I agree - if it's not 1.x, don't put it in a distro intended for new users. That's just stupid.
There should be a repository labeled "Beta crap that will break your system if YOU want to" - this is where stuff like Beryl and most of the wireless stuff Ubuntu uses should be.
Linux is starting to get a rep for being the OS that ships with 4,000 packages, most of which are half-written and don't work properly. That may have been appropriate ten years ago when most Linux stuff WAS half-written, but it's not now. Linux, even with a teensy two or three percent market share, is in no position to get a rep for being crap.
While I'm ranting, I'm also sick of apps that have a "help" button that goes to a page that says "you're on your own." If you don't HAVE help, don't put the goddamn button there!
"Release early and often" does NOT mean "release crap and let everyone be your alpha testers." Alpha testing is YOUR job, developers!
There you go - proof of what I've been saying. They pushed eye candy while your laptop and wireless support is still crap.
The distro priorities today are way out of whack with what is needed by new and longtime users.
And people are talking at cross purposes. Most people who think Ubuntu is fine are running it on vanilla desktops, as I am with my Kubuntu. No problems there. But try running it on a laptop or with wireless or consumer electronic devices - stuff that new users NEED to work correctly. That's where it fails big time.
Meantime the distros are hyping a beta eye candy product that doesn't even work properly and can't even be used by most people without highend video cards.
"The target audience for something like beryl doesn't know enough to use linux anyhow. These are people who are captivated by glitz and chrome. They're prisoners of Bill through and through."
Exactly - and these are exactly the sort of people who should NOT be fed BETA-status software. All Ubuntu does by shoving this stuff out the door and hyping it is create people who will hate Linux for "not working".
Meanwhile, the installation, package management, wireless and laptop support goes by the boards - all of which are critical for new users and even long-time users.
This isn't just an Ubuntu problem - it's endemic with most of the distros today. Eye candy wins out over usability and reliability.
"It really kills me to see people spend so much time to get this running when the "wow" factor wears off fairly quickly."
That is EXACTLY WHY Feisty is buggy, as I've been saying for some time now.
The distros are spending WAY too much time implementing sexy but useless eye candy to compete with Vista while allowing the rest of the distro to lag, especially wireless and laptop support which are CRITICAL for new users.
Shuttleworth (and the rest of the distro heads), WAKE YOUR ASS UP! Start spending more on testing and implementing APPS THAT WORK rather than eye candy! Leave the beta crap for in a beta repository for people who LIKE to break their systems!
This is the same New York Times that told us there were WMDs in Iraq?
This is the same New York Times that tells us today that Iran is making nukes?
Right.
Let's hear from the Washington Times - owned by Reverend Moon - first, okay?
Oh, wait...
Maybe the Washington Post? Uhm, the one with the columnist whose wife is a neocon? The paper that said "Scooter" Libby didn't do anything wrong?
Wait, wait... I seem to recall a remark by CIA chief William Casey...something about the CIA either owns or controls ALL the US mainstream media...and a Mother Jones article (IIRC) about how even most of the alternative publications hire ex-CIA analysts as writers...
" * I calculated (24 hours per day) * 30 days a week = 720 hours
* Power bills are generally measured in kilowatt hours or "kW/h"s. Power rates might be as much as $0.12 per kW/h.
* Our total cost of having the computer on 24/7 for the month in this scenario would be as follows:
*.4 kW (400watts) * 720 Hours * $0.12kW/h = $34.56
That kind of money could pay for a cell phone! If you want to save some cash, keep on reading."
Er, excuse me. If your machine is not running for 720 hours at a cost of $35/month, I would suggest you dump the machine - since you aren't using it.
And if you ARE using it, then you're NOT paying $35/month for NOTHING, right?
How much of that time is the machine idle, and what does THAT time cost? Maybe $5, $10 - $1.95?
At least, he could have calculated the eight hours it presumably is not doing anything when he is asleep - unless of course his system is set to run virus scans and download updates (or run cron jobs) during that time?
