Don't bother. Read the comments here, supposedly enlightened geeks seriously compare Putin's administration with stalinism, which is both hilarious - because the claim is so deliciously absurd - and scary - because people seem to swallow media spin hook, line and sinker.
The irony of people, who mindlessly regurgitate media spin as the absolute truth without question and cry about death of democracy in my country, return to monarchy or some shit is staggering.
Oh, and my personal favourite here was a guy, who posted anonymously about his precious wifey hating on Putin, because otherwise scary KGB would come and inject him with polonium or something. Obviously, our security service has nothing better to do than track down idiotic astroturfers on a nerd blog in USA. And yet, the sheep follow - just take a look at the followup comments.
It will, most likely, teach him a valuable skill to convert any distribution to Slackware using sufficient number of make installs.
Re:You are completely retarded.
on
IPv6 Essentials
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· Score: 1
IPv6 is more secure because communications within a subnet use a special address coding that (a) can never leave the subnet (b) can never be introduced from outside the subnet, and (c) can be positively identified as coming from inside the subnet.
How is this different from reserved for local usage subnets like 10.0.0.0/8? With arguments like this one, it's no surpise the adoption is slow.
QoS has a single field in IPv4 that has no implementation attached to it, and is thus implemented as an afterthought in a collection of vendor-specific ways.
QoS at the network protocol layer is not some magical silver bullet or "next best thing". It's good, but it's not good enough.
IPv6 autoconfiguration is STATELESS. It doesn't require a server to figure out what addresses it has available, which ones it's handed out already, which ones have expired, etc, etc. DHCP is nice, but it requires maintenance. You can tell me how easy DHCP is to configure all day long, but it'll always be tougher than none at all.
So you are saying I should radically change my network infrastructure, so that I don't have to run dhcpd of all things?! Yeah, right, this idea will sell really well.
Re:Address space is too wide
on
IPv6 Essentials
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· Score: 1
MAC address only have to be unique inside one network segment. What's your point?
Sorry to burst your little groupthink bubble there, but is as possible to write big, well-coded and very readable applications in Perl as it is in any other serious language. If you are unable to code well in some $LANGUAGE, it is your incompetence that is the problem, not $LANGUAGE itself.
Yeah, I know, hotspot compilation down to native code, Java guy rant,.NET guy rant, blah blah blah. In the end, its still interpreted - its just a very very smart optimizing interpreter.
Yeah, I know, gcc, object files, native code, blah blah blah. In the end, C code is still interpreted - it's just a very very smart optimizing caching interpreter.
What dimwit could mod this drivel insightful is beyond me.
First, any half-decently written malware will function just fine under limited user rights, nothing prevents you from sending spam or whatever they do under non-administrative account.
Second, user data are actually the only thing worth of something on a typical desktop machine. You could always reinstall Windows, but this won't bring back your photos or spreadsheets. Unless you start sandboxing potentionally vulnerable software (think MSIE) your strategy will get you nothing.
Windows-only, I'm sure. Buying an operating system for the privilege of using an ebook reader - thanks, I think I'll stay with my Palm (or buy Nokia 770). The pricepoint is also pretty ridiculous for the kind of functionality the device offers.
Those are the very same people who brought us viruses starting automatically on disk insertion (unthinkable on PCs before MS), viruses in mail (unthinkable before MS), DOS attacks using font renderer in the kernel and other wonders of technological innovation in the art of pwning the customer.
Exactly right. You foreigners probably don't know, but we already had our share of "wars against piracy". Discs bulldozed on national TV and whatsuch.
There actually was a time (about 7-8 years ago) when pirated discs disappeared from the retail for several months. Unsurprisingly, it didn't stick. Piracy is a big business here, controlled by OUR mobs, it's not just some pop and mom CD-RW operation. So our government will generate some hogwash for RIAA and GW Bush and everything will stay the same.
