I believe the reasoning went something like this: people who want to stick with stable releases will use the kernel prepared by their distro. Anyone willing to build the kernel on their own is knowledgeable enough to deal with potentially unstable upgrades.
Seriously, how often do you update the kernel on a production machine?
Knowledge workers of any kind value their time and are very resistant to doing anything that they perceive to be a waste of time. Users who don't cooperate when the knowledge worker tries to help, are often perceived as a waste of time and, as such, receive poor support. However, users who are trainable, very often receive good support because time spent teaching them in the short-term generally means that in the long-term, they require less of your attention.
I'm not the poster you're replying to, but my home machine is connected to the internet without any firewall. The only network service I've got turned on is sshd and the only reason it's on is because I turned it on. By default, there was nothing open.
Do I feel secure? Yeah, pretty much I do even though I haven't really done anything else to secure my machines.
If I were to post my IP, what do you think you'd be able to do?
Ebuilds for older versions of everything in the portage tree are available in CVS if you need them. I do realize that at some point the system changes enough that old ebuilds might not work properly without tweaking, so if you have vendor supplied software and can't build it yourself, perhaps Gentoo isn't a good match for it.
When a package gets dropped from portage, it's because nobody is willing (or able) to maintain the ebuild (and any required patches). That only happens with unknown software that nobody uses or software that has been completely outdone by its competition such that nobody uses it anymore.
I'm just going out on a limb here, but if your business chose to use certain software, you probably didn't choose software that nobody else uses. That right there will probably prevent it from being dropped from portage (if it's important to more than one person/organization, it's usually well supported). In a worst case scenario, you could simply maintain your own ebuild and have it included in portage (if it works, it's no problem to get it officially into portage, although they might ask you to be the official maintainer).
When people ask me to recommend them a linux distro I generally ask them if they care how it works or if they just care that it works. If they just want it to work, I suggest Ubuntu. If they care how things work, I suggest Gentoo (and mentally add them to my short-term support schedule).
The reason I do this is because Ubuntu can be very frustrating for someone who actually wants to see how things work.
I've had a couple of people switch from Ubuntu to Gentoo after a few weeks, but never the other way around.
If Linux offers a competitive advantage, then companies that refuse to switch to Linux will eventually be pressured out of their markets by competitors that do switch.
Only time will tell, but it's easy to see who's drawing the lines.
You say that like using the web access is tolerable.
Our exchange admins refuse to turn on IMAP support, so us Linux users are limited to using the web interface or Evolution with the exchange connector.
Evolution has recently become a little easier to live with (now on version 2.8.2), but I'm still hoping that Thunderbird will eventually support exchange.
That rule only applies when you're doing the full development yourself.
In this case, they're not interested in developing their own DBMS and so the quality of what they choose is independent of the time it takes to choose it (the cost depends on what they choose, but there are free DBMSs out there that, depending on what they need, will do just as nicely as an expensive DBMS).
You should start seeing diesel being treated more fairly. Now that the ultra-low sulfur diesel is available just about everywhere, cars will be sold that take advantage of it (dare I speculate about diesel electric hybrids in 2009?).
In the long term, I see biodiesel being more practical than ethanol (easier to make, transport, and more efficient to use in an internal combustion engine (at least until high-compression engines optimized for ethanol are built...not these crippled flex fuel engines)), so I'm all for this change.
Maybe even X is too heavyweight for what needs to happen with desktop Unix. The ideas behind it are also pretty old.
X is supremely lightweight. It's the widget libraries (gtk, qt, etc.) that are hefty, but even they aren't all that bad compared to what Microsoft and Apple are doing.
From where I sit, it looks like the Linux desktop, technically, is doing just fine. It's the inertia of the market (people don't like learning new things) that needs to be overcome.
Is Linux right for everyone? Of course, not. But it is right for a growing subset of everyone.
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I believe the reasoning went something like this: people who want to stick with stable releases will use the kernel prepared by their distro. Anyone willing to build the kernel on their own is knowledgeable enough to deal with potentially unstable upgrades.
Seriously, how often do you update the kernel on a production machine?
Does google post any web statistics anywhere?
I would love to see them.
Knowledge workers of any kind value their time and are very resistant to doing anything that they perceive to be a waste of time. Users who don't cooperate when the knowledge worker tries to help, are often perceived as a waste of time and, as such, receive poor support. However, users who are trainable, very often receive good support because time spent teaching them in the short-term generally means that in the long-term, they require less of your attention.
Actually, my OBSD box is configured the same way (only sshd turned on).
