I basically disagree with moderation and don't use it. Turn it off if you don't like the way it is working.
Bingo! If you don't like it, don't use it. I hate idiots who complain about "censorship" on Slashdot when in fact there is none. (Is it censorship on USEnet when I choose to only keep the newsgroups I'm interested in in my.newsrc? Then why do you think it's censorship on Slashdot when people choose to read only certain messages?)
As for Debian's libc6 upgrade what is difficult?... Is there something difficult about typing "apt-get install libc6"... I must be missing something.
You are. The difficult part is not typing the command. The difficult part is when the installation aborts and leaves the system unusable. At least, that was my experience trying to upgrade from slink to potato. For more details, see:
Debian Bug report logs - #48455 libc6.1: libc6 fails to install and leaves installation broken
(Note: I am not Michael Neuffer, I just happen to have had the same experience...)
Now, it's going to take more than a pretty installer to make me switch distros, but I could be persuaded...
"it's going to take MORE than..." Does that mean a pretty installer is a necessary condition (just not a sufficient one)? If that's the case, forget it. Installs don't get much uglier than Debian.
I wouldn't say anything to get you to switch. Try it yourself. If you like it, switch, if you don't, stick with RedHat. There is no one distribution that serves everyone's needs the best. I maintain three Linux machines, and I don't run the same distribution on each. I can't begin to guess at why you might want to run Debian rather than RedHat, or why you'd want to run RedHat rather than Debian. I know why my Debian box runs Debian, and I know why my RedHat box runs Mandrake.:) But seriously, just try it yourself and see which suits your needs better. Then use the one that does, whichever one that may be and regardless of what other people advocate.
Am I mad at Debian? No, I'm mad at Red Hat, for releasing 5.2 with a clearly marked UNSTABLE c library.
Actually, RedHat had glibc2 in its 5.1 release. I know: that's when I switched from Debian to RedHat (for my user machine -- my servers run Debian, of course). I got tired of waiting for all the latest toys to play with. I'm happy putting up with an "unstable" machine for my day to day play. I don't blame RedHat for being willing to fill than niche, in fact I'm glad they did (although these days I use Mandrake). I for one an quite happy to have the choice.
With responses like "if you get this, can you run your fav linux games?", "You can get Linux or FreeBSD for nothing, and you get to *keep* your soul.", "Why would anyone pay $99 for a closed-source, unsupported, singl-architecture UNIX?", it really makes me wonder how many of these people had even HEARD of Unix 5 years ago. I especially love that "why would anyone pay $99" arguement... a Unix license used to run in the thousands!
Irrelevant. The cheapest available electronic calculators were over a hundred dollars when I first got one. But nowadays, people give away better ones for free with your paid subscription to (whatever). What does the fact that Unix licenses used to run in the thousands have to do with the fact that by today's standards this is not a good deal. The fact that I was running a commercial Unix (SunOS primarily) over five years ago doesn't mean I'm too senile to have noticed the Unix world has changed a lot in the last five years.
I find it so amusing that when Compaq does what is basically a *major favor* for the hobbyist computer user, they get blasted for "not being all cool and open sourced!"
I would hardly call $99 for an OS with poor third-party hardware support and an excessively restrictive license a "major favor". If you have a use for it, fine, but it's a rip off for most.
by people who more than likely only use their "rad bawXen" for bitchX and don't even know what C code looks like. Honestly, you people have no idea how good you have it nowadays.
I know what C code looks like. Many styles, in fact. I was fluent in it before ANSI got their hands on it. But again, this is utterly irrelevant. Why on earth would my C programming experience have any bearing on my ability to note that, for my purposes, this is not a good deal?
I'm not sure if this is still available on the newer Slackware versions, but the older versions would let you do a UMBDOS install. What this would do is install linux under a linux directory under windows/Fat16/32, so you don't need to worry about repartitioning.
I'm not sure if Slack 7.0's regular installer will do this, but you can always download and install ZipSlack, a (relatively) small UMSDOS-based version of Slackware Linux to try it out. No X, though. If you've got disk space to burn, a new feature with 7.0 is BigSlack, a huge version of ZipSlack. Again, it's UMSDOS-based, which means you can install it without partitioning, but unlike ZipSlack (which fits on a ZIP or LS-120 disk), BigSlack has all the goodies, like X. However, it takes nearly a gig IIRC.