Personally I don't think a computer should ever be idle - but it's admittedly hard to find things for it to do that don't require supervision in many cases.
I'm not against energy conservation, but like most environmental issues, I suspect there are more important things to worry about than whether consumer computers are sleeping or not. Given the reputed energy bill in Google's new data centers back East, I'd say that probably overshadows most of the consumer machines in that state. And since Intel is forecasting everybody using massively parallel data centers to provide computing services in the future, maybe the energy cost of that should be considered - especially since you will STILL need a consumer computer - albeit maybe a small, low power one - to ACCESS those data centers. And the more portable it is, the smaller the energy source - as in hard-to-dispose of safely old batteries?
As usual, all of this is oversimplified by the environmentalists.
Oh, really? Are you SURE the sample is sent off to a lab?
I knew an inmate at Leavenworth who was contesting his conviction for several reasons - a search warrant with a "judge's" signature in the handwriting of the arresting officer was one reason. Another reason was the search warrant was based on confiscated material which was allegedly sent to a lab and identified as drugs.
Only the inmate contacted the lab - and the lab never heard of that case and said so in writing.
The inmate had a cheapo lawyer - which is about not having the resources to hire a good one. So he had to do the field work from prison that his lawyer should have done.
Hmm, just read yesterday that some Senators or whoever went to Cuba and didn't notice ANY "totalitarian surveillance" anywhere.
Unless Cuba's gotten real technologically good at hiding it, I suspect their "totalitarian" nature has been overrated.
Meanwhile, the US released a known terrorist and sent him back to Miami to be welcomed for downing a Cuban airliner years ago. He's up for extradition to South America for the crime, but the US is refusing to extradite him.
One man's terrorist is...fill in the blanks.
So I don't think you have to look far for "more totalitarian governments."
They cost maybe $6 for Epson black and $7 for color. Never had a problem with them. Compare that to $30 or so for "real" Epson cartridges. And they aren't "refills" but originally manufactured cartridges, supposedly under ISO standards.
You'd have to be nuts to pay the kind of money for ink cartridges that the printer manufacturers want you to pay.
Given the crap software that HP wants to install on your systems now (750MB of crap for their OfficeJet 6310! plus drivers that port scan your system!), I'd say HP is going out of business at some point.
They had the full songs up on the Bebo page at one point, but took them down after a while, but not before I got the whole versions of all three of the songs they posted.
The OfficeJet 6310 has SEVEN HUNDRED FIFTY MEGABYTES of support software for it. It installs a DOZEN or more drivers on your machine, some of which appear to PORT SCAN the ENTIRE PORT RANGE OVER AND OVER, with others that will peg your CPU at 100%.
Obviously this new line of HP junk has so much crap associated with it that it can't even fit on a DVD, so they have to sell it as a managed service since no ordinary IT user could possibly control this POS.
I can no longer recommend HP to anyone. Buy Epson, folks. HP is done. Put a fork in it.
Well, "techies" tend to work in IT positions for companies, so those companies end up running Debian as servers and even desktops.
But you simply can't include Debian as an enterprise, commercially supported distro in the same way as Red Hat Enterprise and Suse. $25 million for HP is a drop in the bucket in that regard.
An article I found sales the following:
HP had $600 million in Linux-based server sales in the fourth quarter of 2006 alone, which would suggest that, if the multiples are the same, HP's Linux-related business (including open source software riding on top of it and the services to implement it and support it) is now probably closer to $9 billion to $10 billion a year. That makes Linux and open source software about a tenth of HP's overall business--very roughly speaking...
Last summer, HP was the first of the top-tier systems providers to offer support on Debian Linux--in particular, on the "Sarge" Debian 3.1 release, which came out in June 2005. And while this is not a big revenue generator for HP, it shows that the company is interested in moving beyond the relatively easy task of offering commercial Linux from Red Hat and Novell and into the relatively uncharted waters of Debian Linux.
