That might be funny, but only if it were true: amd64 support isn't new in 5.4.
Re:I think it is a good idea not to update quickly
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Agreed. I certainly didn't think that was completely unimportant (though I don't personally have an ethical problem with binary-only drivers, I do have technical qualms with them), just not necessarily immediately important. Ultimately, it comes down to whether the increased difficulty of removal before the next release outweighed holding up the release cycle. The majority judged that it did, I guess. Either that, or people weren't willing to compromise on it, which is what going ahead with Sarge as-was would have been (which is what I meant by politics). In truth I think it was probably a mix.
I don't take too much issue with people who honestly believe it wasn't worth it from a technical standpoint (though I disagree), but I do have an issue with not being willing to compromise on it (but there also, I can respect the ethical position of the FSF/GNU crowd, even though I don't agree with it myself). The whole issue made me rethink whether Debian (or Linux for that matter) really was for me (and, at times, whether a certain segment of the Debian community cares at all about anyone who isn't a GNU partisan).
I'm the first to admit that I'm not 100% partial to the GPL (I think it's overly complex, and tries to enforce the FSF mentality to rigidly). I'm more of a Torvalds partisan myself: I think open source is generally better for technical and economic reasons, not ethical or moral ones. I also have some leanings towards the Berkeley License, though, so I may well move to FreeBSD instead. With that said, it might be better if I stayed out of these Debian debates, since I'm too apt to be labelled a BSD-troll (or to actually become one, if I'm not more careful).
Re:I think it is a good idea not to update quickly
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Maybe so. Maybe that was just frustration talking on my part. I hope so, for the sake of the project. I don't think, with the financial situation the way it's been, that Debian could survive the mass exodous that would be sure to follow another fiasco like Sarge's release cycle. I guess I'm just a pessimist at this point, but I certainly don't wish Debian any ill will. As I said, though, "I'll believe it when I see it."
Re:I think it is a good idea not to update quickly
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Sorry, I suppose I really ought to have elaborated.
It was politics and license issues mostly surrounding documentation. Open Source vs. Free Software debate, essentially. It didn't seem to me like something that needed to hold up Sarge, since it was already frozen at the time (and since it represented a change from the policy used for Woody and earlier releases). I still think the changes would have been better implemented in the next release (after Sarge). Instead, they un-froze Sarge to make the changes, then had to re-freeze it, which has held up the release cycle about a year extra.
On the upside, at least they used the opportunity to sneak in some more recent packages that would otherwise not have made Sarge (e.g., GNOME 2.8). On the downside, that has meant even more delays.
Re:I think it is a good idea not to update quickly
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The version of gcc needed was hardly bleeding edge (even in 2002, IIRC), and from what I've heard is much less buggy than the version Woody has. Besides, I'm not complaining that Debian didn't have the latest gcc in 2003 (or even 2002), I'm complaining that the version it has in 2005 is now something like five years old.
I know how much of a PITA Windows updates (and service packs) are first hand: I had to undo SP2 on my aunt's home machine because it broke Explorer (yes, MS's own software) and her machine ground to a halt. I also was able to diagnose a similar problem with a scanner that my father had at his work, and I.T. hadn't been able to fix (they never bothered to even ask him if an update had been installed since the last time the machine had worked, and were rather annoyed that he uninstalled it - lucky for him he has admin privlidges, or the thing would be sitting broken and idle to this day). I know all about the clusterf*ck that is Windows Update, but, IMHO, that is more MS's patch and release strategy and bad coding than it is a release cycle problem.
This is a release cycle issue: If Sarge had come out even last year (which it might have, but for politics) I wouldn't be so annoyed.
Haven't yet. Not sure why. To lazy, I guess. That and the fact that I've been busy trying to read the sendmail book (the 1200 page "bat" book) so that I'll be able to configure sendmail to work on a dial-up system with no domain name (a choice based on aesthetics, on my part, and not on ease, I know). Between the book and the now out-of-date LDP how-to's, I think I may know how to do that now, anyway. I'll probably try it out on Debian before I do any major changes.
