"This, I believe, is Red Hat's plan. I don't know about you, but I'm putting on my tin-foil hat."
Your conspiracy theory is contradicted by, well, everything.
Red Hat bought Netscape Directory Server. They promptly released it as Free software.
They had the cluster file system. They released it as Free software.
RHEL3 and RHEL4 are _all_ Free software. Not some - all.
Sorry, but there is still a very strong Free software sentiment going on over there, and you only need to read the blogs of the employees to find it out. They don't sell anything proprietary, unless you count RHN (which isn't distributed per se anyways).
If you want to convince people, try presenting, I don't know, a coherent argument with some sort of evidence. "I think" is pretty crappy proof.
"The GNOME desktop is seeing development, but the KDE desktop in Fedora is stagnating because it is not seeing any new development and it is even not taking new stuff from the KDE upstream"
I have no idea what you're talking about. Fedora Core always includes an updated version of KDE. FC4 has KDE 3.4.0, for instance.
"I was wondering if a reasonable solution exists yet for the dependancy problem that many complained about during package upgrades"
It's called "yum". It works pretty well now - the speed issues have been solved, and it's on more or less equal footing with apt, at least in my experience. Dependency issues are more or less dead, and have been since FC1.
"What improved features? Take one for a spin, they're pretty complete..."
As was noted in Anandtech's review of the Mac Mini, they're seriously underpowered for any sort of PVR work, and the software DVD decoder sucks. For a computer that seems to be designed to fit near your TV, that's a serious issue. They also have bad onboard video, and are totally non-upgradable (except for RAM, I suppose).
Maybe none of that matters to you - fair enough. But they're enough to make me totally drop the notion of buying a Mac Mini instead of a mini-ITX box.
In summary, they're feature complete for you, but not for everyone.
You're missing one thing: the Pentium D EE _does_ have hyper-threading on both cores (looks like a 4 CPU system to your OS). HT and dual core is not an either/or proposition - you can have both, and HT is not going to hinder performace on dual core CPUs.
"I know that sounds like an incredible amount but if it was spent now the return in profit would soon exceed the entire value of all the world's economies put together."
I'd like to see some sort of theoretical figures for this. I _suspect_ you are talking out of your ass, but let's be sure, shall we?
There's nothing out in space that's going to magically bring in tens of trillions of dollars. Even raw minerals are not anywhere near the sum you're describing.
"Mine is presently using 229MB. Of course, my X server is presently using 303MB, which, together is more than the amount of physical RAM that I have. Does Firefox map the video RAM into its address space?"
It surprises me that you didn't first ask if _X_ maps it. And the answer is yes, I believe.
Sorry, but this seems rather unlikely. Do you really think Core Image is going to use more video ram than Doom3? And if it was such an amazing breakthrough for Core Image, why wouldn't ATI have advertised that at least a little? G-d knows they've got no reason anybody else can figure out for releasing specs for this particular card.
There is also the slight matter that ATI isn't even producing cards with 512mb of RAM, and their partners are not really people Apple does business with.
So, sorry, but your thesis doesn't seem to have any real support.
"This tool can't possibly ensure that some binary wasn't made by someone who looked at the open source version, and just reimplemented the same ideas."
I wouldn't be so sure about that. Reputable colleges and universities do exactly that sort of check in CS courses - there are any number of tools designed to check for cheating, and they are not fooled by anything so trivial as changing variable names or swapping a couple statements. They are pretty good at catching cheaters, too.
You are correct in that it can't check "some [random] binary", but this tool was made to run against source.
I'm trying to remember where I'm not allowed to reimplement other people's ideas to begin with, though.
"Oh yeah, and without the shuttle, there's no Hubble."
I don't think this is true. Using a robotic vehicle to carry out repairs is a serious option, and you don't need a shuttle for that, AFAIK. Just launch it up on a rocket.
Civilization the computer game has absolutely nothing to do with Civilization the board game, except for the name. There was an excellent adaptation of the board game into a game called "Advanced Civilization". Sid Meier's Civilization has precisely zero of the gameplay elements of the board game.
SM's Civilization's theme might not have been new, but the game was highly original and creative.
The only contract I obey is the one I personally sign. And the only laws I care about are set down by my freely-elected government, and my religion. Other than those, my conduct is my own business.
Social contracts are just another way of shoving another man's morality on you.
I agree. I recently bought a "new" (used) car, and I was quite disappointed to find that none of the stereos in Best Buy except _one_ had a minijack in. It can't cost all that much to add either, I would think.
I'm also looking for a stereo head that can accomodate Bluetooth so that I can make hands-free phone calls in my car and just talk to the integrated mic, but no luck there, either.
The CS department has been offering new Linux boxes to replace the old desktop Solaris boxes, too.
We also got a "new" Linux lab a couple years ago in the new CSIC building.
Finally, I believe the Solaris boxen in the labs are being phased out as well.
