He needs to avoid the sorts of black eyes that come from not properly testing massive fundemental changes to how the desktop works.
Which is what happens sometimes when you're feeding off the development branch of any project.
He needs to focus on not pissing off current users and scaring away the new ones.
And a six-month release cycle does nothing to meet either of those goals, when your repository depends so much on what's going on upstream. But OpenBSD releases every six months, too! Yes, and they control the toolchain, the c library, the kernel, etc. etc. And while some attention is paid to the software contained in the ports collection, it's not the primary focus. Furthermore, the code base is relatively stable (okay, so it's disgustingly stable, and I feel like it's 1994 all over again when I use OpenBSD), and it's not like things break hard between most releases.
He needs to continue to be the shiny happy face transplated on top of Debian.
I'm not so sure that Ubuntu is, or has, helped matters at all. Debian, RedHat, and SuSE do help, however, by somewhat stabilizing the platform, making it appropriate for mainstream (read: corporate) use. Windows XP is nearly ubiquitous, and it's almost seven years old now. Even Apple has gotten out of the near-yearly release cycle with OS X.
Six months is just too small a window to put out anything that resembles a quality product for the desktop. And making matters worse, the security cycle is only a grand total of eighteen months for anything other than the LTS releases.
Lately, for people wanting to try things out, I've been recommending Fedora for desktop use, and either Debian (though I am pissed....after spending probably half a day regenerating keys on my boxes), or CentOS.
Thank you for pointing this out. TFA is fluff, and doesn't cover the real OS projects SoC really focuses on. The only things TFA lists that may affect me are the grub improvements, and maybe some of the file converters.
But, DFBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, GNU/Hurd, etc., all have SoC projects that go towards making the OS better. A good example would be the new tmpfs for NetBSD, which has now been ported to FreeBSD.
That was exactly my thought. Then again, my Vista SP1 patch was completely uneventful the other night, too. I think there may be a connection here somewhere.....
And introducing x64....of which some of the design mistakes will come back to bite us in another fifteen years, as it just extends the agony of 8086 legacy even longer. IA64 may be overreaching, but what AMD did wasn't the answer, either.
In any event, Intel still seems far better positioned to move forward than either AMD or nVidia. The abrupt course correction from NetBurst to Core well illustrated that.
And, to be fair, the integrated graphics are a *lot* better than they used to be, and certainly better than some of the real cheap kit (Via, SiS, etc.). I've been pretty pleased with the couple of boards I bought recently w/ 945G chipsets. One happily serves NFS and Samba shares, and rarely has a monitor connected. The other plays videos off that NFS server, with nary a problem running 720p video. It also runs 10C cooler since I pulled the 6600GT in favor of another capture card.
Eh, you're not going back far enough. OSX was originally developed on Motorola 68K, and the Mach-O ABI still has reminants of it. But NeXTstep/OPENSTEP ran on 68k, i386, Sparc, and PA-RISC long before it ran on PPC.
Oh, and NeXTstep runs okay in 16M, but more is better. My 33Mhz 68040 does just fine with 32M, running what is essentially the same OS, on a 2GB hard disk.
An aside...Leopard really is back to the future when it comes to the interface. "Plastic" might as well be "NeXTstep."
AMD dies, then Intel will jack their rates up about double.
AMD, as a company, may die. I seriously doubt their processors and GPUs will anytime soon. My guess would be either IBM or a Japanese semiconductor fab will resurrect their product line out of the smoldering crater.
A not-so-outlandish idea, however, is Samsung. To me, Korean ownership, development, and production makes a hell of a lot of sense.
I seriously doubt many juries, comprised of fellow bank customers, would agree after someone files a lawsuit against those banks who say it's the customer's fault.
So, you link to a CWA-funded site that seeks to keep us locked-in to government-sanctioned monopolies....but, you know, think of the workers!