The frustrating thing about configuring Debian for me is that the defaults don't even seem right. Not even optimized for security or for a server setting, it seems like to me. It seems almost schizophrenic at times: as if some parts were optimized for security, some for speed, some for stability, but there was no grand scheme. Some packages, you get the idea you'd have been better off compiling from scource. Having had to do that for some programs (and for some drivers), and having compiled my own kernel, that prospect no longer bothers me like it would have at one time.
The more I read about ports, the more I like it over packages. I think I'm gonna go with FreeBSD, as it's more mature than Gentoo (and looks like perhaps less of a problem on dial-up). I hate to part with Linux, but at least it would be for another open source OS (and still unix). I was going to switch last fall, but didn't get around to it for some reason.
With any luck, I'll make a switch this summer.
Re:I think it is a good idea not to update quickly
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First of all, NWN is just an example of the problem. Secondly, "stable" is, as others have said, not about stability in that sense so much as it means additions aren't supposed to break it. Lastly, I don't expect them to change their definition of stable, I just wish they wouldn't hold up the release cycle for reasons more political than technical.
I think they've done a great job on the technical aspects of Debian, don't get me wrong. I just wish the release cycle didn't get held up for non-technical reasons.
Re:I think it is a good idea not to update quickly
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It's not that I haven't paid attention, it's that I've heard it twice before: after Potato and after Woody. Not these exact changes, of course, but changes designed to speed up the release cycle. In the end, something always comes up.
I'll believe it when I see it.
Re:I think it is a good idea not to update quickly
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I assume you mean testing, not unstable. The problem is that, for much of the last two years, even testing (Sarge) has been broken. At least, that was the impression I got when I've looked into it. If I wanted intermittently broken, I'd use Windows (which, in fact, I do part of the time, including for NWN).
I know Debian stable isn't the best desktop distro. That part doesn't bother me. What bothers me is when they say "Sarge within a year," and then take three (mostly because of politics).
In the meantime, though I haven't switched yet, I've looked at Gentoo and even at FreeBSD, both of whose design I think I may like better, anyway (e.g., ports/portage instead of packages). I've been lazy about it (partly because I live in the sticks, and hence am still on 56k dial-up, which makes Gentoo in particular more difficult; partly because I dual-boot XP and so have less incentive), but I hope to switch to something else this summer.
Re:I think it is a good idea not to update quickly
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XP wasn't eighteen months obsolete when it released. Yet that is just about how far behind everyone else Woody was when it shipped. Some people were willing to cope with that, since the project leaders promised a short turn around on Sarge (IIRC, they said they were aiming at under a year). Instead, here we are three years later, with Sarge still somewhere "out there" on the horizon, with packages even further behind than Woody's were when it released. I don't feel like waiting until 2008 before I can migrate to tools that other users have now.
An additional point about the XP comparison: nobody shipped software requiring Windows XP in 1999, but that's exactly what happens with Debian. When the Linux version of Neverwinter Nights shipped in 2003, I couldn't install it on Woody, (and still can't, AFAIK) because of Woody's ancient version of gcc. I need Sarge to run that on a stable version of Debian. Here we are, two years later, and still it won't run on Debian stable. It will run on nearly any other distro's latest stable release (and on BSD), but not Debian stable.
The Debian release cycle just keeps getting worse, and I see no end in sight for that. An update every three years might well be fine if the updates weren't falling further behind with each one.
Actually, this was one of the "better things..." I had in mind when I wrote my post. While I agree that it would be best if Congress didn't have to get involved, the Florida legislature and judicial system are standing by and letting a moral (and legal) outrage take place. The federal courts, including the Supreme Court, say they can't get involved for lack of jurisdiction, so Congress feels like they are the only ones who can stop it. So far, they have failed: the feeding tube was removed Friday (or actually, will not be put back: my understanding is that it is only "in" at mealtimes, anyway), despite the subpoena. The judge has also ruled that she is not to be fed or given water even without the tube. Both House and Senate passed bills to give the federal courts jurisdiction, but the disagree on the details. There is some degree of bipartisan support on this (which worries me, because every time the D's and R's get together it seems like a sign of impending doom, even more than usual); they will try again on Monday.
