Why is there more than one linux distribution in the first place?
Every last one of them fills a niche. Whether that niche is "rock solid server", "easy-to-use desktop", "fits on a WRT54G router", "it's Wednesday and I want to make my own distro", each solves a particular problem that none other had.
Imagine if all of the programmer time and effort that goes towards packaging and installation programs for the various Linux distributions was spent on something important, like fixing bugs.....
As far as fragmenting effort: that's a false dichotomy. If I decide not to work on my pet project anymore, I'm not going to automatically work on your pet project. In fact, I may not work on anything for a while. There is no formal delegation of responsibilities, no central entity saying "you here must work on Gnome, and you over there will package software for Debian". People and organizations contribute to specific areas because that's what they want or need to do.
I've packaged up a few things for FreeBSD and released a couple of programs here and there. That effort cost you nothing, and as you're not paying me, you don't get the right to say I should have done something else. At any rate, I'm not qualified to do kernel work, so if you forbade me to manage my own little projects, I wouldn't redirect all that time toward developing it instead.
Simple: Ubuntu has a charismatic millionaire behind it.
Umm, no. For a lot of us, Ubuntu has Debian behind it. It's like the pretty, desktop-oriented version of Debian for people who want relatively recent software without running "unstable". Should Ubuntu cease to exist today, I'll point my sources.list to debian.org and crossgrade back to the parent system.
I like Gentoo and Slackware and FreeBSD and OpenBSD, but Ubuntu is what I use when I want a Debian system with a little bit of polish. It really hit the sweet spot for a lot of people.
If that $5 pill gave you all the good effects of a $3.50 pack of cigarettes but without all the bad (cancer, stink, asthma, etc.), it'd be well worth it. Not to mention, good luck getting your prescription plan to buy you cigarettes.
While that is nice for compression, it doesn't really advance the state of the art in AI.
It's been said that AI is whatever we haven't managed to make computers do yet. A lot of people thought of chess as AI until machines could beat grandmasters, then it was just something computers can do. Speech recognition was AI until you could buy Dragon Dictate, then it was just something computers can do. Lather, rinse, and repeat.
I am absolutely certain that some day you will be able to buy a computer that understands spoken English and can make philosophical judgments on the truth of uttered propositions. When that day comes, it will no longer be AI. It'll just be something that computers can do.
software can't get the same level of compatability as the actual hardware on board
That's right. Hardware is fashioned from semi-sentient fairy dust.
In our world, though, hardware is an expression of an algorithm, said algorithm being implementable in software as well. Haven't you ever used Qemu or any number of video game emulators? It's quite possible to get exact emulation down. It may not be easy and I'd hate to be the one that had to do it, but that doesn't mean it can't be done.
You can't retroactively relicense code down the road (ie, you can't say "you no longer have any GPL2 rights to gzip 1.3.12, it is now covered under the GPL3+ only") so you can't say "because linux includes the code to gunzip (a GPL2 version of it), it has to be GPL3'd."
Well, of course not, but if gzip 1.3.13 fixes a critical buffer overrun, then some kernel dev now gets the unglamorous job of maintaining a GPLv2 fork of gzip. That alone is no big deal, but how many of those external dependencies are there? Could the kernel devs find themselves in the same boat as the one we've been gleefully watching Microsoft board? I don't want that to happen, but I'm pretty ignorant of the situation and hoping that other people have a clearer answer than I do.
Linus may have stated that the kernel won't have V3, but increasingly that will lead to the kernel being unable to incorporate the latest patches from others.
Never, ever, in a million years would I have expected see it come to pass that Solaris was more GNU-friendly than Linux. Should it really pan out that Linux is GPLv2-only and Solaris really is released under GPLv3, will we start seeing a migration?
I haven't looked (and don't know where to look) to see if the kernel itself has any external dependencies - I'm pretty sure it doesn't link to glibc but I don't know about other libraries. Does anyone know either way and care to share with us?
This is Slashdot! You'd think more people would UNDERSTAND the spirit of open source!
Sigh. I was thinking the same thing as I read the replies to you. You'd think no one here has ever written a program for fun or used F/OSS software. Maybe because it involves Windows, people have the idea that you must pay for every trivial, half-assed utility that comes along.
Absolutely! Of course, they don't really live in the same solution space so it's equally true to say that PostgreSQL is much faster than SQLite for many workloads.
