well, then you need to define what you mean by 'working' My point was that you can have a working Gentoo fairly quickly - you still need to read the installing docs beforehand, what a big surprise! but the steps are really straightforward. This was the OP's point - Gentoo docs don't assume you're a Linux guru. Simple things are well documented and enough to get one working.[*]
If you want to understand and tweak the system, that will take more than weeks - and docs, forums, etc. Still, if you define 'work' by 'learning about the os'[**], then you're still getting a 'working system' rather quickly.
In the end it all depends on what you use your computer for, as usual - and why you'd be choosing Gentoo instead of something else. Or not choosing Gentoo, as the case might be.
Anyway, this has gone off the wrong tangent already. I'm not going to push it more by commenting on who has been defensive here ^_^ This article is about Slack, not Gentoo or silly flame wars, and for a good reason too.
[*] this being one of the best things about the distro imho. for the worst... well, let's say your sig would be on topic ^_^
[**] or the distro; you seem to be mixing distro with os, but that was probably a slip ^_^
I would worry if they expect to be working on their computer in any less than a week
bah, so many people in need of a clue!
You can have gentoo up and running in several hours (plus download time) if you install the precompiled versions of the big packages. Then you can start updating at your leisure. You'll need the 'several days' timeframe to get up to date, but you don't need to be up to date to start working.
Physics != Quantum Physics When Einstein published his first papers there was no Quantum Mechanics yet. Planck had barely published his model for the black body radiation a few years before and Bohr was yet to come up with his model for the Hydrogen atom[*]. Einstein was actually one of the physicists criticizing QM later on (the EPD paradox, the "God doesn't play dice" quote). Also, General Relativity still does not play nice with Quantum Physics, but that's not Einstein's fault ^_^
So remember, kids, Einstein is best known for The (General and Special) Theory of Relativity. Quantum Physics (lumping together several things here) was brewed by (lots of) other people.
[*] nitpicking, Einstein's papers on the photoelectric effect and on explaining the Planck law through adding stimulated emission belong to 'classical' QM historically speaking, but that was far from his main focus (although it did bring him the Nobel Prize)
The difference between 32 and 64 bits is not significant anywhere but in the CPU.
You're wrong here. 64bit integers take up twice as much memory as 32bit ones. This is one of the reasons on dual 64/32 platforms (sparc64, G5) some apps are still 32bit - to reduce the memory/cache footprint. For AMD64, the 64bit mode brings several things: more registers (and wider), longer instructions (one extra byte), default integer size of 32bit (to skip the extra 64bit mode prefix)... the net result of this is that 64bit code should be faster most of the time, but the speed increase depends on the app.
afaict the vast majority (if not all) of the plf packages are signed with the plf key - which should have been imported from the repository by any recent enough version of urpmi. The warnings I'm getting (if any) are usually for contrib packages. Are you certain your urpmi settings are correct?
If you had specific problems, file bugs. If it's just hearsay, don't bother posting it next time. 2004.0 works correctly on a lot of AMD64 hw - look only at how active the amd64 tree is, you think they're running it on emulators?
For me, at least, AMD64 Gentoo is quite usable, thank you. Even with nvidia drivers out of the box.
hdlist is the package index that urpmi uses for the given repository. The 'full' version (actually the gzipped hdlist.cz) contains as extra the package info for each package: full file list, notes, changelog (needed if you want to use for instance urpmf - find packages that contain a given filename string). The 'short' version (synthesis.hdlist.gz) contains only the package list and dependencies (provides/requires) for the repository (useful for slow connections, as the full index for mdk easily goes to some tens of megs for main and contrib).
Funny this ended up as flamebait. There's nothing wrong with fighting dirty in a war - after all, that's what a war is, win or lose at all costs. The problem starts when you go beyond that - involve innocent bystanders, try to delude yourself and the rest of the world about the righteousness of the war and so on. But then, again, this is nothing new. America is not the first, nor will it be the last, to do it - the history is full with similar examples. At some point in the future, the holy war on terror will probably be viewed more objectively, but it's a bit too much to ask for that now. History works in cycles, after all.
So, fighting dirty is not a problem, as long as one gets away with it. Being the dominant military power helps getting away with lots of things.