"There has been quite a bit of demand for Debian lately," explains Small. Since announcing Debian support last August, the Debian support, which is done by HP's own techies, has driven about $25 million in systems sales--primarily in Europe. He says that Debian is particularly popular in Germany, Spain, and South Africa. "A lot of customers develop applications in Debian, but then they have to go through the hassle of deploying on Red Hat or SUSE Linux because these are the Linuxes with enterprise-class support."
Yeah, and if everybody came together, we'd all love each other and there'd be ponies...
Get a clue. It's not going to happen.
Unless of course YOU want to PAY ALL these people a decent salary to work on YOUR distro.
Which is what Shuttleworth is trying, basically.
And I doubt he's going to succeed in anything less than another ten years or so, if then, because even he doesn't have the money to pay everybody with an idea to work for him.
As someone once said, "Most of the smart people in the IT industry do NOT work at Microsoft."
The above two posts are about Mandriva not doing adequate testing.
Folk, this is now true about ALL of the distros. There appear to be no exceptions. I've seem this problem with Kubuntu, Mandriva, Suse, Fedora - you name it.
The simple fact is that Linux and all its attendent packages is now TOO COMPLEX for even the commercial Linux companies to adequately test their releases. Too much stuff - especially stuff that will affect new users like installation failings and package management screwups - is falling through the cracks.
I don't know whether this is because they simply don't have enough manpower, or whether they are relying too much on upstream testing from the OSS developers, or whether they are concentrating too much on "eye candy" like Compiz and virtualization stuff like Xen to spend time on their installation and package management processes, but it is definitely becoming a serious issue that needs to be recognized and addressed by ALL the distros.
There was an article today on another site about "The Workaround Trap" in which the author declared that one problem is that when people are confronted with a problem, they prefer to suggest "workarounds" rather than FIXING THE PROBLEM. I think this is becoming ubiquitous in Linux and that approach is going to hurt in the long run. You can't make a mistake, then make more mistakes trying to "work around" the first mistake.
This sort of mindset is endemic in the entire IT industry - and it's just one reason why "nothing works and nobody cares."
Well, to be fair, when last I used Mandriva - 2006 version - the only "hack" you had to do was go to a Web site, select your repositories, then cut and past the command line the Web site generated for you into a terminal and hit return.
Dumb that it had to be done that way, but it worked fine. No matter what the legalities of what repositories, Mandriva should have a way to configure the repositories without having to go anywhere outside of Mandriva.
Once the repositories were set, package management was about as easy as it is in the Kubuntu I use now. Synaptic works pretty well. While Adept isn't great, it works fairly well for updates.
Mandriva in general I think is a better distro for newbies than Ubuntu or Kubuntu. While the greater range of installed packages might be overwhelming for some newbies, I think this doesn't overshadow the general better design of Mandriva. I dislike (X)buntu's blurring of root and normal user for one thing, and I think they also have poorer testing of their stuff due to less manpower than Mandriva. I also dislike the dumbing down of the system management tools.
At the moment I'm hanging in with Kubuntu since I don't really want to take the time to switch back to Mandriva. The only reason I switched from it was that I was dumb enough to do a full upgrade of Mandriva 2006 to 2007 shortly after 2007 was released. Naturally, the upgrade broke the system - and with a few hundred MB of upgrade, how do you tell what broke it? I should have waited several months for the bugs to be fixed and then done a clean install. Since I'd heard good things about Ubuntu, I decided to try Kubuntu. After various stupid tricks, I decided it was adequate but not great. It works okay for me day to day, aside from a problem with the wallpaper changer that occasionally kills my desktop when it encounters a corrupt image file.
If this product is like ninety percent of Microsoft products other than Windows itself and Office (and maybe XBox - is that FINALLY making a profit?) - it's going no where, won't be adopted by anybody, and is recognized as a total POS.
Besides which, by end of the month, somebody will reverse engineer it anyway.
