The current naming convention is for the Debian 2.x series. The Debian 1.x series had a different naming convention. Presumably Debian 3.x will have also have a new naming convention. Hopefully, the 3.x series will arrive prior to running through the names of all the characters from Toy Story.
The time honored tradition of ./configure
make
make install
breaks the usefulness of using a packaging system (whether the system is apt, rpm, or whatever).
If you want to build from source and install custom software and expect to still be able to use your packaging system, you should build your own packages to install instead of using make install. When building your packages, you then tag the package as need be to fill the same dependencies as the stock package.
True, but then you are locked into HPaq for hardware and the whole point of Debian being non-commercial just went out the window.
Eh? No. If one uses HP systems with an HP OS (say, HP/UX) then one is locked into HP for support on both the hardware and software front. If one uses an agnostic OS, then one is locked into HP only for hardware support. Using a free agnostic OS (such as Debian) reduces lock-in either further because one is not locked into an OS company as well as a hardware company.
I know I would prefer to keep support with those that make the product. HPaq supports Debian today? What about tomorrow? It is true that they likely wouldn't change that easily after investing in one product but for businesses that does not necessarily hold true.
This consideration is why it is important to have an agnostic OS. If one centers business around Debian on HP systems and if HP drops support for Debian then one can turn to other vendors for Debian support or develop in-house support. If one centers business around HP/UX on HP systems and if HP drops support for HP/UX then one is sunk.
A new CIO comes in and proclaims HPaq the best hardware for servers and that is all he will approve. He leaves and a new CIO declares IBM the best and all servers hence forth will be IBM. What now? I have seen this very thing happen in real life.
This is irrelevant. If a new CIO dictates a move to a different vendor, then the company will have to pay the cost of conversion no matter what. However, a move from Debian on HP to SuSE or Redhat on IBM would be much less painful than a move from HP/UX to AIX. Further, while IBM may not support Debian on IBM, it is quite possible (probable even) that some other vendor (perhaps even an IBM reseller) does.
I bought a computer with Debian preloaded from Los Alamos Computers. I've had enough of installing operating systems over the years. I decided that it was time for me to let someone else have the headaches.
Your comment seems to me to imply that one cannot buy Debian with support. However, the article specifically states that HP sells and supports Debian. If one buys a system configured with Debian from HP, HP supports it.
The binary of the mame port to the xbox was pulled at Microsoft's request because the binary redistributed Microsoft's intellectual property in the form of having headers and libraries from the xbox sdk.
While I greatly admire the Consumer's Union and the testing they do, I think that you are the victim of misreading their reliability reports. The cardinal rule of scientific investigation is that correlation does not necessarily imply causation.
The short end of the story is that without knowing if all other things (such as routine maintenence) are equal, we don't know if the reliability ratings are meaningful in deciding which vehicle to purchase. I know people with Hondas, Toyotas, Fords and Chevys that haven't lasted long at all. I know people with all of the above that through excellent maintenence habits have driven all of the above for hundreds of thousands of miles.
And the same goes for interiors. I know people with VWs, Toyotas, Fords, Hondas and Chevys that look like hades on the inside. I also know people that take care of their cares and the interiors seem to be perpetually in excellent condition for more years than I've been alive.
Extrapolating a single data point to the universal set is invalid reasoning in the spheres of science, mathematics and logic.
No data points for the non-evolution of life.
Technically speaking this is true. But I feel obligated to point out that there are also no data points that the universe is not filled with invisible pink kittens who live on an as of yet undiscovered ethereal plan. Strictly speaking, one cannot prove a negative based on empiracal observation in most situations.
(There is a relatively small set of controlled situations where it is reasonable to claim certain things do not exist within the universe of the experiment based on the details of the observeration excluding the possibility of the existence of thing being proved to not exist within the confines of the experiment.)
That said, we do have several data points of planets that do not currently appear to us to harbor life. So it is fair to say that our present stage of knowledge, there do not appear to be any other intelligent forms of life in the universe.
Yet we also need to acknowledge the limits of this statement and admit that the state of our knowledge may be the limiting factor and not the presence of other intelligent life forms.
Just as I do not consider the NeXT invasion of Apple to have been complete until Rasphody shipped in the form of Mac OS X as the default Mac OS, I do not consider the Be invasion of Palm Computing to be complete until the next generation of Palm OS ships. (That is until what is currently referred to as v6 ships. That said, Mac OS released two major version updates and how many minor version updates prior to OS X? Palm Computing could conceivably do the same.)
