I hate to admit it, but I think that many people have misinterpreted what Gentoo really is and for whom it is geared. Let's be candid: it's really not about excessive CFLAGS.
Take a good read of this article; it outlines some of the fundamental differences in philosophy between BSD and Linux. In some respects, Gentoo's portage system attempts to reconcile the differences between BSD's ports tree and the absence thereof in Linux as well as the concept of perpetual updates through make buildworld. (I know a guy who's maintained the same install of Gentoo on his laptop for over four years who has kept it up-to-date by using portage without a re-install. Talk about impressive for a Linux distribution.) Yes, it is true that Gentoo does not have a native pkg_add that FreeBSD does to install ports, but what Gentoo offers is as close to that as one can get in Linux; and it is one hell of an improvement on the base concept, might I say. In many respects, if you want to criticize Gentoo over having to compile things to keep it up-to-date, then BSD ought to be brought up for discussion.
Still, it is nice that Gentoo can be updated without having to perform a complete re-installation of the operating system. I hate to say it, but performing "s/old release/new release/g" on/etc/apt/sources.list, apt-get update, and apt-get dist-upgrade is not always as clear as one might expect. When the average user who lacks strong familiarity with dpkg's options is in this situation, I have seen the results: They are very depressing. And while it is true that emerge updates can break, they will at least teach the user in time how to deal with them and learn quite a bit. The same can be said about other distributions, too, so the exclusivity of this issue to Gentoo is really a moot point.
.
What about customization? Sure, some BSD packages may have makefile-based booleans, but in no way are the centrally documented or are they centrally documented. FreeBSD KNOBS comes close, but it still is not exhaustive. There is no real comparison with USE flags. If BSD had it so well, I wonder why people are trying to port portage to BSD. (I love BSD, mind you, so I am not being unreasonably harsh on it.)
What about fundamental design? It is meant to be flexible and dynamic. Ever notice how many directories are suffixed with ".d" in/etc on Gentoo? A lot are. Yes, some other distributions do use the enumerated ".d" directory paradigm, but none seem to do it as much as Gentoo. Gentoo seems to use ".d" directories whenever it can. So if a new package wants to add something to the path, it merely adds another entry to/etc/env.d which specifies this path. I find this system so great, that I've re-implemented it in Debian/Ubuntu across 100+ computers at my work for the special in-house, non FHS-friendly applications. Talk about a compelling innovation.
And when it comes to configuration changes, Debian has debconf, which allows some packages to preserve changes across updates through configuration file regeneration. While this is nice for preseeding, this is not helpful when there are major updates or when you've made hand-made modifications. Yes, dpkg will bring about a diff of the two files, but does dpkg's integrated configuration diff mechanism really hold its own against Gentoo's dispatch-conf? If you've used dispatch-conf, the answer is no.
Yes, it is true that there are some quality assurance failings with packages in Portage, but let's put that aside for a moment. When it comes to making packages for Gentoo, it certainly beats making them for Debian. Yes, Debian has its nice policy manual, but it is not always up to date or the easiest thing to read. Gentoo's documentation let's a first-time package builder build a package in very little time; whereas Debian or Redhat's syste
Is it me or has kernel 2.6 been comparibly unstable and quirky in the past six months? I have to admit that I am very disappointed with this instability and wish that the Linux developers would move back again to their old even-stable and odd-testing version numbering. Things did seem to be a lot more stable back then when this old versioning scheme was used. I mean really, for the past few months kernel quirks in 2.6 have made the kernel appear more like a testing kernel than anything. I am thoroughly disappointed.
I know that people will complain that I have not cited anything specific or tangible; that is fine. The point for me is that I am sick of random spurious issues that seem to be fixed in one release and then some new permutation thereof appears later. Candidly a lot of these things have to do with CPU throttling, power management, USB, and other aspects of the kernel.
While I appreciate how much Linux's hardware support has increased over the past few months, the desire for a more mature environment has left me wanting something more.
