes against the constituents, while enforcing as few of these laws as possible, so that said constituents will not find out, get mad, and boot them from office. Then the new guy will have to repeal the "crime is legal" law before he starts writing his own.
Seems to me Congress is doing exactly that and will continue to do so as long as possible until they really anger the voters. Then they'll change whatever law made us the angriest, wait a few years, and write it again.
I have a theory that this perturbation process actually results in corrections becoming more major as time goes by (because the problem gets worse at a more fundamental level). If I'm right, one day income tax will be repealed.
Note to anyone arguing against this theory (a little note to help the argument-impaired here on
So...he's talking about using the spectrum more efficiently.
But more than that, I think. Consider that the spectrum itself is not quantized. We quantize it with different radio stations, but this is not really absolutely necessary. If our recievers/transmitters where all spread spectrum, and they could all recieve/transmit at nearly any frequency we wanted, then there really wouldn't be much problem with interference. Sure, you might get signal degradation in one frequency band because someone else was using it, but you'd get less in another band that would make up for it.
To make sure that the spectrum doesn't become completely unusable wouldn't require government regulation of WHO uses it as much as it would require regulation on HOW they use it. If people used the spectrum the way that broadcasting companies do now, we would certainly have a problem.
But it is unlikely that anyone would be able to completely use all of the spectrum because of the unbelievable energy requirements that this would need.
In short, with the appropriate scheme, there really is enough bandwidth for everybody (that is, bandwidth would be limited by power, not by regulation).
A lot of the latest games come with the ability to write subgames using their engines.
There are even a few previously released games that are freeware now with such an engine. Dink Smallwood comes to mind.
And for RPGs or interactive fiction a single individual can surely still do their thing. It's even possible to put them on the web.
Not polished? That's crap. To me, polished means no bugs, and an excellent storyline that makes sense. My old games don't crash, and the whole game isn't "go kill the monster and level up." The new ones I've got seem to crash much more often, and I haven't found much BESIDES go kill the monster.
Nearly all of my old games where made by six people or less, but the new ones...
I would also like to note that the best game I've ever played was an independant one.
Hmm...
Yeah...then we'll finally get a zip program called Winzip, and a media player called Winamp...
Maybe even a few that include the whole word!
IANAL, but don't you think that some of these would have been sued already if they had a copyright on Windows? Copyrights, like everything else, are domain specific. VERY domain specific. Also, I'm fairly certain they don't have a copyright on Windows, but rather a copyright on "Microsoft Windows."
If someone knows different and has a link, please let me know...
Never get the hang of...four letters?
Did you learn how to use the turn signals in your car? Same basic principal.
You just have to use it about four times.
We're not talking about using ALL of vi here. Just the navigation stuff and the search function (which is '/'). Take five minutes and learn the bindings. There's no "getting the hang of it," that's really all the time it takes.
See previous thread. "pinfo" works a lot like vi - you can use the same navigation commands, along with the standard info commands (up, next, prev).
Strange that this wasn't used as a standard for info to begin with. VI makes the assumption that mostly you aren't editing while you're moving about the file, while emacs doesn't.
It's a lot less trouble to navigate with just 'j' and 'k' than with 'ctrl+n', 'ctrl+p'. If I'm going to have to use both hands all of the time, I might as well just use the mouse. I suppose its due to who made info...
You might have a point there to some degree...
but it looks like AFS is good for architectures that NFS isn't - specifically, it looks like its designed for when you want to have lots of different distributed network components.
All the situations that I would use AFS/NFS are such that each individual would really want or already have all of their data locally, and AFS/NFS would just be an additional feature I could provide (perhaps) if technically feasible. They wouldn't like having the system distributed much.
So...yeah, I guess I might be trading one hell for another. My big thing is that in AFS "hell" when one node goes down, the whole system doesn't (unless it's the main one). It would just mean that whoever owned that machine wouldn't be able to serve up their stuff.
Still, you are left with implementation, configuration and maintenance yourself, though I tend to think that the third of these is easier with AFS because the first and second are so much more complex.
Let me close in saying that when I think of NFS hell, I think of the inevitably of servers thrashing out of control when peak usage is reached; systems hanging and never coming back up without user intervention, a large degree of interdependance of components, and no way of changing these problems without restarting everything. And when I think of AFS, I think of how the general design (i.e. the proposal for how it should work) includes solutions to these problems.
That doesn't mean its a magic bullet for doing networking when you don't know what you're doing any more than the Discrete Cosine Transform is the magic bullet for image compression. However, when you know what you're doing, I'd say you can get better results with better tools, and with a greater tolerance for error on your part.
