The whole purpose of a representative democracy is to avoid the kind of administrative nightmare your system would be. We the people are supposed to give a damn and elect people who represent our interests. We're supposed to communicate with those representatives. Write them letters to say what laws we want. We can dream up new laws and suggest them, we don't have to just sit and wait for them to suggest laws for us to comment on. If the voters don't do this, then the number of people the representatives have to represent is reduced. This is where the campaign contributions come in. It gets you more time with the representatives in person. This in turn gives their opinions more weight. That's just human nature, you trust those you are familiar with more than those you are not.
Well, the reference you defended was likening peaceful protestors to terrorists. You defined an illegal activity engaged in by protestors, and the_mad_poster defined an illegal activity engaged in by terrorists. So while I agree that is was stretching the bounds of what you technically said, it was a logical way to prove the point that peaceful protestors should not be likened to terrorists purely based on the legality of their respective actions. The comparison should only be made on the actions themselves. Barricading a building to prevent government representatives without causing physical harm of damaging property is not similar to killing people. The motivation is the same but the actions are not, because of the underlying philosophy. So the reference really wasn't all that valid.
We get a choice between Moron and his party 1 and the other Moron and his party 2.
That's a result of voter trends over the generations. Over time, the majority of U.S. citizens have decided that it's not worth it to vote for anyone other than a Democrat or a Republican if you're even going to vote. As such, people who are more concerned about actually getting in office have to play this stupid game of getting into the party and having the party promote them to the public. The system in place was designed so that everyone has direct control over their local government up to the state level, and the state reps get together and pick the federal reps (electoral college, presidential appointess). We seem to have reversed it and all anyone really pays attention to is the presidential campaign, which we don't even vote for directly! If people would get off there asses and give a damn about who is in their state legislature, and who is in the U.S. Congress, then we wouldn't end up with such dimwits in the oval office. There would be more diversity in the opinions presented in debates that matter. Life would be better.
I'm sorry you've had such a poor experience interacting with your representatives. I have received a few positive responses. The most promising response to date was when I wrote the MN Attorney General to voice my opposition to the proposed settlement. His response was that he agreed, and included a stack of papers about an inch thick. His office had sent me copies of the documents which supported his stance. Don't think I've had that much luck with a Senator though.
I'm not sure what it is that these mythical "most users" are asking for that Debian doesn't provide.
That's part of the problem. Debian supporters just don't realise how much of a difference pretty GUI config tools and fancy hardware detection makes for those mythical users. You and I know how to jump on #debian and get help configuring/etc/X11/XF86Config, but those mythical users don't. They want a pretty window that lets them say 'run at this resolution with this color depth and this refresh rate.' They don't even want to say I have this kind of graphics controller and this kind of monitor. These mythical users are the sort who don't want to open a shell window and use ncurses based tools to hand select kernel modules and edit/etc/* with vi or emacs. They want GUIs, and Debian doesn't give GUIs to them. Seriously, if you have a spare machine, install Red Hat 9 or Fedora, and have a look at the applications in the System Tools and System Settings program groups (redhat-config-* on the command line). Combine those with hardware detection at bootup (kudzu on RedHat, forget what knoppix uses) and you have a distro that n00bs can wear out their index finger configuring by mouse, and us old salts can tweak by hand the old-fashioned way with text editors.
however you can always install a minimal stable system and immediately change your sources from stable to unstable and `apt-get dist-upgrade` and continue from there
That's actually the only 'supported' way of getting testing/unstable, as far as I've been led to believe. When I went looking at Debian in the last couple of months, I was looking for a way to get net-install CD's for unstable, and went to #debian. Instead of 'look here' or 'there aren't any', I went through 30 minutes of 'why don't you want to install base stable and distr-upgrade? I can't possibly fathom why any sane person would not want to do it that way.'
which I hand't downloaded or burnt, assuming I could get a decent install with only one disc like Debian can
Now that's a troll and a half. With Debian, you get 6 CDs, make your own CD set, or do a network install. With RedHat, you get 3 CDs, make your own CD set, or do a network install.
knoppix is nice, but "unstable with some 'testing' bits" it is not. The sources.list was over a page long (counting blank lines and comments, but still) the last time I tried it (3.3, I believe). After doing the kpx-hdinstall and rebooting, try doing an apt-get [dist-]upgrade. Knoppix is great as a static system, that's what it was designed for.