In all seriousness, if the quirks of kernel 2.6 keep persisting, I might be inclined to migrate to, god-forbid, BSD.
Aside from actual technical reasons, perhaps one can have philosophical reasons for using it over Firefox and Thunderbird. Consider the following excerpts from the Firefox team's development blog and the Firefox readme:
1.) The middle finger housed at this site certainly implies the user and anyone who differs with the holy developers is wrong. Here, the customer is wrong, so it throws community accountability into question.
2.) Read lines 96 to 111 in the Firefox readme, and tell me that the developers are not being arrogant. While I see the value in meritocracy, to an extent, I fail to see the value arrogance. Secondly, it fails to offer anyone in the community any standardized channel for getting the attention of the developers, were the individual to have something that actually warranted their attention.
- Begin Quote -
96 ian 1.7 Q6: So to whom do I send patches?
97 ian 1.6
98 We are not currently accepting any input. No UI specs, no bugs,
99 and definitely no patches. See Q3.
100 ian 1.9
101 Q7: How do I get involved?
102
103 You don't except by invitation. This is a meritocracy -- only
104 those gain the respect of those in the group can join the group. See
105 Q6.
106 ian 1.6
107 ian 1.10 Q8: I don't like the mozilla/browser process! This sucks! I'm
108 never going to contribute to Mozilla again!
109
110 Oh no, please, don't go, whatever shall we do without you.
111
- End Quote -
The software may technically be open source because I can fetch the source via CVS; but under the policies of its developers, it is unaccountable and closed to my submission. How discouraging.
This is off the topic, but my final complaint about Firefox and Thunderbird is merely technical. Before anyone claims that I am wrong due to the fact that the user can write extensions and thereby participate in the community, I would agree in this argument, but I believe that it overlooks something: Everyone raves about extensions as if they are the best solution to ending the bloat of the original software. That view is fine, but I beg to differ with tradeoff of how cheap and poorly integrated the majority of main extensions feel. I have yet to use an extension that feels integrated better than the numerous features included in the Seamonkey suite.
The state of affairs with theaters and their respective business practices are atrocious.
I went to see Red Eye a few nights ago at a local AMC theater. The showtime was established to be 2140 on the ticket, newspaper, and online, so I arrived at 2130. The film never actually began at 2140, not even the previews. Immediately at 2140, the advertising switched from the standard slideshow of local businesses to thirty minutes (Yes, I actually timed it.) of premium advertising of television shows, Coke and Pepsi products, and the armed services. This was not standard previews, but much more. Finally at 2210 the actual previews began and they lasted about ten minutes.
This misinformation about showtimes is very distasteful and dubious. If anything, it makes me not want to see a film in theater anyway. Even if Hollywood quit making banal films, the theaters would still need the modify their practices to bring me back.
What I find hard to believe about this is that AMC theaters was just purchased by Loews theater company, which in 2003 had a class action lawsuit filed against it for misrepresenting the start time of a movie by five minutes due to premium advertising, not previews.
More information is available here about the suit against Loews:
If Loews a brief can be levied against Loews for delaying a film by 4:49, I wonder what would happen with its newly purchased child-company that delayed the film by nearly thirty minutes.
p.s. - For those armchair economists out there, I am in doubt that this premium advertising is really necessary, given the increases in ticket prices and profit structures from concessions.
While I find this an interesting discussion for Slashdot, I asked a derivation of this question myself about a month ago on the Wikipedia entry for Newegg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Newegg>.
I posed the following question:
The connection of a cult of personality with Newegg may sound a bit odd at first, but I would like someone to comment about this. Repeatedly throughout Newegg's product reviews as well as testimony that I have heard from individuals, I encounter massive exultation of Newegg, almost to the point of disbelief and making me believe that such interest is manufacturered or adulterated. Are individual consumers really that satisfied with this firm, or does the firm just undersell expectations to its consumers? In any case, it appears that Newegg has certainly harvested a loyal customer base. Mattp3d 06:57, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
Specific examples of this exultation may include having the ordered product arrive far earlier than expected or raving about lower prices.
