No. Debian's greatest achievement is creating a 100% free ( as in beer and free speech ), community supported GNU/Linux operating system.
It's only after switching to debian, and then trying out some other distros, that I've really come to appreciate just how impressive that community support is. I like having the newest and shiniest versions of most programs, and I'd be willing to pay a small fee for an easy way to keep everything on my system current. But surprisingly, I havn't seen any commercial distros that update the packages I'm interested in as quickly and neatly as happens with Debian Unstable. Given that it's community supported that's darn impressive!
Almost every significant app will have a package in your distro's package database.
The only downside is how long it might take for new versions to make it into any particular distro. With many the user might be stuck having to wait for the next release of their distro to also get software updates, all the while with the desired program shining with new features on the authors site.
For the most part the average user shouldn't ever need to bother with drivers. Most distros would simply detect what they need and install the appropriate drivers for everything during the initial install, and update them automatically during any system-wide update or if new hardware was detected. One big exception has been nvidia's 3D drivers, but I believe they've now given permission to distribute and install them in downloadable isos so that might not be a problem anymore.
Oh yeah, we're also going to restrict sex so that we only get to do it once every few years. We'll call that time the Ponn Far. It will be deeply spiritual to us.
As I understand it anything that's actually increasing the maximum lifespan, as opposed to just keeping you alive longer so you can croak at 120, should actually slow the agining process. It might also keep the subject more vital and energetic when they reach the new maximum lifespan than they would have been at their old maximum lifespan without the treatment. Or at least I think that's how it plays out with mammals who respond well to increased lifespan through near starvation with optimal nutrient intake. Even if that method turns out to not work well with primates, I'd expect any method we can use to produce similar effects in us as the mammels who could go through the low caloric intake process. Though IANAB, so take my speculation with even more a gain of salt than anything else on slashdot.
Oh yeah, we're also going to restrict sex so that we only get to do it once every few years. We'll call that time the Ponn Far. It will be deeply spiritual to us.
Comic Book Guy - Simpsons: Inspired by the most logical race in the galaxy, the Vulcans, breeding will be permitted once every seven years. For many of you, this will be much less breeding. For me, much, much more.
75 is a lot better than 45. 120 will be better than 75. And 200 will be better than 120.
The problem though is that everything so far has just been increases in the average lifespan. Through recorded history there have been people hitting the 75 or even 110 year mark even when the average age of death would be in the 40s. Better health care and less violent societies simply made it more likley for a person to be able to reach the species maximum lifespan of around 110-120, it never actually increased the maximum amount of time that a human can live in optimal conditions.
Even better, it solves the job problem as well. I think the economy here could easily support five or six thousand more casinos. We've already got one or two per block in Great Falls, more keep coming, and they all seem to do fairly well.
I kept intending to give that article a shot but by the time I overcame my lethergy the market seems to have mostly dried up. Really a pity too since from that article Earth and Beyond seemed almost tailored to this kind of thing with it's trader class.
2. Girls _generally_ don't care about machinery, and when they do, they don't _generally_ care about eye candy.
I have to disagree on the last part. In my experience woman are more likley than men to appreciate the style of a machine over its functionality, and men to do the opposite. The old "What kind of car are you planning to buy?: Blue!" joke springs to mind. Though I too have to stress the 'in general' part. The only woman I know with a strong interest in computing cares about eye candy on it far, far less than me.
Plus, people want to own the book and feel it in their hands.
No, some people want this. Just because that's the way you prefer it dosen't mean that there's not a lot of folks who don't care about the texture of what the story is being read from.
I've never understood why Mandrake has such problems with mice. Years ago it used to play fine with mine, but since then it seems to become more and more a pain to get my wheelmouse working. I decided to try out mandrake again recently, and finding no mouse option working, wound up having to run knoppix and copy and paste from their configuration files to mandrakes to get my mouse working there.
I just hate all non-Windows OSes with a passion. I hate Solaris, I hate various Linux flavours, I hate MacOS 9
What about OSX? Aros, BeOS/Zeta, Syllable, QNX, Amiga? They might not be as popular as Windows or even Linux, but it seems like there's too much out there to say that out of everything only windows has a good gui design.
That's the very reason I'm using Mandrake at the moment, even though I vastly prefer the package management of debian unstable. Seeing the pitying looks of windows using friends when I do anything with the cd drive when they're over just got to be too much.
As long as Linux has the by geeks for geeks mantra, it won't be on the desktop.
of non geeks. I think that's an important distinction. Non geeks already have an operating system tailored to their needs in windows, and the vast majority of them are quite happy with it. Just as I'm thrilled to have an operating system where many of the developers are aiming for the techy crowd. Linux is on the desktop, mine and many others. I've never understood this sentiment that an operating system isn't viable for the desktop unless every prefrence and style of use is met with it. Having multiple programs to choose from to accomplish any task is a good thing, as it allows one to pick the interface and funtionality that best fits his needs, and I think the same applies to operating systems as well.
It is VERY EASY to port Unix software to Windows (thanks to GNU-Win32 and the like); it is VERY HARD to port Windows software to Unix (thanks to Microsoft's semi-closed specs for the Win32 API).
