It's so easy to get fansubs these days with BitTorrent, the fansubbing scene is really nothing like it was only a few years ago.
When a popular series like Naruto has a new release, within a week there will be 100,000-200,000 downloads just from the group that is first to release it (Dattebayo). Add the other popular groups in like Anbu and you're looking at 200,000-300,000 downloads a week. Clearly the demand and distribution capacity is huge, a double feature episode will move over 80 terabyte of data easily in a little more over a week. I can understand the companies starting to get nervous.
Another large problem is that when a series does get licensed, whereas previously this was seen as a good thing today it will be met with extreme hostility from the users who are used to getting their anime fix for free. I pity the company that dares license Naruto before it's completed its run in Japan.
I see only one solution. The companies theselves must provide a service to rival the fansubbers. The animation houses themselves could microcharge for the episodes online. With simultaneous TV/net releases I do see a large portion of the current fansub base supporting such an effort. It could pave the way for other TV series moving towards online distribution, in my opinion it's only a matter of time and who will do it first.
Note that Civ Call to Power (and the sequel) aren't part of the Civilization franchise, it's not made under the same license and I think there were even some lawsuits at the time if I remember correctly. It was made by a completely different company and published by Activision.
I personally like Alpha Centauri the most, it's got all of the best parts of Civilization II plus borders and the ability to create your own units. If you haven't tried it yet, I highly recommend it. It's a Firaxis game (Sid's company). There's even a Linux version available.
Picasa 1.2 made me kick Adobe Album 2.0 out, the software I was using previously to organize photos. The speed of the Picasa interface is something you have to try for yourself, it runs like a greased weasel. Adobe Album behaves like it's downloading the images as progressive jpegs from the net in comparison, you can see the gradual redraws of the image when you open the edit mode.
Now Picasa 2.0 comes along, and it is at least at easy to use and fast as 1.2. It also fixes my number one problem with these organizers, that the program's internal organization is not reflected on the disk, only in some metadata. That just doesn't cut it in real life when you're working with multiple programs. I bet Adobe will start to give away their Album software for free soon, I just don't see who would want to buy it when Picasa is simply better, faster and free.
I'm personally wondering how a relatively new system like SELinux combined with Exec-Shield are keeping machines from being rooted. Let's say a cracker a compromises your Apache server through a bug in the server itself or a flaw you've introduced yourself through either a CGI or PHP script. He is simply not breaking out of the kernel security context set by the SELinux policy, so what's a hacker to do these days? Would a local root exploit allow you to bypass SELinux? What if there's no root on the system anymore, which is entirely possible. Doesn't that completely mess up the hacker's plans?
Do people still get rooted running something like Fedora Core 3 with SELinux? I can imagine they do, you just don't really hear about it anymore. Perhaps the system is still too new to tell either way. If every daemon is locked down with a targeted SELinux policy in the future, and I see no reason why you wouldn't want this once someone has done the work of writing the policy, perhaps we'll see a dramatic reduction in compromised systems.
I for one am sick of these "oh but it requires libgnome/kdelibs". Just fucking install both desktop environments, that way you can run any app you want. Forget selecting libararies, you're doing yourself a disservice. You're likely spending more on toiletpaper any given day than what it costs in disk space to just install everything.
Seriously, if takes a hundred megabytes, a gigabyte, whatever, so what. If it takes you even five minutes to troubleshoot an application you're never going to recuperate your effort. Welcome to 2005, where time is expensive and diskspace is cheap. Fuck custom installations.
Nobody's proposing hydrogen combustion engines anymore, time to update your facts. We've got these little things called electrochemical engines now. Hydrogen fuelcells produce electricity through reverse electrolysis, and that's what's being pushed.
Because you cannot make any assumptions about the attack vector. Say there's a local vulnerability found in the kernel that can give you privilege escalation. It's no problem right, since you don't allow remote logins, so you're not going to patch it. Wrong.
Next time there's a small hole in Apache that for instance allows execution as the apache or nobody users, that local kernel security hole will come back to bite you in the ass and lead to your box being rooted.
It doesn't even have to be a Apache hole. Say some little bit of user supplied input is being used in some chrooted or otherwise jailed context, perhaps you're generating a PS or PDF file in some temp directory on the fly. Again that little security mistake you've made combined with the local privilege escalation flaw you didn't patch will stretch the hole to goatse.cx proportions.