Finally find a good deb source for Gnome 2.4
Debian unstable already packages 2.4.
The best way to use knoppix is to take note of the hardware config it generates (what modules are loaded, X config file, mouse config, etc), then install plain Debian unstable and configure the same way knoppix did. But the next-generation Debian installer seems to worked out many of the hardware detection issues that plague Debian n00bs.
You can't seriously believe market share has anything to do with whether a company can deliver a consistent platform.
Not directly, no. But in order to appeal to large enough demographic to gain that large a market share, in today's landscape, they would need to have a more generic system like Microsoft. So while I don't necessarily see any causality, I do feel there is a correlation.
I just wonder what was going through Ransom's head when he decided to hire Darl.Probably the same thing going through record producers' heads when they decided to give Jerry Dorsey the improved stage name of Englebert Humperdink: a massive void, deprived of any rational thought.
In light of this quote, I'm inclined to agree with you: (Caldera began discussing) what we can do through UnitedLinux to indemnify people who had used both Unix and Linux. Apparently, Darl took that in a little different direction than we intended. Apparently, Ransom also thinks that there is some sort of legal reconciliation necessary for people using Linux and UNIX.
The mostly likely reason for some consumer device not working out-of-box with Red Hat is legal concerns of patent licensing (witness the mp3 fiasco). If the protocol is patented with no GPL-friendly license, or in any way encoded for content 'protection' (DMCA) then Red Hat won't touch it due to U.S. laws. Mandrake and SUSE are foreign companies and aren't subject to these laws, and Debian has a larger network of package sources, which includes foreign repositories, for just this purpose. Yes, it sucks, but Fedora has the potential to fix this. It supports third party repositories very nicely, so everyone just has to be sure and modularize packages to add the missing functionality (like the xmms-mp3 package adds MP3 support to xmms). When that happens, Fedora will have the save level of support for such things as Debian. Isn't that cool?
Maybe because they announced educational/volume discount licensing a week ago. Granted, he should have mentioned it, but as someone with such "particular interest," you can't have been paying too close attention.
sufficient desktop market share that the peripheral makers get incompatibilities straightened out before release
Apple has sufficient market share to get device manufacturers to write drivers in the first place. I think it's rather that Apple has small enough market share to garuantee a consistent platform for device manufacturers to write stable drivers for.
I was actually addressing your comment on taxes. It sounded to my like you thought he was saying taking a job as a programmer at $150 K would net him $50 K after taxes.
Just how much profit do the manufacturers make writing drivers as opposed to selling hardware?
Spending the money to pay the programmers to write the drivers is the deterrent. The money that customers spend buying the hardware because the programmers wrote the software is the incentive. When the incentive becomes greater than the deterrent, the company gives it serious consideration. If 50k people write to Kodak and say "I will buy your camera if you publish a Linux driver for it," they can run the math and maybe decide that the investment will be worth the return.
To put it another way, the release of the software for other platforms will increase hardware sales (witness iTunes as a vehicle to sell iPods).
-1, not failing to install if the packages don't verify
I've always seen it throw warnings if you don't have the signing key installed (like using Freshrpms.net RPM files with `rpm -ivh` without first importing the key with `rpm --import`). The up2date software previously only worked with RH controlled servers, and it did fail when GPG signatures were unverifiable. So to install software with a bad signature you had to do so manually with the command-line tools and would see warnings.
I don't think it was foolish. If you used the ISO images to do installs/upgrades, the GPG keys were obtained from there. And with [signed] md5 checksums available to verify the images, you know the GPG keys that RPM uses to verify the packages is trustworthy. Since you can have faith in the keys, you can have faith in the package. this has, in fact, long been one of the things people traditionally point out in the deb vs rpm holy war, in favor of rpm. From the comments I'm seeing, it looks like GPG checking is being added to apt in debian (the apt pacakges on freshrpms.net and fedora.us for Red Hat and Fedora Core already use rpm --checksig). I think it should be added to dpkg, so then apt can just relegate the verification to the actual package installation tool.