And one never knows, despite Be's mighty engineering prowess, it might suck. . . .
AFAIK, the engineers from Be are working on v6 which is currently a nebulous "next generation" OS for Palm Computing.
Palm OS v5 is essentially the Palm OS kernel hacked to run on ARM with a few kludges for a bit of functionality that Palm OS currently lacks to make it competitive.
If these pix are real, they are far more likely to be of a unit running Palm OS v5 than v6 as v6 doesn't really exist yet except on whiteboards in the heads of the OS architects.
I have two hopes for v6:
Palm Computing doesn't pull an IBM (OS/2 PPC) or an Apple (Copland, the original MacOS 8).
The Be invasion of the software division of Palm Computing proceeds a la the NeXT invasion of Apple.
And I still think it a shame that Palm Computing decided that Linux (because of the GPL) was incompatible with their business model in relation to IP. It is also a shame that they didn't (apparently) look into one of the BSDs.
Of course, the Be crowd was purchased at a fire sale price. I bet JLG is kicking himself in the head when the company he refused to sell to Apple for millions barely managed to get hundreds of thousands in liquidation.
I have faith in my myself. I can prove that I exist. (Cogito ergo sum.) I haven't disappeared yet.
I also have faith in my children. I have a tremendous multitude of rational reasons to believe that they exist. They haven't disappeared yet.
Perhaps, having listened to too many misguided theist and/or skeptic apologists you are confused on the matter. Faith is not opposed to reason. One can have faith for rational and/or irrational reasons. It is not binary either/or proposition.
Multi-profiles would be nice, that is true. But multiuser in that type of OS would be a fairly useless thing to implement.
Two words: security and security.
1. Profiles are little more than eye-candy without permissions to enforce policy on said profiles. Without some sense of multiple users, one user cannot restrict read and/or write access from other users. Even home users have something to gain from little brother not being able to delete big sister's homework. Not to mention keeping users from deleting or changing key system files.
2. The multi-user paradigm allows services to run as other than "root." One of the big weaknesses of most home flavors of Windows is that a compromise in any program is a "root" level compromise. I feel much more confident knowing that if a back door happens to be in my irc client that my exposure is limited to my personal files. Losing data sucks. Having to reinstall the OS sucks worse.
In Virus, Penny was the eventual result of leaving a program designed to optimize other programs running on a workstation that happened to be infected by a network aware virus. The result was an uber-optimized virus: Penny.
Penny was fault redundant. She could seed herself as a trojan onto a floppy disk. This trojan would then in turn build itself into a full copy once run on an uninfected computer.
It was all fun and games until Penny started killing people.
Great book, indeed. Although I must express disatisfaction with the Doom-esqe ending.
Selling more units does not necessarily entail more prophet. It is quite possible that Nintendo could make more money selling fewer consoles at a higher margin than selling more consoles at a lower margin.
As long as the volume of sales at a given margin is on track with the level of market share Nintendo wants, dropping price only serves to eat into profits.
Also, I think that you misremember the Nintendo blurb. IIRC, they stated that they will eventually be able to sell the GC at $99 and still make a profit. This will be after the costs decrease as volume ramps up and economies of scale are achieved and (possibly) the system is re-engineered to be less expensive to produce.
The $185 cost to build a playstation 2 that Red Herring reported is before the cost to fab went down. From what I hear Sony is still selling the PS2 at a profit. I believe that the article mis-stated the facts here. Sony greatly reduced the price of the PS2 when it combined some of the core chips in to one chip.
From the article, I didn't get any indication that the $185 number was for the latest model with the reduced cost to build. If that is what Dean Takahashi intended to get across, he failed. If you know of any sources that report that Sony is currently making a profit on PS2 sales, I'd be appreciative if you could supply it.
It is also quite possible that Dean Takahashi could also be wrong in his numbers and conclusion. Personally, I have no reason to believe that he is wrong. Neither do I have any great reason to believe that he is right.
I completely agree with your remarks on Intel and Nvidia. They certainly want to get their margins and are not interested in selling to Microsoft at a loss. Unlike Microsoft, Nvidia and Intel don't stand to gain from royalties on software if they pay for marketshare by subsidizing their profit.