I was going to say exactly the same thing, only phrased as "Duh".
I got sentenced to Federal prison by a Federal judge who HIMSELF should be in Federal prison due to his involvement with the INSLAW conspiracy.
Quoting from a quick Google site on the INSLAW case:
"But a similar program, DALITE, was developed under another LEAA grant by D. Lowell Jensen, the Alameda County (Calif.) District Attorney. In the mid-1970s, the two programs vied for a lucrative Los Angeles County contract and Inslaw won out. (Early in his career, Ed Meese worked under Jensen at the Alameda County District Attorney's office. Jensen was later appointed to Meese's Justice Department during the Reagan presidency.)...
Brewer was then hired into the Department of Justice specifically to oversee the contract of his former employer. (The DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility ruled there was no conflict of interest.) He would later tell a federal court that everything he did regarding Inslaw was approved by Deputy Attorney General Lowell Jensen, the same man who once supervised DALITE, the product which lost a major contract to Inslaw in the 1970s....
The string of lawsuits and widening allegations caught the eye of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jack Brooks, D-Texas, who in 1989 launched a three-year investigation into the Inslaw affair. In the resulting report, the Committee suggested that among others, Edwin Meese, while presidential counselor and later as attorney general, and D. Lowell Jensen, a former assistant and deputy attorney general and now a US district judge in San Francisco, conspired to steal PROMIS."
This is the same judge who sentenced me. I found out about his past history when another inmate showed me a book on the INSLAW case and related matters. It's nice to find out that the guy that just put you behind bars also belongs there - and for considerably more stolen money!
I thought all the use of current computer, cell phone and DVD devices were all the gadgets the movie needed. On the other hand, maybe it was all just a ploy for product ad placement in the movie.
Otherwise, I thought the movie was great. The initial foot chase scene was definitely up to Bond standards, except that there were no vehicles involved (unless you count the earth mover). It sure established Daniel Craig as someone who has the physique to do the next three or four movies without looking like he needs a wheelchair.
And the babes were first-rate. I mean, Catarina Murino was incredible, and Eva Green was no slouch. Even the bad girl, Ivana Milicevic, was tall and hot.
I'm sick and tired of waiting thirty seconds or more for somebody's slow ass Web server or puny pipe to feed me my porn!
This is nearly as bad as twenty or thirty years ago sitting at a green screen dumb terminal waiting for the mainframe to respond. At least then the wait times were shorter!
Not to mention the times the sites are totally down, or "you do not have permission to access this page" because some moron misconfigured his Apache Web server. (Remember that idiot in some Southern city who thought the site was hacked because the Apache configuration page was up instead of the home page?)
Run stats on your goddamn Web sites! Then buy another box or pay for more bandwidth! Or better yet, get the fuck off the Net because you don't know what you're doing!
Are you listening,/. goofs?
Anybody who thinks the Net is ready for "software as a Web service" is out of his goddamn mind. No company in its right mind would ever trust company business to the Net as the only option. It's hard enough to get the stuff on the company servers to work right. Trust somebody ELSE to do it right? It is to laugh,
Uhm, how many "newbies" moving from Windows have ever HEARD of IRC?
I don't even use it - although I probably should.
I do agree that the Ubuntu community has a lot of great FAQs and support forums. I just hope Shuttleworth isn't relying on that instead of running a decent testing program.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree - if it's not 1.x, don't put it in a distro intended for new users. That's just stupid.
There should be a repository labeled "Beta crap that will break your system if YOU want to" - this is where stuff like Beryl and most of the wireless stuff Ubuntu uses should be.
Linux is starting to get a rep for being the OS that ships with 4,000 packages, most of which are half-written and don't work properly. That may have been appropriate ten years ago when most Linux stuff WAS half-written, but it's not now. Linux, even with a teensy two or three percent market share, is in no position to get a rep for being crap.
While I'm ranting, I'm also sick of apps that have a "help" button that goes to a page that says "you're on your own." If you don't HAVE help, don't put the goddamn button there!