Unless your machine is unplugged from the net, patch that kernel. Seriously, it's like insurance, a little pain every now and then so that when the shit hits the fan you'll hopefully live through it.
One of the last standing feature points for Solaris has over most other OS's is first tier support by Sun's JRE's
Which is kind of funny considering the Solaris JRE is pretty much widely considered to be the worst version available. As anyone who has had the "pleasure" of working with said version will know, it has had a whole slew of issues and is to this day not on par with the Linux or Windows versions.
You can't choose your power company? That's been possible in most European companies since a few years back. I don't know if they all even need to be connected to the national grid (although I think most are), you simply pay directly to the company of your choosing and they output X kWh for your money into the grid or their local net. Who actually supplies the power to your outlet is completely irrelevant.
It's a brilliant system, and obvious in hind sight. Want to support wind power? Pay a few extra cents to a wind power company on your kWhs and more wind generated power is injected into the grid. Or you can just compete the companies for the lowest price if that's what you care about. I wonder if a system like this could ever be implemented in the USA, or would it be lobbied and legislated to death?
As someone who is definitely one of those people, let me shed some light on your confusion.
I have more HD storage space and stuff backed up on media than I can count. Easily terabytes of the stuff. You're perfectly right, I'm not going to sift through the huge piles of CD-R's and DVD-R's to find something, if I want to see some old anime episode it is almost always faster to simply download it again.
However, the dream is that I one day will have all this stuff at my fingertips. My first drive cost a small fortune and held about 10MB. Years from now I'll be picking up terabyte drives for $120. That is the moment the spindles get thrown out. That is when I can find absolutely anything I want instantly.
It doesn't require the CD while you play. In fact, it doesn't require the CD at any point, feel free to throw them away straight away. All you need is the serial number, Steam then downloads all the games you're entitled to, CS:S and HL2 in this case, if you use the steam net installer instead of the installer on the CD. You can also install the games on as many computers as you want, but only one can be playing the game at a time.
In some ways this is much more flexible than the old "must have CD in the drive" system. Want to play on a laptop? Just authorize it using Steam. Lost/scratched the CD? You didn't need it any case, as long as you remember you Steam login name. I think it's great.
I think the point was that Half Life 2 is only being sold on DVD in Europe for example, and this is pretty much the trend for all recent games, i.e. you can't even get the CD versions anymore. Why is that? Clearly there is some reason no publisher is willing to risk DVD games in the states.
This is completely the opposite of what Linus himself thinks. We've got a new kernel development process since the last kernel sumit, and the final stabilization is now explicitly left to the vendors.
2.6 is now both the stable and development branch for the foreseeable future. New features are rapidly integrated and 2.6.x.y versions are optionally released for stability, but a lot of the testing and QA is being offloaded to the distributions.
I personally want Red Hat to tweak their kernels. That's what a distributors job is in my opinion, pulling software from all sort of sources and integrating them into a coherent product. I want Red Hat to include fixes for ACPI, CD recording, and basically do everything to assure that I don't have to compile my own kernel. Red Hat employs some of the best core kernel developers, over the years they've earned my trust and that of my company's. So in a sense, yes, they can do better, and we expect it of them. Perhaps that's not the kind of vendor you're looking for, in which case just stick to Slackware.
The Fedora Core 2 DVD image also included the source discs. With Fedora Core 3 the DVD only contains the same binary data as on the 4 regular CDs. Makes more sense this way in my opinion.
For $35 you get the Novell Linux Desktop media, meaning a bunch of CD's or a DVD. It's exactly the same thing you can download for free as part of the evaluation.
For an additional $50 you get access to Novell's update services for one year.
Is SuSE really going to be waiting for KDE4, which is still a long way off, before starting to move to DBUS & HAL? It seem a bit strange, considering that we're starting to see this tech being included in most distros right now. It's a major feature of Fedora Core 3 which is about a month away, Mandrake 10.1's got it, Gentoo's had it for a long time in testing, Debian spinoff Ubuntu should have it etc.