Also, IBM will be aiding Sony in the latter's R&D for the PS3. Not to mention that Sony certainly has the deep pockets to go the distance.
Coincidentally, Nintendo uses a version of IBM's PPC chip for the Game Cube. Perhaps IBM is going to be the sleeper in the game.
In the meanwhile, I'll continue to buy used games at $5 to $10 bucks a pop for my Dreamcast.
Prior to the large price cuts this past spring, you were probably correct. Given that the Red Herring reports that it is estimated that it costs Sony $185 to build a PS/2, it is pretty reasonable that to figure that they are selling it at a loss when it retails for $199.
Similarly, Nintendo was planning to sell the GameCube at a slight loss at $199 and planned to eventually be profitable due to economies of scale. With the cut to $149, the road to profitability for Nintendo hardware, that road just got a lot longer.
Blame it all on Sega. According to the Gord, Sega was the first console maker to regularly sell their console at a loss.
While it is true that Islam officially teaches that after Mohammed, there will be no more prophets. Yet Islam also allows a role for Imams to teach the direct will of God in specific circumstances. For example, in Shia Islam there is a supreme Imam who is infallible in his pronouncements. Also, if there was no more prophecy in the sense that most people understand the word, there would be no Fatwas issued by various Imams.
Lastly, one can argue that Baha'i (which rejects the principle that Mohammed was the last prophet) is a form of Islam, at least in the same sense that Islam and Christianity are both forms of Judaism.
It's not in writing, but it's the common belief among xians.
It is a common belief among some Baptist groups and in the odd small denomination such as the Campbellite movement (Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ) that miracles (and prophecies) have ceased after the end of the apostolic era. These groups are referred to as "cessationist" and comprise a very small minority of Christians worldwide.
The common belief among most Christian groups from the Shakers to Jehovah's Witnesses to the Roman Catholic Church to Pentacostals to Mormons is that the Holy Spirit continues to bring forth prophets.
If you don't believe me go down to your local Assemblies of God congregation and ask them how many prophets they have in their congregation. I'd wager you can only represent the answer on one hand if you use binary instead of decimal.
Great point - my argument with 99% of religions is "well, our profit (oh, my bad, prophet) said he was going to be the Last Prophet Ever, so that's why God doesn't talk to us anymore".
Odd, for the life of me I can't think of one major world religion with that tenet. Most religions are not cessationist.
SQL, being an acronym, is properly pronounced ess cue el. Mispronouning SQL as sequel shows the lack of pedantry needed to be a good computer scientist.
But mail arrives faster if you spec the correct city or use the Zip+4... because the mail doesn't have to traverse an extra postoffice to get there.
Zip+4 is always a good idea.
Using the city name instead of the name of the post office is not always a good idea. What screws most people up is that a mailing address doesn't list your geographical location in the city field, but rather the name of the post office that services your address.
To make matters more confusing, some post offices have multiple branches. I have a post office three blocks away from me located within the territorial borders of the municipality in which I live. However, this is a branch of the post office for the megapolis next to which my municipality resides. Hence, my mailing address is that of the megapolis and not of the municipality.
Consider a city I used to live in, Beavercreek, Ohio. When I lived there, Beavercreek was serviced by three different post offices: Dayton, Fairborn and Xenia. The zip code depended on which post office serviced that section of Beavercreek. Most people that used the city name Beavercreek instead of the name of the post office that serviced that area had their mail returned to sender or delayed while the letter went bounced around to the three post offices that served Beavercreek.
By 1997, these bees had become major pollinators in Panama. And while they often get a bad rap for their aggressive behavior, farmers and beekeepers are beginning to realize the advantages of the insects, not only to the coffee crop, but to thousands of other species of flowering plants, said Roubik.
Africanized (killer) are apparently more prolific as polinators than the native insects. While the better coffee can be made from any insect, in portions of South and Central America that insect is the killer bee. Hence, the focus in the article on Africanized bees.
Slashdot Mirror
The current naming convention is for the Debian 2.x series. The Debian 1.x series had a different naming convention. Presumably Debian 3.x will have also have a new naming convention. Hopefully, the 3.x series will arrive prior to running through the names of all the characters from Toy Story.
make
make install
breaks the usefulness of using a packaging system (whether the system is apt, rpm, or whatever).