I'm perfectly happy with my DSL connection from a CLEC competing with the monopoly phone and cable company. I don't mind the ~14Mbps I get most of the time. If I need more speed than that, I turn off the television that's provided over the same line. In fact, that's just what I did last night, when I had a big ISO to download.
Actually, reading the complaint, the RIAA did subpeona the records. The argument is that what they requested should still be protected, because the RIAA doesn't actually end up litigating these cases. It's a stretch.
But privacy protections do not extend to protections of illegal activities. This comes up more often in relation to drug investigations...
Cops: Have you busted individuals x, y, and z, on campus for drug posession and/or distribution? School: I can't tell you that. Cops: Okay, we're going to the magistrate right now, and we'll see your counsel in court first thing in the morning. School: Okay, yes, we have busted them ten times. They all completed mandatory university-sponsored drug education, and the drugs were destroyed (in the lit professor's bong).
Kind of the same deal with the KC-135/B707 platform. From my understanding, a lot of the former civilian 707s have been remanufactured for military use (AWACS, JSTARS, etc.)
The C-130 is of similar vintage as the B-52 (about a year younger), and is still in production. On the rotary side, USMC still is ordering new Twin Hueys and Super Cobras.
Using A Fountain Pen. At least someone had the good sense to edit that one. I will admit that finding a fountain pen has become difficult. Other than specialty stores, the only major retailer I've found lately that routinely has them is Staples (and the nearest one of those is around an hour drive away). I use one of these (the charcoal model) pretty much exclusively at work. And I do get quite a few positive comments about it from people who try it.
Heh...nice to know that least one of the eleven people who's responded to me so far got it.
I can remember standing up some new production machines (commercial broadcast automation....so true 24x7 operation), and choosing 2k over XP for a lot of those reasons. A year later when it was time to upgrade some more from 98, XP got the call.
It's funny, though. One of the posters here accused me of drinking MS's Kool-Aid. I immediately thought of my office at home which consists of (from left to right) a NeXTstation, a Vista PC, a PowerMac, and a Linux box running a couple of development VMs (linux and NetBSD). My notebook is a Mac, but I'm an MS fanboi. Yeah.:-D
If you have some older hardware around, install it and try for yourself. The biggest limitations of GNU for a long time were performance and the ~2gb filesystem size limit. They've fixed the latter (up to like 10gb now), but the performance still is pretty lousy. What's got development kind of stalled, as I see it, are two issues:
1. New hardware. GNUMach's SATA support is seriously lacking, and last time I looked, they still have problems on machines with >1gb ram. 2. New development focus. Thomas Bushnell was responsible for a good part of the hurd in its original design. He's really not as involved with development as much as he once was. The new de-facto leadership have been working on other projects trying to get a replacement for Mach. First it was L4, then it was Coyotos (it still is, afaik).
Still, if you've got an older machine around, install it. A quick debian install first, then crosshurd. Having a linux install is nice, because sometimes you need better fsck abilities. I had a public host up for about six months as a challenge to some IA acquaintances. They finally got in, but it took awhile. System never crashed, either.
I tend to ask people who utter it the following question: "If a tree falls in the woods, and there's nobody there to hear it, does it ever fail to make a sound?"
Reality exists despite perception. Vista isn't a great product. Vista isn't a horrible product, and I'd argue that it's far better than XP was when it was released. And that should be the real comparison. XP was a pile of excrement until SP1. Even then, it wasn't secure until SP2. Vista is stable and secure, although the performance needs help in some places. I've been running it since March, and the only problem I've had was with the stupid mp3/network thing.
Reason was on this almost ten years ago. The Nation is a Johnny-come-lately; since the leftist academic estblishment is now affecting one of their pet issues, they're paying attention. Most of the regular media is ignorant.
I think the biggest point that's been lost among all of this, however, is with a few exceptions, college students are adults and citizens.
Most administrators, parents, and media figures see college students as children to be molded and protected. A big change in thinking among those groups, or nasty rebukes by the judicial system, will be needed before there'll be real change.