I think they should coordinate timetables more with other projects, like Red Hat does, in this case with Freedesktop.org. It's just seems strange to me that they'll be releasing SuSE 9.2 one month from now, yet it will still ship GNOME 2.6 and nothing overly exciting. I know this is because the code went "gold" a while back and they need to press cd's and stuff, but is the availability of a boxed set really worth a whole month of slack time? By the time the customers get their hands on the product there's likely to be a set of errata out, which doesn't look good. With Red Hat, even when you buy the big bucks enterprise versions, as soon as you plug in your credit card details you can download the images and then order the CD's for free later if you want them for some reason.
Ah well, that's just me. I'm always putting off buying stuff because there's something better around the corner. I just wonder how SuSE decides when to cut a release, must be hard with the rapid pace of development in the community.
Java and C# are quite different in my view. Java is succesfully entrenched on the server side, while C# looks like it will become quite successful on the desktop.
To date Java has produced exactly two good desktop applications, Eclipse and Azureus. It's an abysmal failure, and the associated stigma won't disappear anytime soon.
Telling users to go to Windows update and pull down.NET 1.1 or bundling the runtime with the OS is a tremendous benefit and a magnitude easier than getting end users to install Java. The most important difference, on both Windows and on Linux, is the fact that some application is written in C# won't be broadcasted to the users. You want application "foo", mono gets pulled in a dependency like any other library or runtime. You launch "foo" and the program comes up with a native GTK#/SWF GUI. It's a fundamentally different outlook than with Java, which continually jumps in your face "this app is written in Java!" either explicitly (as if the user gives a damn) or because of the one hundred little things that are off even when using SWT in Eclipse. NET/Mono will just be a dependency, like the VC++ runtime before it and the VB runtime before that. It's a huge cultural difference: "Java Powered!!!1!" vs "I guess it's written in C#... or something." I was playing around with the NASA World Viewer application featured last week on Slashdot, only later did I find out it was written in.NET on this site. There's just no way to tell.
Mono apps on Linux or Windows won't come in some funky.NET specific container. You'll install the software exactly as you always have, for example by using RPMs via apt-get or yum. It might seem like a small detail, but it's actually a huge deal from the end users point of view because nothing changes. On a pristine installation of Fedora I issue "yum install monodevelop" and then "monodevelop" and lo and behold the app starts. Mono does its work quietly in the background, something Java has never achieved.
The JRE is an alien piece of software in Linux land. Even after you install the official RPM "java" produces a "java: command not found". Even as a developer I don't want to deal with that sort of shit these days if it can just be automated. There's just been no thought given to end user experience and it shows throughout the whole platform.
All these points make Java a horrible system for desktop Linux apps, and Mono on par with existing systems. Then when you add in all the niceties of working in a managed language, you've got to at least give Mono a good look when deciding what to use for your next Linux app.
Mono's 100% open source. Dismissing it right from the start just because it has its origins with MS is just stupid. The situation is completely analogous to MS SMB vs Samba. Even in an all Linux shop you're likely to find Samba in use because, frankly, NFS for the longest time has been a real piece of shit and is only recently worth using on Linux.
Or even better, if you use Keyhole 2, Greenwich CT photos are available at 1m resolution (the entire US is guaranteed to be available at 15m resolution). Now that's pretty damn good, you can make out cars easily and even people, I doubt the town's own images are much better than that. The program is available free of charge for 7 trial days to anyone in the world.
So clearly this data is already available to anyone who wants it, so it's not about security. Restricting aerial photography, that's been paid for by tax money in the first place, just keeps it out of public programs like NASA's World Wind viewer (featured yesterday on Slashdot). I'm sure the greedy bastards at Greenwich would have no objections to selling the photos to a provider like Keyhole instead of just give them up for free. Crying "terrorists, security breach!" is just the fashionable thing to do these days when don't feel like cooperating.
And let's face it. Programs like Keyhole and the free World Wind are only going to get better from here on. 5-10 years from now you're going to able to pan from San Francisco to Paris, either way around, and have a 1-5meter resolution all the way, so that you can count every Starbuck along the way if you feel like it. The globe is going to be mapped completely, deal with it.
Why not? Choosing software isn't some science based on code quality, it's made up of everything from the impressions of the project web page to the leader's public conduct.