So that they know, in no uncertain terms, that such conduct is unacceptable and is costing them your business. Tell them, professionally, that you consider their actions to be unethical, and as a result are taking your business elsewhere, and recommending to all clients, peers, and friends to avoid SCO products. Make no mention of technical quality or value of SCO products. Leave no question that you can't do business with a company willing to make baseless claims affecting other companies' businesses, file frivolous lawsuits, and engage in stock pump and dump scams.
on his first episode, when he said 'his name' while the bell was ringing, he actually said the real names of the other actors. Think I saw that on one of Fox's blooper shows.
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The whole purpose of a representative democracy is to avoid the kind of administrative nightmare your system would be. We the people are supposed to give a damn and elect people who represent our interests. We're supposed to communicate with those representatives. Write them letters to say what laws we want. We can dream up new laws and suggest them, we don't have to just sit and wait for them to suggest laws for us to comment on. If the voters don't do this, then the number of people the representatives have to represent is reduced. This is where the campaign contributions come in. It gets you more time with the representatives in person. This in turn gives their opinions more weight. That's just human nature, you trust those you are familiar with more than those you are not.
Well, the reference you defended was likening peaceful protestors to terrorists. You defined an illegal activity engaged in by protestors, and the_mad_poster defined an illegal activity engaged in by terrorists. So while I agree that is was stretching the bounds of what you technically said, it was a logical way to prove the point that peaceful protestors should not be likened to terrorists purely based on the legality of their respective actions. The comparison should only be made on the actions themselves. Barricading a building to prevent government representatives without causing physical harm of damaging property is not similar to killing people. The motivation is the same but the actions are not, because of the underlying philosophy. So the reference really wasn't all that valid.
That's a result of voter trends over the generations. Over time, the majority of U.S. citizens have decided that it's not worth it to vote for anyone other than a Democrat or a Republican if you're even going to vote. As such, people who are more concerned about actually getting in office have to play this stupid game of getting into the party and having the party promote them to the public. The system in place was designed so that everyone has direct control over their local government up to the state level, and the state reps get together and pick the federal reps (electoral college, presidential appointess). We seem to have reversed it and all anyone really pays attention to is the presidential campaign, which we don't even vote for directly! If people would get off there asses and give a damn about who is in their state legislature, and who is in the U.S. Congress, then we wouldn't end up with such dimwits in the oval office. There would be more diversity in the opinions presented in debates that matter. Life would be better.
I'm sorry you've had such a poor experience interacting with your representatives. I have received a few positive responses. The most promising response to date was when I wrote the MN Attorney General to voice my opposition to the proposed settlement. His response was that he agreed, and included a stack of papers about an inch thick. His office had sent me copies of the documents which supported his stance. Don't think I've had that much luck with a Senator though.
That's part of the problem. Debian supporters just don't realise how much of a difference pretty GUI config tools and fancy hardware detection makes for those mythical users. You and I know how to jump on #debian and get help configuring /etc/X11/XF86Config, but those mythical users don't. They want a pretty window that lets them say 'run at this resolution with this color depth and this refresh rate.' They don't even want to say I have this kind of graphics controller and this kind of monitor. These mythical users are the sort who don't want to open a shell window and use ncurses based tools to hand select kernel modules and edit /etc/* with vi or emacs. They want GUIs, and Debian doesn't give GUIs to them. Seriously, if you have a spare machine, install Red Hat 9 or Fedora, and have a look at the applications in the System Tools and System Settings program groups (redhat-config-* on the command line). Combine those with hardware detection at bootup (kudzu on RedHat, forget what knoppix uses) and you have a distro that n00bs can wear out their index finger configuring by mouse, and us old salts can tweak by hand the old-fashioned way with text editors.
That's actually the only 'supported' way of getting testing/unstable, as far as I've been led to believe. When I went looking at Debian in the last couple of months, I was looking for a way to get net-install CD's for unstable, and went to #debian. Instead of 'look here' or 'there aren't any', I went through 30 minutes of 'why don't you want to install base stable and distr-upgrade? I can't possibly fathom why any sane person would not want to do it that way.'
Now that's a troll and a half. With Debian, you get 6 CDs, make your own CD set, or do a network install. With RedHat, you get 3 CDs, make your own CD set, or do a network install.
Finally find a good deb source for Gnome 2.4
Debian unstable already packages 2.4.
The best way to use knoppix is to take note of the hardware config it generates (what modules are loaded, X config file, mouse config, etc), then install plain Debian unstable and configure the same way knoppix did. But the next-generation Debian installer seems to worked out many of the hardware detection issues that plague Debian n00bs.