Although I am not very familiar with the data structure of word files, would it be fair to assume that a fair amount of Open Office's or Abiword's support for word files is reverse engineered in some way or another, since Microsoft has not opened up the standards that it uses internally?
And on the point of beta software, I have had employment doing QA, both manual and automated development, so I understand what using beta software entails. Secondly, is it not fair for someone to test the software by putting it to real use? The main point I wanted to make is this: I did not want anyone to say that the latest beta release of OO was stable enough for everyday use, so I provided this anecdote to counter the stability argument preemptively by providing a pretty pathetic example of a crash.
Do you not agree that it is pretty pathetic for an application to crash while saving?
I can already say that Open Office, for as nice as it is, cannot load MS Word files that have embedded jpeg images. Even the latest beta versions have this problem.
Outside of this problem, I have been able to use Open Office completely this semester for all of my word processing and data needs. It works really well, most of the time.
My only real regret was writing a full paper in the latest beta version of it, for the thing crashed consistenly when performing a File>Save, no kidding here, resulting in a crashed word processor with a blank saved document.
For the Gentoo and Linux from Scratch users
on
GCC 4.0.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
Outside of any conventional wisdom about using such a new compiler, I would refrain from trying to compile glibc with this newer version of gcc, for glibc will not compile properly.
Actually, I see that it does have a Republican topic, but the question is: when was the last time that I have seen it used on the main page, or even when was the last time that I saw the 'Democrat' topic on the main page prior to this?
Is there any form of an authoritative definition of internet addiction? I mean, I spend a lot of time online a day, like probably many of the readers here, so my interest has been raised.
I personally do not believe that it can be determined quantitatively by how long one spends on the net; rather, perhaps some quality of the use may determine addiction.
As a student, I spend considerable quantities of time online performing research and consulting reference materials. For many things, it is just more efficient to do things online as opposed to performing inefficient information retrieval offline.
I agree with you on this fact 100 per cent on Gentoo and Breakmygentoo not being bleeding edge enough, so I went about building my own portage overlay that I personally keep in-sync with ftp://ftp.gnome.org's latest developmental tar-balls.
While it is true that these packages are not as entirely new as CVS code, I know that they are, in some senses, still valid testing subjects, for they are often only a week or so behind the real CVS code.
Legitimate value in being almost bleeding-edge
on
Gentoo Ricer Comparison
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
There is one value of Gentoo that I think many people tend to overlook. While many seem to focus on Gentoo's ability to let the user specify optimization flags and build a system from scratch for performance reasons, I adore Gentoo's ability to use packages that are plainly newer than what most other distributions could hope to offer, especially with what one can get from using breakmygentoo's packages.
Unlike loading my system with an absurd quantity optimization flags, I run my system with just a stable "-O -g." This has allowed me to commit a large number of very complete bug reports--and I mean over one hundred--for many projects--e.g., Gnome, Mozilla, and KDE--in the past year-and-a-half.
What's more is this: I cannot begin to describe how annoying it is on standard, binary-package distributions to go about using and developing for newer software suites and manually having to deal with bleeding-edge dependencies that these distros would never include end up including for a few months, due to their instability. I am fine with their potential instability on Gentoo; at least I do not have to go about uninstalling nearly all of distro's Gnome's dependencies and rebuilding them from scratch and dealing with very strange conflicts between the distro's older components and the manually installed newer packages.
If I am not believed, wait two months from now, take a fresh Debian or Fedora install, and attempt to compile the development version of Gnome against it without seriously damaging or fudging the distro's packaging mechanism and dependency system. I can attest that this is one virtue that Gentoo has over nearly every distribution that I have used, in that it minimizes the aforementioned dependency and package hell; and believe me: I have used a wide variety of distros in the past seven years, and only Gentoo has pleased me so well. Granted Gentoo does have its problems, but I have not stuck with a single distribution like it for such a long time, since I had been using Slackware and god-forbid, FreeBSD.