As much as I hate federal intervention in state affairs, and as much as I worry this will backfire down the road, it seems the only way to save this woman's life. How can any self-respecting person stand by and watch an innocent die, when they have it in their power to stop it? Given the suspicions of corruption on the part of the judge (who apparently recieved campaign money from the husband's lawyers), and the alterior motives of the husband, one might be able to justify the Fed's getting involved. It also seems like the only way to preserve any faith in this country's legal system. There already have been judges and their families targetted by those who have lost faith in law and order recently: if this woman dies, things could get very ugly in this country.
Not to mention that there is some suspicion that her husband was responsible for her injuries in the first place; and his aparent use of the money earmarked for her rehab on himself, his mistress, and their two children. Also the fact that the Florida judge involved recieved campaign contributions from the husband's lawyers (amongst others involved) last year.
You missed the newest one: the House of Represenatives Committee on Government Reform (what the Hell this has to do with Government Reform I can't fathom) wasting something like six hours this afternoon and evening grandstanding about the steroid problem in baseball. I mean, yeah, I do care about that, but Congress getting involved ain't gonna fix it, and they have got way more important things to spend their time, and our tax money, on. They even contemplated making changes to the whole of collective-bargaining law just to sort out baseball. Talk about making mountains out of mole hills.
You've missed my point: the problem with pre-publication review is that it is often too strictly "organized and regulated" - articles which don't conform to the "establishment" view, no matter how well researched and written, can't get published. There are sacred cows that you have to leave alone. When was the last time you saw articles which took fault with uniformitarian geology or macroevolutionary biology in mainstream journals? You don't see them because you can't get them published. Whether you believe in uniformitarianism and macroevolution or not, you can't deny that both sides have evidence that needs to be adressed and discussed, openly and honestly, rather than being dismissed out of hand (as it stands, both sides are guilty of this).
Style-review is universally important, to make sure articles are readable. Review of facts would be far more difficult to implement fairly, and of more questionable value.
Pre-publication review is a double-edged sword which is too often a means of supressing dissent, rather than controlling accuracy. Does Wikipedia's post-publication review system system need tweaking, perhaps; but no wholesale change, like pre-publication review, is needed. Given the choice between rigid control and allowing every kook on the net to present his "facts," I'd rather err on the side of the latter.
Mere procedural differences. The heart of scientific studies is not in pre-publication review, but in the judgement of the community post-publication. It was in this that I was likening the process to that of the peer-review journals. Lots of worthless studies get published, but the community as a whole judges them harshly. Pre-publication review prevents some bad studies from being published, but not nearly all of them. It is post-publication review by the peer-community (peer-review in a looser sense, perhaps) which filters out the remainder over time.
Some unspecified quasi-Darwinian process will assure that those writings and editings by contributors of greatest expertise will survive; articles will eventually reach a steady state that corresponds to the highest degree of accuracy.
It's called peer review. The scientific community has relied on it for years. So do print encyclopaedias.
Of course, the "highest degree of accuracy" is not 100% in practice, and never will be. The fact of the matter is that all refference works are subject to the limitations of the authors' knowledge. As many here have noted already, print encyclopaedias like Britannica are just as effected by bias, incomplete research, and the like. Indeed, print works like Britannica, being the product of academia, may be even more subject to the whims of the Zeitgeist. My mother has a set of World Book encyclopaedias (for youth) from 1957 - it is full of anti-communist propoganda. Mind you, I'm not pro-communist myself, but I don't believe in overstating the facts to get my point across, either. I've seen egregious errors in the Encyclopaedia Americana as well, many of which were linked to passing academic fads.
The nice thing about Wikipedia is that someone who sees a mistake, or an omission can correct it. Yes, one can introduce mistakes as well, but it's just like OSS: the number of people intent on fixing mistakes is likely to outnumber the number of people intent on introducing them. Is that faith-based to an extent? Yes, but getting information from Britannica is faith-based, too: one has faith in the Britannica name. Would you expect the same level of integrity from some "Bob's Discount Book of Stuff" that you bought at the supermarket? Of course not.