"Release early and often" does NOT mean "release crap and let everyone be your alpha testers." Alpha testing is YOUR job, developers!
There you go - proof of what I've been saying. They pushed eye candy while your laptop and wireless support is still crap.
The distro priorities today are way out of whack with what is needed by new and longtime users.
And people are talking at cross purposes. Most people who think Ubuntu is fine are running it on vanilla desktops, as I am with my Kubuntu. No problems there. But try running it on a laptop or with wireless or consumer electronic devices - stuff that new users NEED to work correctly. That's where it fails big time.
Meantime the distros are hyping a beta eye candy product that doesn't even work properly and can't even be used by most people without highend video cards.
It's ridiculous.
"The target audience for something like beryl doesn't know enough to use linux anyhow. These are people who are captivated by glitz and chrome. They're prisoners of Bill through and through."
Exactly - and these are exactly the sort of people who should NOT be fed BETA-status software. All Ubuntu does by shoving this stuff out the door and hyping it is create people who will hate Linux for "not working".
Meanwhile, the installation, package management, wireless and laptop support goes by the boards - all of which are critical for new users and even long-time users.
This isn't just an Ubuntu problem - it's endemic with most of the distros today. Eye candy wins out over usability and reliability.
Here it is in plain English:
"It really kills me to see people spend so much time to get this running when the "wow" factor wears off fairly quickly."
That is EXACTLY WHY Feisty is buggy, as I've been saying for some time now.
The distros are spending WAY too much time implementing sexy but useless eye candy to compete with Vista while allowing the rest of the distro to lag, especially wireless and laptop support which are CRITICAL for new users.
Shuttleworth (and the rest of the distro heads), WAKE YOUR ASS UP! Start spending more on testing and implementing APPS THAT WORK rather than eye candy! Leave the beta crap for in a beta repository for people who LIKE to break their systems!
This is the same New York Times that told us there were WMDs in Iraq?
This is the same New York Times that tells us today that Iran is making nukes?
Right.
Let's hear from the Washington Times - owned by Reverend Moon - first, okay?
Oh, wait...
Maybe the Washington Post? Uhm, the one with the columnist whose wife is a neocon? The paper that said "Scooter" Libby didn't do anything wrong?
Wait, wait... I seem to recall a remark by CIA chief William Casey...something about the CIA either owns or controls ALL the US mainstream media...and a Mother Jones article (IIRC) about how even most of the alternative publications hire ex-CIA analysts as writers...
Maybe the Onion?
From TFA:
.4 kW (400watts) * 720 Hours * $0.12kW/h = $34.56
" * I calculated (24 hours per day) * 30 days a week = 720 hours
* Power bills are generally measured in kilowatt hours or "kW/h"s. Power rates might be as much as $0.12 per kW/h.
* Our total cost of having the computer on 24/7 for the month in this scenario would be as follows:
*
That kind of money could pay for a cell phone! If you want to save some cash, keep on reading."
Er, excuse me. If your machine is not running for 720 hours at a cost of $35/month, I would suggest you dump the machine - since you aren't using it.
And if you ARE using it, then you're NOT paying $35/month for NOTHING, right?
How much of that time is the machine idle, and what does THAT time cost? Maybe $5, $10 - $1.95?
At least, he could have calculated the eight hours it presumably is not doing anything when he is asleep - unless of course his system is set to run virus scans and download updates (or run cron jobs) during that time?
Personally I don't think a computer should ever be idle - but it's admittedly hard to find things for it to do that don't require supervision in many cases.
I'm not against energy conservation, but like most environmental issues, I suspect there are more important things to worry about than whether consumer computers are sleeping or not. Given the reputed energy bill in Google's new data centers back East, I'd say that probably overshadows most of the consumer machines in that state. And since Intel is forecasting everybody using massively parallel data centers to provide computing services in the future, maybe the energy cost of that should be considered - especially since you will STILL need a consumer computer - albeit maybe a small, low power one - to ACCESS those data centers. And the more portable it is, the smaller the energy source - as in hard-to-dispose of safely old batteries?
