I use Ubuntu now and used Red Hat and Fedora through Core 2. To me the biggest reason to move to Fedora was if you wanted the heavy iron features like out-of-the-box selinux support and the virtualization features. It's also what you'd go with with the industry standard (not that I agree it's worth) RHCE. In short you'd probably want it if you're liberal enough not to get a redhat enterprise edition, but conservative enough not to plunge into Debian. Especially if you already have Redhat deployed elsewhere.
I like Fedora filling the gaps for people who didn't feel comfortable with Debian Unstable
It seems to me that Ubuntu fills this gap. I don't really know why people would go vanilla debian over ubuntu on the desktop. Servers, of course, but not desktops.
but it feels to me like Debian's a bigger organization with more resources to handle more packages than Fedora.
Oooh, I don't know if I agree with that either. Even though it seems Red Hat is loosening it's vice grip on fedora to give the community more control, it's still RedHat's baby. They have a *lot* vested in it. RedHat has a lot of resources and the fedora community is huge.
Is there reason to believe Fedora can continue competing without it's corportate ties?
On the desktop? Yes, but there's much more competition there. Still people feel comfortable with it's red hat roots. On the server? Absolutely, and I believe this is more what they are targeting. Workstations? Well there's still not as many tools in Fedora as are available for Windows to manage workstations, but as linux goes, it's probably what I'd deploy.
I'm a Ubuntu user myself, but I really haven't come across aptitude before. I didn't know what it was so I looked it up. According to its debian project listing:
aptitude is a terminal-based apt frontend with a number of useful features, including: a mutt-like syntax for matching packages in a flexible manner, dselect-like persistence of user actions, the ability to retrieve and display the Debian changelog of most packages, and extreme flexibility and customization.
So it's an ncurses(?) bases front-end to apt? Ubuntu's wiki adds:
aptitude - Curses viewer of packages installed or available. Aptitude can be used from the command-line in a similar way to apt-get, but only for some commands - install and remove being the most common. However, because aptitude keeps track of more information than apt-get does, it can be considered better at install and remove operations.
Ok, so it's good for installation and removing. But then what to use apt or synaptic for? Just upgrades? Can anybody clue me into why you would use apt or not use aptitude?
big business should be protected from open source because it wipes out their profits without any commercial gain and impacts taxable income!
Like IBM, Redhat, and dozens of other businesses out there right? Oh, those don't count? Even for businesses that don't have a direct stake in OSS, there's a huge capital advantage because it allows businesses to shift capital away from non-core expenses. ie. they're not wasting money on software. Thus businesses as a whole are strengthened becuase of OSS. Only the relatively few boxed software companies will feel the pinch. The rest do better.
Common argument, but it's still better to have centralized "dirty" energy sources that are controlled, maintained, and 100% regulated rather than millions of vehicles, a lot of which aren't maintained very much.
Secondly, it takes a non-trivial amount of energy to make gasoline. Getting rid of many oil refineries will help offset the addition electrical production.
Lastly, even though now power plants, and by exention hydrogen plants would be powered by coal, they don't have to be. They can be phased out with cleaner sources with fairly little impact on the rest of the infrastructure.
Thus, though it seems like you're just pushing the pollution sources around, by switching to a hydrogen transportation and moble energy infrastructure you gain many benefits over the current oil system.
Yeah, that's how they get you. They have a cop sitting on one of the side streets in an unmarked car with no lights. Then they just radio down the hill to the cop controlling the stop light. He then just waves you over.
I feel for ya, it's bullshit and I see it all the time. If you're in Pittsburgh, take note: Don't speed on forbes ave, either you'll have to slow down for red lights (they're timed) or you'll get caught in a speed trap.
That wouldn't happen to be Forbes Ave. coming out of Squirrel Hill would it? It's a major city artery that goes down hill for more than a mile. 25 speed limit.
I mean come on. I had a friend that was caught in a speed trap there going 32.