The lesson here is never to rely on a single source for refrence. Always read critically, looking for the slightest sign of bias or poor scholarship. Blind faith in any human work is foolish, and Britannica is far from Divine.
Well...I guess the Wikipedia article is incomplete. Funny, I had thought there was a Linux version of 8 before I read that, but I let it convince me otherwise. I should have checked WP's website to be sure. No offense intended. I certainly didn't mean to imply you couldn't read (just stupidly assumed that you probably had it out of view and had forgotten the version number - happens to me from time to time). Mea culpa.
You're right about Corel being wrong on that score too, then. I didn't get into Linux until around 2000, myself; but, as I said, the WP9 suite soured me on Corel. That installed just fine, but it zombified regularly, especially if you tried to use menus or anything (including more than once while trying to save a file). Got Corel Linux with it, but dumped that for Debian after six months. Just in time, because that was about when Corel dropped (more like threw) Linux and ran. I'm not sure I ever got the rebate cheque from Corel for WPO2000, now that I think about it.
I'm fairly new to vi, not having used Unix in any form until I used AIX at college (fall of '97, and then I mostly used pico for the first year or so before trying Emacs and finally choosing vi), but I grew up with WordStar, before WP5, so I am used to typing in formatting codes for the printer by hand. Still learning to use troff, but the principles are the same as for HTML and the codes used by both WordStar and WordPerfect.
So, no love for Corel from me either, but I still have some nostalgic feelings about WP. I wouldn't buy the new versions at this point, though, unless Corel sold the software to someone else, and that someone else made a decent Unix version - I have WinXP mostly for a few games now, but am not planning to do that with my next machine. Wine runs or will run any games I have by then well enough (and I'm not a big gamer, anyhow). Maybe I'll dig up my parents' copy of WP5.1 and run it under dosemu.
Understand your frustration, but I'm a bit confused about some of your facts. To wit:
It was WordPerfect 9 that was designed for Corel Linux, not 8. WP8 came out several years before Corel Linux 1 ever hit the shelves, and I was unaware there ever was a Unix/Linux version (a quick check of Wikipedia doesn't show one), though IIRC Novell made a Unix port of WP6. WP9 installed just fine on Debian Potato (it actually ran better on that than on Corel Linux, IMO). I know 9 was supposed to run on any distro, not just their own, but heard that the installer ended up needing tweaking on some distros, or even required you to copy the files by hand in some cases (which I agree is very wrong).
My biggest beef was that Corel's decision to use Wine instead of a native port for WP9 was brain-damaged. Pure laziness on their part, especially considering that WP6 was a native port (I believe). The resultant instability has led to my never installing it my new box. The sheer idiocy of making a high-profile product entirely dependant on the stability of software that was still considered alpha at the time is unforgiveable.
Still, I always have regarded the Win versions of WP to be the best word-processing software on the market. I still have WP8 on my Win partition, and have fond memories of WP5 & 6. I haven't installed any other office suite under Linux, because I don't like the design of the.doc format that they all want to use. I would far rather enter troff markup manually in vi than run a word-processor without Reveal Codes. Other than the stupidity around WP9 for Linux, which I hold against Corel, not the WordPerfect product line (and certainly not Novell, which sold WP in 1996). Novell at least tried to compete, something that Corel has never really seemed to do.
Not a BSD user, but as I understand it, it depends on the BSD: FreeBSD will run most any Linux software. There are FreeBSD libraries supplied that make it possible to run most Linux binaries easily. IIRC, people have even gotten the Linux versions of games like Neverwinter Nights to run on FreeBSD (maybe better than on Linux). Beyond that, *nix software is *nix software, so any code written for *nix should compile from source on BSD (okay, so that's an oversimplification, but it's true as a general rule with well-written code). FreeBSD is fairly heavily oriented towards the desktop, while NetBSD and OpenBSD are more oriented towards the classical Unix uses: web and file servers, mainframes, etc.