I think you're making a pretty vast oversimplification with that statement. In my experience the style of the person who wrote the code in the first place is usually far more important than what platform it's from and where it's being moved to. With complexity and size of the program coming in second as a guage of how hard the port is going to be. A tangled web of barley working code is likely to make a port from anything to anything else a chore, even if ports of the compiler and libs exist there. And while I will agree that a port from windows to another platform is more difficult on average than the reverse due to coders there being more likely to depend on closed windows only things, also on average I don't think I'd call it VERY HARD. As long as one is familiar with windows and the target environment, and the language itself is portable, often it's more a question of how tedious it's going to be rather than how difficult. Not that I'm saying exceptions don't exist. But on average it's my opinion that there's not such a huge gulf in difficulty in porting from any one mature operating system to any other of similar capabilities.
I strongly disagree with that. When I was first switching over from Windows to Linux, the answer to every problem I had came from usenet. If the answer didn't come up from searching in the various Linux groups, without exception I received very courtious replies trying to help me out. Often I'd have the answer within an hour or two of posting. I think it all depends on where you're asking, and how the question is put out there. I'm sure one could find a lot of elitist comunities out there, but with a little looking one can just as easily find very useful and polite groups.
You might want to try Dosbox, if you haven't allready. It runs on a large variety of operating systems, and has done a great job with most of the dos games I've thrown at it. I'm really looking foreward to playing through all the old Ultima games in Linux!
Python 2.3. I was very surprised to not see python 2.3, even in mandrake cooker. Given the increased stability and speed I would have thought they'd have rushed to update to it when 2.3 was released. Worse for me, I'm unfamilier enough with rpm building to take the risk of trying to update python myself.
Sony make available a Linux Kit for the PS2, which allows you to do almost anything with your PS2.
Admitingly I lost interest in their kit quite a while back, but I was under the impression that you were quite limited with what you could do with it. You can't even access the DVD drive, can you? Is it actually possible to use it to play games from a region outside the intended area? Heck, I might have to re-evaluate what it would be worth to me if it'd be an easy way to both play around with Linux on it and play the Phantasy Star, and other remakes of old games coming out for it in Japan.
Slashdot Mirror
No. Debian's greatest achievement is creating a 100% free ( as in beer and free speech ), community supported GNU/Linux operating system.
It's only after switching to debian, and then trying out some other distros, that I've really come to appreciate just how impressive that community support is. I like having the newest and shiniest versions of most programs, and I'd be willing to pay a small fee for an easy way to keep everything on my system current. But surprisingly, I havn't seen any commercial distros that update the packages I'm interested in as quickly and neatly as happens with Debian Unstable. Given that it's community supported that's darn impressive!
I haven't got a Dad you insensitive clod!
:)
Anonymous AtheOS user?
Yeah, I realised that shortly after I posted...
Though it does work in a way. I simply figured you meant that unstable had more candles than testing, but only nine were currently working.
Almost every significant app will have a package in your distro's package database.
The only downside is how long it might take for new versions to make it into any particular distro. With many the user might be stuck having to wait for the next release of their distro to also get software updates, all the while with the desired program shining with new features on the authors site.
What about installing drivers and such?
For the most part the average user shouldn't ever need to bother with drivers. Most distros would simply detect what they need and install the appropriate drivers for everything during the initial install, and update them automatically during any system-wide update or if new hardware was detected. One big exception has been nvidia's 3D drivers, but I believe they've now given permission to distribute and install them in downloadable isos so that might not be a problem anymore.
Have you tried Knoppix? Out of any distro I've tried, it's been the best at automatically detecting and configuring my hardware.
How about give back to your less well-todo brothers.
1. Buy raman noodles and mountain dew.
2. Donate to someone at the local lug.
3. Nonprofit!
Crud, that's why previewing is a good idea. The clipboard kept the last comment I replied to instead of this one.
Oh yeah, we're also going to restrict sex so that we only get to do it once every few years. We'll call that time the Ponn Far. It will be deeply spiritual to us.
As I understand it anything that's actually increasing the maximum lifespan, as opposed to just keeping you alive longer so you can croak at 120, should actually slow the agining process. It might also keep the subject more vital and energetic when they reach the new maximum lifespan than they would have been at their old maximum lifespan without the treatment. Or at least I think that's how it plays out with mammals who respond well to increased lifespan through near starvation with optimal nutrient intake. Even if that method turns out to not work well with primates, I'd expect any method we can use to produce similar effects in us as the mammels who could go through the low caloric intake process. Though IANAB, so take my speculation with even more a gain of salt than anything else on slashdot.
Oh yeah, we're also going to restrict sex so that we only get to do it once every few years. We'll call that time the Ponn Far. It will be deeply spiritual to us.
Comic Book Guy - Simpsons: Inspired by the most logical race in the galaxy, the Vulcans, breeding will be permitted once every seven years. For many of you, this will be much less breeding. For me, much, much more.
75 is a lot better than 45. 120 will be better than 75. And 200 will be better than 120.