Of course Tom Lord is allowed to say whatever he wishes, but his immature behavior then directly affects the public perception of the project. The large number of negative posts in this story alone isn't some vast conspiracy, it's just the result of Tom acting like a total asshat for years. Personally, I try to choose software that doesn't rely on asshats, it's usually a lot less stress in the long run.
Arch just isn't a viable alternative for me or my team.
1) It overestimates its own importance. It's just a version control system, yet it imposes restrictions on your coding practices. Specifically, you have to do out of tree builds or constant distcleans because arch assumes every file that gets created should be checked in, meaning there's a 1:1 mapping between the checkout directory and the repository by default. There's some work arounds, but it's a user-hostile stance to take and people moving from CVS/SVN will not accept this.
2) The reason for the above is because "it's a feature of arch to encourage separation of source from builds". More like it is the easy way out of a lot of the tricky details with file renames and removals for the arch developers. Shit, why don't you just solve the tabs-or-spaces problem while you're at it, only allow checkings following the One True Way (tabs btw). I encourage Tom Lord to try separation of head from ass before he starts worrying about the cleanliness of my build tree.
3) Tom Lord reminds me of a certain David Dawes (of Xfree86.org). It's just not that I personally don't like the guy, I could never commit my business or even hobby project to something lead by this man for the long term because I think the project has a high probability of self destructing.
4) It's just unprofessional to blast the SVN developers. Newflash for you Tom: It doesn't matter if Arch is twice as good technically, SVN is good enough, familiar to CVS users and easy to use. They're all perfectly good reasons to go with SVN over arch, it's the reason MySQL is more popular than PostgreSQL. You don't see Postgres developers heckling MySQL, and Postgres is never, ever, going to overtake MySQL. Just be content with making the best versioning system, never mind what everyone else does.
5) There's no Windows/OS X integration or even clients. That makes it a non-contender for any mixed environment, i.e. almost everywhere not counting projects being done in parent's basements.
implying that the apache server they bundle is somehow a different species from the one anyone can download.
Their Apache scores over the regular, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it slightly more expensive; and secondly it has the words IBM inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.
Slashdot Mirror
It's so easy to get fansubs these days with BitTorrent, the fansubbing scene is really nothing like it was only a few years ago.
When a popular series like Naruto has a new release, within a week there will be 100,000-200,000 downloads just from the group that is first to release it (Dattebayo). Add the other popular groups in like Anbu and you're looking at 200,000-300,000 downloads a week. Clearly the demand and distribution capacity is huge, a double feature episode will move over 80 terabyte of data easily in a little more over a week. I can understand the companies starting to get nervous.
Another large problem is that when a series does get licensed, whereas previously this was seen as a good thing today it will be met with extreme hostility from the users who are used to getting their anime fix for free. I pity the company that dares license Naruto before it's completed its run in Japan.
I see only one solution. The companies theselves must provide a service to rival the fansubbers. The animation houses themselves could microcharge for the episodes online. With simultaneous TV/net releases I do see a large portion of the current fansub base supporting such an effort. It could pave the way for other TV series moving towards online distribution, in my opinion it's only a matter of time and who will do it first.
Note that Civ Call to Power (and the sequel) aren't part of the Civilization franchise, it's not made under the same license and I think there were even some lawsuits at the time if I remember correctly. It was made by a completely different company and published by Activision.
I personally like Alpha Centauri the most, it's got all of the best parts of Civilization II plus borders and the ability to create your own units. If you haven't tried it yet, I highly recommend it. It's a Firaxis game (Sid's company). There's even a Linux version available.
Picasa 1.2 made me kick Adobe Album 2.0 out, the software I was using previously to organize photos. The speed of the Picasa interface is something you have to try for yourself, it runs like a greased weasel. Adobe Album behaves like it's downloading the images as progressive jpegs from the net in comparison, you can see the gradual redraws of the image when you open the edit mode.
Now Picasa 2.0 comes along, and it is at least at easy to use and fast as 1.2. It also fixes my number one problem with these organizers, that the program's internal organization is not reflected on the disk, only in some metadata. That just doesn't cut it in real life when you're working with multiple programs. I bet Adobe will start to give away their Album software for free soon, I just don't see who would want to buy it when Picasa is simply better, faster and free.
Simply "rpm -Va" will do, as in Validate All.