Linux is very much in the vogue for cluster computing at our fine school as well - astro uses Condor to have a night cluster, as well as a dedicated one at the bottom of the CSS building.
Bio also has something, not quite sure of the specifics.
OIT, not too long ago, also got the academic license agreement in place. Free RHEL Academic Workstation for download for all students, staff, and faculty (for personal use).
Red Hat is this campus' dominant Linux distro. There are some holdouts in Physics using SuSE, but I suspect this won't last forever.
You nearly sounded intelligent, until I got to: "I don't think his comparison with RPM is completely apropos. RPM was poorly designed from the start, and was probably designed from the start as a tool for vendor lock-in. Apt-get, AFAICT, is well designed."
RPM is not even remotely the same thing as apt-get. It's like saying an apple is inferior to a fruit salad.
AFAIK, RPM is actually ahead of DEB in certain areas. Yum and apt-get are reasonably close in quality, although I would give apt-get the nod for now.
"No case-opening is necessary to use a USB/IDE converter, which might be a good middle ground. Any other ideas?"
Nearly all USB (and Firewire) mass storage devices won't allow you to do a number of things, including check your SMART info on the drive. It is probably not the tool I would use for this kind of operation, which could involve some very low-level IDE operations.
Slightly OT, but I recently had a hard drive go bad in a USB enclosure - it was maddening to not have any way to know of this beforehand, and actually somewhat of a pain to diagnose (is it the hard drive, the enclosure, or some cable?). I've sworn off ideas of serious USB or Firewire RAID because of this very problem.
"After all during the colonizing year (when Europ 'blessed' the world with civilization) didn't the colonies usually end up with more progressive populations, willing to be more practical than hold onto old social norms*."
I think you confuse causation and correlation. And in any event, I would not regard the Puritans as particularly progressive.
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That's ONE THING. Your post made it sound like they never touched KDE. That's flatly untrue.
It's not like you can't use Plastik, either. I mean, listen to yourself: you're whining they didn't use your favorite theme. Get over it.
-Erwos
"This, I believe, is Red Hat's plan. I don't know about you, but I'm putting on my tin-foil hat."
Your conspiracy theory is contradicted by, well, everything.
Red Hat bought Netscape Directory Server. They promptly released it as Free software.
They had the cluster file system. They released it as Free software.
RHEL3 and RHEL4 are _all_ Free software. Not some - all.
Sorry, but there is still a very strong Free software sentiment going on over there, and you only need to read the blogs of the employees to find it out. They don't sell anything proprietary, unless you count RHN (which isn't distributed per se anyways).
If you want to convince people, try presenting, I don't know, a coherent argument with some sort of evidence. "I think" is pretty crappy proof.
-Erwos
"The GNOME desktop is seeing development, but the KDE desktop in Fedora is stagnating because it is not seeing any new development and it is even not taking new stuff from the KDE upstream"
I have no idea what you're talking about. Fedora Core always includes an updated version of KDE. FC4 has KDE 3.4.0, for instance.
-Erwos
"I was wondering if a reasonable solution exists yet for the dependancy problem that many complained about during package upgrades"
It's called "yum". It works pretty well now - the speed issues have been solved, and it's on more or less equal footing with apt, at least in my experience. Dependency issues are more or less dead, and have been since FC1.
-Erwos
"What improved features? Take one for a spin, they're pretty complete..."
As was noted in Anandtech's review of the Mac Mini, they're seriously underpowered for any sort of PVR work, and the software DVD decoder sucks. For a computer that seems to be designed to fit near your TV, that's a serious issue. They also have bad onboard video, and are totally non-upgradable (except for RAM, I suppose).
Maybe none of that matters to you - fair enough. But they're enough to make me totally drop the notion of buying a Mac Mini instead of a mini-ITX box.
In summary, they're feature complete for you, but not for everyone.
-Erwos
You're missing one thing: the Pentium D EE _does_ have hyper-threading on both cores (looks like a 4 CPU system to your OS). HT and dual core is not an either/or proposition - you can have both, and HT is not going to hinder performace on dual core CPUs.
-Erwos
"None of those franchises dates to before the PS1."
Except Metal Gear.
-Erwos
"I know that sounds like an incredible amount but if it was spent now the return in profit would soon exceed the entire value of all the world's economies put together."
I'd like to see some sort of theoretical figures for this. I _suspect_ you are talking out of your ass, but let's be sure, shall we?
There's nothing out in space that's going to magically bring in tens of trillions of dollars. Even raw minerals are not anywhere near the sum you're describing.
But, please, educate me.
-Erwos
"Mine is presently using 229MB. Of course, my X server is presently using 303MB, which, together is more than the amount of physical RAM that I have. Does Firefox map the video RAM into its address space?"
It surprises me that you didn't first ask if _X_ maps it. And the answer is yes, I believe.
-Erwos
Sorry, but this seems rather unlikely. Do you really think Core Image is going to use more video ram than Doom3? And if it was such an amazing breakthrough for Core Image, why wouldn't ATI have advertised that at least a little? G-d knows they've got no reason anybody else can figure out for releasing specs for this particular card.
