Have you looked at the package list? It is one of the most up-to-date Linux distributions in fact; just look at the package versions and compare to any other Linux distribution. All this coming from one man, and offering the most stable and understandable Linux distribution is truely amazing.
At first sight. At second sight Slackwares simplicity and stability is refreshing and unmatched, especially by Gentoo.
This from an ex-FreeBSD user that instinctively started with Gentoo, but who was very dissapointed; it is only superficially like FreeBSD (due to the ports system) but on closer look it is very diffent. Slackware truely remains the best choice if you're forced to run Linux (instead of FreeBSD), in my case because of lack of vmware-3 and decent Java in FreeBSD.
Richard Stallman was (once again) criticized by some of the slashdot crowd today in this article, about being pedantic, purist, impracticle etc. PGP/GPG is an excellent example of RMS being pedantic and purist, and rightly so.
RMS and the FSF have always been refusing to use PGP, because of its license. They have been critiziced along the same lines for this, since PGP was "free in a practical sense" i.e. free as in free beer, even though it had been written by "good guy" Phil Zimmermann. Today we may be glad that the FSF refused to use PGP, started to write GPG as soon as the RSA patent expired (i.e. as it was legally possible to write a clone without infringing on patents).
He is only stating a fact
on
XBox Live Network
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
In this case it is just a fact that microsoft has a "we control everything" approach. Stating this fact is not necessarily anti-microsoft, since for some of their customers this is viewed as an advantage: keeps the world simple, you are not confused by too many choices. Even microsoft themselves admit this, they often stated that giving consumers too many choices is dangerous.
Besides, what is wrong with slashdot being openly (i.e. the posted stories alread share this view) anti-Microsoft? There are numerous pro-microsoft propaganda sites on the web. I'm glad there is at least one site that is consistently against microsoft (and rightly so).
Oil is used for food production (imagine todays farms without machinery, doing everything by hand again). Without oil, food production levels in the west drop by 90% or more, causing mass starvation.
If we don't find an alternative soon (and diminish wasting current oil resources to gain time) we are in for deep trouble indeed, i.e. the end of civilisation as we know it.
You could say the same of the road leading to your house. If those that build it suck, you lose.
The solution is not to build two roads (or get a helicopter landing platform on the roof of your house) as an alternative, but just to make sure that the road-building organization does not suck.
Note, to continue the analogy, that it must not be a state-run firm actually building the local loop; the management is in public hand, but they can subcontract the real work (e.g. digging pipelines, etc) to private companies. They can try to compete and make a profit but have no control.
As others have pointed out there are numerous technical problems with wireless if used at a large scale. It is all the more irrational knowing that there is already a good last mile in place: the local loop. Mostly it has been paid for with tax money, i.e. you could say that everyone owns its own local loop.
Thus, it is only logical to separate the local loop from the service providers. Create a non-profit (public owned) company that maintains the local loop and offers it at cost price. The telecom companies can compete to offer service over this public infrastructure.
Just like the road system (which is mostly public in most countries). Everyone can use them for a relatively small amount of money. Imagine the situation where there would be no public roads, but the 'local transport company' alone would build and own roads and offer their transport services (trucks, taxis) in one package; since you can hardly have 3 different roads leading to your house, you would be dependant on 1 or maybe 2 transport companies if you want to use the road leading to your house.
Would privatization solve such an absurd situation? No, since no true competition can't exist even if the transport companies would be privately owned (i.e. strive for maximum profit).
The only solution is to have a public infrastructure, and have private companies compete using this public infrastructure.
The polititians that essentially gave away the local loop to a privatized telecom operator (i.e. they gave away something that the public has paid for) made a huge mistake. This must be corrected.
Don't believe in privatization -> more competition as a dogma, since it is not always true. There are cases where privatization -> profit maximation of one monopolist.
It all depends on the market. As for local loop: there is only one local loop, it is fully uneconomical to make a second one. Alternatives (such as wireless) are inferior, especially on a large scale. Maybe a second local loop is possible (being cable) in some areas, but still, two companies with no chance for more doesn't really give competition. There shall be (silent, because it's forbidden) agreement between two companies to share and divide the market.
Nothing is worse than the combination of monopoly and privatization.
Privatization with true competition is best. If this is not possible (true for many infrastructure markets such as railways, local loop, utilities such as water etc) then the next best alternative is to create a publicly owned non-profit organization that just manages the infrastructure.
Private companies should compete to offer sericces over that publicly owned infrastructure.
Old example is (publicly owned) roads where many transport companies compete to offer moving goods using trucks, using the public roads.
New example can be publicly owned local loop that is offered to customers at cost price. Then the customer can select a provider that delivers him full internet service via this (cheap) local loop.