The problem is that the 360 was in the exact same position until last November. Estimates at the time were that Microsoft was losing about $150 per unit sold. They're probably actually turning a profit now, but they're not dropping the price. So why is it that Microsoft hasn't run out of early adopters willing to pay release price a year and a half after launch, but Sony has already cleared that market segment in a bit over half a year?
I do understand what you're saying and I'm sure that accounts for much of the difference, but were I an investor I'd be worried about why my company is having to make concessions that its competitors aren't.
An episode of "Malcolm In The Middle". There was a frozen human leg under the garage (complicated story), and the new puppy Hal brought home had crawled in and was chewing on it. Dewey wanted to call the police for help, and that was Hal's response.
You really can't argue with the value the PS3 provides.
Except for the fact that the 360 has most of that for a little more than half the price, and the Wii has all of the fun parts (and a whole lot more) for quite a bit less than half the price. I was a huge PS2 fan and swore I'd never buy a Microsoft console, but I'm a lot more likely to break down and get a 360 than a PS3.
the ps3 has been "worth it" to any videophile since its release simply because of its bluray capability.
Just like the PS2 was "worth it" because of its DVD capability. Never mind that the PS2 was just about the world's worst DVD player. I know quite a few people who won't be testing those particular waters again any time soon.
Disclaimer: I am not advocating this. Not! This is just an observation.
You know, I'm surprised we don't hear about anyone going on a shooting spree inside the offices of the MAFIAA or ASCAP, etc. It's kind of a testament to human goodness that so far, no one driven out of business by these terrorists (yeah, I said it) has freaked out and decided to take their antagonists with them. I mean, given how many hundreds of small businesses have been ruined be these shenanigans, not a single owner has been unstable enough to want revenge? Again, I'm not saying that's what should happen. I'm just kind of surprised that it hasn't.
"I don't need to use version control. I'm the only one working on the system."
Take one for the team and shoot him.
Version control is mandatory here for a few reasons, including "what have you changed since it quit working last Tuesday?" and the ability to throw away a development branch when you realize that it's not panning out the way you'd hoped. The latter is my personal motivation. You can simply be more creative and experimental when you know you're a quick "svn revert" away from a known-good state.
The folks who would get the raise either end up getting let go because a small restaurant can't afford to keep them or the restaurant raises prices to compensate which costs you money in the end. It's funny how someone getting paid more costs you more money isn't it?
I suspect our young poster is a Naderite. Green Party USA espouses such insanity as a welfare payment of $16250.00 per year (in 2000 dollars) for individuals - all individuals - and a substantial ramp-up for families; $12.50 (in 2000 dollars) minimum wage; and a 30-hour work week where the government chips in an extra 10 hours worth of income so that you get paid for 133% of time actually worked. That works out to a base income of $42250.00 per year (in 2000 dollars) for a 16-year-old flipping burgers at his first job. I suppose they pay for that all with a 90% income tax.
Yeah, but the market is a tool to make the rich richer.
No. It's a force of cultural interaction. Just as "nature abhors a vacuum" and "water seeks its own level", the market will adjust conditions. People can get rich by identifying artificial variances in the system and coming up with a way to restore equilibrium (and hopefully extracting a bit of the flow in the process), but that doesn't make it a tool any more than the ocean is a tool.
Yes, I absolutely think the shareholders should take a big cut in their profits to pay their stockers more. Why? Because the stockers are actually doing the work, unlike the shareholders.
The shareholders are doing a tremendous amount of work. They're saying, "hey, we think this business can give me a decent rate of return on money that I lend to it." No money means no capital means no business. As soon as stockholders decide that another company is a better return on investment, they'll cash in their loans and move their capital to that other business. Put more simply, the entire concept of investment is based on risk and reward. You risk your investment in hope of earning a reward. Remove the reward incentive and you also remove the willingness of people to take risk.
Take a big cut in their profits? I think you need to learn the difference between the stock market and a charity. Both have their proper places, and the place of the market is not that of the charity.
How is anything else fair?
Poor people can get in on the action, too. The only barrier to entry is their own willingness to take a risk. Since it is established fact that most poverty is due to lifestyle choices, you could say that they already took a risk but no sufficient reward came.
But beyond that, how is it remotely fair to tell the investor that their reward should be lowered, although their risk will stay the same? Remember, about 60% of the stock market is held by the retirement funds of middle and lower class people.
Both of your examples were case specific and you know it.
