Maybe this has to do with the fact that conference rooms in the middle of the night with their lights switched off are not exactly an exciting scene to stream live?
In other words: the streaming servers are probably switched off. Try again tomorrow morning (Norwegian time).
I've watched some of the live streams yesterday and today, and overall it was quite impressive (the only comparison I have are realplayer streams of recorded TV newscasts at roughly the same bitrate, which always freeze to refill the buffer at some point).
I so totally agree with the parent post like I've never agreed with a slashdot post before;)
Sure, for small and simple programs you can resort to hand-crafted Makefiles and just skip all that autofoo business, no question.
But once you bring stuff like multiple libraries (even if it's just no-install static libraries) or conditional compilation (enable/disable features that rely on certain libraries for example) into the equation, you'll have an extremely hard time getting this right on most platforms with a hand-crafted Makefile.
Not to mention different versions of the tools required on one and the same platform.
Also, let's not forget that most developers do not have 15 boxes with different architectures/OSes to play around with at home. If you have the expertise and know about all those different platforms and operating systems and their respective quirks, you sure have my respect. I don't think that's particularly common though.
I really don't understand why everyone is complaining about the autofoo suite. It works great most of the time, and when it fails, it usually fails in known ways.
Heise is not a very open-source friendly news outlet. So take this with a grain of salt.
I don't have the slightest idea what you base that on.
Heise (who publishes c't magazine and iX magazine) is a very open-source friendly news outlet. Just have a look at a couple of months' worth of magazine covers and you will see that immediately. And if you still don't feel quite convinced, you might want to read the 'heise online' news ticker - even the worst babelfish translations will still make it blatantly obvious that they are very open source friendly.
Don't use your friends' lack of technical knowledge to compare every non-Debian distribution to Windows; you've mentioned nothing that can't be done on any reasonably complete Linux distribution. The hassle-free upgrading you praise is becoming a standard part of most distributions, though Debian was clearly the forerunner in this area. I'm glad you've found happiness with Debian, but I would caution you against evangelizing it too hard. Your admitted lack of up-to-date knowledge with other flavors Linux may very well surprise you someday. The rest of the world hasn't stood still.
It was not intention to 'evangelise', quite the opposite actually. I'm sorry if I conveyed this wrongly.
All of those friends have been using linux for a couple of years and are either computer professionals (system administration or professional programmer), or hobby-programmers that spend a considerable amount of time using their systems and developing on it. I was not talking about linux newbies. That is why I felt their experience was unlikely to be unusual.
I'm glad the rest of the world hasn't stood still, and I really hope that some day all systems will achieve a similar level of 'upgradability' as debian does today, and maybe even surpass it. Maybe some even offer it today. This can only be good for linux-based systems in general.
If someday a superior distribution emerges, I might well switch to it.
Personally, I try to refrain from 'evangelising' about distributions. The power of linux-based systems and open source in general lies in the variety of solutions to choose from, and while I will point out some alternatives to people who ask me about linux distributions, I will also tell them about my personal experience. It's just that - a personal experience.
Here is why I am likely to stick to debian in the foreseeable future:
it's not because of the philosophy (I love the philosophy, but it wouldn't keep me from switching to a better distro if that makes my life in front of the computer better)
it's not just because of apt
it's because the packages have an extremely high quality, and because of a long term hassle-free upgrade procedure
Let me explain this in a bit more detail:
I started using debian roughly 4 years ago, after having tried various other distributions for different amounts of time (admittedly I was a complete clueless newbie then and had only limited abilites to stray too far from the default install).
Since then I have been running exactly the same debian installation.
I have started with stable, then went to testing, then went to unstable. In this time, I've upgraded my cpu and mobo twice, replaced various hardware, and have upgraded my desktop environment through various fairly incompatible KDE versions, and painlessly went through the c++ ABI changes.
And all I've done in all that time is simply 'apt-get upgrade' or 'apt-get dist-upgrade'. Nothing else.
The package quality of debian packages is usually extremely high, and most package maintainers go to great lengths to make complicated upgrade procedures virtually invisible. And it works.
In the mean time, I have seen many of my friends repeatedly re-install their linux system from scratch, because upgrading simply didn't work out quite as expected. And I felt reminded of those good old windows times, where you just re-installed your system every half a year or so.
I don't want that. I want to install my system and keep it up-to-date and want to never have to re-install it (unless the box was compromised of course).
That's why I love debian, because it makes the daily package-juggling and -upgrading easy, and thus improves my quality-of-life-in-front-of-the-box considerably.
I can't say I'm up-to-date with other distributions any more, and I've got nothing against other distributions at all. I am fairly sure the installation procedure of most other distros is far superior to the current debian installer, and probably many have more user-friendly configuration tools as well.
I just watch all my friends doing things I don't want to do. And that makes me a happy debian user.
And for the same reason I would immediately decide for debian when it comes to setting up a linux box at work (partly of course because I know he system better).
The article is from the 26th of June and states that the proposal is due for parliamentary vote on June 30th (earlier than originally planned).
However, the vote has been postponed and is not going to take place on June 30th, at least according to more recent reports by the usually well-informed German heise.de news service.
This seems to contradict the article at least in spirit and gives the Open Source/Free Software community more time to gain momentum and turn the vote into the right direction.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe this has to do with the fact that conference rooms in the middle of the night with their lights switched off are not exactly an exciting scene to stream live?