While I understand a company first looks after its own survival, I think Redhat is shortsighted to first go after fellow UNIX customers, and now even fellow Linux users.
Yes, those may be easier targets, but in the end if no external users can be won (non UNIX) it is all in vain. In these times of oppression, we UNIX users (of which I consider Redhat and Linux to be part) should stick together. Healthy competition is no problem, even beneficial, but we must not forget what the real target is.
Of course VMWare, thanks to its rollback on disks, is excellent to test 'risky' software, but apart from that it is also excellent to run windows software under linux (or linux software under windows), just like the intent of virtualPC.
In that sense, vmware beats virtualPC in all aspects: what both can do it does better and faster, and it can do more, such as not committing changes to your disks, building networks of virtual machines etc.
For that, it is very expensive though. Version 1 and 2 were still affordable for home users, version 3 is no more. I was able to buy version 3 only because once I bought the cheap $75 student/hobbyist licence of version 1, now I could upgrade to version 3 for $100.
My only remaining wish is support for true directX including 3D support. Maybe they could modify their virtual graphics card into one that supports directX fully (and passes the 3D instructions through to the real directX hardware under windows or to openGL under linux).
Does it bring much to donate to the EFF, in a country where those with the most $$$ can buy the legal system?
Usually I am not a radical (and rather right wing for that matter) but I begin the think that the only thing that can help is civil disobedience (for a start). You cannot rely to use the legal system (like supporting the EFF for lawyers) that is corrupt, you can only ignore such a legal system and ignore corrupt laws.
See this page. Well below $2K, 1600x1200 and other good specs, on usenet (google groups) I found quite some happy users of this one.
Of course 1920x1200 would be even nicer but too expensive IMO.
We FreeBSD users have always claimed that one of the big edges FreeBSD has over Linux, is that it is not a one man show. Linux will have a hard time and is in risk of fragmentation when Linus leaves Linux development. FreeBSD, much better organized, is not in such danger.
The first test when JKH stepped down as president and became a mere core member has been very succesful. Now is the next stage where the original 'leader' kind of leaves the project. Now FreeBSD can show that it is indestructible and not in any way dependant on a single person.
As a long time FreeBSD user, being "forced" to run Linux because of some desktop issues (read, vmware3) I do NOT AGREE at all.
Everyone seems to be raving about how cool gentoo is, almost like FreeBSD; how the FreeBSD users formerly attracted to Slackware all run to Gentoo now. Well, I don't think so.
The FreeBSD ports system might have some technical similarities to Gentoo portage (which is even more advanced), but there is a huge and crucial difference:
Portage is instable, ports are broken all the time (just read the forum on gentoo.org); also in FreeBSD the ports are just an add-on, the base system is not ports-based, but is one monolithic (stable) block.
I still think that Slackware is the most FreeBSD-like Linux distro, even though it does not have a ports system. Because: - it is stable - it feels more like FreeBSD, because of little things such as simple init scripts (BSD based) - the base system is not monolithic as in FreeBSD, but still installing the a,ap,d and l series provides you with a base that doesn't change all the time. Almost any slack installation has the same set of basic packages installed, it is much less a choose and pick than any other Linux distribution.
Portage looks nice and impressive the first day you use it, but becomes a nightmare after a few weeks useage (believe me, I was amazed at start and have used it some weeks). Everthing updates all the time, not all dependencies are caught and strange interactions between the ports begin to happen. Not one user of Gentoo has the same versions of packages installed together, because this depends on the (random) timestamps that you decide to run an 'emerge rsync'.
I think gentoo's approach is interesting, but it is not ready for prime time, it should be version 0.1, not 1.1(a).
No no, Slackware still is the greatest for the 'ultra power user', and shall remain so for a long time. Creating your own 'ports' is trivial, I wrote some scripts myself (and I think many slack users did) to create them easily. I like to figure out how to 'port' any package running on my machine myself, except for the packages of the only other person I trust (Patrick Volkerding) in this respect.
It is not really binary compatible, but protocol compatible. X11 is a (network) PROTOCOL that describes how to send drawing instructions from client to server and how the server should send events (mouse, key) back to the client.
And exactly that is the genius of X (in contrast with most other windowing systems that are based on API's). Therefore, it is easy to get network transparency, and backwards compatability does not confront you with the headaches that API binary compatability causes.
Maintaining compatability is just as simple (OK a bit less since it is a complex protocol, but the extention mechanism was very clever) as backwards compatability for ftp,nntp,dns etc.
Even the 'branded' phones are normal GSM phones, just locked with some code.