I hope he's not correct about this one. If he is, then we can look forward to eternal smog, oil spills, traffic, etc, etc.
Nope. The days of exponentially increasing oil usage are long over. These days, we're promoting alternative fuels, but not because we're afraid we're going to run out, rather because we don't like the environmental damage. If current trends continue regarding the decline in how quickly our oil usages increases, it will peak, fall, and reach near zero before we exhaust what oil resources we have already discovered. Finding out oil is more abundant or replaceable than we thought is not going to change that. Back in the 70's, we thought we'd need to pull in the reins because we'd run out soon. We know better now, but we're pulling in the reins anyways. Look forward to a future of electric cars and whatnot, not because we're afraid of running out of fuel but because we just don't want to put up with the pollution anymore...
Let's talk about Redhate Linux....[Huge amount of text snipped]...
Hahaha! Gosh, I'm not sure if this post should be moderated down as flamebait or up as funny! Luckily, I'm out of moderator points, so I don't have to be faced with that decision.
It's truly impressive, either way. I've never seen a post on/. that went on this long without actually saying anything! I got a huge laugh out of it, whether it was intended as humor or not...
... Look at the new Slackware site. It got a refreshing new look, but I actualy prefer the previous black background. White background gives me a headache with all the glare.
Turn down the brightness on your monitor. Make it so nothing ever gets any brighter than a dull grey. Improves the look of all your applications across the board.:-)
Just because a distribution doesn't mean your needs doesn't mean it isn't a quality distribution.
RedHat has different goals than Slackware or Debian. I started using Linux with Debian 1.3 (IIRC, seems like an eternity ago), but I switched to RedHat 5.1 because I got antsy waiting on Debian's glacial release schedule. I wanted all the newest toys and I wanted them NOW!:) These days, I run Mandrake on my desktop (even more bleeding edge and buggier than RedHat, in my experience) but Debian on my servers. Proof positive that there's no single best distribution, the question is meaningless unless you qualify it which "best for what?" Debian and Slackware's conservatism is a bug for some, a feature for others (both for me, depending on which machine I'm using).
I know someone's going to say: "Why did you switch to RedHat rather than just use Debian unstable?" Before I got DSL, it wasn't really an option. I needed a nice CD-ROM to install from. Now, it's just inertia. I may ultimately switch back to Debian on all my machines, but for now I'm happy with the mixture as is.
The point I'm getting at is, RedHat is both a much higher and a much lower quality distribution than Slackware. It all depends on what qualities you're looking for in a distribution.
I dont have any hard figures, but I doubt that the US and Canada could easly produce food for over 1 billion peaple with out much problem.
I don't. Especially if the demand rises. We don't farm a lot of land in North America that we could if it weren't for the fact that there isn't enough money to be made at it. If the world actually came anywhere close to eating all the food it currently produces (as opposed to eating about half of it and throwing away the other half uneaten, as we do now), farmers across North America would rejoice and start cultivating all those extra acres. If that didn't saturate the market and prices remained high, they'd start buying more land to cultivate. North American farmers alone could quite easily feed a few billion more people.
We're rapidly approaching the maximum limit of this planet (estimated to be somewhere between 8 and 10 billion, IIRC)
I take it this estimate was made before the green revolution. Right now, with 6 billion people in the world, we throw away uneaten nearly half the food we grow. In other words, with absolutely zero increases in agritechnology over today, we could feed nearly twice the world's current population. And again, even assuming we never increase our agricultural efficiency beyond today's levels, we could feed much more than that by simply farming more land. We're no where close to farming all available farmable land today. Anyone who estimates the maximum limit of the world's carrying capacity for humans at under 25 billion is seriously out of touch with the realities of modern agriculture. Now, if we take into account the fact that agritechnology is NOT going to stop advancing tomorrow, it seems highly unlikely we'll come anywhere close to maximizing the possible population of the planet during the next several centuries. And if lowering birth rate trends continue, it seems quite likely we'll be no where near our limits a couple thousand years from now. This hardly qualifies as "rapidly approaching" in my book...