You'll get the Canadian answer in Vermont, and most of northern New England, I think. The reason being that distance doesn't tell you anything about how long the trip takes, given that the roads are usually not interstate quality, and have many small towns in the middle of them. For instance, it takes me an hour and forty minutes to get to Montpelier (the capital) from here, while it takes me only an hour and a quarter to reach Burlington, which is almost exactly the same distance (about 60 miles). In neither case do I get anything like an interstate, and in the case of Montpelier I spend fifteen minutes on a dirt road (not stricty necessary, but it's as quick as any other way to get over the mountains).
Vermont actually was going to go metric about ten years back (back when Dean was governor - it was his pet project), but there was such public backlash that the plan got scrapped. Frankly, I consider the push to go metric nothing less than cultural bigotry myself. Why can't cultures have their own measures just like they have their own currency (though in Europe they are against that too, now) I happen to like the fact that we have measurements that have a history within our culture (well, for those of us here with British ancestry) rather than devised by a committee of murderous men which also wanted ten-day weeks.
As I'm sure some of you remember, the CAPS key used to be where the left CTRL key is now located on most keyboards. The solution is to remap, or to get a keyboard with CTRL and CAPS in their proper places. Unicomp makes some good, if pricey, examples.
I still use CAPS from time to time, aspecially in text files or e-mail for headings. It's only the folk who only use word-processors and HTML e-mail (a pet peeve of mine) that have no need for it. Do I use it a lot? No, but I don't use the caret (^) or bracket ({ and }) keys much either. Should we remove them too? Somehow I think the mathematicians would be rather upset at that prospect.
There is room on a 101-key (or 104-key) keyboard for some rarely used keys, the trick is to keep them out of the way. Blame the board manufacturers for swapping the key placements, not for keeping CAPS_LOCK.
You can't have the bulk of the planet living like americans and industrialised europaens
Boy is that true. And here we are, dangling the carrot of living like middle-class Americans in front of the entire third world. We've got China looming on one side, the Arabs on the other (and most projections show Muslim majorities all over Europe by 2020!), and red and blue America are both bringing the house down on itself at the same time, bickering about whatever CNN tells them too. Sheer idiocy.
Our wonderful Lt. Governor here in Vermont (a fairly conservative Republican) had a wonderful revelation during his victory speech two years ago: he said that the people on the far left and the far right need to get together, put aside their differences for the time being, and fix things together, beccause the right-wingers and the progressives have more in common than the so-called moderates (i.e., the ones the media don't consider kooks). This was partly solicited by the Progressive candidate having actually come to concede in person (quite a gesture, if you ask me). I wish it could happen, but unfortuneately, the moderates are the ones who run the parties.
I'm trying to figure out just where on earth I ought to move, before all hell does break loose. Even the sticks of Vermont may not be safe, even for those of us with some survival skills. I'm thinking Greenland.
Slashdot Mirror
That might be funny, but only if it were true: amd64 support isn't new in 5.4.
I don't take too much issue with people who honestly believe it wasn't worth it from a technical standpoint (though I disagree), but I do have an issue with not being willing to compromise on it (but there also, I can respect the ethical position of the FSF/GNU crowd, even though I don't agree with it myself). The whole issue made me rethink whether Debian (or Linux for that matter) really was for me (and, at times, whether a certain segment of the Debian community cares at all about anyone who isn't a GNU partisan).
I'm the first to admit that I'm not 100% partial to the GPL (I think it's overly complex, and tries to enforce the FSF mentality to rigidly). I'm more of a Torvalds partisan myself: I think open source is generally better for technical and economic reasons, not ethical or moral ones. I also have some leanings towards the Berkeley License, though, so I may well move to FreeBSD instead. With that said, it might be better if I stayed out of these Debian debates, since I'm too apt to be labelled a BSD-troll (or to actually become one, if I'm not more careful).
Maybe so. Maybe that was just frustration talking on my part. I hope so, for the sake of the project. I don't think, with the financial situation the way it's been, that Debian could survive the mass exodous that would be sure to follow another fiasco like Sarge's release cycle. I guess I'm just a pessimist at this point, but I certainly don't wish Debian any ill will. As I said, though, "I'll believe it when I see it."