So were yours. That's the whole point of illustrative anecdotes.
What I was implying with my original post was that the MAJORITY of customer issues are due to the fact that the customer is ignorant of what is happening.
You know, when you start to think like that, all customer issues become the fault of the customer. Whether they are in reality is a different story, but you'll always be able to find some (possibly irrelevant) fact that shows that they caused the problem. Phone bill is too high? They shouldn't have been roaming (even if they were sold that ability). Cable modem won't connect? Their firewall is running Linux (which has nothing to do with the fact that the link light on the modem is flashing red). Can't get to CNN.com? Well, neither could their neighbor - there must be a bunch of stupid people in that subdivision.
Maybe that isn't you, but I've seen it far too often. Once you allow yourself to stop looking for the real cause and chalking it up to customer stupidity, that soon becomes the explanation for everything. Be careful when you start to realize that all of your clients are incompetent, because chances are that your competition will be happy to educate them.
Long story short is: If you don't know how to work your own equipment..........don't blame tech support.
I did my time in tech support hell, so I feel your pain. Really. I've been there. But I've seen far too many techs who confuse "customer knows nothing" and "customer knows way more than I do but I can't admit it". If I have a serial connection to my DSL modem and I can verify that it's not getting out, I'm not going to reboot my computer to see if that fixes it. In those situations, the tech's probably cursing at me for "not knowing how to work my own equipment", but I still reserve the right to blame them.
Also, don't curl your lips to yell at billing for the $400 cell phone bill you got last month when you have it in the Analog Roaming Mode (do cells even have this anymore? I haven't had a cell in about 8 years)....thats your dumbass fault.
Interesting choice of example! I had the "super-premium unlimited roaming of kind on any network and unlimited minutes for $bignum per month" plan for a while. When I went on vacation and came home to a $300 phone bill, you can bet your butt that I had a curly lip.
What would be truly fair is if supermarket-stockers made a fair living wage.
They do. They make exactly what the job market says they should be making. If stocking were a more difficult skill, the supply of capable stockers would go down and they'd make more. If more stores open and they need more stockers than are available, they'd make more. Until one of those things happen, the law of supply and demand says they won't make more.
You can argue all day about what constitutes a "good" wage, but supply and demand is busy setting the true fair value. Complaining about that is like complaining about gravity - say what you will but the law still applies to you.
How about you get them to post here to back you up?
I'll tell you why I won't do that: I'm not going to point my mother-in-law at Slashdot. She's too busy with Kmail and Konqueror for the web and Kphotoalbum for her digital camera. Say what you will, but it's definitely ready for new users.
Slashdot Mirror
Every last one of them fills a niche. Whether that niche is "rock solid server", "easy-to-use desktop", "fits on a WRT54G router", "it's Wednesday and I want to make my own distro", each solves a particular problem that none other had.
Imagine if all of the programmer time and effort that goes towards packaging and installation programs for the various Linux distributions was spent on something important, like fixing bugs.....As far as fragmenting effort: that's a false dichotomy. If I decide not to work on my pet project anymore, I'm not going to automatically work on your pet project. In fact, I may not work on anything for a while. There is no formal delegation of responsibilities, no central entity saying "you here must work on Gnome, and you over there will package software for Debian". People and organizations contribute to specific areas because that's what they want or need to do.
I've packaged up a few things for FreeBSD and released a couple of programs here and there. That effort cost you nothing, and as you're not paying me, you don't get the right to say I should have done something else. At any rate, I'm not qualified to do kernel work, so if you forbade me to manage my own little projects, I wouldn't redirect all that time toward developing it instead.
Umm, no. For a lot of us, Ubuntu has Debian behind it. It's like the pretty, desktop-oriented version of Debian for people who want relatively recent software without running "unstable". Should Ubuntu cease to exist today, I'll point my sources.list to debian.org and crossgrade back to the parent system.
I like Gentoo and Slackware and FreeBSD and OpenBSD, but Ubuntu is what I use when I want a Debian system with a little bit of polish. It really hit the sweet spot for a lot of people.
If that $5 pill gave you all the good effects of a $3.50 pack of cigarettes but without all the bad (cancer, stink, asthma, etc.), it'd be well worth it. Not to mention, good luck getting your prescription plan to buy you cigarettes.
Meanwhile data storage and data transmission technology keeps improving many percent a year, with each improvement compounding on the previous ones.