But what happens when I come along and impersonate the trusted IP? And isn't this trivially easy to do? No more difficult that impersonating a different Ethernet MAC address, no? That's something I can do quite easily...
Just because Debian makes a 100% free distrib, what is stopping RedHat from making their own 100% free distrib?
USI (Ubiquitous Slashdot Idiots). See the post you're responding to for an example of one. The USI crowd are generally recognizable for their "One True Way" attitude. USIs argue with one another all the time, but they have the same take, just switch a few words. One USI says "Since KDE exists it's stupid to work on GNOME." Another says the exact same thing, but reverses the terms. They generally are of low enough intelligence that I don't know if there's an actually opinion their and it matters to them if you reverse the terms or not -- they may be a batch of pattern-matching psuedo-AI's running at Micros~1 HQ in an attempt to flood Slashdot with worthless dross. I hope that's the case, I'd hate to think these USIs are actually people who exist and really do suffer from that much stupidity...
The point is that Red Hat claims to be using the DSFG/OpenSource guidelines. On this basis, they are being hypocritical.
How so? By not including Qt 2? Qt 2 is one of thousands of pieces of free software. By your standards, Debian is equally hypocritical. There's plenty of free software they don't include, either...
I'm sure QT would be useful, but so would a lot of other packages. Even if they now have godlike funding, RedHat still has finite human resources available for maintaining their distribution. They do try to verify that each package works properly and keep it working properly with each new release. Adding QT would add another package that would need to be checked and maintained. If there's enough benefit to be gained, they'll devote some time to it. If not, they won't. Lacking KDE 2.0, I imagine they don't see the time and money necessary to add QT to their distribution as being well spent, or rather it may be it would be well spent, but even better spent on something more useful to more people. You can't satisfy everyone, but you can try to satisfy as many as you can as well as you can, and that's what RedHat's trying to do.
Maybe you disgaree with this decision -- if so, put some effort into it yourself and upload QT2 RPMs to the RedHat contrib. (Actually, I'd be surprised if there aren't already QT2 RPMs available...)
What exactly is the point of using Java if you're only going to use Solaris on SPARC HW? If that really is the only good Java platform (which I doubt) then the language is pretty much useless.
If you reread the post you're replying to, you'll see I said I wouldn't want to do Java development on anything but a SPARC. As far as running Java goes, there are plenty of decent VM's out there for many different platforms...
...there almost hasn't been any radical innovations in those desktops for years, the only thing I can thing of is MS's web integration, and maybe the start menu that appeared from win 3.11 to win95.
*cough* *cough* The Start Menu was a radical innovation? I remember thinking when it first came out, "Gosh, now I have a menu that's around all the time, so I can drop apps in it and have them easily accessible at all times like I've been doing with the Apple menu on my Mac for over half a decade!" But that's par for the course -- throughout the 80's and early 90's, innovations came to the PC world about 5 years behind when the appeared in the Mac world. Then Apple stagnated. Don't know why. System 7 was awesome when it first came out, but it got really embarrasing to be still running it 7 years later with virtually no change in it.
The one and only innovation I ever liked from Windows (and that seemed to truly be an innovation, but for all I know it was somewhere else first and I just don't know about it) was the right-click context menus. Now THOSE I've found to be truly useful...
Good move. I starting programming in Java on a SPARC running Solaris (2.3 IIRC) back before there were non-beta versions available for any other OS. As new versions for other OS's have come along, I've tried them, and never found any that seemed to work as well. If you're serious about Java development, do yourself a favor and buy a SPARC. I love my SPARC.
I would definately NOT use Linux for it. I love Linux too, but not for Java development...
Slashdot Mirror
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Bingo! If you don't like it, don't use it. I hate idiots who complain about "censorship" on Slashdot when in fact there is none. (Is it censorship on USEnet when I choose to only keep the newsgroups I'm interested in in my
As for Debian's libc6 upgrade what is difficult?
