Sure some of the companies have dropped the ball. But let's look at one of your examples. One is enough for right now, for there are many other examples that follow suit.
Word processing? It used to be Micropro's WordStar, then Word Perfect -- now it's... you guessed it, Microsoft Word.
Did Microsoft bully all these other products out of the marketplace or force consumers to buy its versions instead? No, they simply turned out a better product at an acceptable price that was promoted with superior marketing.
Okay, so WordPerfect Suite had over 70% of the market at one point or another. What happened next, MS Office 95 became competative and Novell fscked up by not releasing an NT version at all. But there are other issues that one should look at, MS Office 95 was not necessarily a better office suite nor was it "superior marketing" or Novell's screw up that drove the nail into the coffin. There were several other things that did it:
Control of the OEM's. The ability to tell the OEM's that if you do not ship product X with your PC's you don't get Windows is called abuse of Monopoly. This happened.
Beaking of opponents products. I used NT 4.0 and Corel WP Suite 7, and I refused to get a Service Pack until I saw a fix on the Corel site because I knew that the Servce Pack would break WP Suite. This also occured with products like CC Mail and Lotis Notes.
I also remember in the dorms that roughly a month after Corel would release a new fix to the MS Word decoding problem MS would release a patch for Office breaking it again.
Using a monopoly to force OEM's to ship not ship certain products is abuse of monopoly. Purposefully breaking compatability with other products to enforce the use of your own is illegal when it is your monopoly that allows you to do that. It is one thing to offer a choice while at the same time have a superior product, it is another to forcefully stifle choice with superior resources to favor your product. It is a fine line between agressive and preditory and MS is WAY on the side on preditory.
As I said before this is but one example. People have already given examples using BeOS, but there is also the issue of Eudora, CC Mail, Notes, etc... Also, Borland sued MS because of preditory hiring practices. MS was targeting key Borland programmers with obsene amounts of money to leave Borland even when the programmers were not needed (not all were unused but some were removed for the sole purpose of making sure Borland didn't have them). This was settled out of court. And although no one puts a gun to your head telling you to buy a computer not everyone wants to build their computer from parts and until recently it was hard/impossible to buy a PC without Windows pre-installed because OEM's feared retaliation.
Sure we shouldn't be quick to set the blame to when others are short sighted but one looks at this case it is as obvious as a neon beer sign in the window of a bar that MS blatently abused its power. MS shouldn't be punished for others mistakes it should be punished for its illegal actions, to which there are numerous.
I'm getting tired of the fact that the DOJ has been humoring it. Change in administrations tends to do that. The Bush administration favoring big companies, surprise surprise.
bundling it with the OS 95% of the world is using? How does MOZILLA combat THAT?
As much as I cringe saying this, two words, America Online. AOL/TimeWarner has already started testing a Mozilla based browser for their Compuserve division. If Mozilla pans out as a competitive browser (which it looks to me like it is) I could see AOL/TimeWarner deciding to switch the rest of their user base over. They are in a tizzy with M$ right now and considering they, and this would be a way for them to poke M$ in the eye. Considering they are the largest internet provider in the US that would make a big impact.
Oh, and you should probably say with the OS's 95% of the world is using. Windows alone has closer to, or less than, 90%, it is only when you add Mac OS do you get to that 95% mark.
That is why apt was invented (I use debian and I have heard that up2date does the same thing). There is currently an, unstable, gui to apt called gnome-apt. Lets say Pro Knitting Tournament is not only cool enough to have a linux version, but a.deb package also. If they set it up to detect that she is using debian and it breaks in installation she only needs to update and then upgrade and then her program will work.
Of course we must not forget the joke t-shirt on copyleft saying, "Debian - What your mom would use if it were twenty times easier."
I find it interesting that people bitch and moan that Windows is a monopoly, but turn around and get uninterested because there's variants of Linux. This means two important things: 1) Linux is strong and has more support, especially since this will cause whole companies to rally their technology together. 2) This gives everyone more competition. If I remember correctly, SUSE or Mandrake was THE Linux distro to get. Red Hat came along and pushed the bar. Whether or not you like Red Hat or not, they have made a major impact in the Linux world.