In Other Words, IMHO money would be better spent on the second area rather than the first.
You're on the Vista release team, aren't you?
It's been said that AI is whatever we haven't managed to make computers do yet. A lot of people thought of chess as AI until machines could beat grandmasters, then it was just something computers can do. Speech recognition was AI until you could buy Dragon Dictate, then it was just something computers can do. Lather, rinse, and repeat.
I am absolutely certain that some day you will be able to buy a computer that understands spoken English and can make philosophical judgments on the truth of uttered propositions. When that day comes, it will no longer be AI. It'll just be something that computers can do.
That's right. Hardware is fashioned from semi-sentient fairy dust.
In our world, though, hardware is an expression of an algorithm, said algorithm being implementable in software as well. Haven't you ever used Qemu or any number of video game emulators? It's quite possible to get exact emulation down. It may not be easy and I'd hate to be the one that had to do it, but that doesn't mean it can't be done.
Well, of course not, but if gzip 1.3.13 fixes a critical buffer overrun, then some kernel dev now gets the unglamorous job of maintaining a GPLv2 fork of gzip. That alone is no big deal, but how many of those external dependencies are there? Could the kernel devs find themselves in the same boat as the one we've been gleefully watching Microsoft board? I don't want that to happen, but I'm pretty ignorant of the situation and hoping that other people have a clearer answer than I do.
Never, ever, in a million years would I have expected see it come to pass that Solaris was more GNU-friendly than Linux. Should it really pan out that Linux is GPLv2-only and Solaris really is released under GPLv3, will we start seeing a migration?
I haven't looked (and don't know where to look) to see if the kernel itself has any external dependencies - I'm pretty sure it doesn't link to glibc but I don't know about other libraries. Does anyone know either way and care to share with us?
Sigh. I was thinking the same thing as I read the replies to you. You'd think no one here has ever written a program for fun or used F/OSS software. Maybe because it involves Windows, people have the idea that you must pay for every trivial, half-assed utility that comes along.
Absolutely! Of course, they don't really live in the same solution space so it's equally true to say that PostgreSQL is much faster than SQLite for many workloads.
The problem is that the 360 was in the exact same position until last November. Estimates at the time were that Microsoft was losing about $150 per unit sold. They're probably actually turning a profit now, but they're not dropping the price. So why is it that Microsoft hasn't run out of early adopters willing to pay release price a year and a half after launch, but Sony has already cleared that market segment in a bit over half a year?
I do understand what you're saying and I'm sure that accounts for much of the difference, but were I an investor I'd be worried about why my company is having to make concessions that its competitors aren't.
An episode of "Malcolm In The Middle". There was a frozen human leg under the garage (complicated story), and the new puppy Hal brought home had crawled in and was chewing on it. Dewey wanted to call the police for help, and that was Hal's response.
...just eight months ago. The PS2 waited 19 months before its first cut.
They have reduced the price of making the PS3. They have gotten a higher price from those really keen to get one.The same is true for the Wii (also 8 months old) and 360 (15 months old), but neither of them are dropping.
You have clearly had no experience in marketing at all.Yeah, that must be it.
Except for the fact that the 360 has most of that for a little more than half the price, and the Wii has all of the fun parts (and a whole lot more) for quite a bit less than half the price. I was a huge PS2 fan and swore I'd never buy a Microsoft console, but I'm a lot more likely to break down and get a 360 than a PS3.
Just like the PS2 was "worth it" because of its DVD capability. Never mind that the PS2 was just about the world's worst DVD player. I know quite a few people who won't be testing those particular waters again any time soon.
Disclaimer: I am not advocating this. Not! This is just an observation.
You know, I'm surprised we don't hear about anyone going on a shooting spree inside the offices of the MAFIAA or ASCAP, etc. It's kind of a testament to human goodness that so far, no one driven out of business by these terrorists (yeah, I said it) has freaked out and decided to take their antagonists with them. I mean, given how many hundreds of small businesses have been ruined be these shenanigans, not a single owner has been unstable enough to want revenge? Again, I'm not saying that's what should happen. I'm just kind of surprised that it hasn't.
Take one for the team and shoot him.
Version control is mandatory here for a few reasons, including "what have you changed since it quit working last Tuesday?" and the ability to throw away a development branch when you realize that it's not panning out the way you'd hoped. The latter is my personal motivation. You can simply be more creative and experimental when you know you're a quick "svn revert" away from a known-good state.
