Look, Canonical picking up something else Mandriva did two years ago. Well, that's a huge surprise.
"So, users were left with sub-optimal choices. Convert the multimedia to an open format, acquire new media, or use a codec 'found' on the web, which may be illegal."
They inexplicably left out Option 4 - buy the commercial editions of Mandriva Linux 2007 or 2008, both of which came with a legally licensed copy of LinDVD. The commercial edition of 2008 also included Fluendo gstreamer codecs (as does 2008 Spring, and as will 2009).
"Sixty-one percent (61%) of Republicans reject government involvement in Internet content"
O, rly? So they're opposed to the PATRIOT Act, mandatory "family friendly filters" in publicly funded access points, and the DMCA, are they? Try asking them that.
"like the unreliable test for synthetic testosterone that cost Floyd Landis his 2006 Tour de France victory"
So this is basically bitterness at an American cheat getting caught? Okay, check.
It's fairly obvious what would happen if unrestricted doping were allowed: there would always be someone willing to take the most risky and dangerous enhancement substances available (or some government willing to compel its athletes to do it), and damn the long term consequences. It would quickly become impossible to win any form of professional sporting competition without behaviour highly dangerous to both short-term and long-term health, reducing any potential athlete's choices to: compete and risk possible sudden death and probable shortened life span, or don't compete (at least meaningfully). And sports fans would either stop being sports fans out of disgust quite quickly, or become very objectionable characters (I'd hate to be someone who supported an activity that essentially killed its participants).
An imperfect 'war on doping' is massively preferable to this outcome in just about all possible ways. I really don't see how you can reasonably argue otherwise.
Say the Conservatives: "'yet again the Government has proved itself unable to resist the temptation to take a power quite properly designed to combat terrorism to snoop on the lives of ordinary people in everyday circumstances.'""
"It is not right that we charge our police with combating crime and disorder and then tie their hands behind their backs in the name of Whitehall bureaucracy. Revising the RIPA framework so that authorisation - and all the paperwork that goes with it - is not required for basic police work is just one way the Conservatives will cut red tape to free more police onto our streets."
Is that the sweet sweet scent of hypocrisy? Why yes, yes it is.
Actually, I find it more readable like that. There's two ironies in your reply: it's entirely double spaced, and I am in fact gay. Notwithstanding, you're a homophobic twat, and I hope you suffer some kind of unpleasant experience today.
"Do any Slashdotters have a regular workout routine that can be performed in the privacy of the home to stave off those pounds?"
No. And frankly, that would be really rather damn depressing, wouldn't it?
You live (I guess) in the United States, so - let's see, how to put this - even if you're a tad over the optimum weight for your height, you are hardly going to represent a shocking sight to the local populace, let's face it. Get your ass outside and do something in the open air. Also, I find it a bit odd that just because you self-identify as a 'geek', your exercise must be geeky. Huhwha? I work for a Linux company. For exercise I play tennis most days and swim 2-4km every two to three days. Exercise isn't rocket science - just do something that tires you out, for an extended period of time. Voila, exercise! Best make it something you enjoy, otherwise you'll start to hate it in a remarkably short period of time, which for me at least rules out just about every form of 'indoor exercise' because they're repetitive, restricted and involve absolutely zero mental effort.
BTW, when people say they 'don't have time' to exercise, this usually means they don't want to, and not having time is a convenient excuse. It's amazing how few people 'don't have time' to watch TV, or read Slashdot.
For the same reason that it's perfectly possible to predict reasonably accurately what tens of million people will be doing on one specific day ten years in the future (e.g.: watching the Superbowl) but virtually impossible to predict what one person will be doing at 8:56p.m. next Tuesday.
When it comes to future prediction, large-scale trends are generally a lot easier to call than the irritating little details.
It's a sorta online information / update / Shiny Stuff portal thingy (yeah, so I'm vague on the details:>). The naming comes from Emtec. I suspect whoever came up with it wasn't entirely aware of the implications...*sigh*
It's mainly envisaged for the education market, AIUI. The idea is schools buy zillions of the GDiums and then kids can just carry their key from class to class or whatever. Also good for similar type office environments. The whole G-Key thing is really for that kinda setup, not for the individual end-user - I would expect people who buy a GDium to use as an individual consumer machine will just leave the G-Key plugged in pretty much all the time. No reason you can't do that.
Well, my name in the story is a link to my email address, which is @mandriva.com. But I agree that's a bit subtle. I just submit a story text to/. - it's up to them what to print. I guess they don't feel disclaimers are necessary. I suppose a lot of other stories submitted come from interested parties too...*shrug*
Actually, in the future, there will be exactly that. Once we can economically ship 16GB G-Keys (at first they'll be 8GB, I believe), it'll have a x86 build of Mandriva on the key alongside the GDium build.