I must make a quick disclamer before I get flammed, I used Debian, have for three years now. With that said, One more thing that Linux has done is forced ALL of the other operating systems to become better. Although I switched over before Win2000 and XP I have heard from several of their users that they are halfway decent products. That they don't crash, often, and have some nice features. Personally I think those people have to thank the Linux development community for putting a fire under MS. They knew they were getting hosed and had to come back with something that actually WORKED. It just goes to show that competition is an extremely important aspect in innovation across the board, not just within its own family.
I love the fact that there are some many different types of Linux out there. Each little distro, or in this case big conglomerate (sp?) distro, has their own thing that they contribute to the community. It looks like this group is attempting to go after what business want.
Matrox has been very good at providing drivers for Linux. Some may say that the drivers are a bit spotty, but I have had no problems with them or the configuration tool that they have designed for Linux. If you look at the bottom of the page of the article it says, "Operating Systems: Windows, Linux" so I think this is going to be happening.
That is *YOUR* Opinion. Personally, My opinion is that Halo, Project Gotham, Max Payne, Munch's Odysee, Simpsons Road Rage, Rallisport Challenge and DOA3 have all been EXCELLENT games. ... ...And i'm sorry, a 300.00 xbox doesn't cost anymore then a 299.00 PS2. You DO get DD 5.1, HDTV 1080 support, DVD Playback, (yeah yeah, a remote is needed, spend the 20 freaking bucks!), Great game linup and a hard drive with infinate potential and savegames
There is a long term issue here that I would like to address. Currently the X-Box has some good games. Also, they have lined up several companies to produce games for the X-Box. Big thing to remember is that most of the money from console games comes from the games and not from the console. MS knows that, I went to a talk about the X-box and the engineer specifically mentioned that MS is aware of this. Now, the reason why I feel this is important to mention is that that looking at previous actions by MS it is most likely that they will try to get a lot of games for their console at first then screw the competition in the game arena after they have dominance within the console market. Companies know this, and IMHO this is preventing MS from getting a large number of good 3rd parties from building games for their platform. This could be a significant factor in the prevention of the uptake of X-Boxes.
Also, as amazing as the X-Box may be, they are trying to specifically oust PlayStation 2, which has a healthy lead on MS. It is superior technology, but it is NOT considered the next generation, which means they have a very hard battle to fight, especially since their enemy is well entrenched.
Thanks to the friendly guys at (RedHat|Mandrake|SUSE|Debian|etc) we each have a CD on our desks...
...Now click on "Defaults" and click on "Next" until it is installed, then reboot"
First, before people start to flame me I use Debian and really enjoy it this comment is not meant as an attack.
If only Debian was that easy for non-geeks to install. I can see the teacher now, "Okay children, at the prompt, that is the colon, hit enter. Now wait, then hit enter a couple times. Wait for the rest of the class when you get to cfdisk, the screen will look something like this. Okay, now that we are all at cfdisk first use the arrows to delete the partition that says FAT32, next move over to new, allocate X megs to the first partition, this is going to used for swap... "
I recommend that you don't try to use oxy-aceteline on Al or you will have problems. It isn't a matter of melting temperature it is a matter of conduction (Al has a higher conductivity than steel). Al will spread the heat out fast enough that by the time you have puddle a large portion of the Al, not just area with the heat on it, will start to melt and you will have a mess on your hands. It is possible but it isn't easy.
It is possible to MIG weld if you have a line that is short enough to handle the Al line feed. There are special guns designed for this. People usually use TIG welding on Al.
If you don't believe me then go to your local certified welder and ask. I personally just got done learning how to weld. Welding Al, and the problems that occur when trying to do so were very high on the instructors list.
A cutting torch is not going to leave much of a finger
And it isn't going to do as much as you think to the Ti ring. You don't cut Ti with a cutting torch, you can use regular saws if you keep the Ti fairly cold (close to 0 C), but don't expect it to be easy. An oxy-acetaline cutting torch requires getting a puddle of the material to form and then you add large amounts of oxygen. This works really well on steel and iron, if you try it with Al then you will get a big puddle of Al on the floor because it spreads the heat out too quickly. Ti has an amazingly high melting temperature, I think that a cutting torch would have a huge problem with it, which is why they use TIG welding on Ti not oxy-acetaline.
Sane process, yes. However I was under the impression that "testing" was a recent development. Please don't refer to it in a manner that suggests that it has always been this way.