You are. The difficult part is not typing the command. The difficult part is when the installation aborts and leaves the system unusable. At least, that was my experience trying to upgrade from slink to potato. For more details, see:
Debian Bug report logs - #48455
libc6.1: libc6 fails to install and leaves installation broken
(Note: I am not Michael Neuffer, I just happen to have had the same experience...)
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"it's going to take MORE than..." Does that mean a pretty installer is a necessary condition (just not a sufficient one)? If that's the case, forget it. Installs don't get much uglier than Debian.
I wouldn't say anything to get you to switch. Try it yourself. If you like it, switch, if you don't, stick with RedHat. There is no one distribution that serves everyone's needs the best. I maintain three Linux machines, and I don't run the same distribution on each. I can't begin to guess at why you might want to run Debian rather than RedHat, or why you'd want to run RedHat rather than Debian. I know why my Debian box runs Debian, and I know why my RedHat box runs Mandrake.
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Absolutely. You have the right to complain. I have the right to ignore you. Gotta love freedom...
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Actually, RedHat had glibc2 in its 5.1 release. I know: that's when I switched from Debian to RedHat (for my user machine -- my servers run Debian, of course). I got tired of waiting for all the latest toys to play with. I'm happy putting up with an "unstable" machine for my day to day play. I don't blame RedHat for being willing to fill than niche, in fact I'm glad they did (although these days I use Mandrake). I for one an quite happy to have the choice.
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Irrelevant. The cheapest available electronic calculators were over a hundred dollars when I first got one. But nowadays, people give away better ones for free with your paid subscription to (whatever). What does the fact that Unix licenses used to run in the thousands have to do with the fact that by today's standards this is not a good deal. The fact that I was running a commercial Unix (SunOS primarily) over five years ago doesn't mean I'm too senile to have noticed the Unix world has changed a lot in the last five years.
I find it so amusing that when Compaq does what is basically a *major favor* for the hobbyist computer user, they get blasted for "not being all cool and open sourced!"
I would hardly call $99 for an OS with poor third-party hardware support and an excessively restrictive license a "major favor". If you have a use for it, fine, but it's a rip off for most.
by people who more than likely only use their "rad bawXen" for bitchX and don't even know what C code looks like. Honestly, you people have no idea how good you have it nowadays.
I know what C code looks like. Many styles, in fact. I was fluent in it before ANSI got their hands on it. But again, this is utterly irrelevant. Why on earth would my C programming experience have any bearing on my ability to note that, for my purposes, this is not a good deal?
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I'm not sure if Slack 7.0's regular installer will do this, but you can always download and install ZipSlack, a (relatively) small UMSDOS-based version of Slackware Linux to try it out. No X, though. If you've got disk space to burn, a new feature with 7.0 is BigSlack, a huge version of ZipSlack. Again, it's UMSDOS-based, which means you can install it without partitioning, but unlike ZipSlack (which fits on a ZIP or LS-120 disk), BigSlack has all the goodies, like X. However, it takes nearly a gig IIRC.
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Nope. The days of exponentially increasing oil usage are long over. These days, we're promoting alternative fuels, but not because we're afraid we're going to run out, rather because we don't like the environmental damage. If current trends continue regarding the decline in how quickly our oil usages increases, it will peak, fall, and reach near zero before we exhaust what oil resources we have already discovered. Finding out oil is more abundant or replaceable than we thought is not going to change that. Back in the 70's, we thought we'd need to pull in the reins because we'd run out soon. We know better now, but we're pulling in the reins anyways. Look forward to a future of electric cars and whatnot, not because we're afraid of running out of fuel but because we just don't want to put up with the pollution anymore...
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Hahaha! Gosh, I'm not sure if this post should be moderated down as flamebait or up as funny! Luckily, I'm out of moderator points, so I don't have to be faced with that decision.
It's truly impressive, either way. I've never seen a post on
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Whadayamean? You just increment to the next digit: A
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Turn down the brightness on your monitor. Make it so nothing ever gets any brighter than a dull grey. Improves the look of all your applications across the board.
I actually rather like the new look...
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RedHat has different goals than Slackware or Debian. I started using Linux with Debian 1.3 (IIRC, seems like an eternity ago), but I switched to RedHat 5.1 because I got antsy waiting on Debian's glacial release schedule. I wanted all the newest toys and I wanted them NOW!