Which brings us to the present day. The Chechens have no love lost for the Russians who have for more than a hundred years been trying to fuck them over. This process is still going strong. To call them terrorists is quite like beating somebody into a coma and then calling him an intolerable bully since he had the guts to throw a stone in your window after he had miraculously recovered.
It doesn't matter. Those who commit terrorist acts (e.g. blowing up innocent civilians, taking those civilians as hostages and killing them) would be called terrorists. Who beat whom into the pulp is largely irrelevant to this issue. This is your basic strawman argument, but thank you for playing.
As I said, geopolitical and/or separatism related problems are always very, very ugly. Take kurds, take chechens, whatever. I didn't even argue, remember?
I don't live in Russia, I live in one of those neighbouring countries who have also just recently seen the same horror and who are now being painted very black by the famous and very capable Russian propaganda machine.
Yep, I usually read on foreign news sites how famous Russian propaganda machine paints everyone black. I'm yet to see this black paint in our media, but it doesn't really matter, does it?
Russia -- where most press and all TV-stations are state-controlled.
Yeah, tell me about this so called mainstream free press in the USA. Fox News, right?
Russia -- where courts are in the President's pocket.
Having courts in the corporation's pocket is somehow better, I suppose?
Russia -- which uses air-bombers and heavy artillery against the very people, it claims are its citizens (although they disagree).
I dunno, noone bombed me (yet). Actions against separatism are ALWAYS ugly, pick any country. Nice of you to single out my country like this.
Russia -- where regional governors are appointed by the President.
Yes, we don't have your loose federation structure. So what? Everyone should be exactly like the motherlode of freedom, the USA? Thanks, but no thanks.
Russia -- where the Communist Party is among the strongest.
I hate to break it to you, but we (as the silent majority) don't really give a lot of shit about parties. We've just been screwed too much by communist crooks or democrate crooks or whatever other crooks.
You complain about random searches in NYC subways? In Russia you are obligated to carry identification with you at all times and present it to any law enforcer upon request.
Again, you have your rules - we have ours. You think that not having ID is your God-given right, well, it doesn't work here. I don't give a lot of shit about it either, but I guess it's a matter or perspective.
Unhappy about racial profiling here? If you are dark-skinned (thus looking like a Chechen), you will be harassed and periodically searched on the streets in Russia. And not in some red-neck backwater, but in the shiny newly-rich capital of Moscow.
Yes, it's a valid issue. You have your terrorist ghosts in the middle east, we have ours in the Caucasia. Had them for hundreds of years, to be specific.
If you are non-white looking -- don't go to St. Petersburgh (Russia's other capital -- the "sophisticated" one). Russian skin-heads have been attacking non-whites (Asian students primarily) there recently, with police looking the other way.
Oh, come on. You make it sound like asian looking people are being shot on sight here. There are stupid nazist fucks everywhere, it's no reason to spread sensationalistic nonsense. You probably read your free press too much (j/k).
And just in case - I'm white russian living in Saint-Petersburg.
Oh, brother. Mac UI consistency? You mean, classic or Aqua or metallic thingies and whatever custom interface Jobbs envisioned for specific application based on abovementioned toolkits?
I don't even want to start on Windows UI consistency, it's just ridiculous. For example, Windows doesn't have any human interface guidelines whatsoever. I recall some semi-coherent instructions written in an obscure place at MSDN - but even Microsoft never followed those, they just stamp new widgets around like there is no tomorrow and week after every stupid shareware developer starts copying them. Remember those stupid flat menus which suddenly surfaced in Office? Right. Oh, and the dazzling world of "lovely" themeable applications of which no one looks like the other is another big issue.
Actually, at the moment, I think Gnome has more UI consistency than both those systems combined. Which is actually an achievement, whether you like the end result or not. Gnome is not my thing (I use FVWM with some GTK/Gnome apps), but the road they traveled since Gnome 1.x is far and the progress to the "Just works" world they made may well be respected. Oh, and I'll take Muine over Amarok any day of the week.
I don't know what that has to do with using MySQL in my small personal project though?