I wasn't trying to suggest that it was always that way (sorry if you got that impression). I was very happy when they decided to move to this system. It seemed like the logical step up from what it was before, which IMHO was a step up from what other distros offered.
As for the stable architectures not being usefull for a plurality of users. That is true, but for those of us who are dealing with labs that are using Tru64, Solaris, IRIX, and have x86 machines in the lab, and are starting to run into problems with software working significantly different under each OS, having one OS that works under multiple archs is very appealing.
I agree that the install procedure is abysmal. Journalling fs support, OTOH, is not that old. XFS was patched into the 2.2 kernel, Reiser wasn't until 2.4, and ext3 wasn't in the kernel until 2.4.17, I haven't paid much attention to JFS so I don't know when it showed up. There have been several discussions on which of the systems should be used in future debian releases on debianplanet. If I remember correctly people were concerned about XFS and JFS due to not all of the code having been released under the GPL, or equivalent. Although ReiserFS has shown itself to be superior in tests to ext3 there is the ability to fall back on ext2 commands to fix an ext3 fs, so pre2.4.17 kernels can fix errors in ext3 fses. I think that the introduction of a journalling fs into Debian is waiting until there is a decission on which one to use as the primary.
This weeks news on debian discusses the use of the Progany installer. Maybe by Sid Debian can have an installer that is close to that of commercial installers. OTOH I agree with some of the people on debianplanet in that there should always be the option for the old style installer, for more control and power over the install (and those of us who like pain).
So what is Debian offering me other than a warm, fuzzy feeling?
There are several different things that I feel that Debian offers over the other distros.
11 Stable, supported architechtures. All of which are given equal priority.
Linux, Hurd, and BSD versions of Debian. Pick
A sain process of releasing new software into the system. Start in unstable, work its way into testing, move testing to stable. As opposed to spewing out new releases every time something big happens. Slow, sure, but at least I know that it has been tested properly.
It isn't perfect, so what, neither is RedHat (or others). Sure, by this time the journaling filesystems have been tested and are pretty stable. I myself have been using ext3 for quite some time now. I agree that it would be nice to have a journaling filesystem as a primary installation option, but I also understand that it will, most likely, get done in a update release. Right now Debian is in a bug squashing mode, not adding new features to the system. The attention placed on removing release critical bugs over constantly adding new features is one of the things that I find most appealing about Debian.
If you apt-get install mozilla first and mozilla has had a milestone update then it will remove galeon. I don't use dselect when dealing with unstable because I only want a few things from the unstable branch, galeon, lastest mozilla, nautilus, and evolution.
For those of you who are unhappy with the purity aspects of Debian there is at least one place that I have found that has some unofficial packages like mplayer and the flash plugin for Mozilla.
I haven't had any problems with the packaging that has done by the maintainer.
Actually Galeon is not completely dead in Debian. You can install it from the unstable tree. Also it will only uninstall Galeon if Mozilla increases by a milestone, ie.9.8-.9.9.
I think a more important question is, have the Executive orders restricting research and funding caused enough good researchers working on stem cells, embryonic or not, to leave the US and go to the UK, or parts of the EU, where there are less restrictions? Thereby causing the US to fall behind in the tech needed to be able to do this?
Although the biggest complaint is from embryonic stem cells, Congress is going to be discussing that and theraputic cloning soon. If they ban that it is only a hop skip and a jump away from banning research like this which uses genetic modification. I know a few biologist who are worried about this and are thinking of leaving the country. Is our government causing a brain drain?
By executive order he prevented federally funding new lines. He did not prevent the creation of new lines, just restricted their funding to the private sector. Congress has stem cell research and theraputic cloning on their agenda for this year.
Also, in theory, someone who creates a new line can request, through proper channels, for funding and still get it IF Congress decides that they should get the funding (remember that Congress is the one who holds the check book so to speak). Executive orders are not law of the land, only guidelines to follow.
What did happen roughly six months ago was the beginning of the departure of good bio researchers from the US to the UK. I remember that there was one article posted on slashdot about a Stanford research who left because of President Bush's Executive order knowing that it would harm his researching potential. I wouldn't be surprised if we lose a lot more if we restrict the research even more.
Re:this reminds me of a trick for telemarketers
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He Writes Back
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A friend of mine worked as a telemarketer before he went to college. Someone tried the first line on him, his responce was something of to the effect of: sure it is xxx-xxx-xxxx, will you, your wife, or two daughters be calling me? I currently live in North Dakota, if you want to spend your time calling me from you nice home at (insert address) I would love to talk to you.