I'm not the poster you're replying to, but my home machine is connected to the internet
without any firewall. The only network service I've got turned on is sshd and the only
reason it's on is because I turned it on. By default, there was nothing open.
Do I feel secure? Yeah, pretty much I do even though I haven't really done anything else
to secure my machines.
If I were to post my IP, what do you think you'd be able to do?
Unless you have crazy memory needs, you can generally do away with swap entirely once you have 1G+ RAM. At least that's my experience, YMMV.
/var used for nowadays? Do we still need it or is it merely an historical hold-over (like an appendix)?
What is
Let me know when they support anything other than x86.
Seriously, not even a PPC port?
Ebuilds for older versions of everything in the portage tree are available in CVS if you need them. I do realize that at some point the system changes enough that old ebuilds might not work properly without tweaking, so if you have vendor supplied software and can't build it yourself, perhaps Gentoo isn't a good match for it.
When a package gets dropped from portage, it's because nobody is willing (or able) to maintain the ebuild (and any required patches). That only happens with unknown software that nobody uses or software that has been completely outdone by its competition such that nobody uses it anymore.
I'm just going out on a limb here, but if your business chose to use certain software, you probably didn't choose software that nobody else uses. That right there will probably prevent it from being dropped from portage (if it's important to more than one person/organization, it's usually well supported). In a worst case scenario, you could simply maintain your own ebuild and have it included in portage (if it works, it's no problem to get it officially into portage, although they might ask you to be the official maintainer).
When people ask me to recommend them a linux distro I generally ask them if they care how it works or if they just care that it works. If they just want it to work, I suggest Ubuntu. If they care how things work, I suggest Gentoo (and mentally add them to my short-term support schedule).
The reason I do this is because Ubuntu can be very frustrating for someone who actually wants to see how things work.
I've had a couple of people switch from Ubuntu to Gentoo after a few weeks, but never the other way around.
If Linux offers a competitive advantage, then companies that refuse to switch to Linux will eventually be pressured out of their markets by competitors that do switch.
Only time will tell, but it's easy to see who's drawing the lines.
Can you give us an idea how big a company you're talking about
and what sorts of problems/solutions were encountered during the
migration?
Good case studies are hard to find.
When a machine is brought down by a virus, we generally try to pop Linux
on it unless the user can make a case for needing windows.
You say that like using the web access is tolerable.
Our exchange admins refuse to turn on IMAP support, so us Linux users are
limited to using the web interface or Evolution with the exchange connector.
Evolution has recently become a little easier to live with (now on version 2.8.2),
but I'm still hoping that Thunderbird will eventually support exchange.
That rule only applies when you're doing the full development yourself.
In this case, they're not interested in developing their own DBMS and so the quality
of what they choose is independent of the time it takes to choose it (the cost depends
on what they choose, but there are free DBMSs out there that, depending on what they
need, will do just as nicely as an expensive DBMS).
You should start seeing diesel being treated more fairly. Now that the ultra-low sulfur diesel is
available just about everywhere, cars will be sold that take advantage of it (dare I speculate about
diesel electric hybrids in 2009?).
In the long term, I see biodiesel being more practical than ethanol (easier to make, transport, and
more efficient to use in an internal combustion engine (at least until high-compression engines
optimized for ethanol are built...not these crippled flex fuel engines)), so I'm all for this change.
If you want something that you can make look and feel like CDE ("Oh, God! Why???") take a look
at FVWM.
It's even possible that someone has already built such a config.
Maybe even X is too heavyweight for what needs to happen with desktop Unix. The ideas behind it are also pretty old.
X is supremely lightweight. It's the widget libraries (gtk, qt, etc.) that are hefty, but even they aren't all that bad
compared to what Microsoft and Apple are doing.
From where I sit, it looks like the Linux desktop, technically, is doing just fine. It's the inertia of the market
(people don't like learning new things) that needs to be overcome.
Is Linux right for everyone? Of course, not. But it is right for a growing subset of everyone.
Do not disregard partial solutions just because they're not 100%.
I'm currently using Evolution to read my work email because the powers that be refuse to turn
on IMAP support on the Exchange server.
Could I use the new Thunderbird to do this?
How do you mitigate transmission losses when you have smal scale generators far away from the consumer?
Could you please point me to a site that explains how seawater + air + electricity yields ethanol?
That sounds interesting.
I vote for this too. Except for my flash drive, all my external storage is EXT2 or EXT3.
It's frustrating that OSX doesn't know how to handle these.
In the absence of evidence, wouldn't non-belief be the default position?
Or do you routinely believe in everything that you nothing about?
Are there any distros that actually implement LSB?