Actually, he's right. Studies show that cars tend to travel at a collective speed that depends more on the conditions of the road than the speed limit. That's not to say that there aren't asswipes that drive 90 in a 55 (or worse). It's saying that as a whole, drivers (who have their own self preservation in mind most of the time) will choose a resonable speed.
It also depends on how crazy the cops there are. On the PA turnpike, you'll pretty much never get pulled over for doing say 72 in a 65. Get into NJ on the AC expressway, and they'll nail you for going five miles over much more often.
Another point. While driving in the west across OK,TX,NM, and AZ I saw a lot of 70, and 75 speed limit signs. For a 70 speed limit I went 75, at 75, I went 75. And so did most if not all of the cars around me. I think it's much more important to match the speed of the traffic around you, to match the conditions of the road, rather than pay too much attention to an arbitrary sign.
Don't know how? You could probably 'ln -s/usr/bin/ssh/usr/bin/telnet' without anybody noticing much. Sure there may be "power users" of telnet, but they probably already know how to use ssh.
In my experience, an excel "power user" uses excel as an application development environment. "Buttons", application logic, database functionality, a power user uses all these things.
If you use a spreadsheet like it was meant to be used, than I haven't seen anything in OO.o's that is inadaquate. If you use excel for everything under the sun, you might find something that isn't there in OO.o.
Yeah, except that the Kessel system is *filled* with black holes. Apparently, to make the run through the whole group in 12 parsecs would put you close enough to several black holes, where you would need a fast ship to pass safely.
It seems that the "safe" route through the kessel system would require a meandering trial instead of a straighter line out to maintain distance from black holes for slower ships. Thus the shorter the distance the faster the craft.
Firefox 1.0.4 comes out at a whopping 5 megs for the windows version and 8 for the linux version. It's hardly big. If by big you mean feature bloat, then tell me what humongous load of features FF has added since 0.8. Lay out some facts yourself.
Yes memory usage isn't optimal, but considering that people (in my experience) usually have more FF tabs open than IE windows because it's easier to manage. Most people don't even notice it's taking up a lot of memory.
This is complete rumor. As yet, Microsoft has not made a committed response to this question. By the way, which version of CSS does FF support? What's the "latest" version? Hmmmm.
And yes, no browser fully conforms to the CSS2 standard, but if you've ever done CSS you know that working it for IE has some serious headaches involved. I have no reason to believe that IE7 will be any different.
8 to 10% seems to be a ceiling. I predict it will not go much higher, if at all.
What ceiling? FF growth has been continuous. Or are you just being a troll?
But flash *does* run on the vast majority of desktop platforms out there. Since this guys wants to do banking, I assume he's working on some sort of desktop system. Who runs a desktop that isn't x86, PPC, or SPARC?
If it's flash, why can't you use it in Linux? Flash is one of the few plugins that firefox will install with it's auto-plugin thingy.
Anyway, I've never heard of disposable CC numbers, it does sound handy. I think I'll have to look into too.
And for the "why ask slashdot, when you can google it in two minutes" aswer, it looks like, American Express, and MBNA offer them, but without signing up, I don't know what kind a mechanism they use. The PCworld article says something about "Orbiscom's O-power" application, but I can't find technicle details on it. Orbiscom's clients page says that most of the bigger CC people are dabbling in this sort of tech.
Unfortunately, with 90%(ish) of the market, Explorer IS the standard.
You are alright with businesses alienating 1 out of every 10 customers? If I was a business, that's an alarmingly high number. If I was a potential customer, I'd likely be driven away. That fact and the fact that it's not much harder to design for standards really makes me question *why* sites still tend to do IE specific stuff.
Not necessarily. The smaller program could use more naive methods of memory allocation and use. Additionally, the program could implement look-up tables instead of dynamically calculating values, etc.
The instruction size may be smaller, but the data size, and hence the total memory footprint, isn't necessarily so.
that denying the world the source code is not nice and undermines the reason we allow copyright in the first place. Information wants to be free.