The guy who tried to pull a Seinfeld freaked at the amount of information that my friend had at his fingertips and hung up.
I was running it on a K6-2 450 (currently using the Gnome 1.4 that Debian is packaging for fewer dependency problems) and I had very few problems with speed after I added more memory. I found that my system was swapping out fairly often till I went from 128 MB to 384 MB. Now, it didn't become lightning fast, but it there was a noticable improvement. Memory is cheap these days, or was last I checked.
Frankly, I think both look ugly. When I first saw the new G4 iMac I could only think of the servo robots from Red Dwarf. It's a great TV show but I never thought the servo robots were sexy. This new thing, the Gateway model, looks like a glorified etch-a-sketch. Both look like toys.
The G4 Cube, now that was sexy. Powerful, practical, with an interesting design that didn't give it the look of merely a toy. It is too bad they didn't sell well enough.
I have never been a fan of combined monitor and machine. The attempt at effeciency while trying to make it artistic reminds me of the Constructivist movement, and you end up with something that does an okay job at both. If they allowed for the monitor to detach and connect onto other stablizing platforms so that you can A) get a better monitor without replacing the whole computer, and B) have more ability for personal arrangement of the equipment I might have been pleased.
Actually, I think they are, or at least SUN is, doing this to hurt Microsoft. There is a very distinct hatred between the two companies and I think that SUN saw the ruling that Microsoft is a monopoly as a weakness to attack. SUN is going to very much enjoy poking MS in the eye. Anyway, their main goal is the opening of API's, proprietary formats, and forcing MS to include a Java plugin into IE, and force them to use a VM that is Java certified, they aren't going for money in the suit directly.
In the end they are trying to make money, of course. I think that this is more of a, if we weaken them they can encroach on MS's desktop monopoly, either with their own products or through the use of Linux. If they can get the API's and proprietary formats released to the public that allows for two things. First, other office productivity suites can open Microsoft formats with 100% effeciency. Second, it will help out groups like Wine, which would allow programs that only run on MS Windows to be transported to non-MS platforms. Either case, MS loses and weakens it stranglehold, and SUN can use this to leverage the sale of their servers.
I found the large ad that I had while viewing the article to be quite amusing. It was from Sybase. At the top it said in big letters, "Don't Accept the Lies" and in the middle was a nondiscript person in a suit holding a sign that said "It's Our Way or the Highway"
The part of the article that I find most insteresting is the discussion on Linux in Europe. I am sure that most of us have read some of the articles where Germany and other countries have openly denouced MS, and Sun for that matter, for the backdoors that are [most likely] in it, but that they actually followed through is interesting. With Germany being the economic powerhouse of the EU this trend will only spread to the other member countries.
Why I find this interesting is the potential shift in the computer world. The US may not see Linux on the desktop in the near future but perhaps in Europe, Russia, and China we may. With strong economic powers outside the US using operating systems that are MS incompatable this may force a change in MS practices with regard to other products, perhaps the selling of compatable versions of MS products within those countries (and making it illigal to use such copies in the US, ahh locale).
As for the CS students in the Colleges in the US not wanting to use MS products. Something tells me that economics will win in the end.
I agree that mozilla can be a bit slow at times, especially at loading. I actually have four browsers installed on my box, Mozilla, Galeon, Opera, and Netscape 4.7, each serves their own purpose. I mainly use Galeon unless it crashes on a site with repeated frequency, then I move to Mozilla (which I have found to be more stable). If Mozilla cannot handle the page then I move to good old Netscape. The only reason I have Opera on my machine is for my brother who uses it unless it either cannot render a page or renders it horribly.
Some people have mentioned tabbed browsing being faster for adding new pages. This is true but you have to get used to tabbed browsing (it drives me berserk).
Of all the things I have heard about IE I personally have had bad experiences with it. I have had to turn off all of the scripting because if I don't then at boot up my windows partition starts asking if I want to continue to run some IE script. Even if I say no it still runs it. I haven't been able to figure out where the hell this damn thing has been residing. There are a couple other things about the way it acts that bother me like the multisecond delay after a right mouse click. Frankly Netscape 6.2 with the preloading is only half a second slower to load up then IE and renders just as fast and I haven't had it crash on me yet.