There is also the slight matter that ATI isn't even producing cards with 512mb of RAM, and their partners are not really people Apple does business with.
So, sorry, but your thesis doesn't seem to have any real support.
-Erwos
"This tool can't possibly ensure that some binary wasn't made by someone who looked at the open source version, and just reimplemented the same ideas."
I wouldn't be so sure about that. Reputable colleges and universities do exactly that sort of check in CS courses - there are any number of tools designed to check for cheating, and they are not fooled by anything so trivial as changing variable names or swapping a couple statements. They are pretty good at catching cheaters, too.
You are correct in that it can't check "some [random] binary", but this tool was made to run against source.
I'm trying to remember where I'm not allowed to reimplement other people's ideas to begin with, though.
-Erwos
"reminding everyone how past/present behavior of the RIAA and its members is an even worse model of values..."
Two wrongs don't make a right.
-Erwos
"Oh yeah, and without the shuttle, there's no Hubble."
I don't think this is true. Using a robotic vehicle to carry out repairs is a serious option, and you don't need a shuttle for that, AFAIK. Just launch it up on a rocket.
-Erwos
I find it highly unlikely that a German working in Japan isn't paying taxes to someone.
The US law is that if you pay your taxes to foriegn government, you're exempt from paying them in the US. They don't double tax you or anything.
-Erwos
Purtilo's 435 class is godawful, dude. Let us never speak of the abomination that SEAM is.
-Erwos
Figure out which class from your local university deals with software engineering, find the book(s) for the class, and buy it.
Writing a good design doc is mostly tedious work interspersed with lots and lots of communication with your programmers and customer.
-Erwos
Civilization the computer game has absolutely nothing to do with Civilization the board game, except for the name. There was an excellent adaptation of the board game into a game called "Advanced Civilization". Sid Meier's Civilization has precisely zero of the gameplay elements of the board game.
SM's Civilization's theme might not have been new, but the game was highly original and creative.
-Erwos
The only contract I obey is the one I personally sign. And the only laws I care about are set down by my freely-elected government, and my religion. Other than those, my conduct is my own business.
Social contracts are just another way of shoving another man's morality on you.
-Erwos
I agree. I recently bought a "new" (used) car, and I was quite disappointed to find that none of the stereos in Best Buy except _one_ had a minijack in. It can't cost all that much to add either, I would think.
I'm also looking for a stereo head that can accomodate Bluetooth so that I can make hands-free phone calls in my car and just talk to the integrated mic, but no luck there, either.
-Erwos
That would also be called "libel" in some countries. It would also be grossly unprofessional.
-Erwos
This is a nightmare to maintain, since you can't roll out automatic updates and be _certain_ they will happen in a certain time frame.
If GRUB could query the system clock to determine what to boot to, that would solve many, many problems...
-Erwos
The CS department has been offering new Linux boxes to replace the old desktop Solaris boxes, too.
We also got a "new" Linux lab a couple years ago in the new CSIC building.
Finally, I believe the Solaris boxen in the labs are being phased out as well.
Linux is very much in the vogue for cluster computing at our fine school as well - astro uses Condor to have a night cluster, as well as a dedicated one at the bottom of the CSS building.
Bio also has something, not quite sure of the specifics.
OIT, not too long ago, also got the academic license agreement in place. Free RHEL Academic Workstation for download for all students, staff, and faculty (for personal use).
Red Hat is this campus' dominant Linux distro. There are some holdouts in Physics using SuSE, but I suspect this won't last forever.
-Erwos
You nearly sounded intelligent, until I got to:
"I don't think his comparison with RPM is completely apropos. RPM was poorly designed from the start, and was probably designed from the start as a tool for vendor lock-in. Apt-get, AFAICT, is well designed."
RPM is not even remotely the same thing as apt-get. It's like saying an apple is inferior to a fruit salad.
AFAIK, RPM is actually ahead of DEB in certain areas. Yum and apt-get are reasonably close in quality, although I would give apt-get the nod for now.
-Erwos
"No case-opening is necessary to use a USB/IDE converter, which might be a good middle ground. Any other ideas?"
Nearly all USB (and Firewire) mass storage devices won't allow you to do a number of things, including check your SMART info on the drive. It is probably not the tool I would use for this kind of operation, which could involve some very low-level IDE operations.
Slightly OT, but I recently had a hard drive go bad in a USB enclosure - it was maddening to not have any way to know of this beforehand, and actually somewhat of a pain to diagnose (is it the hard drive, the enclosure, or some cable?). I've sworn off ideas of serious USB or Firewire RAID because of this very problem.
-Erwos
"After all during the colonizing year (when Europ 'blessed' the world with civilization) didn't the colonies usually end up with more progressive populations, willing to be more practical than hold onto old social norms*."
I think you confuse causation and correlation. And in any event, I would not regard the Puritans as particularly progressive.
-Erwos