On another note, if some want to claim that the packages contained in Gentoo's portage tree are not bleeding edge, I can say that I personally maintain a rather large, manually created portage overlay that contains numerous unofficial packages. The fact that these packages can be compiled uniformally, installed consistently, and removed with ease is wonderful and something that I would dare not do with another distribution.
Agreed, be careful about saying you have never seen a banner add in years - especially through a test-based interface. We don't want to give those ever so sneaky AD-People ideas, do we?
Hrmm, this sounds like something from Star Trek. The day the nannites or nano-bots rebel. It would be funny to drink some of these or to have some of these little bots rebel like cancer in the water killing any life inside of it.
Hrmm, I wonder what they would do to my water-softner?
I have been wanting to build an in-car MP3 player for sometime now. For 1K, I don't know how economical one of these systems would be. I mean really: get a power inverter, rig up some input interface, and hook up the sound and you've got an in-car MP3 player.
Sure, I will admit for 1K all of that in one combined unit is pretty cool.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to admit it, but I think that many people have misinterpreted what Gentoo really is and for whom it is geared. Let's be candid: it's really not about excessive CFLAGS.
Take a good read of this article; it outlines some of the fundamental differences in philosophy between BSD and Linux. In some respects, Gentoo's portage system attempts to reconcile the differences between BSD's ports tree and the absence thereof in Linux as well as the concept of perpetual updates through make buildworld. (I know a guy who's maintained the same install of Gentoo on his laptop for over four years who has kept it up-to-date by using portage without a re-install. Talk about impressive for a Linux distribution.) Yes, it is true that Gentoo does not have a native pkg_add that FreeBSD does to install ports, but what Gentoo offers is as close to that as one can get in Linux; and it is one hell of an improvement on the base concept, might I say. In many respects, if you want to criticize Gentoo over having to compile things to keep it up-to-date, then BSD ought to be brought up for discussion.
Still, it is nice that Gentoo can be updated without having to perform a complete re-installation of the operating system. I hate to say it, but performing "s/old release/new release/g" on /etc/apt/sources.list, apt-get update, and apt-get dist-upgrade is not always as clear as one might expect. When the average user who lacks strong familiarity with dpkg's options is in this situation, I have seen the results: They are very depressing. And while it is true that emerge updates can break, they will at least teach the user in time how to deal with them and learn quite a bit. The same can be said about other distributions, too, so the exclusivity of this issue to Gentoo is really a moot point.
.
What about customization? Sure, some BSD packages may have makefile-based booleans, but in no way are the centrally documented or are they centrally documented. FreeBSD KNOBS comes close, but it still is not exhaustive. There is no real comparison with USE flags. If BSD had it so well, I wonder why people are trying to port portage to BSD. (I love BSD, mind you, so I am not being unreasonably harsh on it.)
What about fundamental design? It is meant to be flexible and dynamic. Ever notice how many directories are suffixed with ".d" in /etc on Gentoo? A lot are. Yes, some other distributions do use the enumerated ".d" directory paradigm, but none seem to do it as much as Gentoo. Gentoo seems to use ".d" directories whenever it can. So if a new package wants to add something to the path, it merely adds another entry to /etc/env.d which specifies this path. I find this system so great, that I've re-implemented it in Debian/Ubuntu across 100+ computers at my work for the special in-house, non FHS-friendly applications. Talk about a compelling innovation.
And when it comes to configuration changes, Debian has debconf, which allows some packages to preserve changes across updates through configuration file regeneration. While this is nice for preseeding, this is not helpful when there are major updates or when you've made hand-made modifications. Yes, dpkg will bring about a diff of the two files, but does dpkg's integrated configuration diff mechanism really hold its own against Gentoo's dispatch-conf? If you've used dispatch-conf, the answer is no.