I'm personally wondering how a relatively new system like SELinux combined with Exec-Shield are keeping machines from being rooted. Let's say a cracker a compromises your Apache server through a bug in the server itself or a flaw you've introduced yourself through either a CGI or PHP script. He is simply not breaking out of the kernel security context set by the SELinux policy, so what's a hacker to do these days? Would a local root exploit allow you to bypass SELinux? What if there's no root on the system anymore, which is entirely possible. Doesn't that completely mess up the hacker's plans?
Do people still get rooted running something like Fedora Core 3 with SELinux? I can imagine they do, you just don't really hear about it anymore. Perhaps the system is still too new to tell either way. If every daemon is locked down with a targeted SELinux policy in the future, and I see no reason why you wouldn't want this once someone has done the work of writing the policy, perhaps we'll see a dramatic reduction in compromised systems.
I for one am sick of these "oh but it requires libgnome/kdelibs". Just fucking install both desktop environments, that way you can run any app you want. Forget selecting libararies, you're doing yourself a disservice. You're likely spending more on toiletpaper any given day than what it costs in disk space to just install everything.
Seriously, if takes a hundred megabytes, a gigabyte, whatever, so what. If it takes you even five minutes to troubleshoot an application you're never going to recuperate your effort. Welcome to 2005, where time is expensive and diskspace is cheap. Fuck custom installations.
Nobody's proposing hydrogen combustion engines anymore, time to update your facts. We've got these little things called electrochemical engines now. Hydrogen fuelcells produce electricity through reverse electrolysis, and that's what's being pushed.
Because you cannot make any assumptions about the attack vector. Say there's a local vulnerability found in the kernel that can give you privilege escalation. It's no problem right, since you don't allow remote logins, so you're not going to patch it. Wrong.
Next time there's a small hole in Apache that for instance allows execution as the apache or nobody users, that local kernel security hole will come back to bite you in the ass and lead to your box being rooted.
It doesn't even have to be a Apache hole. Say some little bit of user supplied input is being used in some chrooted or otherwise jailed context, perhaps you're generating a PS or PDF file in some temp directory on the fly. Again that little security mistake you've made combined with the local privilege escalation flaw you didn't patch will stretch the hole to goatse.cx proportions.
Unless your machine is unplugged from the net, patch that kernel. Seriously, it's like insurance, a little pain every now and then so that when the shit hits the fan you'll hopefully live through it.
One of the last standing feature points for Solaris has over most other OS's is first tier support by Sun's JRE's
Which is kind of funny considering the Solaris JRE is pretty much widely considered to be the worst version available. As anyone who has had the "pleasure" of working with said version will know, it has had a whole slew of issues and is to this day not on par with the Linux or Windows versions.
You can't choose your power company? That's been possible in most European companies since a few years back. I don't know if they all even need to be connected to the national grid (although I think most are), you simply pay directly to the company of your choosing and they output X kWh for your money into the grid or their local net. Who actually supplies the power to your outlet is completely irrelevant.
It's a brilliant system, and obvious in hind sight. Want to support wind power? Pay a few extra cents to a wind power company on your kWhs and more wind generated power is injected into the grid. Or you can just compete the companies for the lowest price if that's what you care about. I wonder if a system like this could ever be implemented in the USA, or would it be lobbied and legislated to death?
As someone who is definitely one of those people, let me shed some light on your confusion.
I have more HD storage space and stuff backed up on media than I can count. Easily terabytes of the stuff. You're perfectly right, I'm not going to sift through the huge piles of CD-R's and DVD-R's to find something, if I want to see some old anime episode it is almost always faster to simply download it again.
However, the dream is that I one day will have all this stuff at my fingertips. My first drive cost a small fortune and held about 10MB. Years from now I'll be picking up terabyte drives for $120. That is the moment the spindles get thrown out. That is when I can find absolutely anything I want instantly.
It doesn't require the CD while you play. In fact, it doesn't require the CD at any point, feel free to throw them away straight away. All you need is the serial number, Steam then downloads all the games you're entitled to, CS:S and HL2 in this case, if you use the steam net installer instead of the installer on the CD. You can also install the games on as many computers as you want, but only one can be playing the game at a time.
In some ways this is much more flexible than the old "must have CD in the drive" system. Want to play on a laptop? Just authorize it using Steam. Lost/scratched the CD? You didn't need it any case, as long as you remember you Steam login name. I think it's great.