Are you really sure that your small project doesn't need joins, views, transactions and any enforced referential data integrity whatsoever? What if your small project becomes bigger, are you planning on switching to another RDBMS and rewriting everything then? I mean, we are not talking about advanced stuff like PL/SQL or DB2 warehousing, we are talking about basic functionality - MySQL is the RDBMS that announced (with fanfare!) limited support for welcome-to-1995 features like views in their latest version, WTF?
Another thing, MySQL is extensively used by newbies in DB-programming world. Because of its quirks, relaxed attitude to data integrity and very limited subset of supported SQL, it teaches bad style of database-related programming. I would never hire anyone with only MySQL experience to a DB-related position, small project or not, because they would have to unlearn most of what they learned in MySQL land anyway. It's actually better to hire someone bright and teach them proper RDBMS from scratch - it's like hiring IE-only web developer, only worse. I've actually interviewed this kinds of people. Ew.
I think I'll file this under other "misc" such as the "Don't go to Linux, you'll have higher TCO!" remarks by Microsoft.
Look, it is surely possible to solve some problems with MySQL, but you really need to know what you are doing and what shortcomings to expect. It is, unfortunately, not very common thing in MySQL world, just looking at insanity of some open-source database schemas will tell you everything you need to know. Going "lalalala I can't hear anything you all are just Postgres/DB2/whatever zealots" won't change anything at all.
I heard almost nothing but bad things over MySQL by PostSQLers or Oraclers due to missing features though I went with it anyway.
When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp.
What you don't understand is that they don't care about selling itself. That's one of the big points of Debian, because they don't try to outwhore other distros with whizbang bleeding edge features, but their stuff seems to work rock solid, even testing/unstable.
The question is whether web site usage equals program distribution. Under GPL2 if you download some program, you should have access to the source code. If you use website - you don't. This is what grandparent was talking about.
The spirit of GPL regarding ability to use (not distribute!) software is not changed - you are perfectly free to use your modified GPL software or allow access to sites based on GPL code in-house without releasing any code.
My linux boxes do "dependency checks in realtime" and "unlink in-use libraries". They don't seem particularly fragile. Knowing Microsoft, though, poor implementation for first three service packs is an expected thing, but the whole idea is nothing special - everyone else was doing this crazy "dependency checks in realtime" for years. Good for them if they are finally jumping on the bandwagon.
Well, Gnus does IMAP, so if you have IMAP enabled on your exchange server you could try connecting to it this way. Not everyone enables IMAP access though, and there could be some compatibility issues (I never actually tried myself, our company uses only OSS mail clients and servers), but it's worth a try anyway.
As the enlightened know, Gnus can do everything. RSS, news, mail, whatever. Seriously (I don't mean parent poster), if you didn't try Gnus and aren't afraid of a little Lisp here and there, give it a try. It will blow your mind away.
It's a shame, that for 5 years I've been reading Slashdot, it is actually first time I see Gnus being mentioned in email-related discussion. Those kids with their posh buttony mail clients, Thunderbird, bah!
Would creation of.xxx TLD magically move all available smut into it? If you really believe this, I have a slightly used bridge for sale somewhere around here.
.xxx was a stupid "feel good" idea, e.g. it would be very easy to block it everywhere and feel good about it. You won't block any reasonable percentage of available porn, but who cares, right?
You make it sound like this doesn't happen to other OSes.
Pray tell, what other OSes use proprietary systemwide configuration database in unknown unfixable format which can break the system completely if just one file got hosed on the partition and which I can't easily copy from some other system, like I could copy/vmunix if it got corrupted?
Oh, and I've seen registry being corrupted by a lot less than a hardware failure in our small ~100 workstation organization so you may consider yourself really lucky or a victim of serious case of wishful thinking.
I like the fact that all software on my systems are completely managed, e.g. I can easily tell which file belongs to each package and vice versa. I like the fact that my systems are upgradeable by issuing one command over the internet. I don't like dll hell of Windows or base system/ports.so hell of BSDs, sorry. The reality is that Linux software world is comprised of miriads of libraries and small applications, not just dozen big names from posh vendors like Microsoft or Adobe. This situation requires advanced package handling tools. No, whining about it won't help, just man up and deal with it.