In other words: the streaming servers are probably switched off. Try again tomorrow morning (Norwegian time).
I've watched some of the live streams yesterday and today, and overall it was quite impressive (the only comparison I have are realplayer streams of recorded TV newscasts at roughly the same bitrate, which always freeze to refill the buffer at some point).
Off topic, but ... Are there any examples of actual projects using mono that I could try out right now? (On Linux.)
Muine (Music player for Gnome) uses Mono and is a fully functional application.
I so totally agree with the parent post like I've never agreed with a slashdot post before ;)
Sure, for small and simple programs you can resort to hand-crafted Makefiles and just skip all that autofoo business, no question.
But once you bring stuff like multiple libraries (even if it's just no-install static libraries) or conditional compilation (enable/disable features that rely on certain libraries for example) into the equation, you'll have an extremely hard time getting this right on most platforms with a hand-crafted Makefile.
Not to mention different versions of the tools required on one and the same platform.
Also, let's not forget that most developers do not have 15 boxes with different architectures/OSes to play around with at home. If you have the expertise and know about all those different platforms and operating systems and their respective quirks, you sure have my respect. I don't think that's particularly common though.
I really don't understand why everyone is complaining about the autofoo suite. It works great most of the time, and when it fails, it usually fails in known ways.
Heise is not a very open-source friendly news outlet. So take this with a grain of salt.
I don't have the slightest idea what you base that on.
Heise (who publishes c't magazine and iX magazine) is a very open-source friendly news outlet. Just have a look at a couple of months' worth of magazine covers and you will see that immediately. And if you still don't feel quite convinced, you might want to read the 'heise online' news ticker - even the worst babelfish translations will still make it blatantly obvious that they are very open source friendly.
Am I the only one who saw an imaginary 'i' in there?
Don't use your friends' lack of technical knowledge to compare every non-Debian distribution to Windows; you've mentioned nothing that can't be done on any reasonably complete Linux distribution. The hassle-free upgrading you praise is becoming a standard part of most distributions, though Debian was clearly the forerunner in this area. I'm glad you've found happiness with Debian, but I would caution you against evangelizing it too hard. Your admitted lack of up-to-date knowledge with other flavors Linux may very well surprise you someday. The rest of the world hasn't stood still.
It was not intention to 'evangelise', quite the opposite actually. I'm sorry if I conveyed this wrongly.
All of those friends have been using linux for a couple of years and are either computer professionals (system administration or professional programmer), or hobby-programmers that spend a considerable amount of time using their systems and developing on it. I was not talking about linux newbies. That is why I felt their experience was unlikely to be unusual.
I'm glad the rest of the world hasn't stood still, and I really hope that some day all systems will achieve a similar level of 'upgradability' as debian does today, and maybe even surpass it. Maybe some even offer it today. This can only be good for linux-based systems in general.
If someday a superior distribution emerges, I might well switch to it.
Personally, I try to refrain from 'evangelising' about distributions. The power of linux-based systems and open source in general lies in the variety of solutions to choose from, and while I will point out some alternatives to people who ask me about linux distributions, I will also tell them about my personal experience. It's just that - a personal experience.
Here is why I am likely to stick to debian in the foreseeable future:
Let me explain this in a bit more detail:
I started using debian roughly 4 years ago, after having tried various other distributions for different amounts of time (admittedly I was a complete clueless newbie then and had only limited abilites to stray too far from the default install).
Since then I have been running exactly the same debian installation.
I have started with stable, then went to testing, then went to unstable. In this time, I've upgraded my cpu and mobo twice, replaced various hardware, and have upgraded my desktop environment through various fairly incompatible KDE versions, and painlessly went through the c++ ABI changes.
And all I've done in all that time is simply 'apt-get upgrade' or 'apt-get dist-upgrade'. Nothing else.
The package quality of debian packages is usually extremely high, and most package maintainers go to great lengths to make complicated upgrade procedures virtually invisible. And it works.
In the mean time, I have seen many of my friends repeatedly re-install their linux system from scratch, because upgrading simply didn't work out quite as expected. And I felt reminded of those good old windows times, where you just re-installed your system every half a year or so.
I don't want that. I want to install my system and keep it up-to-date and want to never have to re-install it (unless the box was compromised of course).
That's why I love debian, because it makes the daily package-juggling and -upgrading easy, and thus improves my quality-of-life-in-front-of-the-box considerably.
I can't say I'm up-to-date with other distributions any more, and I've got nothing against other distributions at all. I am fairly sure the installation procedure of most other distros is far superior to the current debian installer, and probably many have more user-friendly configuration tools as well.
I just watch all my friends doing things I don't want to do. And that makes me a happy debian user.
And for the same reason I would immediately decide for debian when it comes to setting up a linux box at work (partly of course because I know he system better).
Anyway, thanks for reading :-)
The article is from the 26th of June and states that the proposal is due for parliamentary vote on June 30th (earlier than originally planned).
However, the vote has been postponed and is not going to take place on June 30th, at least according to more recent reports by the usually well-informed German heise.de news service.
heise.de news article (in German)
This seems to contradict the article at least in spirit and gives the Open Source/Free Software community more time to gain momentum and turn the vote into the right direction.