I suspect our young poster is a Naderite. Green Party USA espouses such insanity as a welfare payment of $16250.00 per year (in 2000 dollars) for individuals - all individuals - and a substantial ramp-up for families; $12.50 (in 2000 dollars) minimum wage; and a 30-hour work week where the government chips in an extra 10 hours worth of income so that you get paid for 133% of time actually worked. That works out to a base income of $42250.00 per year (in 2000 dollars) for a 16-year-old flipping burgers at his first job. I suppose they pay for that all with a 90% income tax.
Don't. We're people.
No. It's a force of cultural interaction. Just as "nature abhors a vacuum" and "water seeks its own level", the market will adjust conditions. People can get rich by identifying artificial variances in the system and coming up with a way to restore equilibrium (and hopefully extracting a bit of the flow in the process), but that doesn't make it a tool any more than the ocean is a tool.
Yes, I absolutely think the shareholders should take a big cut in their profits to pay their stockers more. Why? Because the stockers are actually doing the work, unlike the shareholders.The shareholders are doing a tremendous amount of work. They're saying, "hey, we think this business can give me a decent rate of return on money that I lend to it." No money means no capital means no business. As soon as stockholders decide that another company is a better return on investment, they'll cash in their loans and move their capital to that other business. Put more simply, the entire concept of investment is based on risk and reward. You risk your investment in hope of earning a reward. Remove the reward incentive and you also remove the willingness of people to take risk.
Take a big cut in their profits? I think you need to learn the difference between the stock market and a charity. Both have their proper places, and the place of the market is not that of the charity.
How is anything else fair?Poor people can get in on the action, too. The only barrier to entry is their own willingness to take a risk. Since it is established fact that most poverty is due to lifestyle choices, you could say that they already took a risk but no sufficient reward came.
But beyond that, how is it remotely fair to tell the investor that their reward should be lowered, although their risk will stay the same? Remember, about 60% of the stock market is held by the retirement funds of middle and lower class people.
So were yours. That's the whole point of illustrative anecdotes.
What I was implying with my original post was that the MAJORITY of customer issues are due to the fact that the customer is ignorant of what is happening.You know, when you start to think like that, all customer issues become the fault of the customer. Whether they are in reality is a different story, but you'll always be able to find some (possibly irrelevant) fact that shows that they caused the problem. Phone bill is too high? They shouldn't have been roaming (even if they were sold that ability). Cable modem won't connect? Their firewall is running Linux (which has nothing to do with the fact that the link light on the modem is flashing red). Can't get to CNN.com? Well, neither could their neighbor - there must be a bunch of stupid people in that subdivision.
Maybe that isn't you, but I've seen it far too often. Once you allow yourself to stop looking for the real cause and chalking it up to customer stupidity, that soon becomes the explanation for everything. Be careful when you start to realize that all of your clients are incompetent, because chances are that your competition will be happy to educate them.
I did my time in tech support hell, so I feel your pain. Really. I've been there. But I've seen far too many techs who confuse "customer knows nothing" and "customer knows way more than I do but I can't admit it". If I have a serial connection to my DSL modem and I can verify that it's not getting out, I'm not going to reboot my computer to see if that fixes it. In those situations, the tech's probably cursing at me for "not knowing how to work my own equipment", but I still reserve the right to blame them.
Also, don't curl your lips to yell at billing for the $400 cell phone bill you got last month when you have it in the Analog Roaming Mode (do cells even have this anymore? I haven't had a cell in about 8 years)....thats your dumbass fault.Interesting choice of example! I had the "super-premium unlimited roaming of kind on any network and unlimited minutes for $bignum per month" plan for a while. When I went on vacation and came home to a $300 phone bill, you can bet your butt that I had a curly lip.
They do. They make exactly what the job market says they should be making. If stocking were a more difficult skill, the supply of capable stockers would go down and they'd make more. If more stores open and they need more stockers than are available, they'd make more. Until one of those things happen, the law of supply and demand says they won't make more.
You can argue all day about what constitutes a "good" wage, but supply and demand is busy setting the true fair value. Complaining about that is like complaining about gravity - say what you will but the law still applies to you.
I'll tell you why I won't do that: I'm not going to point my mother-in-law at Slashdot. She's too busy with Kmail and Konqueror for the web and Kphotoalbum for her digital camera. Say what you will, but it's definitely ready for new users.
(friendly note: I said "could still tell")