Tell that to the millions of Mac OS X users. They will laugh at you as they merely drag Applications to the Applications folder.
Tell these millions of users that I can upgrade my server park with one shell command and I see this kind of functionality as basic and required even for my desktop machines. Pray tell, how am I worse than Grandma Tillie, why my needs should be sacrificed for some very questionable usability ideas?
THere's this concept called "Bundles" where all shared libraries, language packs, and binaries for multiple architectures are stored in a single folder that appears to be a single application.
I don't know about you, but I don't want twenty versions of slightly different GTKs each in its own bundle all loaded at different addresses hogging memory and diskspace for the sake of some Grandma Tillie's usability. Sorry, just because Holy Apple does something doesn't mean it is best idea ever for any possible use case. And just because some self proclaimed usability experts (which always seem to come out of the woodwork in any Linux-related discussions, oh dear) can't spend 15 minutes to figure out the packages on their own doesn't mean that people who require functionality they provide should just switch off the lights and go home. Which, surprisingly, always seems to be the case, because those experts always know better for everyone of us.
By the way, even Microsoft recently began to reinvent package management, albeit poorly like they usually do at first. Even they begin to understand that dozen different incompatible installers is not the way, and bundles are actually no better either.
(Sorry, this came out somewhat rantish, I've got nothing personal against you, just needed to get this off my chest).
Qualitywise, MS SQL Server is the IIS of the database world.
Sorry, MySQL is the IIS of database world. And not even IIS6, it's like IIS4 or something like that. MS SQL is actually a solid and robust product, one of Microsoft's best (our company uses DB2 almost exclusively, but we experimented with MS SQL and results were very good).
Those two are even starting to nibble at the heels of Oracle in some contexts, unlike MS SQL.
Man, this is so funny what you just said. You probably don't even understand how actually funny it is. MySQL nibbling at Oracle, muahahahaha.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't bother. Read the comments here, supposedly enlightened geeks seriously compare Putin's administration with stalinism, which is both hilarious - because the claim is so deliciously absurd - and scary - because people seem to swallow media spin hook, line and sinker.
The irony of people, who mindlessly regurgitate media spin as the absolute truth without question and cry about death of democracy in my country, return to monarchy or some shit is staggering.
Oh, and my personal favourite here was a guy, who posted anonymously about his precious wifey hating on Putin, because otherwise scary KGB would come and inject him with polonium or something. Obviously, our security service has nothing better to do than track down idiotic astroturfers on a nerd blog in USA. And yet, the sheep follow - just take a look at the followup comments.
It will, most likely, teach him a valuable skill to convert any distribution to Slackware using sufficient number of make installs.
IPv6 is more secure because communications within a subnet use a special address coding that (a) can never leave the subnet (b) can never be introduced from outside the subnet, and (c) can be positively identified as coming from inside the subnet.
How is this different from reserved for local usage subnets like 10.0.0.0/8? With arguments like this one, it's no surpise the adoption is slow.
QoS has a single field in IPv4 that has no implementation attached to it, and is thus implemented as an afterthought in a collection of vendor-specific ways.
QoS at the network protocol layer is not some magical silver bullet or "next best thing". It's good, but it's not good enough.
IPv6 autoconfiguration is STATELESS. It doesn't require a server to figure out what addresses it has available, which ones it's handed out already, which ones have expired, etc, etc. DHCP is nice, but it requires maintenance. You can tell me how easy DHCP is to configure all day long, but it'll always be tougher than none at all.
So you are saying I should radically change my network infrastructure, so that I don't have to run dhcpd of all things?! Yeah, right, this idea will sell really well.
MAC address only have to be unique inside one network segment. What's your point?