It was politics and license issues mostly surrounding documentation. Open Source vs. Free Software debate, essentially. It didn't seem to me like something that needed to hold up Sarge, since it was already frozen at the time (and since it represented a change from the policy used for Woody and earlier releases). I still think the changes would have been better implemented in the next release (after Sarge). Instead, they un-froze Sarge to make the changes, then had to re-freeze it, which has held up the release cycle about a year extra.
Here's an example (in this case, it was issues with the amended Social Contract, IIRC there were others as well): http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/0 4/26/229237&mode=nested&tid=106&tid=117&tid=185&ti d=90&tid=99&threshold=4
On the upside, at least they used the opportunity to sneak in some more recent packages that would otherwise not have made Sarge (e.g., GNOME 2.8). On the downside, that has meant even more delays.
I know how much of a PITA Windows updates (and service packs) are first hand: I had to undo SP2 on my aunt's home machine because it broke Explorer (yes, MS's own software) and her machine ground to a halt. I also was able to diagnose a similar problem with a scanner that my father had at his work, and I.T. hadn't been able to fix (they never bothered to even ask him if an update had been installed since the last time the machine had worked, and were rather annoyed that he uninstalled it - lucky for him he has admin privlidges, or the thing would be sitting broken and idle to this day). I know all about the clusterf*ck that is Windows Update, but, IMHO, that is more MS's patch and release strategy and bad coding than it is a release cycle problem.
This is a release cycle issue: If Sarge had come out even last year (which it might have, but for politics) I wouldn't be so annoyed.
The frustrating thing about configuring Debian for me is that the defaults don't even seem right. Not even optimized for security or for a server setting, it seems like to me. It seems almost schizophrenic at times: as if some parts were optimized for security, some for speed, some for stability, but there was no grand scheme. Some packages, you get the idea you'd have been better off compiling from scource. Having had to do that for some programs (and for some drivers), and having compiled my own kernel, that prospect no longer bothers me like it would have at one time.
The more I read about ports, the more I like it over packages. I think I'm gonna go with FreeBSD, as it's more mature than Gentoo (and looks like perhaps less of a problem on dial-up). I hate to part with Linux, but at least it would be for another open source OS (and still unix). I was going to switch last fall, but didn't get around to it for some reason.
With any luck, I'll make a switch this summer.
I think they've done a great job on the technical aspects of Debian, don't get me wrong. I just wish the release cycle didn't get held up for non-technical reasons.
I'll believe it when I see it.
I know Debian stable isn't the best desktop distro. That part doesn't bother me. What bothers me is when they say "Sarge within a year," and then take three (mostly because of politics).
In the meantime, though I haven't switched yet, I've looked at Gentoo and even at FreeBSD, both of whose design I think I may like better, anyway (e.g., ports/portage instead of packages). I've been lazy about it (partly because I live in the sticks, and hence am still on 56k dial-up, which makes Gentoo in particular more difficult; partly because I dual-boot XP and so have less incentive), but I hope to switch to something else this summer.
So after "Sarge" comes Debian "Fry?"
An additional point about the XP comparison: nobody shipped software requiring Windows XP in 1999, but that's exactly what happens with Debian. When the Linux version of Neverwinter Nights shipped in 2003, I couldn't install it on Woody, (and still can't, AFAIK) because of Woody's ancient version of gcc. I need Sarge to run that on a stable version of Debian. Here we are, two years later, and still it won't run on Debian stable. It will run on nearly any other distro's latest stable release (and on BSD), but not Debian stable.
The Debian release cycle just keeps getting worse, and I see no end in sight for that. An update every three years might well be fine if the updates weren't falling further behind with each one.
As much as I hate federal intervention in state affairs, and as much as I worry this will backfire down the road, it seems the only way to save this woman's life. How can any self-respecting person stand by and watch an innocent die, when they have it in their power to stop it? Given the suspicions of corruption on the part of the judge (who apparently recieved campaign money from the husband's lawyers), and the alterior motives of the husband, one might be able to justify the Fed's getting involved. It also seems like the only way to preserve any faith in this country's legal system. There already have been judges and their families targetted by those who have lost faith in law and order recently: if this woman dies, things could get very ugly in this country.