Still, there are cracks in the armor when it comes to student rights. Look at the Duke Lacrosse case, and the lawsuits pending following the university's disregard for the students' rights, and then their badmouthing of the former coach.
How does someone come to despise education that much?!
Personal experience while I was in college, fucktard. Some students I didn't even know personally were expelled in a manner I thought was patently unfair. I actually bothered to read my student handbook on the "judicial system," instead of just my text books, and was appalled at what I saw. Oh, my major wasn't something technical, either. I have a degree in Government/Law. I put my own ass on the line against a publicity-hound university president (here's a clue: I went to the same school as XKCD, and the pres. is a former US Senator) to defend other students' rights under both state and federal law. You know, simple things like not having a negative inference drawn if defendant chooses to exercise his fifth amendment rights, and being able to cross-examine accusers (the case that fired me up, neither was allowed).
Let me guess: you parents threatened to take away your trust-fund if you didn't finish college. I can see how that might make someone feel "imprisoned". Nevertheless, you were free to leave at any time.
Guess again. I worked nearly full-time most of my time in school as a news reporter. If I had a massive trust fund, I wouldn't have had to battle traffic on I-95 the better part of the day driving to DC for a modestly-paying government contracting job.
Ring, ring, ring, ring, bananaphone! Your village is calling. They miss you.
Settling is the last thing he should do. A settlement, while providing for him, does nothing to fix the mess that higher education has become, all hidden behind federal law. A public court case, however......
Sunlight is the thing colleges fear the most, because it will show them to be gulags where freedom is only a faint notion.
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He needs to avoid the sorts of black eyes that come from not properly testing massive fundemental changes to how the desktop works.
Which is what happens sometimes when you're feeding off the development branch of any project.
He needs to focus on not pissing off current users and scaring away the new ones.
And a six-month release cycle does nothing to meet either of those goals, when your repository depends so much on what's going on upstream. But OpenBSD releases every six months, too! Yes, and they control the toolchain, the c library, the kernel, etc. etc. And while some attention is paid to the software contained in the ports collection, it's not the primary focus. Furthermore, the code base is relatively stable (okay, so it's disgustingly stable, and I feel like it's 1994 all over again when I use OpenBSD), and it's not like things break hard between most releases.
He needs to continue to be the shiny happy face transplated on top of Debian.
I'm not so sure that Ubuntu is, or has, helped matters at all. Debian, RedHat, and SuSE do help, however, by somewhat stabilizing the platform, making it appropriate for mainstream (read: corporate) use. Windows XP is nearly ubiquitous, and it's almost seven years old now. Even Apple has gotten out of the near-yearly release cycle with OS X.
Six months is just too small a window to put out anything that resembles a quality product for the desktop. And making matters worse, the security cycle is only a grand total of eighteen months for anything other than the LTS releases.
Lately, for people wanting to try things out, I've been recommending Fedora for desktop use, and either Debian (though I am pissed....after spending probably half a day regenerating keys on my boxes), or CentOS.
RS232 is still useful, but there's not much reason these days to have it on the motherboard.
I'd prefer to see more USB ports than RS232 or PS/2 ports.
There was something that flew past the other day talking about how Via is going to be the next big player in x86 chips, blah blah blah...
But even in the market Via pioneered, Intel and AMD now have superior offerings, both in performance and TDP.
Thank you for pointing this out. TFA is fluff, and doesn't cover the real OS projects SoC really focuses on. The only things TFA lists that may affect me are the grub improvements, and maybe some of the file converters.
But, DFBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, GNU/Hurd, etc., all have SoC projects that go towards making the OS better. A good example would be the new tmpfs for NetBSD, which has now been ported to FreeBSD.
Hey now, that Amiga if not being used as a Video Toaster, makes a pretty damn good BSD machine. :-)
That was exactly my thought. Then again, my Vista SP1 patch was completely uneventful the other night, too. I think there may be a connection here somewhere.....
On the upside, we're moving to a new network and hardware soon, so the site should be much faster and more stable rsn.