And it is very uncommon nowadays to lock them; it was common some years ago but consumer organisations protested. Now you get the phone cheaper when you sign up for a contract (e.g. for one year), but the phone itself is not locked.
Those that come with a lock will be unlocked after a period, or if you pay the operator that subsidized your phone.
My companies solution (large bank in switzerland) is to roll out IE, but disable active-X, javascript and cookies for the "Internet Zone". i.e. the standard browser is almost useless.
Everyone keeps using NS4 (the former "official" browser) or installs some other browser themselves.
Intel is less in bed with MSFT, and has been for years more independant (OK, they are more powerful so they can afford to be, but still). As for price-performance, for the top-end CPU's that may be true, for the mid-range however the differences aren't that big anymore.
But since Mozilla is run by volunteers without commercial motives, they won't get carried away as Netscape once was. They will stick to w3c standards, no matter how heated the competition gets.
I'll assume that to mean that previously, you've bought AMD rather than Intel for political reasons
No, I have always bought Intel because I didn't trust AMD performance and stability, until one year ago when I became convinced that AMD can deliver those for less money.
AMD still has a small edge w.r.t. price-performance ratio, but bringing in this political aspect it is no longer worth it for me. Thus in the future I shall buy Intel again.
I don't see why anyone should have or should have had political reasons against buying Intel.
What does AMD have to do with whether multiple versions/configurations/permutations of windows would be good or not? They just make CPU's and chipsets that emulate Intel's instruction set. This instruction set is not operating system dependent. Rather is the operating system (at least the machine dependant part of it, such as NT's HAL) dependent on the CPU.
Apart from that, indeed my next CPU will no more be an AMD.
And, if Windows didn't run on non-specialized microprocessors (whatever is more specialized to Sparc than to Intel puzzles me), something else would run on it; for example Unixware, or some other commercial UNIX variant would have taken over the Intel market.
Also possible is that Apple would have had a bigger marketshare, and the PowerPC would be THE general purpose CPU instead of Intel/AMD.
Huh, why is XML more open then specifying how Corba data is to be marshalled? It is all neatly described, just read the IIOP spec (available on www.omg.com). Why easier to use? Because XML is human readable? I don't see the fundamental difference.
No developer (except those that implement an ORB) need to debug the transport mechanism.
And, should you wish to do so and still think that XML somehow is "easier", then feel free to implement Corba on top of XML, i.e. use XML to transfer Corba requests/data. In fact, I'm pretty sure that Corba implementors shall quickly offer "Corba over SOAP" (just like they were quick to implement a Corba-COM bridge).
Slashdot Mirror
Have you looked at the package list? It is one of the most up-to-date Linux distributions in fact; just look at the package versions and compare to any other Linux distribution. All this coming from one man, and offering the most stable and understandable Linux distribution is truely amazing.
At first sight. At second sight Slackwares simplicity and stability is refreshing and unmatched, especially by Gentoo.
This from an ex-FreeBSD user that instinctively started with Gentoo, but who was very dissapointed; it is only superficially like FreeBSD (due to the ports system) but on closer look it is very diffent. Slackware truely remains the best choice if you're forced to run Linux (instead of FreeBSD), in my case because of lack of vmware-3 and decent Java in FreeBSD.
Richard Stallman was (once again) criticized by some of the slashdot crowd today in this article, about being pedantic, purist, impracticle etc. PGP/GPG is an excellent example of RMS being pedantic and purist, and rightly so.
RMS and the FSF have always been refusing to use PGP, because of its license. They have been critiziced along the same lines for this, since PGP was "free in a practical sense" i.e. free as in free beer, even though it had been written by "good guy" Phil Zimmermann. Today we may be glad that the FSF refused to use PGP, started to write GPG as soon as the RSA patent expired (i.e. as it was legally possible to write a clone without infringing on patents).
In this case it is just a fact that microsoft has a "we control everything" approach. Stating this fact is not necessarily anti-microsoft, since for some of their customers this is viewed as an advantage: keeps the world simple, you are not confused by too many choices. Even microsoft themselves admit this, they often stated that giving consumers too many choices is dangerous.
Besides, what is wrong with slashdot being openly (i.e. the posted stories alread share this view) anti-Microsoft? There are numerous pro-microsoft propaganda sites on the web. I'm glad there is at least one site that is consistently against microsoft (and rightly so).
Oil is used for food production (imagine todays farms without machinery, doing everything by hand again). Without oil, food production levels in the west drop by 90% or more, causing mass starvation.
If we don't find an alternative soon (and diminish wasting current oil resources to gain time) we are in for deep trouble indeed, i.e. the end of civilisation as we know it.