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized. There are many situation where it makes sence to keep information proprietary. There are many situtations where the greater community will actually benefit from closed information.
Also, how is it not nice? Who do I harm if I keep my source closed? I may not be helping anybody, but I'm certainly not hurting them. Don't get me wrong, I think OSS is great, but there is still widespread *need* for proprietary software. Not nice? What a naive view.
It might make sense for businesses, but I'm not in the business of helping businesses to do better business.
I'd care about business if I were you. You're standard of living wouldn't be nearly as high if it weren't for the modern business model.
I've been treating ethics and morality as synonymes. Maybe you know something I don't?
A doctor who breaches doctor/patient confidentiality to proctect many others from harm may be morally sound but definately unethical. A journal who resists listing sources in certain cases is acting ethically, but may be immoral. They are two different words for a reason.
you can easily revert back all your changes without having to read through comments and figure out what you changed.
Thats what code versioning is for bud. The ability to go back to any version (or date) is priceless and it will work far more realiably than your "comment out" method. Old code belongs in the versioning database, *not* in the current code.
Furthermore, it's not -1, Wrong just because you have a system that you think is better.
As clumsy a plot devise as the ewoks were, (what? storm trooper armor doesn't protect against small *rocks*?), they were still much better than Jar-Jar.
If you couldn't understand Jar-Jar, like the ewoks, he would have been much more tolerable. Chewy and R2D2 are other examples of beloved non-humans, and I also attribute that to them not speaking english. C3PO? God some of those puns (What a drag!) and damn awful.
I think you've been blinded by fond childhood memories;)
The first of the movies I saw (I was four at the time) was ROTJ, and I didn't see the others until much later (~10). Still I rank ANH and TESB better than ROTJ. Blinded? I see faults with the orignal as well. But I see the same faults in the new movies. GL has had 20 years to work on it.
His way is the right way, since it's his creation.
Normally I'd agree with you, but in this case I'm going to have to differ.
Because Mozilla.org did the right thing and (mostly) ignored the vocal people in the community, and did what's best for Firefox, and not for the people who shout the loudest.
The mozilla foundation made a browser that was faster, simpler and slimmer. All of those things the community was clamoring for. What was it that moz.org did that went against the grain?
He can't "listen to the fans", because "the fans" is really millions of people with different opinions!
Well, there are consensus out there. Jar Jar was almost universally reviled, Han shot first, midiclorians (or whatever the hell those were), etc. Don't get me wrong, he is a fantastic visual artist. It's just that as a director he's suppose to make dialogue come out, move the story, motivate the actors, and in general make the movie come alive. And not use clumsy plot devices. The series is rife with those.
It seems as though (and this is not the first supposition) he thinks he is the be-all-end-all and is always right. His moving making skills have not seen an improvement or big change in 30 years. Look at how other directors evolve with their work. They'll tell you that there's always work to be done, and you never know enough. George seems to be content with the way he runs movies.
It's a shame because when he was establishing himself, he did some really cool stuff. When he was in school a lot of his stuff was remarkable, and it was about *content* not visuals. What has he *really* done since 89? Why doesn't he apply that same zest to the news Star Wars that he did to Indiana Jones?
Why not listen just a little bit to the vast masses, a la Ron Moore and the ecellent Battlestar Galatica? Why turn deaf ears and whine, "it's mine I'll do what I want!". Fine George, you go do that, it's your perogative. But you've fallen amoungst critics and die-hard fans alike.
No doubt. But I think his biggest problem, is that he wants it his way, and not want his die-hard fans want. Would Star Wars have been any less successful is Lucas targeted and listened to his core constituency? Doubtful. If he didn't insist on reworking (ruining also come to mind) the classics and having a doubious plan for the 1-3 trilogy, star wars would be *great*.