Actually... Dell did install Netscape (6.x if I remember correctly) as the default browser on some Optiplexes about a year ago. Dunno if this was the rule or the exception though.
Firefox might be a bit of a problem, what with OSS and corporate support things (plus, it's not an officially stable version yet).
I'm still wondering about that... does anyone have a quote on what the upgrade to XServer is costing them? Because the original comparison was rather unfair - G5 were desktop machines, compared to usually more expensive workstation setups (the main contender people cite is Opteron, which should really be pitted against XServer - for one thing, the ECC memory makes a difference in price w.r.t. the original G5). So, after all thei upgrades are in place, I'd be curious how their final costs compare with alternate (and equivalent) setups. Mind you, I'm not saying Power970 isn't a nice processor - AltiVec appears to be quite nice for some types of number crunching, so (as usual) price does not tell the whole story.
And with windows... then w2k would also be a fair comparison - and you should be able to find cheap enough versions of it. nah, it doesn't make much sense to push this on, which os is cheaper depends too much on what exactly it is you plan on doing with it. General arguments are bound to have counter-examples.
This one is not entirelycorrect, if you want to stay up to date. The yearly upgrade cycle so far made OSX quite more expensive than XP if you started with the first released version on both. And if you're talking OEM, XP might be actually cheaper now.
Granted, if the software would be the only difference, OSX would have XP beat hands down. However, if you're out to buy a cheap and reasonably fast computer, Apple is not exactly in the top 10 choices (emphasis on both cheap and fast).
Adapting the old saying: cheap, fast, cool - pick two.
Add to that various connection patterns they can obtain by correlating the GUID with the IP. Still, not a big privacy issue yet.
However, I'm not sure how exact this list is - given that previous examples of info capture showed that WindowsUpdate didn't bother to select only the MS products from the registry list it grabbed and sent the full list of installed software.
The point of the official versions for any Linux vendor is to be stable, not up-to-date (except for patches, that is). That's why you mostly get the major component upgrades with the distro upgrade - it costs them time (thus money) to test, track config changes and everything from various states of upgrade: do you upgrade to kde-3.2.3 from 3.2.2, 3.2.1, 3.1 and so on.
Anyway, don't give up yet - if you want to stay up to date with packages, at the cost of some stability, you still have choices: Fedora, even SuSe for some stuff (most notably kde), Debian (yeah, sounds amazing), Gentoo.
The key, as always, is to figure out what you really need when forced to choose between two less-than-compatible options (up-to-date and stable/tested). Then stick to your answer.
On top of that, he's also wrong. Mandrake and SuSe (afair) ship with ntfsresize. Provided that no ugly accidents happen, you only need a defrag before starting the installation.
[flame]If you use xdmcp over wireless you're not even worth the time to root.[/flame]
joking aside, XDMCP is an insecure abomination - at least I hope you're tunnelling it over something more secure. What do you need it for that can't be done with ssh+Xforwarding anyway?
Depends on what you're doing. SuSe seems ok at leading newbies by the hand from what I remember, a task out of reach for Fedora. However, for an advanced user the newbie-friendliness can be a pain.
Personally, from these 3 I'd choose Mandrake, too - mostly because can fit more bills easy enough. The official release, if set up properly, is actually quite usable by newbies; and for tweaks, Cooker is the bleeding edge. Not to mention the boon that is PLF ^_^
Why would they? they finally have an OS to fight for markershare (well, windows is way too far away), there's no point in providing the opponent with bullets.
A computer is a tool, and should be approached as such. A user (newbie or otherwise) should not be forced to adapt their mind to structures used for efficient electronic computation.
wow, nice contradiction here.
How do you approach a tool you're not familiar with? You learn to use it. Nobody is 'born' with the spatial paradigm deeply rooted in one's brain. Heck, it's not even all that natural to boot with - you don't naturally remember objects by position, but by their relationships with each other. That's neither spatial nor tree-like, although it's used by both. And the tree-like structure is not computer-optimized, but that was already pointed out.