I know someone's going to say: "Why did you switch to RedHat rather than just use Debian unstable?" Before I got DSL, it wasn't really an option. I needed a nice CD-ROM to install from. Now, it's just inertia. I may ultimately switch back to Debian on all my machines, but for now I'm happy with the mixture as is.
The point I'm getting at is, RedHat is both a much higher and a much lower quality distribution than Slackware. It all depends on what qualities you're looking for in a distribution.
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I don't. Especially if the demand rises. We don't farm a lot of land in North America that we could if it weren't for the fact that there isn't enough money to be made at it. If the world actually came anywhere close to eating all the food it currently produces (as opposed to eating about half of it and throwing away the other half uneaten, as we do now), farmers across North America would rejoice and start cultivating all those extra acres. If that didn't saturate the market and prices remained high, they'd start buying more land to cultivate. North American farmers alone could quite easily feed a few billion more people.
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I take it this estimate was made before the green revolution. Right now, with 6 billion people in the world, we throw away uneaten nearly half the food we grow. In other words, with absolutely zero increases in agritechnology over today, we could feed nearly twice the world's current population. And again, even assuming we never increase our agricultural efficiency beyond today's levels, we could feed much more than that by simply farming more land. We're no where close to farming all available farmable land today. Anyone who estimates the maximum limit of the world's carrying capacity for humans at under 25 billion is seriously out of touch with the realities of modern agriculture. Now, if we take into account the fact that agritechnology is NOT going to stop advancing tomorrow, it seems highly unlikely we'll come anywhere close to maximizing the possible population of the planet during the next several centuries. And if lowering birth rate trends continue, it seems quite likely we'll be no where near our limits a couple thousand years from now. This hardly qualifies as "rapidly approaching" in my book...
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No fair! Judaism got a head start...
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Are you suggesting they should not have shipped with 2.2.13pre7 and instead shipped with the buggier 2.2.12? Why? You enjoy memory leaks and crashes?
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USI (Ubiquitous Slashdot Idiots). See the post you're responding to for an example of one. The USI crowd are generally recognizable for their "One True Way" attitude. USIs argue with one another all the time, but they have the same take, just switch a few words. One USI says "Since KDE exists it's stupid to work on GNOME." Another says the exact same thing, but reverses the terms. They generally are of low enough intelligence that I don't know if there's an actually opinion their and it matters to them if you reverse the terms or not -- they may be a batch of pattern-matching psuedo-AI's running at Micros~1 HQ in an attempt to flood Slashdot with worthless dross. I hope that's the case, I'd hate to think these USIs are actually people who exist and really do suffer from that much stupidity...
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How so? By not including Qt 2? Qt 2 is one of thousands of pieces of free software. By your standards, Debian is equally hypocritical. There's plenty of free software they don't include, either...
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Maybe you disgaree with this decision -- if so, put some effort into it yourself and upload QT2 RPMs to the RedHat contrib. (Actually, I'd be surprised if there aren't already QT2 RPMs available...)
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If you reread the post you're replying to, you'll see I said I wouldn't want to do Java development on anything but a SPARC. As far as running Java goes, there are plenty of decent VM's out there for many different platforms...
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Heh. I always figured Micros~1 got the idea from somewhere, I just never knew where before. Thanks...
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*cough* *cough* The Start Menu was a radical innovation? I remember thinking when it first came out, "Gosh, now I have a menu that's around all the time, so I can drop apps in it and have them easily accessible at all times like I've been doing with the Apple menu on my Mac for over half a decade!" But that's par for the course -- throughout the 80's and early 90's, innovations came to the PC world about 5 years behind when the appeared in the Mac world. Then Apple stagnated. Don't know why. System 7 was awesome when it first came out, but it got really embarrasing to be still running it 7 years later with virtually no change in it.
The one and only innovation I ever liked from Windows (and that seemed to truly be an innovation, but for all I know it was somewhere else first and I just don't know about it) was the right-click context menus. Now THOSE I've found to be truly useful...
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I would definately NOT use Linux for it. I love Linux too, but not for Java development...
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