As usual, all of this is oversimplified by the environmentalists.
Oh, really? Are you SURE the sample is sent off to a lab?
I knew an inmate at Leavenworth who was contesting his conviction for several reasons - a search warrant with a "judge's" signature in the handwriting of the arresting officer was one reason. Another reason was the search warrant was based on confiscated material which was allegedly sent to a lab and identified as drugs.
Only the inmate contacted the lab - and the lab never heard of that case and said so in writing.
The inmate had a cheapo lawyer - which is about not having the resources to hire a good one. So he had to do the field work from prison that his lawyer should have done.
Hmm, just read yesterday that some Senators or whoever went to Cuba and didn't notice ANY "totalitarian surveillance" anywhere.
Unless Cuba's gotten real technologically good at hiding it, I suspect their "totalitarian" nature has been overrated.
Meanwhile, the US released a known terrorist and sent him back to Miami to be welcomed for downing a Cuban airliner years ago. He's up for extradition to South America for the crime, but the US is refusing to extradite him.
One man's terrorist is...fill in the blanks.
So I don't think you have to look far for "more totalitarian governments."
They cost maybe $6 for Epson black and $7 for color. Never had a problem with them. Compare that to $30 or so for "real" Epson cartridges. And they aren't "refills" but originally manufactured cartridges, supposedly under ISO standards.
You'd have to be nuts to pay the kind of money for ink cartridges that the printer manufacturers want you to pay.
Given the crap software that HP wants to install on your systems now (750MB of crap for their OfficeJet 6310! plus drivers that port scan your system!), I'd say HP is going out of business at some point.
I'm busy listening to Andrea Corr's "Shame On You" antiwar song from her new solo album to be released in June by Atlantic.
Check out the 30-second sample on her MySpace page or her Bebo page.
They had the full songs up on the Bebo page at one point, but took them down after a while, but not before I got the whole versions of all three of the songs they posted.
All the rest JUST HAPPEN to be running Vista Ultimate.
Oh, please, this is a fucking advertisement for Dell products.
Don't waste my time with this drivel.
The OfficeJet 6310 has SEVEN HUNDRED FIFTY MEGABYTES of support software for it. It installs a DOZEN or more drivers on your machine, some of which appear to PORT SCAN the ENTIRE PORT RANGE OVER AND OVER, with others that will peg your CPU at 100%.
Obviously this new line of HP junk has so much crap associated with it that it can't even fit on a DVD, so they have to sell it as a managed service since no ordinary IT user could possibly control this POS.
I can no longer recommend HP to anyone. Buy Epson, folks. HP is done. Put a fork in it.
Naturally, being a typical
No, I was an armed bank robber.
That make you feel better, asshole?
"substantially more genes in chimps evolved in ways that were beneficial than was the case with human genes"
Well, "techies" tend to work in IT positions for companies, so those companies end up running Debian as servers and even desktops.
But you simply can't include Debian as an enterprise, commercially supported distro in the same way as Red Hat Enterprise and Suse. $25 million for HP is a drop in the bucket in that regard.
An article I found sales the following:
HP had $600 million in Linux-based server sales in the fourth quarter of 2006 alone, which would suggest that, if the multiples are the same, HP's Linux-related business (including open source software riding on top of it and the services to implement it and support it) is now probably closer to $9 billion to $10 billion a year. That makes Linux and open source software about a tenth of HP's overall business--very roughly speaking...
Last summer, HP was the first of the top-tier systems providers to offer support on Debian Linux--in particular, on the "Sarge" Debian 3.1 release, which came out in June 2005. And while this is not a big revenue generator for HP, it shows that the company is interested in moving beyond the relatively easy task of offering commercial Linux from Red Hat and Novell and into the relatively uncharted waters of Debian Linux.