I think the point was that Half Life 2 is only being sold on DVD in Europe for example, and this is pretty much the trend for all recent games, i.e. you can't even get the CD versions anymore. Why is that? Clearly there is some reason no publisher is willing to risk DVD games in the states.
SELinux is included in stock 2.6.
This is completely the opposite of what Linus himself thinks. We've got a new kernel development process since the last kernel sumit, and the final stabilization is now explicitly left to the vendors.
2.6 is now both the stable and development branch for the foreseeable future. New features are rapidly integrated and 2.6.x.y versions are optionally released for stability, but a lot of the testing and QA is being offloaded to the distributions.
I personally want Red Hat to tweak their kernels. That's what a distributors job is in my opinion, pulling software from all sort of sources and integrating them into a coherent product. I want Red Hat to include fixes for ACPI, CD recording, and basically do everything to assure that I don't have to compile my own kernel. Red Hat employs some of the best core kernel developers, over the years they've earned my trust and that of my company's. So in a sense, yes, they can do better, and we expect it of them. Perhaps that's not the kind of vendor you're looking for, in which case just stick to Slackware.
The Fedora Core 2 DVD image also included the source discs. With Fedora Core 3 the DVD only contains the same binary data as on the 4 regular CDs. Makes more sense this way in my opinion.
Read the page you linked more carefully.
For $35 you get the Novell Linux Desktop media, meaning a bunch of CD's or a DVD. It's exactly the same thing you can download for free as part of the evaluation.
For an additional $50 you get access to Novell's update services for one year.
That's pretty good, but check out this setup. An amazing 13 screen setup, and he's even found an app that can use all of them.
Is SuSE really going to be waiting for KDE4, which is still a long way off, before starting to move to DBUS & HAL? It seem a bit strange, considering that we're starting to see this tech being included in most distros right now. It's a major feature of Fedora Core 3 which is about a month away, Mandrake 10.1's got it, Gentoo's had it for a long time in testing, Debian spinoff Ubuntu should have it etc.
I think they should coordinate timetables more with other projects, like Red Hat does, in this case with Freedesktop.org. It's just seems strange to me that they'll be releasing SuSE 9.2 one month from now, yet it will still ship GNOME 2.6 and nothing overly exciting. I know this is because the code went "gold" a while back and they need to press cd's and stuff, but is the availability of a boxed set really worth a whole month of slack time? By the time the customers get their hands on the product there's likely to be a set of errata out, which doesn't look good. With Red Hat, even when you buy the big bucks enterprise versions, as soon as you plug in your credit card details you can download the images and then order the CD's for free later if you want them for some reason.
Ah well, that's just me. I'm always putting off buying stuff because there's something better around the corner. I just wonder how SuSE decides when to cut a release, must be hard with the rapid pace of development in the community.
Java and C# are quite different in my view. Java is succesfully entrenched on the server side, while C# looks like it will become quite successful on the desktop.
.NET 1.1 or bundling the runtime with the OS is a tremendous benefit and a magnitude easier than getting end users to install Java. The most important difference, on both Windows and on Linux, is the fact that some application is written in C# won't be broadcasted to the users. You want application "foo", mono gets pulled in a dependency like any other library or runtime. You launch "foo" and the program comes up with a native GTK#/SWF GUI. It's a fundamentally different outlook than with Java, which continually jumps in your face "this app is written in Java!" either explicitly (as if the user gives a damn) or because of the one hundred little things that are off even when using SWT in Eclipse. NET/Mono will just be a dependency, like the VC++ runtime before it and the VB runtime before that. It's a huge cultural difference: "Java Powered!!!1!" vs "I guess it's written in C#... or something." I was playing around with the NASA World Viewer application featured last week on Slashdot, only later did I find out it was written in .NET on this site. There's just no way to tell.
.NET specific container. You'll install the software exactly as you always have, for example by using RPMs via apt-get or yum. It might seem like a small detail, but it's actually a huge deal from the end users point of view because nothing changes. On a pristine installation of Fedora I issue "yum install monodevelop" and then "monodevelop" and lo and behold the app starts. Mono does its work quietly in the background, something Java has never achieved.
To date Java has produced exactly two good desktop applications, Eclipse and Azureus. It's an abysmal failure, and the associated stigma won't disappear anytime soon.
