Unix from AT&T had a similar problem. they kept calling it "System N" and incrementing N. when they hit "System V" (the first to use a roman numeral, i think), they started pushing the tagline "consider it standard" to combat the fears of people noting that there was no official standard for Unix,
UCB's CSRG orginally wanted to name their successor to BSD 4 "BSD 5", which was the pattern for all of their previous new releases. They were pressured by AT&T to use "BSD 4.1" instead to keep people from confusing it with System V.
Strangely, free BSD varients based on "4.4BSDlite" started over, numbering their first releases "1.0" rather than "4.5", etc. (386BSD started this scheme, the last versions were 0.9)
FreeBSD is currently in the development branch is working on 5.0 (current release version 4.6, soon to be 4.6.1). I assume that AT&T, or whoever owns the trademark now, won't try to make them not number it 5.0, as they went to court with BSDI to make sure *BSD couldn't call it "Unix", so making them not number it 5.0 so people wouldn't confuse it with being a more recent version of Unix would seem hypocritical don't you think?:-)
If you think this is bad, you should compare Linux distribution numbering systems; which practically are completely arbitrary. One vendor's 7.3 is another vendor's 8.2 in every practical sense except marketing.
But why can't Linux use or consider BSD style ports & packages?
Actually, Gentoo's "portage" package system claims to have some similarity to BSD ports. Gentoo though is not for lowly dial-up users like me, it's for people who download and compile source for *everything* (it includes no system for binary packages.) The original form of distribution was a lowly 10 meg ISO file that you use to create a CD that bootstraps the rest of the system, downloading and compiling as you go, everything from glibc to KDE. The theory is that things get faster if you recompile using your favorite CPU's optimizations. Adding a package is as simple as "emerge kde", but in some cases you'd better be prepared for it to take a while before you have it.:-)
an interesting coincidence
on
Is RPM Doomed?
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· Score: 1
Hopefully I won't get modded down for this...
It's interesting that on the same day an article critical of RPM is posted to/., there's an article announcing the release of FreeBSD 4.6.:-) FreeBSD from what I understand has a very simple and powerful package management system; in fact it's the system that inspired Gentoo Linux. It also has a huge number of packages, comparable to Debian in scope; and has nearly 100% binary compatability with Linux to boot. It might be a good idea when you have some time on your hands to give it a whirl if you're tired of RPM...Don't pay attention to the "BSD is dead" trolls.
I remember using gopher when that was the only available option. It was never a choice - it's a pants interface.
If I wanted to find something, then I always used _archie_ (because there were no search engines as such).
Gopher had a search engine, Veronica. It wasn't a very good one though.
I understand that a lot of Jewish religous law about technology is based around the 'started fire' idea. Forgive me for not knowing more about it as I'm not Jewish, but the way I understand it, a fire cannot be started on the sabbath, but a fire can be maintained during the sabbath.
Not exactly, one cannot make a fire stronger or weaker during the sabbath either; but that doesn't have much to do with computers.
By the same doctrine, computerized systems can be booted on the day before the sabbath and then put on an autmatic mode during the sabbath. During that time, a sysadmin can address important issues as they creep up, just like he would add a log to the fire he started before the sabbath.
Unfortunately, this isn't correct. In order to fix the problems the sysadmin would have to type; thus pressing keys, the keys being pressed would be like (and in fact are) flicking a switch, and thus could cause sparks; which is forbidden. However, you are right that the computer could be left on during the sabbath; but if something goes wrong a Jew cannot do anything about it...
Okay, this said, is Linux kosher for the sabbath? Is it permissable to say, perform a checkfs during the holy day? What tasks can you perform and what tasks can't you?
It's curious that this announcement comes from the three most closed and proprietary (relatively speaking) Linux vendors. Caldera has always been a semi-proprietary distribution, with per-seat licensing and other unpleasantness, and both SuSE and TurboLinux keep some of their own software (such as SuSE's YaST installer) non-free. Say what you like about Red Hat, at least they release all of their code as free software (AFAIK).
SuSE's Yast installer is not totally non-free, they include source code and simply say that you can't make money off of it. (It has to be either from SuSE or free-as-in-beer.)
It's possible that this deal will mean the end of SuSE's and Caldera's and TurboLinux's proprietary installers, since none of the four companies will want the others to get control over the distribution.
I hope not, YaST is pretty good. I think what they are planning on doing is making all of them seamlessly RPM compatable (and the like) with each other, and maybe even having apt4rpm. SuSE has an unofficial apt4rpm repository BTW, but it would be nice if there was official support, which would eliminate some problems, and more mirrors.:-) BTW, you shouldn't be so paranoid about the plans of these Linux distributions - they aren't evil people plotting to take over the world like Microsoft.;-)
It does seem useful, but on Windows, I'd rather just click the "Related" button in IE and get Alexa's list. Here on my Linux box, this is a good substitute for Opera and Konq to use.