The better question would probably be why did the browsing paradigm survive for so long while the spatial one gets reinvented every few years, then dropped? I don't have an answer to that, but venturing a guess I'd say users outgrow 'newbie interfaces' - at some point the spatial paradigm simply stops being useful enough. No user stays newbie forever, as others pointed out, organizing your files into moderately deep trees isn't rocket science; on the other hand, sorting through several thousend files in one folder would end up annoying anyone.
And to close the argument, let's rehash the most 'mom-and-pop' counter-example for spatial pardigm: digital photo. With all the digicams out there, this is bound to be one of the major ways of filling a hard drive. Now, all those cameras give the files some silly counter names that overflow quite rapidly. So users have 2 choices: either rename every picture to something unique in order to dump them all in the same 'spatially-organized' folder, or put them in unique folders for each shooting session. Now the first choice, aside from being, shall I say, tiresome, has the disadvantage that the one 'my pictures' folder will start opening up rather slowly once you have thousands of pictures in it (especially if one uses thumbnail previews) and finding files will become rather tedious[*]. How long do you think a newbie user will stick to this method? and when he/she moves on and organizes stuff, how soon until the spatial paradigm breaks?
[*] please don't bring up metadata searches in this case. Metadata is not something that gets automagically embedded into an image file, you still have to type it in. I am yet to see someone who would add metadata to several hundreds of pictures - and even if that someone exists, it won't be a 'newbie user'.
This looks like a pointless argument, but I'll give it a shot. Just to make it clear from the beginnig, I think you're too extreme on this. I'm just trying to play the devil's advocate a bit to balance the field.
Companies are in business for the money. Love it, hate it, that's the goal. If keeping code closed brings them an advantage, most will do it. If opening the code brings the advantage... well, you get the idea. The consequence is that, in a givn field, the underdog is more likely to have open drivers/specs. This happened to NVidia w.r.t. the nforce chipset: when they started losing ground to Via, opening up at least part of the spec made sense. In the video segment, the competition is too fierce, so both NVidia and ATI go closed-source for now. Heck, look just at CPU chipsets: AMD actively encourages third-party chipsets, while Intel would rather sink the competition. Look at how much time it took Intel to come up with Linux drivers for Centrino (and they probably did it mostly because of the planned push into Linux laptops with IBM) - and Intel is supposed to be a Linux backer these days.
Now, back to the video drivers issue. In the blue corner, NVidia. In the red one, ATI. Whom would you call 'more open-source friendly'? Bear in mind that, lately, Linux rendering is mainstream and offloading some processing to the gpu seems like the next interesting trend - thus, there's a market for Linux drivers. So both players release Linux binary drivers. NVidia has been doing it for a long time now, ATI just started (if you're not counting half-baked, unsupported drivers). But wait, NVidia has drivers for some apparent useless platforms, like IA64, AMD64, or FreeBSD/x86. Not much of an economic incentive there. So why do they do it? Or, conversely, why is ATI not doing it?
My point is: here's a corporation that spends some resources to provide a number of people with drivers without much economic gain (I don't really think the number of GF cards bought for playing 3D games on FreeBSD or Linux/IA64 covers too much). In my book, that makes NVidia more open-source friendly than ATI. They are in it for the money, sure, but also a little more than that. Also, remember that they were providing Linux drivers when Linux was a lot less used and NVidia was the top graphics dog, which again was a refreshing difference of attitude from the mainstream.
Yeah, I know, I'm biased here. I'm probably just happy I get 3D accelerated graphics on my Linux/AMD64. I could have had to stick with just 2D, but there was this one vendor that had drivers from almost day one. That does not make them holy or anything *insert bitching about nforce3 drivers here* but it's sure nice to have a working option instead of none from time to time.
I would think they used 'in parallel' rather loosely. Depending on what tech they use for the holograms, it could be doable to have the outgoing beam angled from the incoming one (really easy if the holo is a volume one); then they can use, say 3 holos for RGB that would scatter light from 3 (R, G, B) lasers in the same direction to superimpose the images and get the color one.