I have been known to do stuff like this. When I get messages that contain attached.doc files I politely ask the person to resend the file in a.rtf telling them I am unable to read their file. I give them step by step directions. If the person continues to send me stuff in a.doc files then I start sending them messages in postscript files knowing full well that most people using Windows do not have Ghostscript. If they send me stuff in.rtf I return the favor and send stuff in.rtf or.pdf, two formats that everyone can read.
Maybe this is childish because there ways of dealing with.doc files in Linux these days, but that is not the point. I should not have to install and run some crappy converter to understand what someone says any more than someone should have to install Ghostscript to understand what I am saying. Basically if we can agree on some format that EVERYONE can read it removes the need for people to pull sh*t like this. It is not that hard for people to save as.rtf, it is not that hard for Outlook and Outlook Express users to turn off certain features that make their email unreadable, and it is not that hard for me to make my LaTeX documents pdf files.
I have found that people using MS products are as much *ssh*l*s about these sort of things as Linux community. The only difference I see is that the Linux community wants everyone to be able to read what they say, assuming they follow international standards, whereas MS users want everyone to use MS standards.
Slashdot Mirror
Word processing? It used to be Micropro's WordStar, then Word Perfect -- now it's... you guessed it, Microsoft Word.
Did Microsoft bully all these other products out of the marketplace or force consumers to buy its versions instead? No, they simply turned out a better product at an acceptable price that was promoted with superior marketing.
Okay, so WordPerfect Suite had over 70% of the market at one point or another. What happened next, MS Office 95 became competative and Novell fscked up by not releasing an NT version at all. But there are other issues that one should look at, MS Office 95 was not necessarily a better office suite nor was it "superior marketing" or Novell's screw up that drove the nail into the coffin. There were several other things that did it:
Using a monopoly to force OEM's to ship not ship certain products is abuse of monopoly. Purposefully breaking compatability with other products to enforce the use of your own is illegal when it is your monopoly that allows you to do that. It is one thing to offer a choice while at the same time have a superior product, it is another to forcefully stifle choice with superior resources to favor your product. It is a fine line between agressive and preditory and MS is WAY on the side on preditory.
As I said before this is but one example. People have already given examples using BeOS, but there is also the issue of Eudora, CC Mail, Notes, etc... Also, Borland sued MS because of preditory hiring practices. MS was targeting key Borland programmers with obsene amounts of money to leave Borland even when the programmers were not needed (not all were unused but some were removed for the sole purpose of making sure Borland didn't have them). This was settled out of court. And although no one puts a gun to your head telling you to buy a computer not everyone wants to build their computer from parts and until recently it was hard/impossible to buy a PC without Windows pre-installed because OEM's feared retaliation.
Sure we shouldn't be quick to set the blame to when others are short sighted but one looks at this case it is as obvious as a neon beer sign in the window of a bar that MS blatently abused its power. MS shouldn't be punished for others mistakes it should be punished for its illegal actions, to which there are numerous.
I'm getting tired of the fact that the DOJ has been humoring it.
Change in administrations tends to do that. The Bush administration favoring big companies, surprise surprise.
As much as I cringe saying this, two words, America Online. AOL/TimeWarner has already started testing a Mozilla based browser for their Compuserve division. If Mozilla pans out as a competitive browser (which it looks to me like it is) I could see AOL/TimeWarner deciding to switch the rest of their user base over. They are in a tizzy with M$ right now and considering they, and this would be a way for them to poke M$ in the eye. Considering they are the largest internet provider in the US that would make a big impact.
Oh, and you should probably say with the OS's 95% of the world is using. Windows alone has closer to, or less than, 90%, it is only when you add Mac OS do you get to that 95% mark.
That is why apt was invented (I use debian and I have heard that up2date does the same thing). There is currently an, unstable, gui to apt called gnome-apt. Lets say Pro Knitting Tournament is not only cool enough to have a linux version, but a .deb package also. If they set it up to detect that she is using debian and it breaks in installation she only needs to update and then upgrade and then her program will work.
Of course we must not forget the joke t-shirt on copyleft saying, "Debian - What your mom would use if it were twenty times easier."