Yes, it is true that there are some quality assurance failings with packages in Portage, but let's put that aside for a moment. When it comes to making packages for Gentoo, it certainly beats making them for Debian. Yes, Debian has its nice policy manual, but it is not always up to date or the easiest thing to read. Gentoo's documentation let's a first-time package builder build a package in very little time; whereas Debian or Redhat's syste
Is it me or has kernel 2.6 been comparibly unstable and quirky in the past six months? I have to admit that I am very disappointed with this instability and wish that the Linux developers would move back again to their old even-stable and odd-testing version numbering. Things did seem to be a lot more stable back then when this old versioning scheme was used. I mean really, for the past few months kernel quirks in 2.6 have made the kernel appear more like a testing kernel than anything. I am thoroughly disappointed.
I know that people will complain that I have not cited anything specific or tangible; that is fine. The point for me is that I am sick of random spurious issues that seem to be fixed in one release and then some new permutation thereof appears later. Candidly a lot of these things have to do with CPU throttling, power management, USB, and other aspects of the kernel.
While I appreciate how much Linux's hardware support has increased over the past few months, the desire for a more mature environment has left me wanting something more.
In all seriousness, if the quirks of kernel 2.6 keep persisting, I might be inclined to migrate to, god-forbid, BSD.
Oh, who needs merKel or KSchroeder when you could have KStoiber?
You know how long it takes to compile Firefox and Thunderbird?
Sure; just ask Gentoo's genlop.
genlop -t mozilla
Average time: ~28 minutes
genlop -t mozilla-firefox
Average time: ~25 minutes
Wow, it is certainly amazing to see how little of a difference there is between these two times.
Aside from actual technical reasons, perhaps one can have philosophical reasons for using it over Firefox and Thunderbird. Consider the following excerpts from the Firefox team's development blog and the Firefox readme:
1.) The middle finger housed at this site certainly implies the user and anyone who differs with the holy developers is wrong. Here, the customer is wrong, so it throws community accountability into question.
2.) Read lines 96 to 111 in the Firefox readme, and tell me that the developers are not being arrogant. While I see the value in meritocracy, to an extent, I fail to see the value arrogance. Secondly, it fails to offer anyone in the community any standardized channel for getting the attention of the developers, were the individual to have something that actually warranted their attention.
- Begin Quote -
96 ian 1.7 Q6: So to whom do I send patches?
97 ian 1.6
98 We are not currently accepting any input. No UI specs, no bugs,
99 and definitely no patches. See Q3.
100 ian 1.9
101 Q7: How do I get involved?
102
103 You don't except by invitation. This is a meritocracy -- only
104 those gain the respect of those in the group can join the group. See
105 Q6.
106 ian 1.6
107 ian 1.10 Q8: I don't like the mozilla/browser process! This sucks! I'm
108 never going to contribute to Mozilla again!
109
110 Oh no, please, don't go, whatever shall we do without you.
111
- End Quote -
The software may technically be open source because I can fetch the source via CVS; but under the policies of its developers, it is unaccountable and closed to my submission. How discouraging.
This is off the topic, but my final complaint about Firefox and Thunderbird is merely technical. Before anyone claims that I am wrong due to the fact that the user can write extensions and thereby participate in the community, I would agree in this argument, but I believe that it overlooks something: Everyone raves about extensions as if they are the best solution to ending the bloat of the original software. That view is fine, but I beg to differ with tradeoff of how cheap and poorly integrated the majority of main extensions feel. I have yet to use an extension that feels integrated better than the numerous features included in the Seamonkey suite.
If my views are not sufficient here, consider taking a look at this large list of individuals who think otherwise: http://wiki.mozilla.org/SeaMonkey:Reasons.
The state of affairs with theaters and their respective business practices are atrocious.