I give up, where do you get a G4 for $800? The online store starts at $1300 for G4s.
Not directly, no. But in order to appeal to large enough demographic to gain that large a market share, in today's landscape, they would need to have a more generic system like Microsoft. So while I don't necessarily see any causality, I do feel there is a correlation.
I just wonder what was going through Ransom's head when he decided to hire Darl.Probably the same thing going through record producers' heads when they decided to give Jerry Dorsey the improved stage name of Englebert Humperdink: a massive void, deprived of any rational thought.
In light of this quote, I'm inclined to agree with you: (Caldera began discussing) what we can do through UnitedLinux to indemnify people who had used both Unix and Linux. Apparently, Darl took that in a little different direction than we intended. Apparently, Ransom also thinks that there is some sort of legal reconciliation necessary for people using Linux and UNIX.
The mostly likely reason for some consumer device not working out-of-box with Red Hat is legal concerns of patent licensing (witness the mp3 fiasco). If the protocol is patented with no GPL-friendly license, or in any way encoded for content 'protection' (DMCA) then Red Hat won't touch it due to U.S. laws. Mandrake and SUSE are foreign companies and aren't subject to these laws, and Debian has a larger network of package sources, which includes foreign repositories, for just this purpose. Yes, it sucks, but Fedora has the potential to fix this. It supports third party repositories very nicely, so everyone just has to be sure and modularize packages to add the missing functionality (like the xmms-mp3 package adds MP3 support to xmms). When that happens, Fedora will have the save level of support for such things as Debian. Isn't that cool?
Maybe because they announced educational/volume discount licensing a week ago. Granted, he should have mentioned it, but as someone with such "particular interest," you can't have been paying too close attention.
Apple has sufficient market share to get device manufacturers to write drivers in the first place. I think it's rather that Apple has small enough market share to garuantee a consistent platform for device manufacturers to write stable drivers for.
I was actually addressing your comment on taxes. It sounded to my like you thought he was saying taking a job as a programmer at $150 K would net him $50 K after taxes.
Spending the money to pay the programmers to write the drivers is the deterrent. The money that customers spend buying the hardware because the programmers wrote the software is the incentive. When the incentive becomes greater than the deterrent, the company gives it serious consideration. If 50k people write to Kodak and say "I will buy your camera if you publish a Linux driver for it," they can run the math and maybe decide that the investment will be worth the return.
To put it another way, the release of the software for other platforms will increase hardware sales (witness iTunes as a vehicle to sell iPods).
He's saying he'd rather make $50K tax free from the mob then $150K gross less taxes paid to the IRS.
I've always seen it throw warnings if you don't have the signing key installed (like using Freshrpms.net RPM files with `rpm -ivh` without first importing the key with `rpm --import`). The up2date software previously only worked with RH controlled servers, and it did fail when GPG signatures were unverifiable. So to install software with a bad signature you had to do so manually with the command-line tools and would see warnings.
I don't think it was foolish. If you used the ISO images to do installs/upgrades, the GPG keys were obtained from there. And with [signed] md5 checksums available to verify the images, you know the GPG keys that RPM uses to verify the packages is trustworthy. Since you can have faith in the keys, you can have faith in the package. this has, in fact, long been one of the things people traditionally point out in the deb vs rpm holy war, in favor of rpm. From the comments I'm seeing, it looks like GPG checking is being added to apt in debian (the apt pacakges on freshrpms.net and fedora.us for Red Hat and Fedora Core already use rpm --checksig). I think it should be added to dpkg, so then apt can just relegate the verification to the actual package installation tool.
Does apt-get check signatures before installing?
Sun is a SCO licensee.
So that they know, in no uncertain terms, that such conduct is unacceptable and is costing them your business. Tell them, professionally, that you consider their actions to be unethical, and as a result are taking your business elsewhere, and recommending to all clients, peers, and friends to avoid SCO products. Make no mention of technical quality or value of SCO products. Leave no question that you can't do business with a company willing to make baseless claims affecting other companies' businesses, file frivolous lawsuits, and engage in stock pump and dump scams.
I think it should be referred to as the GNU/Linux Operating Environment, and the Linux Operating System.
on his first episode, when he said 'his name' while the bell was ringing, he actually said the real names of the other actors. Think I saw that on one of Fox's blooper shows.