Mozilla and Netscape (use version 7), have Linux versions and include this feature. No need to dual-boot to get Alexa.
Not everybody's got the bandwidth and the time neccesary to install and maintain Gentoo. After all, that's why Slackware distributes CDs; while the most Gentoo does is have a single 10-100M ISO that acts only as a bootstrap to downloading it via a fat pipe.
Someone suggested that DeCSS may not exist if there were a DVD player available for Linux. The MPAA guy argued that all programs written for Linux must be open-sourced, which would compromise what is essentially their security-through-obscurity scheme of handling CSS. And Siva AGREED! Now correct me if I'm wrong - isnt it possible to write programs for Linux that are closed-source?
Of course it's possible to write closed-source programs for Linux; Richard Stallman has said specifically that one can even use GNU C libraries, for example, to write non-free programs. Star Office is a popular example of a closed-source program that runs on Linux. (Though some of it's source is available via Open Office; but this isn't by legal neccessity but because Sun wants to leverage the open source process and community.)
Red Hat is probably doing this because their equivalent products are for the most part more expensive than the equivalent SuSE and Mandrake distributions. For example, Red Hat's four-disk distro is $59 while SuSE Pro (7 disks) is $79 and SuSE Personal (their 4 disk set) is $39. Mandrake is similarly priced. The Professional edition of Red Hat runs at $199, though you can get discounts.
If they didn't give these rebates nobody who bought the Personal or Professional versions of other distros would give a second thought to buying Red Hat Personal on a price basis alone. Red Hat is not cost competitive without the rebates, and even with the rebates their Professional distribution is on the pricy side; unless you compare it to Windows.
That's exactly what 8.0 changed. They now have several config files, one for every package. Hack away!
The reason why they made the change is that the LSB spec says that this is the layout of the configuration files. SuSE is perhaps the most LSB complient distro; to some extent this is why there has been so much incompatability between Red Hat and SuSE packages. Red Hat sort of had followed their own standards. I say "had" because RH has announced that "by the end of this year" they'll be LSB complient.
Legally speaking, as long as no licenses are violated, SuSE can do whatever it wants. Technically speaking, I do think that SuSE should at least make YaST's source code available; after all, there may be some excellent ideas there that we can all profit from. Nonetheless, I don't think we should count it as a strike against them that YaST is closed-source.
I don't know why I'm responding to this troll topic, but here goes. Actually, YaST's source code *is* available, right on the CDs. The only thing is you can't use YaST for your own profit, even for cost of media, only SuSE can do that. Therefore it's not open sources.
When I tried SuSE a couple of years ago, the thing that seemed to set it apart was its ambitious attempt to rework system configuration. Instead of hacking the usual array of scripts and config files, the SuSE admin was supposed to set a large set of parameters contained in a single file.
Thanks to SuSE's commitment to the LSB (Linux standards base) rc.config has been split into several smaller files residing in a directory (/etc/sysconfig or something) in accordance with the new specs. I actually like rc.config so I'm not sure if this is an improvement.
The first beige computer, was an early mainframe which had a color change via the advice of a female programmer, Betty Holberton. She was mentioned earlier on slashdot I am surprised that nobody caught the error.
But the important thing here is that IBM has this option. The storage device market is not their lifeblood. If you released a holographic storage system tomorrow that blew the entire HDD market out of the water, IBM would be hurt, but not fatally impaired.
The same is not true for most of the companies you mentioned. They're looking at potential extinction (particularly the middle men in the entertainment business - e.g. the studios and record labels). So they're fighting for their lives. They can't just "leave the market" or "restructure their business". There is no new market and no new structure for them to go to and retain anything even vaguely like what they have now.
I deeply disagree with their attempts to have government prop their industries up, but I'm also realistic. Cornered animals don't fight nice
What's Microsoft's excuse for shady business practices? They aren't facing extinction due to the competition out there, at least not yet. For example, when they made IE4 they actually could have competed well against Netscape without using various things like making the browser part of the kernel and having per-unit charges to OEMs for their OS as tools against them and others.
Two days is not enough. Get them books to take home with them on Linux and Unix.
Get them an introductory book like O'Reilly's "Running Linux". Also get them the new "Linux Administration Handbook" by Evi Nemeth et.al., the green Linux decendant of the famous purple/red books on Unix (and in the purple ed. RH Linux 6) that were reviewed on slashdot.
Another essential book for anyone using the command line under Linux is "Unix Power Tools" from O'Reilly. It contains a lot of tips that show the power of the shell, vi, and assorted *nix utilities (They apply to Linux too, especially since Linux distros already include most or all of up to date versions of the GNU tools on the CD-ROM; I have this book and I haven't had to bother opening up the CD-ROM.:-) )
Don't just show them the command line stuff of course, show off fancy X Windows window managers and desktop environments, show them the power of multiple desktops for example (though such are available on Windows too from third parties) Show them the customizability and better interfaces than Microsoft that can be achieved in X.