Sorry to burst your little groupthink bubble there, but is as possible to write big, well-coded and very readable applications in Perl as it is in any other serious language. If you are unable to code well in some $LANGUAGE, it is your incompetence that is the problem, not $LANGUAGE itself.
Yeah, I know, hotspot compilation down to native code, Java guy rant, .NET guy rant, blah blah blah. In the end, its still interpreted - its just a very very smart optimizing interpreter.
Yeah, I know, gcc, object files, native code, blah blah blah. In the end, C code is still interpreted - it's just a very very smart optimizing caching interpreter.
What dimwit could mod this drivel insightful is beyond me.
First, any half-decently written malware will function just fine under limited user rights, nothing prevents you from sending spam or whatever they do under non-administrative account.
Second, user data are actually the only thing worth of something on a typical desktop machine. You could always reinstall Windows, but this won't bring back your photos or spreadsheets. Unless you start sandboxing potentionally vulnerable software (think MSIE) your strategy will get you nothing.
Windows-only, I'm sure. Buying an operating system for the privilege of using an ebook reader - thanks, I think I'll stay with my Palm (or buy Nokia 770). The pricepoint is also pretty ridiculous for the kind of functionality the device offers.
Those are the very same people who brought us viruses starting automatically on disk insertion (unthinkable on PCs before MS), viruses in mail (unthinkable before MS), DOS attacks using font renderer in the kernel and other wonders of technological innovation in the art of pwning the customer.
Exactly right. You foreigners probably don't know, but we already had our share of "wars against piracy". Discs bulldozed on national TV and whatsuch.
There actually was a time (about 7-8 years ago) when pirated discs disappeared from the retail for several months. Unsurprisingly, it didn't stick. Piracy is a big business here, controlled by OUR mobs, it's not just some pop and mom CD-RW operation. So our government will generate some hogwash for RIAA and GW Bush and everything will stay the same.
Which brings us to the present day. The Chechens have no love lost for the Russians who have for more than a hundred years been trying to fuck them over. This process is still going strong. To call them terrorists is quite like beating somebody into a coma and then calling him an intolerable bully since he had the guts to throw a stone in your window after he had miraculously recovered.
It doesn't matter. Those who commit terrorist acts (e.g. blowing up innocent civilians, taking those civilians as hostages and killing them) would be called terrorists. Who beat whom into the pulp is largely irrelevant to this issue. This is your basic strawman argument, but thank you for playing.
As I said, geopolitical and/or separatism related problems are always very, very ugly. Take kurds, take chechens, whatever. I didn't even argue, remember?
I don't live in Russia, I live in one of those neighbouring countries who have also just recently seen the same horror and who are now being painted very black by the famous and very capable Russian propaganda machine.
Yep, I usually read on foreign news sites how famous Russian propaganda machine paints everyone black. I'm yet to see this black paint in our media, but it doesn't really matter, does it?
Russia -- where most press and all TV-stations are state-controlled.
Yeah, tell me about this so called mainstream free press in the USA. Fox News, right?
Russia -- where courts are in the President's pocket.
Having courts in the corporation's pocket is somehow better, I suppose?
Russia -- which uses air-bombers and heavy artillery against the very people, it claims are its citizens (although they disagree).
I dunno, noone bombed me (yet). Actions against separatism are ALWAYS ugly, pick any country. Nice of you to single out my country like this.
Russia -- where regional governors are appointed by the President.
Yes, we don't have your loose federation structure. So what? Everyone should be exactly like the motherlode of freedom, the USA? Thanks, but no thanks.
Russia -- where the Communist Party is among the strongest.
I hate to break it to you, but we (as the silent majority) don't really give a lot of shit about parties. We've just been screwed too much by communist crooks or democrate crooks or whatever other crooks.
You complain about random searches in NYC subways? In Russia you are obligated to carry identification with you at all times and present it to any law enforcer upon request.
Again, you have your rules - we have ours. You think that not having ID is your God-given right, well, it doesn't work here. I don't give a lot of shit about it either, but I guess it's a matter or perspective.