The problem though is that everything so far has just been increases in the average lifespan. Through recorded history there have been people hitting the 75 or even 110 year mark even when the average age of death would be in the 40s. Better health care and less violent societies simply made it more likley for a person to be able to reach the species maximum lifespan of around 110-120, it never actually increased the maximum amount of time that a human can live in optimal conditions.
Even better, it solves the job problem as well. I think the economy here could easily support five or six thousand more casinos. We've already got one or two per block in Great Falls, more keep coming, and they all seem to do fairly well.
I kept intending to give that article a shot but by the time I overcame my lethergy the market seems to have mostly dried up. Really a pity too since from that article Earth and Beyond seemed almost tailored to this kind of thing with it's trader class.
2. Girls _generally_ don't care about machinery, and when they do, they don't _generally_ care about eye candy.
I have to disagree on the last part. In my experience woman are more likley than men to appreciate the style of a machine over its functionality, and men to do the opposite. The old "What kind of car are you planning to buy?: Blue!" joke springs to mind. Though I too have to stress the 'in general' part. The only woman I know with a strong interest in computing cares about eye candy on it far, far less than me.
Plus, people want to own the book and feel it in their hands.
No, some people want this. Just because that's the way you prefer it dosen't mean that there's not a lot of folks who don't care about the texture of what the story is being read from.
I've never understood why Mandrake has such problems with mice. Years ago it used to play fine with mine, but since then it seems to become more and more a pain to get my wheelmouse working. I decided to try out mandrake again recently, and finding no mouse option working, wound up having to run knoppix and copy and paste from their configuration files to mandrakes to get my mouse working there.
I just hate all non-Windows OSes with a passion. I hate Solaris, I hate various Linux flavours, I hate MacOS 9
What about OSX? Aros, BeOS/Zeta, Syllable, QNX, Amiga? They might not be as popular as Windows or even Linux, but it seems like there's too much out there to say that out of everything only windows has a good gui design.
That's the very reason I'm using Mandrake at the moment, even though I vastly prefer the package management of debian unstable. Seeing the pitying looks of windows using friends when I do anything with the cd drive when they're over just got to be too much.
I was thin and small for my age, with large eyes and ears and a lanky body
Don't fall for their lies! Those aren't elves, they're those little grey big eyed aliens!
As long as Linux has the by geeks for geeks mantra, it won't be on the desktop.
of non geeks. I think that's an important distinction. Non geeks already have an operating system tailored to their needs in windows, and the vast majority of them are quite happy with it. Just as I'm thrilled to have an operating system where many of the developers are aiming for the techy crowd. Linux is on the desktop, mine and many others. I've never understood this sentiment that an operating system isn't viable for the desktop unless every prefrence and style of use is met with it. Having multiple programs to choose from to accomplish any task is a good thing, as it allows one to pick the interface and funtionality that best fits his needs, and I think the same applies to operating systems as well.
It is VERY EASY to port Unix software to Windows (thanks to GNU-Win32 and the like); it is VERY HARD to port Windows software to Unix (thanks to Microsoft's semi-closed specs for the Win32 API).
I think you're making a pretty vast oversimplification with that statement. In my experience the style of the person who wrote the code in the first place is usually far more important than what platform it's from and where it's being moved to. With complexity and size of the program coming in second as a guage of how hard the port is going to be. A tangled web of barley working code is likely to make a port from anything to anything else a chore, even if ports of the compiler and libs exist there. And while I will agree that a port from windows to another platform is more difficult on average than the reverse due to coders there being more likely to depend on closed windows only things, also on average I don't think I'd call it VERY HARD. As long as one is familiar with windows and the target environment, and the language itself is portable, often it's more a question of how tedious it's going to be rather than how difficult. Not that I'm saying exceptions don't exist. But on average it's my opinion that there's not such a huge gulf in difficulty in porting from any one mature operating system to any other of similar capabilities.
I strongly disagree with that. When I was first switching over from Windows to Linux, the answer to every problem I had came from usenet. If the answer didn't come up from searching in the various Linux groups, without exception I received very courtious replies trying to help me out. Often I'd have the answer within an hour or two of posting. I think it all depends on where you're asking, and how the question is put out there. I'm sure one could find a lot of elitist comunities out there, but with a little looking one can just as easily find very useful and polite groups.
You might want to try Dosbox, if you haven't allready. It runs on a large variety of operating systems, and has done a great job with most of the dos games I've thrown at it. I'm really looking foreward to playing through all the old Ultima games in Linux!
Python 2.3. I was very surprised to not see python 2.3, even in mandrake cooker. Given the increased stability and speed I would have thought they'd have rushed to update to it when 2.3 was released. Worse for me, I'm unfamilier enough with rpm building to take the risk of trying to update python myself.
Sony make available a Linux Kit for the PS2, which allows you to do almost anything with your PS2.
Admitingly I lost interest in their kit quite a while back, but I was under the impression that you were quite limited with what you could do with it. You can't even access the DVD drive, can you? Is it actually possible to use it to play games from a region outside the intended area? Heck, I might have to re-evaluate what it would be worth to me if it'd be an easy way to both play around with Linux on it and play the Phantasy Star, and other remakes of old games coming out for it in Japan.