With the initial 8GB keys, this won't be the case, but you will be able to access the home partition from other machines.
I honestly actually have no idea what the U.S. pricing will be. I haven't seen any numbers on that. I expect it'll probably be competitive with the Eee 900 / 1000 range and the Acer Aspire, which are kinda the most obvious competition I guess. But yeah, there's no finalized price set yet that I know of.
"On the contrary, it's downstream distributors who rely on changelog information in order to decide when to patch the kernels of their distributions, in order to keep their users safe."
No, it really isn't. No responsible kernel maintainer would rely solely on changelogs for information.
With dd-wrt you can also up the maximum connection limit to 2048 or 4096. The default on most routers is 512, which (in combination the long timeouts mentioned by the OP) is far too few for even a couple of machines running BT.
It took me several months of being driven absolutely bonkers by having to reboot my router every two days to figure this one out, but once I did install dd-wrt and up the limit to 2048, I've literally never needed to reboot my router due to the router's behaviour since.
Ubuntu's backports repositories are far smaller and less active than Mandriva's (just do a file listing on both and have a look). In practice, most 'backports' for Ubuntu are done via PPAs or just via projects posting packages on their websites, which I find a much more messy and potentially problematic system than a centralized backports repository (although it seems to work out okay for most people most of the time).
It is true that Ubuntu has slightly more packages than Mandriva (last I checked it was in the region of 20% more), mainly thanks to its Debian heritage. You can file a request for new packages at Bugzilla if you come across something useful that's not packaged.
I know Ubuntu works the same way as Mandriva with regards to official updates (in fact they're more conservative, if anything) - I did mention that most other distros do the same in my reply, and honestly I was a bit confused by the OP overall, as I don't see how what he wrote can actually be true...
Just for the record - non-free packages that can legally be redistributed to the general public (including NVIDIA and ATI proprietary graphics drivers) are now in a public repository,/non-free . They're also included in the One edition of Mandriva. Not trying to argue you out of Ubuntu or anything - just posting for the record in case anyone thinks things are still as they were when you left.:)
Well, use the live CD - that way if it doesn't work well, you haven't lost anything. That's usually the best way to test any distro.
The problem with your idea is that when something has just been released there aren't any reviews of it:). So there wouldn't be one to link to. Later in the cycle we'll have a Release Tour - see the 2008 Spring tour for an example of how this looks - but there wouldn't be any point making this for 2009 yet as it's still nowhere near complete and looks nothing like the final 2009 will.
If you just want to check out how MDV looks these days I wouldn't recommend touching this with a barge pole. Grab the 2008 Spring live CD (One) from the download page instead, and try that. It's changed a lot since the 8.x / 9.x days.
Well, it was my experience with SUSE every time I tried it, and it was clearly what the OP of this thread meant by his comment so I figured he had the same experience.
What I found is that if you make any manual modification to a configuration file that YaST controls, and then you run YaST (even for something unrelated), on quitting YaST it re-creates all the config files it controls, including the one you made a modification to, and removes that modification. It seems like this is also what the OP meant.
If this has been fixed with recent releases (I think the last time I tested SUSE was 10.0 or so), that's great.
If you're running a server why would you *want* to upgrade to the latest shiny version of XYZ all the time? That's just a recipe for pain.
My servers are still on Mandriva 2008. They'll run that till 2009 comes out. Or possibly 2009 Spring. Why waste time updating them to the Latest Spanking Shiny Version of Everything if they don't actually need it? In case you didn't know, Mandriva (like every other sensible distro) does not necessarily do full version upgrades to fix security issues. What that means is that if there's a security issue in XYZ 1.0 and it's fixed by XYZ 2.0, which also introduces a bunch of other changes, we won't update our XYZ package to 2.0 in the official update repositories, we'll backport the security fix to 1.0 and issue 1.0-1.1mdv (or whatever). So don't assume that because the version number of a distro package is not the absolute latest, it's vulnerable to some kind of security issue; it probably isn't. All decent distros have security mailing lists to help you keep on top of this kind of thing; if you run remotely accessible servers you really should subscribe to your distro's.
For those who always like to be on the bleeding edge of everything, we have the backports repositories, which are probably the most extensive such of any distro.
Slashdot Mirror
ext2 is (and always has been) an option in the MDV installer, it's labelled "Linux native".
Look, Canonical picking up something else Mandriva did two years ago. Well, that's a huge surprise.
"So, users were left with sub-optimal choices. Convert the multimedia to an open format, acquire new media, or use a codec 'found' on the web, which may be illegal."
They inexplicably left out Option 4 - buy the commercial editions of Mandriva Linux 2007 or 2008, both of which came with a legally licensed copy of LinDVD. The commercial edition of 2008 also included Fluendo gstreamer codecs (as does 2008 Spring, and as will 2009).