Unhappy about racial profiling here? If you are dark-skinned (thus looking like a Chechen), you will be harassed and periodically searched on the streets in Russia. And not in some red-neck backwater, but in the shiny newly-rich capital of Moscow.
Yes, it's a valid issue. You have your terrorist ghosts in the middle east, we have ours in the Caucasia. Had them for hundreds of years, to be specific.
If you are non-white looking -- don't go to St. Petersburgh (Russia's other capital -- the "sophisticated" one). Russian skin-heads have been attacking non-whites (Asian students primarily) there recently, with police looking the other way.
Oh, come on. You make it sound like asian looking people are being shot on sight here. There are stupid nazist fucks everywhere, it's no reason to spread sensationalistic nonsense. You probably read your free press too much (j/k).
And just in case - I'm white russian living in Saint-Petersburg.
Oh, brother. Mac UI consistency? You mean, classic or Aqua or metallic thingies and whatever custom interface Jobbs envisioned for specific application based on abovementioned toolkits?
I don't even want to start on Windows UI consistency, it's just ridiculous. For example, Windows doesn't have any human interface guidelines whatsoever. I recall some semi-coherent instructions written in an obscure place at MSDN - but even Microsoft never followed those, they just stamp new widgets around like there is no tomorrow and week after every stupid shareware developer starts copying them. Remember those stupid flat menus which suddenly surfaced in Office? Right. Oh, and the dazzling world of "lovely" themeable applications of which no one looks like the other is another big issue.
Actually, at the moment, I think Gnome has more UI consistency than both those systems combined. Which is actually an achievement, whether you like the end result or not. Gnome is not my thing (I use FVWM with some GTK/Gnome apps), but the road they traveled since Gnome 1.x is far and the progress to the "Just works" world they made may well be respected. Oh, and I'll take Muine over Amarok any day of the week.
I don't know what that has to do with using MySQL in my small personal project though?
Are you really sure that your small project doesn't need joins, views, transactions and any enforced referential data integrity whatsoever? What if your small project becomes bigger, are you planning on switching to another RDBMS and rewriting everything then? I mean, we are not talking about advanced stuff like PL/SQL or DB2 warehousing, we are talking about basic functionality - MySQL is the RDBMS that announced (with fanfare!) limited support for welcome-to-1995 features like views in their latest version, WTF?
Another thing, MySQL is extensively used by newbies in DB-programming world. Because of its quirks, relaxed attitude to data integrity and very limited subset of supported SQL, it teaches bad style of database-related programming. I would never hire anyone with only MySQL experience to a DB-related position, small project or not, because they would have to unlearn most of what they learned in MySQL land anyway. It's actually better to hire someone bright and teach them proper RDBMS from scratch - it's like hiring IE-only web developer, only worse. I've actually interviewed this kinds of people. Ew.
I think I'll file this under other "misc" such as the "Don't go to Linux, you'll have higher TCO!" remarks by Microsoft.
Look, it is surely possible to solve some problems with MySQL, but you really need to know what you are doing and what shortcomings to expect. It is, unfortunately, not very common thing in MySQL world, just looking at insanity of some open-source database schemas will tell you everything you need to know. Going "lalalala I can't hear anything you all are just Postgres/DB2/whatever zealots" won't change anything at all.
I heard almost nothing but bad things over MySQL by PostSQLers or Oraclers due to missing features though I went with it anyway.
When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp.
What you don't understand is that they don't care about selling itself. That's one of the big points of Debian, because they don't try to outwhore other distros with whizbang bleeding edge features, but their stuff seems to work rock solid, even testing/unstable.
The question is whether web site usage equals program distribution. Under GPL2 if you download some program, you should have access to the source code. If you use website - you don't. This is what grandparent was talking about.
The spirit of GPL regarding ability to use (not distribute!) software is not changed - you are perfectly free to use your modified GPL software or allow access to sites based on GPL code in-house without releasing any code.