Not to mention that there is some suspicion that her husband was responsible for her injuries in the first place; and his aparent use of the money earmarked for her rehab on himself, his mistress, and their two children. Also the fact that the Florida judge involved recieved campaign contributions from the husband's lawyers (amongst others involved) last year.
You missed the newest one: the House of Represenatives Committee on Government Reform (what the Hell this has to do with Government Reform I can't fathom) wasting something like six hours this afternoon and evening grandstanding about the steroid problem in baseball. I mean, yeah, I do care about that, but Congress getting involved ain't gonna fix it, and they have got way more important things to spend their time, and our tax money, on. They even contemplated making changes to the whole of collective-bargaining law just to sort out baseball. Talk about making mountains out of mole hills.
Personally, I'd rather see him as Gandalf for a change. He was Tolkien's choice, afterall.
Style-review is universally important, to make sure articles are readable. Review of facts would be far more difficult to implement fairly, and of more questionable value.
Pre-publication review is a double-edged sword which is too often a means of supressing dissent, rather than controlling accuracy. Does Wikipedia's post-publication review system system need tweaking, perhaps; but no wholesale change, like pre-publication review, is needed. Given the choice between rigid control and allowing every kook on the net to present his "facts," I'd rather err on the side of the latter.
Mere procedural differences. The heart of scientific studies is not in pre-publication review, but in the judgement of the community post-publication. It was in this that I was likening the process to that of the peer-review journals. Lots of worthless studies get published, but the community as a whole judges them harshly. Pre-publication review prevents some bad studies from being published, but not nearly all of them. It is post-publication review by the peer-community (peer-review in a looser sense, perhaps) which filters out the remainder over time.
Of course, the "highest degree of accuracy" is not 100% in practice, and never will be. The fact of the matter is that all refference works are subject to the limitations of the authors' knowledge. As many here have noted already, print encyclopaedias like Britannica are just as effected by bias, incomplete research, and the like. Indeed, print works like Britannica, being the product of academia, may be even more subject to the whims of the Zeitgeist. My mother has a set of World Book encyclopaedias (for youth) from 1957 - it is full of anti-communist propoganda. Mind you, I'm not pro-communist myself, but I don't believe in overstating the facts to get my point across, either. I've seen egregious errors in the Encyclopaedia Americana as well, many of which were linked to passing academic fads.
The nice thing about Wikipedia is that someone who sees a mistake, or an omission can correct it. Yes, one can introduce mistakes as well, but it's just like OSS: the number of people intent on fixing mistakes is likely to outnumber the number of people intent on introducing them. Is that faith-based to an extent? Yes, but getting information from Britannica is faith-based, too: one has faith in the Britannica name. Would you expect the same level of integrity from some "Bob's Discount Book of Stuff" that you bought at the supermarket? Of course not.
The lesson here is never to rely on a single source for refrence. Always read critically, looking for the slightest sign of bias or poor scholarship. Blind faith in any human work is foolish, and Britannica is far from Divine.
You're right about Corel being wrong on that score too, then. I didn't get into Linux until around 2000, myself; but, as I said, the WP9 suite soured me on Corel. That installed just fine, but it zombified regularly, especially if you tried to use menus or anything (including more than once while trying to save a file). Got Corel Linux with it, but dumped that for Debian after six months. Just in time, because that was about when Corel dropped (more like threw) Linux and ran. I'm not sure I ever got the rebate cheque from Corel for WPO2000, now that I think about it.
I'm fairly new to vi, not having used Unix in any form until I used AIX at college (fall of '97, and then I mostly used pico for the first year or so before trying Emacs and finally choosing vi), but I grew up with WordStar, before WP5, so I am used to typing in formatting codes for the printer by hand. Still learning to use troff, but the principles are the same as for HTML and the codes used by both WordStar and WordPerfect.
So, no love for Corel from me either, but I still have some nostalgic feelings about WP. I wouldn't buy the new versions at this point, though, unless Corel sold the software to someone else, and that someone else made a decent Unix version - I have WinXP mostly for a few games now, but am not planning to do that with my next machine. Wine runs or will run any games I have by then well enough (and I'm not a big gamer, anyhow). Maybe I'll dig up my parents' copy of WP5.1 and run it under dosemu.