Instead we get mediocre fiction that is targeted to the 12 year old "average" movie goer, and over-hyped merchedise tie-ins. Woo. Wee.
I imagine the sceene from "On The Waterfront" with Star Wars as Marlon Brando and Lucas as his older brother:
"You don't understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let's face it. It was you, George."
As a lot of people have already pointed out, BK's distributed nature make it so that the clients can become servers. It's more of a peer-peer thing.
The advantage of this is that it's group friendly. You can have four teams of five each merge with their respective team leaders. The leaders then, are the only ones to merge with the main line. It's much more useful than branching alone, and the main line breaks less often.
Anyway, what he *could* do it give away the server and bundle the excellent gui tools and support. Now *that* would work.
I use Clearcase at work and I think it is the worst source control system
I'm glad to see that. I was actually trying to be fair to CC, because I, like you, despise it. To elaborate further, it's a hardware resource hog, it's a man power resource hog (my employer had *two* full time CC admins for 50 devs), it scales terribly, it is *far* too network sensitive (network is down or slow? say goodbye to any work today!), their distributed system is ugly, etc, etc, etc.
Then again I haven't used it in four years.
I also agree it would have been good business sense to open it. I might not have bet on it seven years ago, but I would've two years ago. And you're right. An open BitKeeper would wipe the OSS SCM market right out. There would be no reason not to use it. McVoy knows how good it is, but fails to see the potential.
Man, it's not often I reply to somebody who agreed with me, just to say I entirely agree with them;)
Slashdot Mirror
I use Ubuntu now and used Red Hat and Fedora through Core 2. To me the biggest reason to move to Fedora was if you wanted the heavy iron features like out-of-the-box selinux support and the virtualization features. It's also what you'd go with with the industry standard (not that I agree it's worth) RHCE. In short you'd probably want it if you're liberal enough not to get a redhat enterprise edition, but conservative enough not to plunge into Debian. Especially if you already have Redhat deployed elsewhere.
I like Fedora filling the gaps for people who didn't feel comfortable with Debian Unstable
It seems to me that Ubuntu fills this gap. I don't really know why people would go vanilla debian over ubuntu on the desktop. Servers, of course, but not desktops.
but it feels to me like Debian's a bigger organization with more resources to handle more packages than Fedora.
Oooh, I don't know if I agree with that either. Even though it seems Red Hat is loosening it's vice grip on fedora to give the community more control, it's still RedHat's baby. They have a *lot* vested in it. RedHat has a lot of resources and the fedora community is huge.
Is there reason to believe Fedora can continue competing without it's corportate ties?
On the desktop? Yes, but there's much more competition there. Still people feel comfortable with it's red hat roots. On the server? Absolutely, and I believe this is more what they are targeting. Workstations? Well there's still not as many tools in Fedora as are available for Windows to manage workstations, but as linux goes, it's probably what I'd deploy.
I'm a Ubuntu user myself, but I really haven't come across aptitude before. I didn't know what it was so I looked it up. According to its debian project listing:
aptitude is a terminal-based apt frontend with a number of useful features, including: a mutt-like syntax for matching packages in a flexible manner, dselect-like persistence of user actions, the ability to retrieve and display the Debian changelog of most packages, and extreme flexibility and customization.
So it's an ncurses(?) bases front-end to apt? Ubuntu's wiki adds:
aptitude - Curses viewer of packages installed or available. Aptitude can be used from the command-line in a similar way to apt-get, but only for some commands - install and remove being the most common. However, because aptitude keeps track of more information than apt-get does, it can be considered better at install and remove operations.
Ok, so it's good for installation and removing. But then what to use apt or synaptic for? Just upgrades? Can anybody clue me into why you would use apt or not use aptitude?
**slaps head** The yoda misquote aside...
big business should be protected from open source because it wipes out their profits without any commercial gain and impacts taxable income!