My linux boxes do "dependency checks in realtime" and "unlink in-use libraries". They don't seem particularly fragile. Knowing Microsoft, though, poor implementation for first three service packs is an expected thing, but the whole idea is nothing special - everyone else was doing this crazy "dependency checks in realtime" for years. Good for them if they are finally jumping on the bandwagon.
Well, Gnus does IMAP, so if you have IMAP enabled on your exchange server you could try connecting to it this way. Not everyone enables IMAP access though, and there could be some compatibility issues (I never actually tried myself, our company uses only OSS mail clients and servers), but it's worth a try anyway.
It's a shame, that for 5 years I've been reading Slashdot, it is actually first time I see Gnus being mentioned in email-related discussion. Those kids with their posh buttony mail clients, Thunderbird, bah!
Would creation of .xxx TLD magically move all available smut into it? If you really believe this, I have a slightly used bridge for sale somewhere around here.
.xxx was a stupid "feel good" idea, e.g. it would be very easy to block it everywhere and feel good about it. You won't block any reasonable percentage of available porn, but who cares, right?
As far as I remember, they state that 3 hours is a web-surfing time. I suppose, web surfing means 802.11 which sucks power like crazy.
You make it sound like this doesn't happen to other OSes.
Pray tell, what other OSes use proprietary systemwide configuration database in unknown unfixable format which can break the system completely if just one file got hosed on the partition and which I can't easily copy from some other system, like I could copy /vmunix if it got corrupted?
Oh, and I've seen registry being corrupted by a lot less than a hardware failure in our small ~100 workstation organization so you may consider yourself really lucky or a victim of serious case of wishful thinking.
I'm saying packages shouldn't exist. Period.
I like the fact that all software on my systems are completely managed, e.g. I can easily tell which file belongs to each package and vice versa. I like the fact that my systems are upgradeable by issuing one command over the internet. I don't like dll hell of Windows or base system/ports .so hell of BSDs, sorry. The reality is that Linux software world is comprised of miriads of libraries and small applications, not just dozen big names from posh vendors like Microsoft or Adobe. This situation requires advanced package handling tools. No, whining about it won't help, just man up and deal with it.
Tell that to the millions of Mac OS X users. They will laugh at you as they merely drag Applications to the Applications folder.
Tell these millions of users that I can upgrade my server park with one shell command and I see this kind of functionality as basic and required even for my desktop machines. Pray tell, how am I worse than Grandma Tillie, why my needs should be sacrificed for some very questionable usability ideas?
THere's this concept called "Bundles" where all shared libraries, language packs, and binaries for multiple architectures are stored in a single folder that appears to be a single application.
I don't know about you, but I don't want twenty versions of slightly different GTKs each in its own bundle all loaded at different addresses hogging memory and diskspace for the sake of some Grandma Tillie's usability. Sorry, just because Holy Apple does something doesn't mean it is best idea ever for any possible use case. And just because some self proclaimed usability experts (which always seem to come out of the woodwork in any Linux-related discussions, oh dear) can't spend 15 minutes to figure out the packages on their own doesn't mean that people who require functionality they provide should just switch off the lights and go home. Which, surprisingly, always seems to be the case, because those experts always know better for everyone of us.
By the way, even Microsoft recently began to reinvent package management, albeit poorly like they usually do at first. Even they begin to understand that dozen different incompatible installers is not the way, and bundles are actually no better either.
(Sorry, this came out somewhat rantish, I've got nothing personal against you, just needed to get this off my chest).
Qualitywise, MS SQL Server is the IIS of the database world.
Sorry, MySQL is the IIS of database world. And not even IIS6, it's like IIS4 or something like that. MS SQL is actually a solid and robust product, one of Microsoft's best (our company uses DB2 almost exclusively, but we experimented with MS SQL and results were very good).
Those two are even starting to nibble at the heels of Oracle in some contexts, unlike MS SQL.
Man, this is so funny what you just said. You probably don't even understand how actually funny it is. MySQL nibbling at Oracle, muahahahaha.