Slashdot Mirror
well, then you need to define what you mean by 'working' My point was that you can have a working Gentoo fairly quickly - you still need to read the installing docs beforehand, what a big surprise! but the steps are really straightforward. This was the OP's point - Gentoo docs don't assume you're a Linux guru. Simple things are well documented and enough to get one working.[*]
... well, let's say your sig would be on topic ^_^
If you want to understand and tweak the system, that will take more than weeks - and docs, forums, etc. Still, if you define 'work' by 'learning about the os'[**], then you're still getting a 'working system' rather quickly.
In the end it all depends on what you use your computer for, as usual - and why you'd be choosing Gentoo instead of something else. Or not choosing Gentoo, as the case might be.
Anyway, this has gone off the wrong tangent already. I'm not going to push it more by commenting on who has been defensive here ^_^ This article is about Slack, not Gentoo or silly flame wars, and for a good reason too.
[*] this being one of the best things about the distro imho. for the worst
[**] or the distro; you seem to be mixing distro with os, but that was probably a slip ^_^
I would worry if they expect to be working on their computer in any less than a week
bah, so many people in need of a clue!
You can have gentoo up and running in several hours (plus download time) if you install the precompiled versions of the big packages. Then you can start updating at your leisure. You'll need the 'several days' timeframe to get up to date, but you don't need to be up to date to start working.
argh ... anyway, for the misinformed:
Physics != Quantum Physics
When Einstein published his first papers there was no Quantum Mechanics yet. Planck had barely published his model for the black body radiation a few years before and Bohr was yet to come up with his model for the Hydrogen atom[*]. Einstein was actually one of the physicists criticizing QM later on (the EPD paradox, the "God doesn't play dice" quote). Also, General Relativity still does not play nice with Quantum Physics, but that's not Einstein's fault ^_^
So remember, kids, Einstein is best known for The (General and Special) Theory of Relativity. Quantum Physics (lumping together several things here) was brewed by (lots of) other people.
[*] nitpicking, Einstein's papers on the photoelectric effect and on explaining the Planck law through adding stimulated emission belong to 'classical' QM historically speaking, but that was far from his main focus (although it did bring him the Nobel Prize)
erm ... maybe I'm missing the obvious here, but how are SAP and Nokia US companies?
The difference between 32 and 64 bits is not significant anywhere but in the CPU.
... the net result of this is that 64bit code should be faster most of the time, but the speed increase depends on the app.
You're wrong here. 64bit integers take up twice as much memory as 32bit ones. This is one of the reasons on dual 64/32 platforms (sparc64, G5) some apps are still 32bit - to reduce the memory/cache footprint. For AMD64, the 64bit mode brings several things: more registers (and wider), longer instructions (one extra byte), default integer size of 32bit (to skip the extra 64bit mode prefix)
afaict the vast majority (if not all) of the plf packages are signed with the plf key - which should have been imported from the repository by any recent enough version of urpmi. The warnings I'm getting (if any) are usually for contrib packages. Are you certain your urpmi settings are correct?
If you had specific problems, file bugs. If it's just hearsay, don't bother posting it next time. 2004.0 works correctly on a lot of AMD64 hw - look only at how active the amd64 tree is, you think they're running it on emulators?
For me, at least, AMD64 Gentoo is quite usable, thank you. Even with nvidia drivers out of the box.
hdlist is the package index that urpmi uses for the given repository. The 'full' version (actually the gzipped hdlist.cz) contains as extra the package info for each package: full file list, notes, changelog (needed if you want to use for instance urpmf - find packages that contain a given filename string). The 'short' version (synthesis.hdlist.gz) contains only the package list and dependencies (provides/requires) for the repository (useful for slow connections, as the full index for mdk easily goes to some tens of megs for main and contrib).
Funny this ended up as flamebait. There's nothing wrong with fighting dirty in a war - after all, that's what a war is, win or lose at all costs. The problem starts when you go beyond that - involve innocent bystanders, try to delude yourself and the rest of the world about the righteousness of the war and so on. But then, again, this is nothing new. America is not the first, nor will it be the last, to do it - the history is full with similar examples. At some point in the future, the holy war on terror will probably be viewed more objectively, but it's a bit too much to ask for that now. History works in cycles, after all.
So, fighting dirty is not a problem, as long as one gets away with it. Being the dominant military power helps getting away with lots of things.
Judging from this, you'll have to wait a while ^_^
Pages with lots of equally probable links will kill this. Case to the point: /.