Like IBM, Redhat, and dozens of other businesses out there right? Oh, those don't count? Even for businesses that don't have a direct stake in OSS, there's a huge capital advantage because it allows businesses to shift capital away from non-core expenses. ie. they're not wasting money on software. Thus businesses as a whole are strengthened becuase of OSS. Only the relatively few boxed software companies will feel the pinch. The rest do better.
Common argument, but it's still better to have centralized "dirty" energy sources that are controlled, maintained, and 100% regulated rather than millions of vehicles, a lot of which aren't maintained very much.
Secondly, it takes a non-trivial amount of energy to make gasoline. Getting rid of many oil refineries will help offset the addition electrical production.
Lastly, even though now power plants, and by exention hydrogen plants would be powered by coal, they don't have to be. They can be phased out with cleaner sources with fairly little impact on the rest of the infrastructure.
Thus, though it seems like you're just pushing the pollution sources around, by switching to a hydrogen transportation and moble energy infrastructure you gain many benefits over the current oil system.
Reminds me of a favorite quote:
"Given enough time and money,eventually Microsoft will re-invent UNIX"
-Unknown
Anybody know the original source of this quote? A quick google says some say a slashdot comment, others a usenet sig, others IRC.
Yeah, that's how they get you. They have a cop sitting on one of the side streets in an unmarked car with no lights. Then they just radio down the hill to the cop controlling the stop light. He then just waves you over.
I feel for ya, it's bullshit and I see it all the time. If you're in Pittsburgh, take note: Don't speed on forbes ave, either you'll have to slow down for red lights (they're timed) or you'll get caught in a speed trap.
"Did you go at 75 indicated, or 75 actual?"
75 indicated, of course. If my speedometer is wrong how would I know what speed I was actually going?
That wouldn't happen to be Forbes Ave. coming out of Squirrel Hill would it? It's a major city artery that goes down hill for more than a mile. 25 speed limit.
I mean come on. I had a friend that was caught in a speed trap there going 32.
Actually, he's right. Studies show that cars tend to travel at a collective speed that depends more on the conditions of the road than the speed limit. That's not to say that there aren't asswipes that drive 90 in a 55 (or worse). It's saying that as a whole, drivers (who have their own self preservation in mind most of the time) will choose a resonable speed.
It also depends on how crazy the cops there are. On the PA turnpike, you'll pretty much never get pulled over for doing say 72 in a 65. Get into NJ on the AC expressway, and they'll nail you for going five miles over much more often.
Another point. While driving in the west across OK,TX,NM, and AZ I saw a lot of 70, and 75 speed limit signs. For a 70 speed limit I went 75, at 75, I went 75. And so did most if not all of the cars around me. I think it's much more important to match the speed of the traffic around you, to match the conditions of the road, rather than pay too much attention to an arbitrary sign.
some of them just don't know how to use ssh
/usr/bin/ssh /usr/bin/telnet' without anybody noticing much. Sure there may be "power users" of telnet, but they probably already know how to use ssh.
Don't know how? You could probably 'ln -s
Seriously, instead of
telnet me@host
do
ssh me@host
For the trivial case it's a drop in replacement.
In my experience, an excel "power user" uses excel as an application development environment. "Buttons", application logic, database functionality, a power user uses all these things.
If you use a spreadsheet like it was meant to be used, than I haven't seen anything in OO.o's that is inadaquate. If you use excel for everything under the sun, you might find something that isn't there in OO.o.
Yeah, except that the Kessel system is *filled* with black holes. Apparently, to make the run through the whole group in 12 parsecs would put you close enough to several black holes, where you would need a fast ship to pass safely.
It seems that the "safe" route through the kessel system would require a meandering trial instead of a straighter line out to maintain distance from black holes for slower ships. Thus the shorter the distance the faster the craft.
Tada.
With every release, FF gets bigger and bigger
Firefox 1.0.4 comes out at a whopping 5 megs for the windows version and 8 for the linux version. It's hardly big. If by big you mean feature bloat, then tell me what humongous load of features FF has added since 0.8. Lay out some facts yourself.