You could say the same of the road leading to your house. If those that build it suck, you lose.
The solution is not to build two roads (or get a helicopter landing platform on the roof of your house) as an alternative, but just to make sure that the road-building organization does not suck.
Note, to continue the analogy, that it must not be a state-run firm actually building the local loop; the management is in public hand, but they can subcontract the real work (e.g. digging pipelines, etc) to private companies. They can try to compete and make a profit but have no control.
As others have pointed out there are numerous technical problems with wireless if used at a large scale. It is all the more irrational knowing that there is already a good last mile in place: the local loop. Mostly it has been paid for with tax money, i.e. you could say that everyone owns its own local loop.
Thus, it is only logical to separate the local loop from the service providers. Create a non-profit (public owned) company that maintains the local loop and offers it at cost price. The telecom companies can compete to offer service over this public infrastructure.
Just like the road system (which is mostly public in most countries). Everyone can use them for a relatively small amount of money. Imagine the situation where there would be no public roads, but the 'local transport company' alone would build and own roads and offer their transport services (trucks, taxis) in one package; since you can hardly have 3 different roads leading to your house, you would be dependant on 1 or maybe 2 transport companies if you want to use the road leading to your house.
Would privatization solve such an absurd situation? No, since no true competition can't exist even if the transport companies would be privately owned (i.e. strive for maximum profit).
The only solution is to have a public infrastructure, and have private companies compete using this public infrastructure.
The polititians that essentially gave away the local loop to a privatized telecom operator (i.e. they gave away something that the public has paid for) made a huge mistake. This must be corrected.
Don't believe in privatization -> more competition as a dogma, since it is not always true. There are cases where privatization -> profit maximation of one monopolist.
It all depends on the market. As for local loop: there is only one local loop, it is fully uneconomical to make a second one. Alternatives (such as wireless) are inferior, especially on a large scale. Maybe a second local loop is possible (being cable) in some areas, but still, two companies with no chance for more doesn't really give competition. There shall be (silent, because it's forbidden) agreement between two companies to share and divide the market.
Nothing is worse than the combination of monopoly and privatization.
Privatization with true competition is best.
If this is not possible (true for many infrastructure markets such as railways, local loop, utilities such as water etc) then the next best alternative is to create a publicly owned non-profit organization that just manages the infrastructure.
Private companies should compete to offer sericces over that publicly owned infrastructure.
Old example is (publicly owned) roads where many transport companies compete to offer moving goods using trucks, using the public roads.
New example can be publicly owned local loop that is offered to customers at cost price. Then the customer can select a provider that delivers him full internet service via this (cheap) local loop.
While I understand a company first looks after its own survival, I think Redhat is shortsighted to first go after fellow UNIX customers, and now even fellow Linux users.
Yes, those may be easier targets, but in the end if no external users can be won (non UNIX) it is all in vain. In these times of oppression, we UNIX users (of which I consider Redhat and Linux to be part) should stick together. Healthy competition is no problem, even beneficial, but we must not forget what the real target is.
Having to reboot to switch (and terminate all running programs) is a pain.
:) and switch using a KVM.
A better alternative is to buy a second cheap PC (second hand, almost anything available will do to outperform virtualPC
Of course VMWare, thanks to its rollback on disks, is excellent to test 'risky' software, but apart from that it is also excellent to run windows software under linux (or linux software under windows), just like the intent of virtualPC.
In that sense, vmware beats virtualPC in all aspects: what both can do it does better and faster, and it can do more, such as not committing changes to your disks, building networks of virtual machines etc.
For that, it is very expensive though. Version 1 and 2 were still affordable for home users, version 3 is no more. I was able to buy version 3 only because once I bought the cheap $75 student/hobbyist licence of version 1, now I could upgrade to version 3 for $100.
My only remaining wish is support for true directX including 3D support. Maybe they could modify their virtual graphics card into one that supports directX fully (and passes the 3D instructions through to the real directX hardware under windows or to openGL under linux).
Does it bring much to donate to the EFF, in a country
where those with the most $$$ can buy the legal system?
Usually I am not a radical (and rather right wing for that matter) but I begin the think that the only thing that can help is civil disobedience (for a start). You cannot rely to use the legal system (like supporting the EFF for lawyers) that is corrupt, you can only ignore such a legal system and ignore corrupt laws.
See this page. Well below $2K, 1600x1200 and other good specs, on usenet (google groups) I found quite some happy users of this one. Of course 1920x1200 would be even nicer but too expensive IMO.
And I'm confident that FreeBSD shall prove this.