I must make a quick disclamer before I get flammed, I used Debian, have for three years now. With that said, One more thing that Linux has done is forced ALL of the other operating systems to become better. Although I switched over before Win2000 and XP I have heard from several of their users that they are halfway decent products. That they don't crash, often, and have some nice features. Personally I think those people have to thank the Linux development community for putting a fire under MS. They knew they were getting hosed and had to come back with something that actually WORKED. It just goes to show that competition is an extremely important aspect in innovation across the board, not just within its own family.
I love the fact that there are some many different types of Linux out there. Each little distro, or in this case big conglomerate (sp?) distro, has their own thing that they contribute to the community. It looks like this group is attempting to go after what business want.
Matrox has been very good at providing drivers for Linux. Some may say that the drivers are a bit spotty, but I have had no problems with them or the configuration tool that they have designed for Linux. If you look at the bottom of the page of the article it says, "Operating Systems: Windows, Linux" so I think this is going to be happening.
There is a long term issue here that I would like to address. Currently the X-Box has some good games. Also, they have lined up several companies to produce games for the X-Box. Big thing to remember is that most of the money from console games comes from the games and not from the console. MS knows that, I went to a talk about the X-box and the engineer specifically mentioned that MS is aware of this. Now, the reason why I feel this is important to mention is that that looking at previous actions by MS it is most likely that they will try to get a lot of games for their console at first then screw the competition in the game arena after they have dominance within the console market. Companies know this, and IMHO this is preventing MS from getting a large number of good 3rd parties from building games for their platform. This could be a significant factor in the prevention of the uptake of X-Boxes.
Also, as amazing as the X-Box may be, they are trying to specifically oust PlayStation 2, which has a healthy lead on MS. It is superior technology, but it is NOT considered the next generation, which means they have a very hard battle to fight, especially since their enemy is well entrenched.
First, before people start to flame me I use Debian and really enjoy it this comment is not meant as an attack.
If only Debian was that easy for non-geeks to install. I can see the teacher now, "Okay children, at the prompt, that is the colon, hit enter. Now wait, then hit enter a couple times. Wait for the rest of the class when you get to cfdisk, the screen will look something like this. Okay, now that we are all at cfdisk first use the arrows to delete the partition that says FAT32, next move over to new, allocate X megs to the first partition, this is going to used for swap... "
I recommend that you don't try to use oxy-aceteline on Al or you will have problems. It isn't a matter of melting temperature it is a matter of conduction (Al has a higher conductivity than steel). Al will spread the heat out fast enough that by the time you have puddle a large portion of the Al, not just area with the heat on it, will start to melt and you will have a mess on your hands. It is possible but it isn't easy.
It is possible to MIG weld if you have a line that is short enough to handle the Al line feed. There are special guns designed for this. People usually use TIG welding on Al.
If you don't believe me then go to your local certified welder and ask. I personally just got done learning how to weld. Welding Al, and the problems that occur when trying to do so were very high on the instructors list.
And it isn't going to do as much as you think to the Ti ring. You don't cut Ti with a cutting torch, you can use regular saws if you keep the Ti fairly cold (close to 0 C), but don't expect it to be easy. An oxy-acetaline cutting torch requires getting a puddle of the material to form and then you add large amounts of oxygen. This works really well on steel and iron, if you try it with Al then you will get a big puddle of Al on the floor because it spreads the heat out too quickly. Ti has an amazingly high melting temperature, I think that a cutting torch would have a huge problem with it, which is why they use TIG welding on Ti not oxy-acetaline.
I wasn't trying to suggest that it was always that way (sorry if you got that impression). I was very happy when they decided to move to this system. It seemed like the logical step up from what it was before, which IMHO was a step up from what other distros offered.
As for the stable architectures not being usefull for a plurality of users. That is true, but for those of us who are dealing with labs that are using Tru64, Solaris, IRIX, and have x86 machines in the lab, and are starting to run into problems with software working significantly different under each OS, having one OS that works under multiple archs is very appealing.
I agree that the install procedure is abysmal. Journalling fs support, OTOH, is not that old. XFS was patched into the 2.2 kernel, Reiser wasn't until 2.4, and ext3 wasn't in the kernel until 2.4.17, I haven't paid much attention to JFS so I don't know when it showed up. There have been several discussions on which of the systems should be used in future debian releases on debianplanet. If I remember correctly people were concerned about XFS and JFS due to not all of the code having been released under the GPL, or equivalent. Although ReiserFS has shown itself to be superior in tests to ext3 there is the ability to fall back on ext2 commands to fix an ext3 fs, so pre2.4.17 kernels can fix errors in ext3 fses. I think that the introduction of a journalling fs into Debian is waiting until there is a decission on which one to use as the primary.