"There has been quite a bit of demand for Debian lately," explains Small. Since announcing Debian support last August, the Debian support, which is done by HP's own techies, has driven about $25 million in systems sales--primarily in Europe. He says that Debian is particularly popular in Germany, Spain, and South Africa. "A lot of customers develop applications in Debian, but then they have to go through the hassle of deploying on Red Hat or SUSE Linux because these are the Linuxes with enterprise-class support."
Yeah, and if everybody came together, we'd all love each other and there'd be ponies...
Get a clue. It's not going to happen.
Unless of course YOU want to PAY ALL these people a decent salary to work on YOUR distro.
Which is what Shuttleworth is trying, basically.
And I doubt he's going to succeed in anything less than another ten years or so, if then, because even he doesn't have the money to pay everybody with an idea to work for him.
As someone once said, "Most of the smart people in the IT industry do NOT work at Microsoft."
See, now, here we have another example.
The above two posts are about Mandriva not doing adequate testing.
Folk, this is now true about ALL of the distros. There appear to be no exceptions. I've seem this problem with Kubuntu, Mandriva, Suse, Fedora - you name it.
The simple fact is that Linux and all its attendent packages is now TOO COMPLEX for even the commercial Linux companies to adequately test their releases. Too much stuff - especially stuff that will affect new users like installation failings and package management screwups - is falling through the cracks.
I don't know whether this is because they simply don't have enough manpower, or whether they are relying too much on upstream testing from the OSS developers, or whether they are concentrating too much on "eye candy" like Compiz and virtualization stuff like Xen to spend time on their installation and package management processes, but it is definitely becoming a serious issue that needs to be recognized and addressed by ALL the distros.
There was an article today on another site about "The Workaround Trap" in which the author declared that one problem is that when people are confronted with a problem, they prefer to suggest "workarounds" rather than FIXING THE PROBLEM. I think this is becoming ubiquitous in Linux and that approach is going to hurt in the long run. You can't make a mistake, then make more mistakes trying to "work around" the first mistake.
This sort of mindset is endemic in the entire IT industry - and it's just one reason why "nothing works and nobody cares."
Well, to be fair, when last I used Mandriva - 2006 version - the only "hack" you had to do was go to a Web site, select your repositories, then cut and past the command line the Web site generated for you into a terminal and hit return.
Dumb that it had to be done that way, but it worked fine. No matter what the legalities of what repositories, Mandriva should have a way to configure the repositories without having to go anywhere outside of Mandriva.
Once the repositories were set, package management was about as easy as it is in the Kubuntu I use now. Synaptic works pretty well. While Adept isn't great, it works fairly well for updates.
Mandriva in general I think is a better distro for newbies than Ubuntu or Kubuntu. While the greater range of installed packages might be overwhelming for some newbies, I think this doesn't overshadow the general better design of Mandriva. I dislike (X)buntu's blurring of root and normal user for one thing, and I think they also have poorer testing of their stuff due to less manpower than Mandriva. I also dislike the dumbing down of the system management tools.
At the moment I'm hanging in with Kubuntu since I don't really want to take the time to switch back to Mandriva. The only reason I switched from it was that I was dumb enough to do a full upgrade of Mandriva 2006 to 2007 shortly after 2007 was released. Naturally, the upgrade broke the system - and with a few hundred MB of upgrade, how do you tell what broke it? I should have waited several months for the bugs to be fixed and then done a clean install. Since I'd heard good things about Ubuntu, I decided to try Kubuntu. After various stupid tricks, I decided it was adequate but not great. It works okay for me day to day, aside from a problem with the wallpaper changer that occasionally kills my desktop when it encounters a corrupt image file.
If this product is like ninety percent of Microsoft products other than Windows itself and Office (and maybe XBox - is that FINALLY making a profit?) - it's going no where, won't be adopted by anybody, and is recognized as a total POS.
Besides which, by end of the month, somebody will reverse engineer it anyway.