Well done. That was the point. Thank you for writing about it for so long. We needed that.
"Me: do you have backups of your documents and important files?
User: yes"
Ahahahaha! Hahahahahaha! Hahahahahahahahahahah!
*rolls in aisles*
*holds sides*
*wipes tears of laughter from eyes*
"Sixty-one percent (61%) of Republicans reject government involvement in Internet content"
O, rly? So they're opposed to the PATRIOT Act, mandatory "family friendly filters" in publicly funded access points, and the DMCA, are they? Try asking them that.
"like the unreliable test for synthetic testosterone that cost Floyd Landis his 2006 Tour de France victory"
So this is basically bitterness at an American cheat getting caught? Okay, check.
It's fairly obvious what would happen if unrestricted doping were allowed: there would always be someone willing to take the most risky and dangerous enhancement substances available (or some government willing to compel its athletes to do it), and damn the long term consequences. It would quickly become impossible to win any form of professional sporting competition without behaviour highly dangerous to both short-term and long-term health, reducing any potential athlete's choices to: compete and risk possible sudden death and probable shortened life span, or don't compete (at least meaningfully). And sports fans would either stop being sports fans out of disgust quite quickly, or become very objectionable characters (I'd hate to be someone who supported an activity that essentially killed its participants).
An imperfect 'war on doping' is massively preferable to this outcome in just about all possible ways. I really don't see how you can reasonably argue otherwise.
Say the Conservatives: "'yet again the Government has proved itself unable to resist the temptation to take a power quite properly designed to combat terrorism to snoop on the lives of ordinary people in everyday circumstances.'""
Sounds very impressive, yes?
Here's the self-same Conservatives supporting the extension of RIPA - the Regulation of Investigative Powers Act, another Act that was 'quite properly designed to combat terrorism':
"It is not right that we charge our police with combating crime and disorder and then tie their hands behind their backs in the name of Whitehall bureaucracy. Revising the RIPA framework so that authorisation - and all the paperwork that goes with it - is not required for basic police work is just one way the Conservatives will cut red tape to free more police onto our streets."
Is that the sweet sweet scent of hypocrisy? Why yes, yes it is.
Actually, I find it more readable like that. There's two ironies in your reply: it's entirely double spaced, and I am in fact gay. Notwithstanding, you're a homophobic twat, and I hope you suffer some kind of unpleasant experience today.
From the original article, by the owner of the list:
"It's like shooting a gun into a crowd of people, then walking away before seeing what happened."
So, marking an email as spam accidentally is "like" cold-blooded indiscriminate murder.
No, hold on a minute, I know -
it isn't!
Grow a sense of perspective, you self-important blowhard.
"Do any Slashdotters have a regular workout routine that can be performed in the privacy of the home to stave off those pounds?"
No. And frankly, that would be really rather damn depressing, wouldn't it?
You live (I guess) in the United States, so - let's see, how to put this - even if you're a tad over the optimum weight for your height, you are hardly going to represent a shocking sight to the local populace, let's face it. Get your ass outside and do something in the open air. Also, I find it a bit odd that just because you self-identify as a 'geek', your exercise must be geeky. Huhwha? I work for a Linux company. For exercise I play tennis most days and swim 2-4km every two to three days. Exercise isn't rocket science - just do something that tires you out, for an extended period of time. Voila, exercise! Best make it something you enjoy, otherwise you'll start to hate it in a remarkably short period of time, which for me at least rules out just about every form of 'indoor exercise' because they're repetitive, restricted and involve absolutely zero mental effort.
BTW, when people say they 'don't have time' to exercise, this usually means they don't want to, and not having time is a convenient excuse. It's amazing how few people 'don't have time' to watch TV, or read Slashdot.
For the same reason that it's perfectly possible to predict reasonably accurately what tens of million people will be doing on one specific day ten years in the future (e.g.: watching the Superbowl) but virtually impossible to predict what one person will be doing at 8:56p.m. next Tuesday.
When it comes to future prediction, large-scale trends are generally a lot easier to call than the irritating little details.
We already did, it's called Mandriva Flash. It's been on sale for a couple of years now.
Update on this - I'm told the European price "is expected to be _less_ than 400 euros".
It's a sorta online information / update / Shiny Stuff portal thingy (yeah, so I'm vague on the details :>). The naming comes from Emtec. I suspect whoever came up with it wasn't entirely aware of the implications...*sigh*
It's mainly envisaged for the education market, AIUI. The idea is schools buy zillions of the GDiums and then kids can just carry their key from class to class or whatever. Also good for similar type office environments. The whole G-Key thing is really for that kinda setup, not for the individual end-user - I would expect people who buy a GDium to use as an individual consumer machine will just leave the G-Key plugged in pretty much all the time. No reason you can't do that.
