The wonderfulness that is apt-get, and the dpkg engine that it runs, is two fold:
o apt-get install galeon. Yes to install deps, blam! done.
o The true reason people love it so, and the reason it Works, is mainly due to the hard work, sweat and tears that the package maintainers put into each package. Each maintainer generally only handles either a single package, or just a few. With the 7-8k stable in all but name packages in Woody/testing, this represents a truely huge effort.
Not to belittle other distributions, but Apt has a huge advantage, solely due to the sheer amount of people hours that are put into tweaking every little package until it is just right. For a comercial distribution tho, this is cost prohibitive, and one maintainer must be responsible for many many base packages. The debian maintainers also QA addtional packages, so users arn't so much at the mercy of the setup that the origianal external software authors used.
I hope I don't come across as too much of a zealot, but it is really really really nice.
When we were in New Zealand the sun feels different ! It feels very intense and somewhat uncomfortable, and it was only the first month of spring. You HAVE to use sunscreen.
That's because the earth is closer to the Sun when the southern hemisphere is having their spring and summer. The 'hole' in the Ozone was noticed during the first Geophyiscal year, in 1954, long before Freon came into common use. [generic "it's all made up" rant omitted]
True & only slightly true, but..
When I first moved to southern New Zealand I set up the daily? ozone snapshot [lost the URL] of the south pole as my browser's homepage. My personal observation & conclusion after looking at a few months of data from the Southern Hemisphere spring (nb: I have no idea of what the relevant long term temporal scale is in upper atmospheric weather systems), was that it got way further north in S. America than it ever got in NZ. Not that we didn't get lower levels, just not to the 'deep purple' levels on the bottom of the colorbar that Antarctica & wisps up into S. Am. got to. Also shifts seemed to happen on the scale of days for whatever that's worth..
The big reason our sun is so friggin intense is that we have very clear air. Nothing but ocean for thousands and thousands of miles upwind. No significant dust or smoggy pollutants to filter out all the nasty UV. Trade lung cancer for skin cancer. Turn your globe upside down and have a look. No land.
Of note/other rants:
The hole is bigger in the Southern Hemisphere than it is in the Northern due to the stability of the circumpolar winds that circle Antarctica continually. Once again, my upper-atm iq could be whacked, but this is what hampers ozone which is produced in the tropics (and Northern Hem. dirty air) from making it down to the way south quickly.
Work is ongoing into what happens when the UV making it through the hole kills off the free floating microscopic plants that make up the bottom of the food chain in the southern ocean. Wipe that out and you've got really serious fish/whale/food/stress on other fishery stocks type problems. Be afraid. Total collapse of the food chain. Bad Thing. As these guys also make most of the oxygen you breath, we should probably treat them nice. I hear that evolution is ready to step in though, and some of these little phytoplanktons which have on-board sunscreens will take over darwin-like & will save the day, maybe.
Freon/CFCs ain't the only anthropogenic ozone killing gas, so Freon use/time offset hole size correlations won't always line up, and the hole won't go away simply as a function of time since production was banned. Illegal CFC factories just south of the Texas border and in China (proof? I have no proof! ha!) do not help. I figure that a fair whack (majority?) of the world's cumulative supply of Freon is still sitting inside old A/C's & fridges just waiting to leak out as well.
A one year reduction in hole size, while nice, does not mean very much. The upper-atm is very stable and these things could easily linger for a century+.
Stick a bunch of fair skinned northern Europeans on south pacific islands and you really shouldn't be surprised when they all burn and get skin cancer.
This goes for both the global warming 'debate' & for ozone depletion, nuclear holocaust, whatever: geologically it's all pretty insignificant. We aren't fucking the Earth, we are fucking ourselves. All those really smart PhD world class scientist type people aren't making this crap up to prop up some 'greenie' agenda or to get chicks or funding or whatever. Stop being so fscking selfish.
And besides, all those cute little sheep are getting damaged eyes and going blind!
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The wonderfulness that is apt-get, and the dpkg engine that it runs, is two fold:
o apt-get install galeon. Yes to install deps, blam! done.
o The true reason people love it so, and the reason it Works, is mainly due to the hard work, sweat and tears that the package maintainers put into each package. Each maintainer generally only handles either a single package, or just a few. With the 7-8k stable in all but name packages in Woody/testing, this represents a truely huge effort.
Not to belittle other distributions, but Apt has a huge advantage, solely due to the sheer amount of people hours that are put into tweaking every little package until it is just right. For a comercial distribution tho, this is cost prohibitive, and one maintainer must be responsible for many many base packages. The debian maintainers also QA addtional packages, so users arn't so much at the mercy of the setup that the origianal external software authors used.
I hope I don't come across as too much of a zealot, but it is really really really nice.
~.~
True & only slightly true, but..
When I first moved to southern New Zealand I set up the daily? ozone snapshot [lost the URL] of the south pole as my browser's homepage. My personal observation & conclusion after looking at a few months of data from the Southern Hemisphere spring (nb: I have no idea of what the relevant long term temporal scale is in upper atmospheric weather systems), was that it got way further north in S. America than it ever got in NZ. Not that we didn't get lower levels, just not to the 'deep purple' levels on the bottom of the colorbar that Antarctica & wisps up into S. Am. got to. Also shifts seemed to happen on the scale of days for whatever that's worth..
The big reason our sun is so friggin intense is that we have very clear air. Nothing but ocean for thousands and thousands of miles upwind. No significant dust or smoggy pollutants to filter out all the nasty UV. Trade lung cancer for skin cancer. Turn your globe upside down and have a look. No land.
Of note/other rants:
The hole is bigger in the Southern Hemisphere than it is in the Northern due to the stability of the circumpolar winds that circle Antarctica continually. Once again, my upper-atm iq could be whacked, but this is what hampers ozone which is produced in the tropics (and Northern Hem. dirty air) from making it down to the way south quickly.
Work is ongoing into what happens when the UV making it through the hole kills off the free floating microscopic plants that make up the bottom of the food chain in the southern ocean. Wipe that out and you've got really serious fish/whale/food/stress on other fishery stocks type problems. Be afraid. Total collapse of the food chain. Bad Thing. As these guys also make most of the oxygen you breath, we should probably treat them nice. I hear that evolution is ready to step in though, and some of these little phytoplanktons which have on-board sunscreens will take over darwin-like & will save the day, maybe.
Freon/CFCs ain't the only anthropogenic ozone killing gas, so Freon use/time offset hole size correlations won't always line up, and the hole won't go away simply as a function of time since production was banned. Illegal CFC factories just south of the Texas border and in China (proof? I have no proof! ha!) do not help. I figure that a fair whack (majority?) of the world's cumulative supply of Freon is still sitting inside old A/C's & fridges just waiting to leak out as well.
A one year reduction in hole size, while nice, does not mean very much. The upper-atm is very stable and these things could easily linger for a century+.
Stick a bunch of fair skinned northern Europeans on south pacific islands and you really shouldn't be surprised when they all burn and get skin cancer.
This goes for both the global warming 'debate' & for ozone depletion, nuclear holocaust, whatever: geologically it's all pretty insignificant. We aren't fucking the Earth, we are fucking ourselves. All those really smart PhD world class scientist type people aren't making this crap up to prop up some 'greenie' agenda or to get chicks or funding or whatever. Stop being so fscking selfish.
And besides, all those cute little sheep are getting damaged eyes and going blind!