./ remain in the 20th Century?
Will this new network include IPv6 access, or will
And introducing x64....of which some of the design mistakes will come back to bite us in another fifteen years, as it just extends the agony of 8086 legacy even longer. IA64 may be overreaching, but what AMD did wasn't the answer, either.
In any event, Intel still seems far better positioned to move forward than either AMD or nVidia. The abrupt course correction from NetBurst to Core well illustrated that.
And, to be fair, the integrated graphics are a *lot* better than they used to be, and certainly better than some of the real cheap kit (Via, SiS, etc.). I've been pretty pleased with the couple of boards I bought recently w/ 945G chipsets. One happily serves NFS and Samba shares, and rarely has a monitor connected. The other plays videos off that NFS server, with nary a problem running 720p video. It also runs 10C cooler since I pulled the 6600GT in favor of another capture card.
Eh, you're not going back far enough. OSX was originally developed on Motorola 68K, and the Mach-O ABI still has reminants of it. But NeXTstep/OPENSTEP ran on 68k, i386, Sparc, and PA-RISC long before it ran on PPC.
Oh, and NeXTstep runs okay in 16M, but more is better. My 33Mhz 68040 does just fine with 32M, running what is essentially the same OS, on a 2GB hard disk.
An aside...Leopard really is back to the future when it comes to the interface. "Plastic" might as well be "NeXTstep."
AMD dies, then Intel will jack their rates up about double.
AMD, as a company, may die. I seriously doubt their processors and GPUs will anytime soon. My guess would be either IBM or a Japanese semiconductor fab will resurrect their product line out of the smoldering crater.
A not-so-outlandish idea, however, is Samsung. To me, Korean ownership, development, and production makes a hell of a lot of sense.
I seriously doubt many juries, comprised of fellow bank customers, would agree after someone files a lawsuit against those banks who say it's the customer's fault.
So, you link to a CWA-funded site that seeks to keep us locked-in to government-sanctioned monopolies....but, you know, think of the workers!
I'm perfectly happy with my DSL connection from a CLEC competing with the monopoly phone and cable company. I don't mind the ~14Mbps I get most of the time. If I need more speed than that, I turn off the television that's provided over the same line. In fact, that's just what I did last night, when I had a big ISO to download.
Actually, reading the complaint, the RIAA did subpeona the records. The argument is that what they requested should still be protected, because the RIAA doesn't actually end up litigating these cases. It's a stretch.
But privacy protections do not extend to protections of illegal activities. This comes up more often in relation to drug investigations...
Cops: Have you busted individuals x, y, and z, on campus for drug posession and/or distribution?
School: I can't tell you that.
Cops: Okay, we're going to the magistrate right now, and we'll see your counsel in court first thing in the morning.
School: Okay, yes, we have busted them ten times. They all completed mandatory university-sponsored drug education, and the drugs were destroyed (in the lit professor's bong).
McCain is currently accepting the endorsement of Pastor John Hagee
There's a big difference between accepting someone's endorsement, and faithfully attending his church for 20+ years.
'cause water is from the toilet. Brawndo's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes.
Kind of the same deal with the KC-135/B707 platform. From my understanding, a lot of the former civilian 707s have been remanufactured for military use (AWACS, JSTARS, etc.)
The C-130 is of similar vintage as the B-52 (about a year younger), and is still in production. On the rotary side, USMC still is ordering new Twin Hueys and Super Cobras.
Using A Fountain Pen. At least someone had the good sense to edit that one. I will admit that finding a fountain pen has become difficult. Other than specialty stores, the only major retailer I've found lately that routinely has them is Staples (and the nearest one of those is around an hour drive away). I use one of these (the charcoal model) pretty much exclusively at work. And I do get quite a few positive comments about it from people who try it.
Might that have been for their old GEnie service?
Heh...nice to know that least one of the eleven people who's responded to me so far got it.