Well, my name in the story is a link to my email address, which is @mandriva.com. But I agree that's a bit subtle. I just submit a story text to /. - it's up to them what to print. I guess they don't feel disclaimers are necessary. I suppose a lot of other stories submitted come from interested parties too...*shrug*
Actually, in the future, there will be exactly that. Once we can economically ship 16GB G-Keys (at first they'll be 8GB, I believe), it'll have a x86 build of Mandriva on the key alongside the GDium build.
With the initial 8GB keys, this won't be the case, but you will be able to access the home partition from other machines.
As it says, the pricing isn't finalized.
I honestly actually have no idea what the U.S. pricing will be. I haven't seen any numbers on that. I expect it'll probably be competitive with the Eee 900 / 1000 range and the Acer Aspire, which are kinda the most obvious competition I guess. But yeah, there's no finalized price set yet that I know of.
"On the contrary, it's downstream distributors who rely on changelog information in order to decide when to patch the kernels of their distributions, in order to keep their users safe."
No, it really isn't. No responsible kernel maintainer would rely solely on changelogs for information.
With dd-wrt you can also up the maximum connection limit to 2048 or 4096. The default on most routers is 512, which (in combination the long timeouts mentioned by the OP) is far too few for even a couple of machines running BT.
It took me several months of being driven absolutely bonkers by having to reboot my router every two days to figure this one out, but once I did install dd-wrt and up the limit to 2048, I've literally never needed to reboot my router due to the router's behaviour since.
Ubuntu's backports repositories are far smaller and less active than Mandriva's (just do a file listing on both and have a look). In practice, most 'backports' for Ubuntu are done via PPAs or just via projects posting packages on their websites, which I find a much more messy and potentially problematic system than a centralized backports repository (although it seems to work out okay for most people most of the time).
It is true that Ubuntu has slightly more packages than Mandriva (last I checked it was in the region of 20% more), mainly thanks to its Debian heritage. You can file a request for new packages at Bugzilla if you come across something useful that's not packaged.
I know Ubuntu works the same way as Mandriva with regards to official updates (in fact they're more conservative, if anything) - I did mention that most other distros do the same in my reply, and honestly I was a bit confused by the OP overall, as I don't see how what he wrote can actually be true...
Just for the record - non-free packages that can legally be redistributed to the general public (including NVIDIA and ATI proprietary graphics drivers) are now in a public repository, /non-free . They're also included in the One edition of Mandriva. Not trying to argue you out of Ubuntu or anything - just posting for the record in case anyone thinks things are still as they were when you left. :)
Well, use the live CD - that way if it doesn't work well, you haven't lost anything. That's usually the best way to test any distro.
:). So there wouldn't be one to link to. Later in the cycle we'll have a Release Tour - see the 2008 Spring tour for an example of how this looks - but there wouldn't be any point making this for 2009 yet as it's still nowhere near complete and looks nothing like the final 2009 will.
The problem with your idea is that when something has just been released there aren't any reviews of it
If you just want to check out how MDV looks these days I wouldn't recommend touching this with a barge pole. Grab the 2008 Spring live CD (One) from the download page instead, and try that. It's changed a lot since the 8.x / 9.x days.
Well, it was my experience with SUSE every time I tried it, and it was clearly what the OP of this thread meant by his comment so I figured he had the same experience.
What I found is that if you make any manual modification to a configuration file that YaST controls, and then you run YaST (even for something unrelated), on quitting YaST it re-creates all the config files it controls, including the one you made a modification to, and removes that modification. It seems like this is also what the OP meant.
If this has been fixed with recent releases (I think the last time I tested SUSE was 10.0 or so), that's great.
If you're running a server why would you *want* to upgrade to the latest shiny version of XYZ all the time? That's just a recipe for pain.
My servers are still on Mandriva 2008. They'll run that till 2009 comes out. Or possibly 2009 Spring. Why waste time updating them to the Latest Spanking Shiny Version of Everything if they don't actually need it? In case you didn't know, Mandriva (like every other sensible distro) does not necessarily do full version upgrades to fix security issues. What that means is that if there's a security issue in XYZ 1.0 and it's fixed by XYZ 2.0, which also introduces a bunch of other changes, we won't update our XYZ package to 2.0 in the official update repositories, we'll backport the security fix to 1.0 and issue 1.0-1.1mdv (or whatever). So don't assume that because the version number of a distro package is not the absolute latest, it's vulnerable to some kind of security issue; it probably isn't. All decent distros have security mailing lists to help you keep on top of this kind of thing; if you run remotely accessible servers you really should subscribe to your distro's.
For those who always like to be on the bleeding edge of everything, we have the backports repositories, which are probably the most extensive such of any distro.