Telling users to go to Windows update and pull down
Mono apps on Linux or Windows won't come in some funky
The JRE is an alien piece of software in Linux land. Even after you install the official RPM "java" produces a "java: command not found". Even as a developer I don't want to deal with that sort of shit these days if it can just be automated. There's just been no thought given to end user experience and it shows throughout the whole platform.
All these points make Java a horrible system for desktop Linux apps, and Mono on par with existing systems. Then when you add in all the niceties of working in a managed language, you've got to at least give Mono a good look when deciding what to use for your next Linux app.
Mono's 100% open source. Dismissing it right from the start just because it has its origins with MS is just stupid. The situation is completely analogous to MS SMB vs Samba. Even in an all Linux shop you're likely to find Samba in use because, frankly, NFS for the longest time has been a real piece of shit and is only recently worth using on Linux.
Or even better, if you use Keyhole 2, Greenwich CT photos are available at 1m resolution (the entire US is guaranteed to be available at 15m resolution). Now that's pretty damn good, you can make out cars easily and even people, I doubt the town's own images are much better than that. The program is available free of charge for 7 trial days to anyone in the world.
So clearly this data is already available to anyone who wants it, so it's not about security. Restricting aerial photography, that's been paid for by tax money in the first place, just keeps it out of public programs like NASA's World Wind viewer (featured yesterday on Slashdot). I'm sure the greedy bastards at Greenwich would have no objections to selling the photos to a provider like Keyhole instead of just give them up for free. Crying "terrorists, security breach!" is just the fashionable thing to do these days when don't feel like cooperating.
And let's face it. Programs like Keyhole and the free World Wind are only going to get better from here on. 5-10 years from now you're going to able to pan from San Francisco to Paris, either way around, and have a 1-5meter resolution all the way, so that you can count every Starbuck along the way if you feel like it. The globe is going to be mapped completely, deal with it.
Why not? Choosing software isn't some science based on code quality, it's made up of everything from the impressions of the project web page to the leader's public conduct.
Of course Tom Lord is allowed to say whatever he wishes, but his immature behavior then directly affects the public perception of the project. The large number of negative posts in this story alone isn't some vast conspiracy, it's just the result of Tom acting like a total asshat for years. Personally, I try to choose software that doesn't rely on asshats, it's usually a lot less stress in the long run.
Arch just isn't a viable alternative for me or my team.
1) It overestimates its own importance. It's just a version control system, yet it imposes restrictions on your coding practices. Specifically, you have to do out of tree builds or constant distcleans because arch assumes every file that gets created should be checked in, meaning there's a 1:1 mapping between the checkout directory and the repository by default. There's some work arounds, but it's a user-hostile stance to take and people moving from CVS/SVN will not accept this.
2) The reason for the above is because "it's a feature of arch to encourage separation of source from builds". More like it is the easy way out of a lot of the tricky details with file renames and removals for the arch developers. Shit, why don't you just solve the tabs-or-spaces problem while you're at it, only allow checkings following the One True Way (tabs btw). I encourage Tom Lord to try separation of head from ass before he starts worrying about the cleanliness of my build tree.
3) Tom Lord reminds me of a certain David Dawes (of Xfree86.org). It's just not that I personally don't like the guy, I could never commit my business or even hobby project to something lead by this man for the long term because I think the project has a high probability of self destructing.
4) It's just unprofessional to blast the SVN developers. Newflash for you Tom: It doesn't matter if Arch is twice as good technically, SVN is good enough, familiar to CVS users and easy to use. They're all perfectly good reasons to go with SVN over arch, it's the reason MySQL is more popular than PostgreSQL. You don't see Postgres developers heckling MySQL, and Postgres is never, ever, going to overtake MySQL. Just be content with making the best versioning system, never mind what everyone else does.
5) There's no Windows/OS X integration or even clients. That makes it a non-contender for any mixed environment, i.e. almost everywhere not counting projects being done in parent's basements.
implying that the apache server they bundle is somehow a different species from the one anyone can download.
Their Apache scores over the regular, more pedestrian work in two important respects.
First, it slightly more expensive; and secondly it has the words IBM inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.
Sounds great! I'll just get my hardware from Microsoft and my software from IBM.