-gabe
It was WordPerfect 9 that was designed for Corel Linux, not 8. WP8 came out several years before Corel Linux 1 ever hit the shelves, and I was unaware there ever was a Unix/Linux version (a quick check of Wikipedia doesn't show one), though IIRC Novell made a Unix port of WP6. WP9 installed just fine on Debian Potato (it actually ran better on that than on Corel Linux, IMO). I know 9 was supposed to run on any distro, not just their own, but heard that the installer ended up needing tweaking on some distros, or even required you to copy the files by hand in some cases (which I agree is very wrong).
My biggest beef was that Corel's decision to use Wine instead of a native port for WP9 was brain-damaged. Pure laziness on their part, especially considering that WP6 was a native port (I believe). The resultant instability has led to my never installing it my new box. The sheer idiocy of making a high-profile product entirely dependant on the stability of software that was still considered alpha at the time is unforgiveable.
Still, I always have regarded the Win versions of WP to be the best word-processing software on the market. I still have WP8 on my Win partition, and have fond memories of WP5 & 6. I haven't installed any other office suite under Linux, because I don't like the design of the .doc format that they all want to use. I would far rather enter troff markup manually in vi than run a word-processor without Reveal Codes. Other than the stupidity around WP9 for Linux, which I hold against Corel, not the WordPerfect product line (and certainly not Novell, which sold WP in 1996). Novell at least tried to compete, something that Corel has never really seemed to do.
Not a BSD user, but as I understand it, it depends on the BSD: FreeBSD will run most any Linux software. There are FreeBSD libraries supplied that make it possible to run most Linux binaries easily. IIRC, people have even gotten the Linux versions of games like Neverwinter Nights to run on FreeBSD (maybe better than on Linux). Beyond that, *nix software is *nix software, so any code written for *nix should compile from source on BSD (okay, so that's an oversimplification, but it's true as a general rule with well-written code). FreeBSD is fairly heavily oriented towards the desktop, while NetBSD and OpenBSD are more oriented towards the classical Unix uses: web and file servers, mainframes, etc.
Then why did they axe Itanium workstations last month?
Vermont actually was going to go metric about ten years back (back when Dean was governor - it was his pet project), but there was such public backlash that the plan got scrapped. Frankly, I consider the push to go metric nothing less than cultural bigotry myself. Why can't cultures have their own measures just like they have their own currency (though in Europe they are against that too, now) I happen to like the fact that we have measurements that have a history within our culture (well, for those of us here with British ancestry) rather than devised by a committee of murderous men which also wanted ten-day weeks.
I still use CAPS from time to time, aspecially in text files or e-mail for headings. It's only the folk who only use word-processors and HTML e-mail (a pet peeve of mine) that have no need for it. Do I use it a lot? No, but I don't use the caret (^) or bracket ({ and }) keys much either. Should we remove them too? Somehow I think the mathematicians would be rather upset at that prospect.
There is room on a 101-key (or 104-key) keyboard for some rarely used keys, the trick is to keep them out of the way. Blame the board manufacturers for swapping the key placements, not for keeping CAPS_LOCK.
Boy is that true. And here we are, dangling the carrot of living like middle-class Americans in front of the entire third world. We've got China looming on one side, the Arabs on the other (and most projections show Muslim majorities all over Europe by 2020!), and red and blue America are both bringing the house down on itself at the same time, bickering about whatever CNN tells them too. Sheer idiocy.
Our wonderful Lt. Governor here in Vermont (a fairly conservative Republican) had a wonderful revelation during his victory speech two years ago: he said that the people on the far left and the far right need to get together, put aside their differences for the time being, and fix things together, beccause the right-wingers and the progressives have more in common than the so-called moderates (i.e., the ones the media don't consider kooks). This was partly solicited by the Progressive candidate having actually come to concede in person (quite a gesture, if you ask me). I wish it could happen, but unfortuneately, the moderates are the ones who run the parties.
I'm trying to figure out just where on earth I ought to move, before all hell does break loose. Even the sticks of Vermont may not be safe, even for those of us with some survival skills. I'm thinking Greenland.