I went to see Red Eye a few nights ago at a local AMC theater. The showtime was established to be 2140 on the ticket, newspaper, and online, so I arrived at 2130. The film never actually began at 2140, not even the previews. Immediately at 2140, the advertising switched from the standard slideshow of local businesses to thirty minutes (Yes, I actually timed it.) of premium advertising of television shows, Coke and Pepsi products, and the armed services. This was not standard previews, but much more. Finally at 2210 the actual previews began and they lasted about ten minutes.
This misinformation about showtimes is very distasteful and dubious. If anything, it makes me not want to see a film in theater anyway. Even if Hollywood quit making banal films, the theaters would still need the modify their practices to bring me back.
What I find hard to believe about this is that AMC theaters was just purchased by Loews theater company, which in 2003 had a class action lawsuit filed against it for misrepresenting the start time of a movie by five minutes due to premium advertising, not previews.
More information is available here about the suit against Loews:
http://www.nomovieads.com/doc.htm
If Loews a brief can be levied against Loews for delaying a film by 4:49, I wonder what would happen with its newly purchased child-company that delayed the film by nearly thirty minutes.
p.s. - For those armchair economists out there, I am in doubt that this premium advertising is really necessary, given the increases in ticket prices and profit structures from concessions.
While I find this an interesting discussion for Slashdot, I asked a derivation of this question myself about a month ago on the Wikipedia entry for Newegg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Newegg>.
I posed the following question:
The connection of a cult of personality with Newegg may sound a bit odd at first, but I would like someone to comment about this. Repeatedly throughout Newegg's product reviews as well as testimony that I have heard from individuals, I encounter massive exultation of Newegg, almost to the point of disbelief and making me believe that such interest is manufacturered or adulterated. Are individual consumers really that satisfied with this firm, or does the firm just undersell expectations to its consumers? In any case, it appears that Newegg has certainly harvested a loyal customer base. Mattp3d 06:57, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
Specific examples of this exultation may include having the ordered product arrive far earlier than expected or raving about lower prices.
What does the community think about this?
Although I am not very familiar with the data structure of word files, would it be fair to assume that a fair amount of Open Office's or Abiword's support for word files is reverse engineered in some way or another, since Microsoft has not opened up the standards that it uses internally?
And on the point of beta software, I have had employment doing QA, both manual and automated development, so I understand what using beta software entails. Secondly, is it not fair for someone to test the software by putting it to real use? The main point I wanted to make is this: I did not want anyone to say that the latest beta release of OO was stable enough for everyday use, so I provided this anecdote to counter the stability argument preemptively by providing a pretty pathetic example of a crash.
Do you not agree that it is pretty pathetic for an application to crash while saving?
I can already say that Open Office, for as nice as it is, cannot load MS Word files that have embedded jpeg images. Even the latest beta versions have this problem.
Outside of this problem, I have been able to use Open Office completely this semester for all of my word processing and data needs. It works really well, most of the time.
My only real regret was writing a full paper in the latest beta version of it, for the thing crashed consistenly when performing a File>Save, no kidding here, resulting in a crashed word processor with a blank saved document.
Outside of any conventional wisdom about using such a new compiler, I would refrain from trying to compile glibc with this newer version of gcc, for glibc will not compile properly.
The issues associated with compiling glibc should be fixed with the version 2.3.6 release, whenever that may be.
I started a brief web site that documents some of the issues of using the new compiler, so check it out here.
Actually, I see that it does have a Republican topic, but the question is: when was the last time that I have seen it used on the main page, or even when was the last time that I saw the 'Democrat' topic on the main page prior to this?
Playing devil's advocate:
As long as Slashdot has a 'Democrats topic,' I hope that it has a topic for the GOP and others.
Is there any form of an authoritative definition of internet addiction? I mean, I spend a lot of time online a day, like probably many of the readers here, so my interest has been raised.
I personally do not believe that it can be determined quantitatively by how long one spends on the net; rather, perhaps some quality of the use may determine addiction.