Yes memory usage isn't optimal, but considering that people (in my experience) usually have more FF tabs open than IE windows because it's easier to manage. Most people don't even notice it's taking up a lot of memory.
This is complete rumor. As yet, Microsoft has not made a committed response to this question. By the way, which version of CSS does FF support? What's the "latest" version? Hmmmm.
Microsoft isn't planning to go the whole way and make IE 7.0 fully CSS2 compliant...
And yes, no browser fully conforms to the CSS2 standard, but if you've ever done CSS you know that working it for IE has some serious headaches involved. I have no reason to believe that IE7 will be any different.
8 to 10% seems to be a ceiling. I predict it will not go much higher, if at all.
What ceiling? FF growth has been continuous. Or are you just being a troll?
Linux doesn't just run on x86, you know.
But flash *does* run on the vast majority of desktop platforms out there. Since this guys wants to do banking, I assume he's working on some sort of desktop system. Who runs a desktop that isn't x86, PPC, or SPARC?
If it's flash, why can't you use it in Linux? Flash is one of the few plugins that firefox will install with it's auto-plugin thingy.
Anyway, I've never heard of disposable CC numbers, it does sound handy. I think I'll have to look into too.
And for the "why ask slashdot, when you can google it in two minutes" aswer, it looks like, American Express, and MBNA offer them, but without signing up, I don't know what kind a mechanism they use. The PCworld article says something about "Orbiscom's O-power" application, but I can't find technicle details on it. Orbiscom's clients page says that most of the bigger CC people are dabbling in this sort of tech.
Have fun.
Unfortunately, with 90%(ish) of the market, Explorer IS the standard.
You are alright with businesses alienating 1 out of every 10 customers? If I was a business, that's an alarmingly high number. If I was a potential customer, I'd likely be driven away. That fact and the fact that it's not much harder to design for standards really makes me question *why* sites still tend to do IE specific stuff.
and smaller memory footprint
Not necessarily. The smaller program could use more naive methods of memory allocation and use. Additionally, the program could implement look-up tables instead of dynamically calculating values, etc.
The instruction size may be smaller, but the data size, and hence the total memory footprint, isn't necessarily so.
Sigh. I hate replying to ACs but here it goes.
that denying the world the source code is not nice and undermines the reason we allow copyright in the first place. Information wants to be free.
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized. There are many situation where it makes sence to keep information proprietary. There are many situtations where the greater community will actually benefit from closed information.
Also, how is it not nice? Who do I harm if I keep my source closed? I may not be helping anybody, but I'm certainly not hurting them. Don't get me wrong, I think OSS is great, but there is still widespread *need* for proprietary software. Not nice? What a naive view.
It might make sense for businesses, but I'm not in the business of helping businesses to do better business.
I'd care about business if I were you. You're standard of living wouldn't be nearly as high if it weren't for the modern business model.
I've been treating ethics and morality as synonymes. Maybe you know something I don't?
A doctor who breaches doctor/patient confidentiality to proctect many others from harm may be morally sound but definately unethical. A journal who resists listing sources in certain cases is acting ethically, but may be immoral. They are two different words for a reason.
WhitespaceCanbeJustasuseful.
Moderate -1, Naive
you can easily revert back all your changes without having to read through comments and figure out what you changed.
Thats what code versioning is for bud. The ability to go back to any version (or date) is priceless and it will work far more realiably than your "comment out" method. Old code belongs in the versioning database, *not* in the current code.
Furthermore, it's not -1, Wrong just because you have a system that you think is better.
Jar-Jar? What about the Ewoks?
;)
As clumsy a plot devise as the ewoks were, (what? storm trooper armor doesn't protect against small *rocks*?), they were still much better than Jar-Jar.