If you want to build from source and install custom software and expect to still be able to use your packaging system, you should build your own packages to install instead of using make install. When building your packages, you then tag the package as need be to fill the same dependencies as the stock package.
Your comment seems to me to imply that one cannot buy Debian with support. However, the article specifically states that HP sells and supports Debian. If one buys a system configured with Debian from HP, HP supports it.
The short end of the story is that without knowing if all other things (such as routine maintenence) are equal, we don't know if the reliability ratings are meaningful in deciding which vehicle to purchase. I know people with Hondas, Toyotas, Fords and Chevys that haven't lasted long at all. I know people with all of the above that through excellent maintenence habits have driven all of the above for hundreds of thousands of miles.
And the same goes for interiors. I know people with VWs, Toyotas, Fords, Hondas and Chevys that look like hades on the inside. I also know people that take care of their cares and the interiors seem to be perpetually in excellent condition for more years than I've been alive.
(There is a relatively small set of controlled situations where it is reasonable to claim certain things do not exist within the universe of the experiment based on the details of the observeration excluding the possibility of the existence of thing being proved to not exist within the confines of the experiment.)
That said, we do have several data points of planets that do not currently appear to us to harbor life. So it is fair to say that our present stage of knowledge, there do not appear to be any other intelligent forms of life in the universe.
Yet we also need to acknowledge the limits of this statement and admit that the state of our knowledge may be the limiting factor and not the presence of other intelligent life forms.
Just as I do not consider the NeXT invasion of Apple to have been complete until Rasphody shipped in the form of Mac OS X as the default Mac OS, I do not consider the Be invasion of Palm Computing to be complete until the next generation of Palm OS ships. (That is until what is currently referred to as v6 ships. That said, Mac OS released two major version updates and how many minor version updates prior to OS X? Palm Computing could conceivably do the same.)
And one never knows, despite Be's mighty engineering prowess, it might suck. . . .
Palm OS v5 is essentially the Palm OS kernel hacked to run on ARM with a few kludges for a bit of functionality that Palm OS currently lacks to make it competitive.
If these pix are real, they are far more likely to be of a unit running Palm OS v5 than v6 as v6 doesn't really exist yet except on whiteboards in the heads of the OS architects.
I have two hopes for v6:
- Palm Computing doesn't pull an IBM (OS/2 PPC) or an Apple (Copland, the original MacOS 8).
- The Be invasion of the software division of Palm Computing proceeds a la the NeXT invasion of Apple.
And I still think it a shame that Palm Computing decided that Linux (because of the GPL) was incompatible with their business model in relation to IP. It is also a shame that they didn't (apparently) look into one of the BSDs.Of course, the Be crowd was purchased at a fire sale price. I bet JLG is kicking himself in the head when the company he refused to sell to Apple for millions barely managed to get hundreds of thousands in liquidation.
Whether we can know if a given axiom is true or false is another issue entirely.
I also have faith in my children. I have a tremendous multitude of rational reasons to believe that they exist. They haven't disappeared yet.
Perhaps, having listened to too many misguided theist and/or skeptic apologists you are confused on the matter. Faith is not opposed to reason. One can have faith for rational and/or irrational reasons. It is not binary either/or proposition.
Regards,
-l
1. Profiles are little more than eye-candy without permissions to enforce policy on said profiles. Without some sense of multiple users, one user cannot restrict read and/or write access from other users. Even home users have something to gain from little brother not being able to delete big sister's homework. Not to mention keeping users from deleting or changing key system files.
2. The multi-user paradigm allows services to run as other than "root." One of the big weaknesses of most home flavors of Windows is that a compromise in any program is a "root" level compromise. I feel much more confident knowing that if a back door happens to be in my irc client that my exposure is limited to my personal files. Losing data sucks. Having to reinstall the OS sucks worse.
Regards,
-l
Penny was fault redundant. She could seed herself as a trojan onto a floppy disk. This trojan would then in turn build itself into a full copy once run on an uninfected computer.
It was all fun and games until Penny started killing people.
Great book, indeed. Although I must express disatisfaction with the Doom-esqe ending.
As long as the volume of sales at a given margin is on track with the level of market share Nintendo wants, dropping price only serves to eat into profits.