I hate to say this, but considering the fate of cloned animals, with genes misfiring or not turning on at all, not only will the clone be born on Marie Curie's birthday, assuming it even gets to that point, it will also share her fate; being short-lived.
I usually copy the SuSE distro cds to my hard drive and have everything available every time I use YaST.Yast2 doesn't like the installation from hard drive but YaST has no problems with it.
One of the new features of SuSE 8.0 will be that rather than maintaining two installers, YAST2 will be the only installer - though it's text mode will be much improved for administration tasks over ssh and the like. You might want to take this into consideration before copying 7 CDs worth of RPMs to your hard drive only to find that YaST2 doesn't like it.:-) (Or maybe it's time that you bought a DVD-ROM drive; SuSE Linux Pro comes with one DVD-ROM with everything on it this removes the hassle of swapping CDs which might be the reason for your doing this.)
Is it something in the design? The freely available fonts?
This makes me think that you're not using MS's true type fonts under X. Run the program, included in the X11 tools package, fetchmsttfonts. It will download (quite legally after reading the license; don't forget to press 'q' to get out of your the pager) some of Microsoft's TrueType fonts; including the ones used most frequently on the web. Another possibility is to copy them over from your Windows directory and install them.
he is also still Microsoft's Chief Software Architect. He very much isn't stupid when it comes to the internals of the PC. MS-DOS tried to work around the 640k limitations IBM set in place using EMM386 and HIMEM.
Bill Gates said in an interview that the last time he did any coding was for the original IBM PC's ROM BASIC. Don't give him credit for MS-DOS, which was originally bought from a third party which was subsequently sued out of existence when Microsoft worried about them being a future competitor, or for HIMEM and EMM386, both of which are hacks and the latter of which was simply a software emulation of old circuit boards, and was inferior to non-Micrsoft programs such as QEMM386 that did this before MS did (Which with Desqview-386 provided not-half-bad DOS multitasking, something Windows couldn't do for a long time.)
Slashdot Mirror
Strangely, free BSD varients based on "4.4BSDlite" started over, numbering their first releases "1.0" rather than "4.5", etc. (386BSD started this scheme, the last versions were 0.9) FreeBSD is currently in the development branch is working on 5.0 (current release version 4.6, soon to be 4.6.1). I assume that AT&T, or whoever owns the trademark now, won't try to make them not number it 5.0, as they went to court with BSDI to make sure *BSD couldn't call it "Unix", so making them not number it 5.0 so people wouldn't confuse it with being a more recent version of Unix would seem hypocritical don't you think? :-)
If you think this is bad, you should compare Linux distribution numbering systems; which practically are completely arbitrary. One vendor's 7.3 is another vendor's 8.2 in every practical sense except marketing.
Hopefully I won't get modded down for this... It's interesting that on the same day an article critical of RPM is posted to /., there's an article announcing the release of FreeBSD 4.6. :-) FreeBSD from what I understand has a very simple and powerful package management system; in fact it's the system that inspired Gentoo Linux. It also has a huge number of packages, comparable to Debian in scope; and has nearly 100% binary compatability with Linux to boot. It might be a good idea when you have some time on your hands to give it a whirl if you're tired of RPM...Don't pay attention to the "BSD is dead" trolls.
One often sees com.com type addresses for CNet sites. ZDNet and CNet made a merger a year or two ago, so it's no wonder that ZDNet is using it.
If they didn't give these rebates nobody who bought the Personal or Professional versions of other distros would give a second thought to buying Red Hat Personal on a price basis alone. Red Hat is not cost competitive without the rebates, and even with the rebates their Professional distribution is on the pricy side; unless you compare it to Windows.
The first beige computer, was an early mainframe which had a color change via the advice of a female programmer, Betty Holberton. She was mentioned earlier on slashdot I am surprised that nobody caught the error.
Get them an introductory book like O'Reilly's "Running Linux". Also get them the new "Linux Administration Handbook" by Evi Nemeth et.al., the green Linux decendant of the famous purple/red books on Unix (and in the purple ed. RH Linux 6) that were reviewed on slashdot.
Another essential book for anyone using the command line under Linux is "Unix Power Tools" from O'Reilly. It contains a lot of tips that show the power of the shell, vi, and assorted *nix utilities (They apply to Linux too, especially since Linux distros already include most or all of up to date versions of the GNU tools on the CD-ROM; I have this book and I haven't had to bother opening up the CD-ROM. :-) )
Don't just show them the command line stuff of course, show off fancy X Windows window managers and desktop environments, show them the power of multiple desktops for example (though such are available on Windows too from third parties) Show them the customizability and better interfaces than Microsoft that can be achieved in X.
I hate to say this, but considering the fate of cloned animals, with genes misfiring or not turning on at all, not only will the clone be born on Marie Curie's birthday, assuming it even gets to that point, it will also share her fate; being short-lived.