:-D
I can remember standing up some new production machines (commercial broadcast automation....so true 24x7 operation), and choosing 2k over XP for a lot of those reasons. A year later when it was time to upgrade some more from 98, XP got the call.
It's funny, though. One of the posters here accused me of drinking MS's Kool-Aid. I immediately thought of my office at home which consists of (from left to right) a NeXTstation, a Vista PC, a PowerMac, and a Linux box running a couple of development VMs (linux and NetBSD). My notebook is a Mac, but I'm an MS fanboi. Yeah.
If you have some older hardware around, install it and try for yourself. The biggest limitations of GNU for a long time were performance and the ~2gb filesystem size limit. They've fixed the latter (up to like 10gb now), but the performance still is pretty lousy. What's got development kind of stalled, as I see it, are two issues:
1. New hardware. GNUMach's SATA support is seriously lacking, and last time I looked, they still have problems on machines with >1gb ram.
2. New development focus. Thomas Bushnell was responsible for a good part of the hurd in its original design. He's really not as involved with development as much as he once was. The new de-facto leadership have been working on other projects trying to get a replacement for Mach. First it was L4, then it was Coyotos (it still is, afaik).
Still, if you've got an older machine around, install it. A quick debian install first, then crosshurd. Having a linux install is nice, because sometimes you need better fsck abilities. I had a public host up for about six months as a challenge to some IA acquaintances. They finally got in, but it took awhile. System never crashed, either.
Ah, that stupid catch phrase.....
I tend to ask people who utter it the following question: "If a tree falls in the woods, and there's nobody there to hear it, does it ever fail to make a sound?"
Reality exists despite perception. Vista isn't a great product. Vista isn't a horrible product, and I'd argue that it's far better than XP was when it was released. And that should be the real comparison. XP was a pile of excrement until SP1. Even then, it wasn't secure until SP2. Vista is stable and secure, although the performance needs help in some places. I've been running it since March, and the only problem I've had was with the stupid mp3/network thing.
Reason was on this almost ten years ago. The Nation is a Johnny-come-lately; since the leftist academic estblishment is now affecting one of their pet issues, they're paying attention. Most of the regular media is ignorant.
I think the biggest point that's been lost among all of this, however, is with a few exceptions, college students are adults and citizens.
Most administrators, parents, and media figures see college students as children to be molded and protected. A big change in thinking among those groups, or nasty rebukes by the judicial system, will be needed before there'll be real change.
Still, there are cracks in the armor when it comes to student rights. Look at the Duke Lacrosse case, and the lawsuits pending following the university's disregard for the students' rights, and then their badmouthing of the former coach.
How does someone come to despise education that much?!
Personal experience while I was in college, fucktard. Some students I didn't even know personally were expelled in a manner I thought was patently unfair. I actually bothered to read my student handbook on the "judicial system," instead of just my text books, and was appalled at what I saw. Oh, my major wasn't something technical, either. I have a degree in Government/Law. I put my own ass on the line against a publicity-hound university president (here's a clue: I went to the same school as XKCD, and the pres. is a former US Senator) to defend other students' rights under both state and federal law. You know, simple things like not having a negative inference drawn if defendant chooses to exercise his fifth amendment rights, and being able to cross-examine accusers (the case that fired me up, neither was allowed).
Let me guess: you parents threatened to take away your trust-fund if you didn't finish college. I can see how that might make someone feel "imprisoned". Nevertheless, you were free to leave at any time.
Guess again. I worked nearly full-time most of my time in school as a news reporter. If I had a massive trust fund, I wouldn't have had to battle traffic on I-95 the better part of the day driving to DC for a modestly-paying government contracting job.
Ring, ring, ring, ring, bananaphone! Your village is calling. They miss you.
Settling is the last thing he should do. A settlement, while providing for him, does nothing to fix the mess that higher education has become, all hidden behind federal law. A public court case, however......
Sunlight is the thing colleges fear the most, because it will show them to be gulags where freedom is only a faint notion.