This weeks news on debian discusses the use of the Progany installer. Maybe by Sid Debian can have an installer that is close to that of commercial installers. OTOH I agree with some of the people on debianplanet in that there should always be the option for the old style installer, for more control and power over the install (and those of us who like pain).
There are several different things that I feel that Debian offers over the other distros.
It isn't perfect, so what, neither is RedHat (or others). Sure, by this time the journaling filesystems have been tested and are pretty stable. I myself have been using ext3 for quite some time now. I agree that it would be nice to have a journaling filesystem as a primary installation option, but I also understand that it will, most likely, get done in a update release. Right now Debian is in a bug squashing mode, not adding new features to the system. The attention placed on removing release critical bugs over constantly adding new features is one of the things that I find most appealing about Debian.
If you apt-get install mozilla first and mozilla has had a milestone update then it will remove galeon. I don't use dselect when dealing with unstable because I only want a few things from the unstable branch, galeon, lastest mozilla, nautilus, and evolution.
For those of you who are unhappy with the purity aspects of Debian there is at least one place that I have found that has some unofficial packages like mplayer and the flash plugin for Mozilla.
I haven't had any problems with the packaging that has done by the maintainer.
Actually Galeon is not completely dead in Debian. You can install it from the unstable tree. Also it will only uninstall Galeon if Mozilla increases by a milestone, ie .9.8-.9.9.
I think a more important question is, have the Executive orders restricting research and funding caused enough good researchers working on stem cells, embryonic or not, to leave the US and go to the UK, or parts of the EU, where there are less restrictions? Thereby causing the US to fall behind in the tech needed to be able to do this?
Although the biggest complaint is from embryonic stem cells, Congress is going to be discussing that and theraputic cloning soon. If they ban that it is only a hop skip and a jump away from banning research like this which uses genetic modification. I know a few biologist who are worried about this and are thinking of leaving the country. Is our government causing a brain drain?
By executive order he prevented federally funding new lines. He did not prevent the creation of new lines, just restricted their funding to the private sector. Congress has stem cell research and theraputic cloning on their agenda for this year.
Also, in theory, someone who creates a new line can request, through proper channels, for funding and still get it IF Congress decides that they should get the funding (remember that Congress is the one who holds the check book so to speak). Executive orders are not law of the land, only guidelines to follow.
What did happen roughly six months ago was the beginning of the departure of good bio researchers from the US to the UK. I remember that there was one article posted on slashdot about a Stanford research who left because of President Bush's Executive order knowing that it would harm his researching potential. I wouldn't be surprised if we lose a lot more if we restrict the research even more.
A friend of mine worked as a telemarketer before he went to college. Someone tried the first line on him, his responce was something of to the effect of: sure it is xxx-xxx-xxxx, will you, your wife, or two daughters be calling me? I currently live in North Dakota, if you want to spend your time calling me from you nice home at (insert address) I would love to talk to you.
The guy who tried to pull a Seinfeld freaked at the amount of information that my friend had at his fingertips and hung up.
I was running it on a K6-2 450 (currently using the Gnome 1.4 that Debian is packaging for fewer dependency problems) and I had very few problems with speed after I added more memory. I found that my system was swapping out fairly often till I went from 128 MB to 384 MB. Now, it didn't become lightning fast, but it there was a noticable improvement. Memory is cheap these days, or was last I checked.
Frankly, I think both look ugly. When I first saw the new G4 iMac I could only think of the servo robots from Red Dwarf. It's a great TV show but I never thought the servo robots were sexy. This new thing, the Gateway model, looks like a glorified etch-a-sketch. Both look like toys.
The G4 Cube, now that was sexy. Powerful, practical, with an interesting design that didn't give it the look of merely a toy. It is too bad they didn't sell well enough.
I have never been a fan of combined monitor and machine. The attempt at effeciency while trying to make it artistic reminds me of the Constructivist movement, and you end up with something that does an okay job at both. If they allowed for the monitor to detach and connect onto other stablizing platforms so that you can A) get a better monitor without replacing the whole computer, and B) have more ability for personal arrangement of the equipment I might have been pleased.