As a student, I spend considerable quantities of time online performing research and consulting reference materials. For many things, it is just more efficient to do things online as opposed to performing inefficient information retrieval offline.
I agree with you on this fact 100 per cent on Gentoo and Breakmygentoo not being bleeding edge enough, so I went about building my own portage overlay that I personally keep in-sync with ftp://ftp.gnome.org's latest developmental tar-balls.
While it is true that these packages are not as entirely new as CVS code, I know that they are, in some senses, still valid testing subjects, for they are often only a week or so behind the real CVS code.
There is one value of Gentoo that I think many people tend to overlook. While many seem to focus on Gentoo's ability to let the user specify optimization flags and build a system from scratch for performance reasons, I adore Gentoo's ability to use packages that are plainly newer than what most other distributions could hope to offer, especially with what one can get from using breakmygentoo's packages.
Unlike loading my system with an absurd quantity optimization flags, I run my system with just a stable "-O -g." This has allowed me to commit a large number of very complete bug reports--and I mean over one hundred--for many projects--e.g., Gnome, Mozilla, and KDE--in the past year-and-a-half.
What's more is this: I cannot begin to describe how annoying it is on standard, binary-package distributions to go about using and developing for newer software suites and manually having to deal with bleeding-edge dependencies that these distros would never include end up including for a few months, due to their instability.
I am fine with their potential instability on Gentoo; at least I do not have to go about uninstalling nearly all of distro's Gnome's dependencies and rebuilding them from scratch and dealing with very strange conflicts between the distro's older components and the manually installed newer packages.
If I am not believed, wait two months from now, take a fresh Debian or Fedora install, and attempt to compile the development version of Gnome against it without seriously damaging or fudging the distro's packaging mechanism and dependency system. I can attest that this is one virtue that Gentoo has over nearly every distribution that I have used, in that it minimizes the aforementioned dependency and package hell; and believe me: I have used a wide variety of distros in the past seven years, and only Gentoo has pleased me so well. Granted Gentoo does have its problems, but I have not stuck with a single distribution like it for such a long time, since I had been using Slackware and god-forbid, FreeBSD.
On another note, if some want to claim that the packages contained in Gentoo's portage tree are not bleeding edge, I can say that I personally maintain a rather large, manually created portage overlay that contains numerous unofficial packages. The fact that these packages can be compiled uniformally, installed consistently, and removed with ease is wonderful and something that I would dare not do with another distribution.
KDE has rendered SVG based icons since its 3.0 or 3.1 betas; this is nothing too new.
Agreed, be careful about saying you have never seen a banner add in years - especially through a test-based interface. We don't want to give those ever so sneaky AD-People ideas, do we?
Great, I hope I don't see region locked computer components in my lifetime.
China: Nuclear Arms
America: Espionage
Great, I am certain this double standard will go over quite well with arms negotiations.
Hrmm, this sounds like something from Star Trek. The day the nannites or nano-bots rebel. It would be funny to drink some of these or to have some of these little bots rebel like cancer in the water killing any life inside of it.
Hrmm, I wonder what they would do to my water-softner?
I have been wanting to build an in-car MP3 player for sometime now. For 1K, I don't know how economical one of these systems would be. I mean really: get a power inverter, rig up some input interface, and hook up the sound and you've got an in-car MP3 player.
Sure, I will admit for 1K all of that in one combined unit is pretty cool.
At least Lucas has enough sense not to have Blink 182 or some stupid whiny kiddies involved with the movie.
Why is Star Wars targeted at young ninnies nowadays?
I dunno.
I think Lucas is screwing with a large dedicated audience by embeding such kiddy nonsense like Jar Jar Binks, etc.
On the serious side --pardon my lack of technical knowledge here, but what would happen if the beam missed?
Hrmm, it is funny because I can "War Drive" in the mid-west. That shouldn't happen. ;)