Microsoft is going to put Flash out of business?
Email me when this happens.
thinking about the Web as a business conduit - it's utter unreliability.
And it's not unreliable because of the protocols, or the design, or the routers, or any of that.
It's unreliable because of the companies running it.
They don't get enough hardware or bandwidth to do their job. It's that simple.
And that isn't going to change.
Any company that exposes itself to the risk of running its business dependently on the Net is asking for trouble.
Sun's notion that "the network is the computer" is totally wrong and always will be wrong.
Only where YOU CONTROL the network is that statement true.
Trust another chimpanzee to do their job?
It is to laugh.
I was going to say exactly the same thing, only phrased as "Duh".
I got sentenced to Federal prison by a Federal judge who HIMSELF should be in Federal prison due to his involvement with the INSLAW conspiracy.
Quoting from a quick Google site on the INSLAW case:
"But a similar program, DALITE, was developed under another LEAA grant by D. Lowell Jensen, the Alameda County (Calif.) District Attorney. In the mid-1970s, the two programs vied for a lucrative Los Angeles County contract and Inslaw won out. (Early in his career, Ed Meese worked under Jensen at the Alameda County District Attorney's office. Jensen was later appointed to Meese's Justice Department during the Reagan presidency.)...
Brewer was then hired into the Department of Justice specifically to oversee the contract of his former employer. (The DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility ruled there was no conflict of interest.) He would later tell a federal court that everything he did regarding Inslaw was approved by Deputy Attorney General Lowell Jensen, the same man who once supervised DALITE, the product which lost a major contract to Inslaw in the 1970s....
The string of lawsuits and widening allegations caught the eye of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jack Brooks, D-Texas, who in 1989 launched a three-year investigation into the Inslaw affair. In the resulting report, the Committee suggested that among others, Edwin Meese, while presidential counselor and later as attorney general, and D. Lowell Jensen, a former assistant and deputy attorney general and now a US district judge in San Francisco, conspired to steal PROMIS."
This is the same judge who sentenced me. I found out about his past history when another inmate showed me a book on the INSLAW case and related matters. It's nice to find out that the guy that just put you behind bars also belongs there - and for considerably more stolen money!
I thought all the use of current computer, cell phone and DVD devices were all the gadgets the movie needed. On the other hand, maybe it was all just a ploy for product ad placement in the movie.
Otherwise, I thought the movie was great. The initial foot chase scene was definitely up to Bond standards, except that there were no vehicles involved (unless you count the earth mover). It sure established Daniel Craig as someone who has the physique to do the next three or four movies without looking like he needs a wheelchair.
And the babes were first-rate. I mean, Catarina Murino was incredible, and Eva Green was no slouch. Even the bad girl, Ivana Milicevic, was tall and hot.
I'm sick and tired of waiting thirty seconds or more for somebody's slow ass Web server or puny pipe to feed me my porn!
This is nearly as bad as twenty or thirty years ago sitting at a green screen dumb terminal waiting for the mainframe to respond. At least then the wait times were shorter!
Not to mention the times the sites are totally down, or "you do not have permission to access this page" because some moron misconfigured his Apache Web server. (Remember that idiot in some Southern city who thought the site was hacked because the Apache configuration page was up instead of the home page?)
Run stats on your goddamn Web sites! Then buy another box or pay for more bandwidth! Or better yet, get the fuck off the Net because you don't know what you're doing!
Are you listening,
Anybody who thinks the Net is ready for "software as a Web service" is out of his goddamn mind. No company in its right mind would ever trust company business to the Net as the only option. It's hard enough to get the stuff on the company servers to work right. Trust somebody ELSE to do it right? It is to laugh,
Uhm, how many "newbies" moving from Windows have ever HEARD of IRC?
I don't even use it - although I probably should.
I do agree that the Ubuntu community has a lot of great FAQs and support forums. I just hope Shuttleworth isn't relying on that instead of running a decent testing program.