To each his/her own.
Actually, I think they are, or at least SUN is, doing this to hurt Microsoft. There is a very distinct hatred between the two companies and I think that SUN saw the ruling that Microsoft is a monopoly as a weakness to attack. SUN is going to very much enjoy poking MS in the eye. Anyway, their main goal is the opening of API's, proprietary formats, and forcing MS to include a Java plugin into IE, and force them to use a VM that is Java certified, they aren't going for money in the suit directly.
In the end they are trying to make money, of course. I think that this is more of a, if we weaken them they can encroach on MS's desktop monopoly, either with their own products or through the use of Linux. If they can get the API's and proprietary formats released to the public that allows for two things. First, other office productivity suites can open Microsoft formats with 100% effeciency. Second, it will help out groups like Wine, which would allow programs that only run on MS Windows to be transported to non-MS platforms. Either case, MS loses and weakens it stranglehold, and SUN can use this to leverage the sale of their servers.
I found the large ad that I had while viewing the article to be quite amusing. It was from Sybase. At the top it said in big letters, "Don't Accept the Lies" and in the middle was a nondiscript person in a suit holding a sign that said "It's Our Way or the Highway"
Rather ironic IMHO.
The part of the article that I find most insteresting is the discussion on Linux in Europe. I am sure that most of us have read some of the articles where Germany and other countries have openly denouced MS, and Sun for that matter, for the backdoors that are [most likely] in it, but that they actually followed through is interesting. With Germany being the economic powerhouse of the EU this trend will only spread to the other member countries.
Why I find this interesting is the potential shift in the computer world. The US may not see Linux on the desktop in the near future but perhaps in Europe, Russia, and China we may. With strong economic powers outside the US using operating systems that are MS incompatable this may force a change in MS practices with regard to other products, perhaps the selling of compatable versions of MS products within those countries (and making it illigal to use such copies in the US, ahh locale).
As for the CS students in the Colleges in the US not wanting to use MS products. Something tells me that economics will win in the end.
Disclamer-Opinion of Person
I agree that mozilla can be a bit slow at times, especially at loading. I actually have four browsers installed on my box, Mozilla, Galeon, Opera, and Netscape 4.7, each serves their own purpose. I mainly use Galeon unless it crashes on a site with repeated frequency, then I move to Mozilla (which I have found to be more stable). If Mozilla cannot handle the page then I move to good old Netscape. The only reason I have Opera on my machine is for my brother who uses it unless it either cannot render a page or renders it horribly.
Some people have mentioned tabbed browsing being faster for adding new pages. This is true but you have to get used to tabbed browsing (it drives me berserk).
Of all the things I have heard about IE I personally have had bad experiences with it. I have had to turn off all of the scripting because if I don't then at boot up my windows partition starts asking if I want to continue to run some IE script. Even if I say no it still runs it. I haven't been able to figure out where the hell this damn thing has been residing. There are a couple other things about the way it acts that bother me like the multisecond delay after a right mouse click. Frankly Netscape 6.2 with the preloading is only half a second slower to load up then IE and renders just as fast and I haven't had it crash on me yet.
I have been known to do stuff like this. When I get messages that contain attached .doc files I politely ask the person to resend the file in a .rtf telling them I am unable to read their file. I give them step by step directions. If the person continues to send me stuff in a .doc files then I start sending them messages in postscript files knowing full well that most people using Windows do not have Ghostscript. If they send me stuff in .rtf I return the favor and send stuff in .rtf or .pdf, two formats that everyone can read.
.doc files in Linux these days, but that is not the point. I should not have to install and run some crappy converter to understand what someone says any more than someone should have to install Ghostscript to understand what I am saying. Basically if we can agree on some format that EVERYONE can read it removes the need for people to pull sh*t like this. It is not that hard for people to save as .rtf, it is not that hard for Outlook and Outlook Express users to turn off certain features that make their email unreadable, and it is not that hard for me to make my LaTeX documents pdf files.
Maybe this is childish because there ways of dealing with
I have found that people using MS products are as much *ssh*l*s about these sort of things as Linux community. The only difference I see is that the Linux community wants everyone to be able to read what they say, assuming they follow international standards, whereas MS users want everyone to use MS standards.