Also, I think that you misremember the Nintendo blurb. IIRC, they stated that they will eventually be able to sell the GC at $99 and still make a profit. This will be after the costs decrease as volume ramps up and economies of scale are achieved and (possibly) the system is re-engineered to be less expensive to produce.
-l
From the article, I didn't get any indication that the $185 number was for the latest model with the reduced cost to build. If that is what Dean Takahashi intended to get across, he failed. If you know of any sources that report that Sony is currently making a profit on PS2 sales, I'd be appreciative if you could supply it.
It is also quite possible that Dean Takahashi could also be wrong in his numbers and conclusion. Personally, I have no reason to believe that he is wrong. Neither do I have any great reason to believe that he is right.
I completely agree with your remarks on Intel and Nvidia. They certainly want to get their margins and are not interested in selling to Microsoft at a loss. Unlike Microsoft, Nvidia and Intel don't stand to gain from royalties on software if they pay for marketshare by subsidizing their profit.
Also, IBM will be aiding Sony in the latter's R&D for the PS3. Not to mention that Sony certainly has the deep pockets to go the distance.
Coincidentally, Nintendo uses a version of IBM's PPC chip for the Game Cube. Perhaps IBM is going to be the sleeper in the game.
In the meanwhile, I'll continue to buy used games at $5 to $10 bucks a pop for my Dreamcast.
Regards,
-l
Prior to the large price cuts this past spring, you were probably correct. Given that the Red Herring reports that it is estimated that it costs Sony $185 to build a PS/2, it is pretty reasonable that to figure that they are selling it at a loss when it retails for $199.
Similarly, Nintendo was planning to sell the GameCube at a slight loss at $199 and planned to eventually be profitable due to economies of scale. With the cut to $149, the road to profitability for Nintendo hardware, that road just got a lot longer.
Blame it all on Sega. According to the Gord, Sega was the first console maker to regularly sell their console at a loss.
-l
While it is true that Islam officially teaches that after Mohammed, there will be no more prophets. Yet Islam also allows a role for Imams to teach the direct will of God in specific circumstances. For example, in Shia Islam there is a supreme Imam who is infallible in his pronouncements. Also, if there was no more prophecy in the sense that most people understand the word, there would be no Fatwas issued by various Imams.
Lastly, one can argue that Baha'i (which rejects the principle that Mohammed was the last prophet) is a form of Islam, at least in the same sense that Islam and Christianity are both forms of Judaism.
Regards,
-l
It is a common belief among some Baptist groups and in the odd small denomination such as the Campbellite movement (Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ) that miracles (and prophecies) have ceased after the end of the apostolic era. These groups are referred to as "cessationist" and comprise a very small minority of Christians worldwide.
The common belief among most Christian groups from the Shakers to Jehovah's Witnesses to the Roman Catholic Church to Pentacostals to Mormons is that the Holy Spirit continues to bring forth prophets.
If you don't believe me go down to your local Assemblies of God congregation and ask them how many prophets they have in their congregation. I'd wager you can only represent the answer on one hand if you use binary instead of decimal.
Regards,
-l
Odd, for the life of me I can't think of one major world religion with that tenet. Most religions are not cessationist.
-l
SQL, being an acronym, is properly pronounced ess cue el. Mispronouning SQL as sequel shows the lack of pedantry needed to be a good computer scientist.
Zip+4 is always a good idea.
Using the city name instead of the name of the post office is not always a good idea. What screws most people up is that a mailing address doesn't list your geographical location in the city field, but rather the name of the post office that services your address.
To make matters more confusing, some post offices have multiple branches. I have a post office three blocks away from me located within the territorial borders of the municipality in which I live. However, this is a branch of the post office for the megapolis next to which my municipality resides. Hence, my mailing address is that of the megapolis and not of the municipality.
Consider a city I used to live in, Beavercreek, Ohio. When I lived there, Beavercreek was serviced by three different post offices: Dayton, Fairborn and Xenia. The zip code depended on which post office serviced that section of Beavercreek. Most people that used the city name Beavercreek instead of the name of the post office that serviced that area had their mail returned to sender or delayed while the letter went bounced around to the three post offices that served Beavercreek.
Fun, eh?
Africanized (killer) are apparently more prolific as polinators than the native insects. While the better coffee can be made from any insect, in portions of South and Central America that insect is the killer bee. Hence, the focus in the article on Africanized bees.
Paying money is no guarantee that software will work as expected.