We FreeBSD users have always claimed that one of the big edges FreeBSD has over Linux, is that it is not a one man show. Linux will have a hard time and is in risk of fragmentation when Linus leaves Linux development. FreeBSD, much better organized, is not in such danger.
The first test when JKH stepped down as president and became a mere core member has been very succesful. Now is the next stage where the original 'leader' kind of leaves the project. Now FreeBSD can show that it is indestructible and not in any way dependant on a single person.
As a long time FreeBSD user, being "forced" to run Linux because of some desktop issues (read, vmware3) I do NOT AGREE at all.
Everyone seems to be raving about how cool gentoo is, almost like FreeBSD; how the FreeBSD users formerly attracted to Slackware all run to Gentoo now. Well, I don't think so.
The FreeBSD ports system might have some technical similarities to Gentoo portage (which is even more advanced), but there is a huge and crucial difference:
Portage is instable, ports are broken all the time (just read the forum on gentoo.org); also in FreeBSD the ports are just an add-on, the base system is not ports-based, but is one monolithic (stable) block.
I still think that Slackware is the most FreeBSD-like Linux distro, even though it does not have a ports system. Because:
- it is stable
- it feels more like FreeBSD, because of little things such as simple init scripts (BSD based)
- the base system is not monolithic as in FreeBSD, but still installing the a,ap,d and l series provides you with a base that doesn't change all the time. Almost any slack installation has the same set of basic packages installed, it is much less a choose and pick than any other Linux distribution.
Portage looks nice and impressive the first day you use it, but becomes a nightmare after a few weeks useage (believe me, I was amazed at start and have used it some weeks). Everthing updates all the time, not all dependencies are caught and strange interactions between the ports begin to happen. Not one user of Gentoo has the same versions of packages installed together, because this depends on the (random) timestamps that you decide to run an 'emerge rsync'.
I think gentoo's approach is interesting, but it is not ready for prime time, it should be version 0.1, not 1.1(a).
No no, Slackware still is the greatest for the 'ultra power user', and shall remain so for a long time. Creating your own 'ports' is trivial, I wrote some scripts myself (and I think many slack users did) to create them easily. I like to figure out how to 'port' any package running on my machine myself, except for the packages of the only other person I trust (Patrick Volkerding) in this respect.
It is not really binary compatible, but protocol compatible. X11 is a (network) PROTOCOL that describes how to send drawing instructions from client to server and how the server should send events (mouse, key) back to the client.
And exactly that is the genius of X (in contrast with most other windowing systems that are based on API's). Therefore, it is easy to get network transparency, and backwards compatability does not confront you with the headaches that API binary compatability causes.
Maintaining compatability is just as simple (OK a bit less since it is a complex protocol, but the extention mechanism was very clever) as backwards compatability for ftp,nntp,dns etc.
Even the 'branded' phones are normal GSM phones, just locked with some code.
And it is very uncommon nowadays to lock them; it was common some years ago but consumer organisations protested. Now you get the phone cheaper when you sign up for a contract (e.g. for one year), but the phone itself is not locked.
Those that come with a lock will be unlocked after a period, or if you pay the operator that subsidized your phone.
Indeed, this bug might offer users a "legal" way to access sites with javascript :)
My companies solution (large bank in switzerland) is to roll out IE, but disable active-X, javascript and cookies for the "Internet Zone". i.e. the standard browser is almost useless.
Everyone keeps using NS4 (the former "official" browser) or installs some other browser themselves.
Intel is less in bed with MSFT, and has been for years more independant (OK, they are more powerful so they can afford to be, but still). As for price-performance, for the top-end CPU's that may be true, for the mid-range however the differences aren't that big anymore.
But since Mozilla is run by volunteers without commercial motives, they won't get carried away as Netscape once was. They will stick to w3c standards, no matter how heated the competition gets.
AMD still has a small edge w.r.t. price-performance ratio, but bringing in this political aspect it is no longer worth it for me. Thus in the future I shall buy Intel again.
I don't see why anyone should have or should have had political reasons against buying Intel.
What does AMD have to do with whether multiple versions/configurations/permutations of windows would be good or not? They just make CPU's and chipsets that emulate Intel's instruction set. This instruction set is not operating system dependent. Rather is the operating system (at least the machine dependant part of it, such as NT's HAL) dependent on the CPU.
Apart from that, indeed my next CPU will no more be an AMD.
And, if Windows didn't run on non-specialized microprocessors (whatever is more specialized to Sparc than to Intel puzzles me), something else would run on it; for example Unixware, or some other commercial UNIX variant would have taken over the Intel market.
Also possible is that Apple would have had a bigger marketshare, and the PowerPC would be THE general purpose CPU instead of Intel/AMD.
Anyway he reverses cause and effect.