Now, if only there were some way to reduce the upfront cost of buying the book to zero your system would be perfect!
Go read it in the bookstore. There are some that kind of encourage you to do so (B&N cafes come to mind).
Actually ... Dell did install Netscape (6.x if I remember correctly) as the default browser on some Optiplexes about a year ago. Dunno if this was the rule or the exception though.
Firefox might be a bit of a problem, what with OSS and corporate support things (plus, it's not an officially stable version yet).
I'm still wondering about that ... does anyone have a quote on what the upgrade to XServer is costing them? Because the original comparison was rather unfair - G5 were desktop machines, compared to usually more expensive workstation setups (the main contender people cite is Opteron, which should really be pitted against XServer - for one thing, the ECC memory makes a difference in price w.r.t. the original G5). So, after all thei upgrades are in place, I'd be curious how their final costs compare with alternate (and equivalent) setups. Mind you, I'm not saying Power970 isn't a nice processor - AltiVec appears to be quite nice for some types of number crunching, so (as usual) price does not tell the whole story.
... then w2k would also be a fair comparison - and you should be able to find cheap enough versions of it. nah, it doesn't make much sense to push this on, which os is cheaper depends too much on what exactly it is you plan on doing with it. General arguments are bound to have counter-examples.
And with windows
It's cheaper than XP
This one is not entirelycorrect, if you want to stay up to date. The yearly upgrade cycle so far made OSX quite more expensive than XP if you started with the first released version on both. And if you're talking OEM, XP might be actually cheaper now.
Granted, if the software would be the only difference, OSX would have XP beat hands down. However, if you're out to buy a cheap and reasonably fast computer, Apple is not exactly in the top 10 choices (emphasis on both cheap and fast).
Adapting the old saying: cheap, fast, cool - pick two.
Add to that various connection patterns they can obtain by correlating the GUID with the IP. Still, not a big privacy issue yet.
However, I'm not sure how exact this list is - given that previous examples of info capture showed that WindowsUpdate didn't bother to select only the MS products from the registry list it grabbed and sent the full list of installed software.
The point of the official versions for any Linux vendor is to be stable, not up-to-date (except for patches, that is). That's why you mostly get the major component upgrades with the distro upgrade - it costs them time (thus money) to test, track config changes and everything from various states of upgrade: do you upgrade to kde-3.2.3 from 3.2.2, 3.2.1, 3.1 and so on.
Anyway, don't give up yet - if you want to stay up to date with packages, at the cost of some stability, you still have choices: Fedora, even SuSe for some stuff (most notably kde), Debian (yeah, sounds amazing), Gentoo.
The key, as always, is to figure out what you really need when forced to choose between two less-than-compatible options (up-to-date and stable/tested). Then stick to your answer.
On top of that, he's also wrong. Mandrake and SuSe (afair) ship with ntfsresize. Provided that no ugly accidents happen, you only need a defrag before starting the installation.
[flame]If you use xdmcp over wireless you're not even worth the time to root.[/flame]
joking aside, XDMCP is an insecure abomination - at least I hope you're tunnelling it over something more secure. What do you need it for that can't be done with ssh+Xforwarding anyway?
Depends on what you're doing. SuSe seems ok at leading newbies by the hand from what I remember, a task out of reach for Fedora. However, for an advanced user the newbie-friendliness can be a pain.
Personally, from these 3 I'd choose Mandrake, too - mostly because can fit more bills easy enough. The official release, if set up properly, is actually quite usable by newbies; and for tweaks, Cooker is the bleeding edge. Not to mention the boon that is PLF ^_^
Why would they? they finally have an OS to fight for markershare (well, windows is way too far away), there's no point in providing the opponent with bullets.
btw, use the mplayer plugin.
Neat. Also, completely, utterly, un-spatial. But a beautiful clue for all the spatial zealots saying their way is the one true way. Thank you.
wow, nice contradiction here.
How do you approach a tool you're not familiar with? You learn to use it. Nobody is 'born' with the spatial paradigm deeply rooted in one's brain. Heck, it's not even all that natural to boot with - you don't naturally remember objects by position, but by their relationships with each other. That's neither spatial nor tree-like, although it's used by both. And the tree-like structure is not computer-optimized, but that was already pointed out.