The lowest quality brand of printer on the market has decided that people can't copy their cartridges!
What's next?
Will it be illegal to make generic versions of RC Cola?
Illegal to make work-alikes to "No-Ad" sunblock?
No one will be able to make anything that looks like a Ford Pinto? Or one of these cars?
What is this world coming to!
Well, at least I can still buy Tandy 5000 compatible computers.
Not to be one of those "just do it a different way" guys, but don't use NFS. Obviously its NFS that's the problem.
Distributed file servers are better from a technical point of view because it protects your data by physical separateness. What if that one machine dies? Then EVERYBODY is without their data.
Today there are several different architectures available for distributing data. I'm rather partial to AFS myself.
Wrong, many mirrors keep old versions, otherwise you can mirror internally (as we do). Try ftp://mandrake.redbox.cz
...)
I spent about three hours back when I had 8.2 looking for one. If they're that hard to find, I'd rather switch distros. And yes, I did look in contrib. I'm not going to mirror internally. That's too much data for my little hard disc.
Either that, or you are competent enough to package software properly (rpm is good at enforcing discipline in software management), and if suiteable, submit it to contribs.
If I can't get the packages to compile, I can't make an RPM, can I? Besides, I don't *want* to have to make an rpm to include it in my package management system. I want it to be easy (not necessarily easy to learn - easy to use). It's a distro-breaker for me.
(you probably left out the mrpoper target, which is documented in the readme
No I didn't. I read, and reread the readme, and tried different stuff to get it to work, including that. I thought there was something wrong with me. The thing that finally worked was "upgrading" the version of gcc using an rpm from redhat. Unfortunately, that broke a lot of other stuff on my system.
Mandrake has not been a developer's distro in the past. Perhaps it is now, but that's why I switched.
This is known as a hasty generalization.
Have you read any of Slashdot today?
How many people have you read that are criticizing Mandrake because of it's ease of use?
THINK!
I personally don't use Mandrake because of all of the problems I had getting it to install new versions of stuff that wasn't part of Mandrake's distribution page. Moreover, I noticed that you can't use the repositories for the previous version when the next version comes out - you have to upgrade when Mandrake does, or else you can't install any new packages without violating the dependencies. Obviously, this isn't going to be a problem for anyone that thinks that Mandrake has every package they will ever need, so for them it probably is a walk in the park to use.
I'm sorry, but that's just not easy enough for me to use. Plus, the compiler version they've been shipping with blows, in my experience (maybe they've upgraded by now and it works - haven't given it another chance). It failed most of the time when compiling new packages for me (I couldn't even get the kernel to compile with the default options that Mandrake had on it). I switched because I wanted a distro that was flexible when it came to changing the dependencies, and which I could easily add take advantage of the package system to add my own very quickly.
My experience has been the same. It's not been the processor that has been the problem EVER, it's been the memory.
A while ago I was running Mandrake 8.0 on my 200Mhz K6 (I have since given it to my sisters, who will only run Win98 on it). X was plenty fast enough.
There where some problems with KDE - all of it's transition animations took loads of CPU time, and thsi machine also only had 64MB of memory. So I switched to icewm and the memory and CPU problems went away completely; it was as fast as the windows machine, and with a WAY underpowered system.
If you're having trouble with a Celeron 500 you're doing something seriously wrong.
Losing. Market. Share. Is. An. Indication. Of. A. Company's. Failure.
.5% or even lower, but that doesn't make it a non-issue.
Why can't you understand this? If Apple loses all of its market, it will no longer be in business. Profit isn't some magical thing that comes from the profit fairy, it's produced by doing business. If Apple stops selling stuff, it will go under.
They can't make a profit otherwise. Furthermore, there is a limit to the minimum profit a company can have in the computer industry because expenditures aren't zero, so there is a minimum market share.
The question, as always, is how close Apple is coming to that line such that they will no longer have the funds to compete?
I personally think it's closer to
Also, there's the question of third-party support which is invariably tied to market share, except for in a few cases. Take Linux, for example. How many software manufacturers put out a Linux version? Very few because there is a negligable market share in Linux, but its usually the apps that make the system desirable.
I'm afraid there's a bug in your logic: implication is not the same as equivalence.
"Bugs are cool" does not mean that things that are without bugs are not cool.
Don't feel bad.
At least you can know that you're cool.
They don't? Enlighten me, then, what constitutes owning the lines?
I suppose they don't own the cable running into my home, but don't they own the switches that make it possible? Isn't it the switches that are expensive, and also something that we can only have so many of?
Maybe I'm wrong and the ultimate control of the hardware isn't up to Bell...but then why would they be doing this push? I think you're wrong here.