If you couldn't understand Jar-Jar, like the ewoks, he would have been much more tolerable. Chewy and R2D2 are other examples of beloved non-humans, and I also attribute that to them not speaking english. C3PO? God some of those puns (What a drag!) and damn awful.
I think you've been blinded by fond childhood memories
The first of the movies I saw (I was four at the time) was ROTJ, and I didn't see the others until much later (~10). Still I rank ANH and TESB better than ROTJ. Blinded? I see faults with the orignal as well. But I see the same faults in the new movies. GL has had 20 years to work on it.
His way is the right way, since it's his creation.
Normally I'd agree with you, but in this case I'm going to have to differ.
Because Mozilla.org did the right thing and (mostly) ignored the vocal people in the community, and did what's best for Firefox, and not for the people who shout the loudest.
The mozilla foundation made a browser that was faster, simpler and slimmer. All of those things the community was clamoring for. What was it that moz.org did that went against the grain?
He can't "listen to the fans", because "the fans" is really millions of people with different opinions!
Well, there are consensus out there. Jar Jar was almost universally reviled, Han shot first, midiclorians (or whatever the hell those were), etc. Don't get me wrong, he is a fantastic visual artist. It's just that as a director he's suppose to make dialogue come out, move the story, motivate the actors, and in general make the movie come alive. And not use clumsy plot devices. The series is rife with those.
It seems as though (and this is not the first supposition) he thinks he is the be-all-end-all and is always right. His moving making skills have not seen an improvement or big change in 30 years. Look at how other directors evolve with their work. They'll tell you that there's always work to be done, and you never know enough. George seems to be content with the way he runs movies.
It's a shame because when he was establishing himself, he did some really cool stuff. When he was in school a lot of his stuff was remarkable, and it was about *content* not visuals. What has he *really* done since 89? Why doesn't he apply that same zest to the news Star Wars that he did to Indiana Jones?
Why not listen just a little bit to the vast masses, a la Ron Moore and the ecellent Battlestar Galatica? Why turn deaf ears and whine, "it's mine I'll do what I want!". Fine George, you go do that, it's your perogative. But you've fallen amoungst critics and die-hard fans alike.
He likes the job. He likes creating stuff.
No doubt. But I think his biggest problem, is that he wants it his way, and not want his die-hard fans want. Would Star Wars have been any less successful is Lucas targeted and listened to his core constituency? Doubtful. If he didn't insist on reworking (ruining also come to mind) the classics and having a doubious plan for the 1-3 trilogy, star wars would be *great*.
Instead we get mediocre fiction that is targeted to the 12 year old "average" movie goer, and over-hyped merchedise tie-ins. Woo. Wee.
I imagine the sceene from "On The Waterfront" with Star Wars as Marlon Brando and Lucas as his older brother:
"You don't understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let's face it. It was you, George."
As a lot of people have already pointed out, BK's distributed nature make it so that the clients can become servers. It's more of a peer-peer thing.
The advantage of this is that it's group friendly. You can have four teams of five each merge with their respective team leaders. The leaders then, are the only ones to merge with the main line. It's much more useful than branching alone, and the main line breaks less often.
Anyway, what he *could* do it give away the server and bundle the excellent gui tools and support. Now *that* would work.
I use Clearcase at work and I think it is the worst source control system
;)
I'm glad to see that. I was actually trying to be fair to CC, because I, like you, despise it. To elaborate further, it's a hardware resource hog, it's a man power resource hog (my employer had *two* full time CC admins for 50 devs), it scales terribly, it is *far* too network sensitive (network is down or slow? say goodbye to any work today!), their distributed system is ugly, etc, etc, etc.
Then again I haven't used it in four years.
I also agree it would have been good business sense to open it. I might not have bet on it seven years ago, but I would've two years ago. And you're right. An open BitKeeper would wipe the OSS SCM market right out. There would be no reason not to use it. McVoy knows how good it is, but fails to see the potential.
Man, it's not often I reply to somebody who agreed with me, just to say I entirely agree with them