The better question would probably be why did the browsing paradigm survive for so long while the spatial one gets reinvented every few years, then dropped? I don't have an answer to that, but venturing a guess I'd say users outgrow 'newbie interfaces' - at some point the spatial paradigm simply stops being useful enough. No user stays newbie forever, as others pointed out, organizing your files into moderately deep trees isn't rocket science; on the other hand, sorting through several thousend files in one folder would end up annoying anyone.
And to close the argument, let's rehash the most 'mom-and-pop' counter-example for spatial pardigm: digital photo. With all the digicams out there, this is bound to be one of the major ways of filling a hard drive. Now, all those cameras give the files some silly counter names that overflow quite rapidly. So users have 2 choices: either rename every picture to something unique in order to dump them all in the same 'spatially-organized' folder, or put them in unique folders for each shooting session. Now the first choice, aside from being, shall I say, tiresome, has the disadvantage that the one 'my pictures' folder will start opening up rather slowly once you have thousands of pictures in it (especially if one uses thumbnail previews) and finding files will become rather tedious[*]. How long do you think a newbie user will stick to this method? and when he/she moves on and organizes stuff, how soon until the spatial paradigm breaks?
[*] please don't bring up metadata searches in this case. Metadata is not something that gets automagically embedded into an image file, you still have to type it in. I am yet to see someone who would add metadata to several hundreds of pictures - and even if that someone exists, it won't be a 'newbie user'.
This looks like a pointless argument, but I'll give it a shot. Just to make it clear from the beginnig, I think you're too extreme on this. I'm just trying to play the devil's advocate a bit to balance the field.
... well, you get the idea. The consequence is that, in a givn field, the underdog is more likely to have open drivers/specs. This happened to NVidia w.r.t. the nforce chipset: when they started losing ground to Via, opening up at least part of the spec made sense. In the video segment, the competition is too fierce, so both NVidia and ATI go closed-source for now. Heck, look just at CPU chipsets: AMD actively encourages third-party chipsets, while Intel would rather sink the competition. Look at how much time it took Intel to come up with Linux drivers for Centrino (and they probably did it mostly because of the planned push into Linux laptops with IBM) - and Intel is supposed to be a Linux backer these days.
Companies are in business for the money. Love it, hate it, that's the goal. If keeping code closed brings them an advantage, most will do it. If opening the code brings the advantage
Now, back to the video drivers issue. In the blue corner, NVidia. In the red one, ATI. Whom would you call 'more open-source friendly'? Bear in mind that, lately, Linux rendering is mainstream and offloading some processing to the gpu seems like the next interesting trend - thus, there's a market for Linux drivers. So both players release Linux binary drivers. NVidia has been doing it for a long time now, ATI just started (if you're not counting half-baked, unsupported drivers). But wait, NVidia has drivers for some apparent useless platforms, like IA64, AMD64, or FreeBSD/x86. Not much of an economic incentive there. So why do they do it? Or, conversely, why is ATI not doing it?
My point is: here's a corporation that spends some resources to provide a number of people with drivers without much economic gain (I don't really think the number of GF cards bought for playing 3D games on FreeBSD or Linux/IA64 covers too much). In my book, that makes NVidia more open-source friendly than ATI. They are in it for the money, sure, but also a little more than that. Also, remember that they were providing Linux drivers when Linux was a lot less used and NVidia was the top graphics dog, which again was a refreshing difference of attitude from the mainstream.
Yeah, I know, I'm biased here. I'm probably just happy I get 3D accelerated graphics on my Linux/AMD64. I could have had to stick with just 2D, but there was this one vendor that had drivers from almost day one. That does not make them holy or anything *insert bitching about nforce3 drivers here* but it's sure nice to have a working option instead of none from time to time.
I would think they used 'in parallel' rather loosely. Depending on what tech they use for the holograms, it could be doable to have the outgoing beam angled from the incoming one (really easy if the holo is a volume one); then they can use, say 3 holos for RGB that would scatter light from 3 (R, G, B) lasers in the same direction to superimpose the images and get the color one.