And if you didn't boot into Linux for many months resulting in lots of unpatched security holes, and there were a ton of people trying to attack Linux boxes because Linux controlled 95% of the market, you'd have the same experience there.
Sure, if the above were true, you'd be right in practical terms.
Honestly, though, can you see Linux ever getting to that stage?
Here's another thought: Just after the cleanup I installed Debian. In fact I'm typing from it now. I used a netinstall CD to get me up and running. It dates from June or July; I'm fairly sure it has bugs. Probably even security bugs. I did apt-get and upgraded to testing immediately.
If you look at some of my other comments on Debian you'll see that I couldn't even use older versions of the installer CDs -- though Debian prides itself on being able to upgrade directly from older CDs to the latest and greatest, even testing and unstable. And yet, and yet...
My point is, no one should have to put up with all this insecure crap from Microsoft. Hearing about how great MS is from a shill is just salt in the wound, don't you think?
Actually, that's a very good idea and I thank you for it. I'll have to remember that.
I use XP for farting around with music samples with Ableton Live. If I could get Live to work under Linux/Wine/Cedega/Crossover Office, I'd drop XP like a shot.
Crossover Office with Office XP works particularly well for the one thing that practically mandates you use Office : CVs, simply because recruiters often require applicants to submit editable documents that can have their contact details removed.
Move along, people. Nothing to see here. There's no point in getting pissed off about this; Microsoft shills are liars and exaggerators.
I will never forget -- seeing as how it happened only on 19 December just gone -- about my broadband installation. Not wanting to rock the boat nor confuse the cable installer guy, I rebooted into XP just prior to his arrival. He hooked my old beater celery up with DHCP and I surfed for about ten minutes. I thanked him and he left.
So I figured I'd do the decent thing and do the security updates....
Eight hours later, I cleaned off the last of the spyware, adware, malware horseshit.
To Nick McGrath: Fuck off and die, you wanker. How much you want to bet your router at home runs a Linux variant for firewalling purposes?
Your first point: Ah, that must be it. I still have problems with it, on principle (I am now repeating myself, sorry).
I honestly believe these analysts would a much better time of it if they changed their titles to 'software shill'.
Your last point: Yeah. I had to give up on Linux advocacy when I realised that hand-holding is 95% of the job. Even with a restricted client base (such as I used to have) and a supportive-but-wary management I found myself losing weeks on simple things like, 'OK, click on the Red Hat Update icon in the lower part of the screen'.
As for Macs, they still are comparatively more expensive here in the UK, and my clients have half of the time balked at anything that isn't XP-stupid (ie/ dumb, not simple) in design and function. The other half of the time they reject macs simply because they are different.
You're right, of course. (Digression: I actually tried to install a cracked alpha/beta/whatever months ago for the hell of it. Wouldn't boot. Yes, I'm a hypocrite. Sue me.)
I meant, though, about the principle of review by government. Although it would make life much more difficult for the DOJ to control once Longhorn is released, I am wondering about the principle of fairness -- though I do not trust Microsoft at all, this smacks of software development by committee and I do have a problem with it.
OK. I live in the UK now, and while I applauded the European Commission's judgement against bundling Windows Media Player with Windows, the important detail or difference between the two cases is that in this the DOJ is trying to impose controls on Microsoft before they have even released the software. Doesn't that strike you as strange, in principle?
And why is the Yahoo article writer so keen to get opinions from that twit of an analyst Laura DiDio? I'm sure someone else here will point out her lovely work defending SCO...
Finally, why the hell do I care about this? Oh yeah, that's it: because every single one of my clients continues to use MS. Arrgh.
OpenBSD for security, NetBSD for portability and FreeBSD for diffusion in the wider world (ie, comparable to Linux).
I have no need for portability, and FreeBSD didn't appeal to me, so OpenBSD it was -- five years ago. I don't think you'll go wrong with any of them, though. If I did it again to experiment I'd probably try FreeBSD out this time.
BSDs do generally have more thorough online and internal documentation than Linux for the core basics, so you won't miss with any of them.
Oh, I don't know. I heard a commentator on BBC World News here in London say this morning that the British actually have the highest number of patents taken out every year, of all countries and nationalities.
Of course, he didn't back it up with the references or citations to prove it, but I found it interesting.
To address your point, though... the French themselves under Chirac and Sarkozy are actively trying to figure ways of importing and domesticating formerly-derided 'Anglo-Saxon capitalism' [their term] -- if they thought it really wasn't so appealing, they certainly wouldn't be doing it now.
Finally, Germany, France and Italy (of the countries that spring to mind) all recognise that their economies lose far too many days to unnecessary strikes, and have to varying degrees all enabled measures in the last four years to get their workforces under control. While I don't normally have a rightwards-slant on workers' issues, all 3 countries have insane policies on long-term unemployment, retraining and hire/fire provisions, and they are all trying to import UK/US policies.
Disclaimer: I am not British, though I moved back here after many years in the North American wilderness;)
I wish that were true... it's just that I did multiple upgrades from whatever Debian stable was called to Woody... they broke too.
Debian itself as a distribution is still my Linux of choice, but after experimenting with the greater ease of use of Mandrake and Fedora Core, I go back to it only with the upgrade path as my reason to sticking with it.
One of the things I've noticed of late with Debian is that their vaulted upgrade procedure between versions is definitely not working for Woody and Sarge.
Upgrading from a fresh Woody install -- of 3.0r0, to be precise -- directly to Sarge as it now stands destroys Gnome completely. It will boot, start X11, but then die horribly for reasons I have yet to sort out fully. (I did this three weeks ago, for an old beater that was a gift) And it would die consistently only in that operating any Gnome application in tandem with another would do it.
The only way I could get the install procedure to update correctly was by using a sarge netinstall CD with a beta from August.
I believe the kernel versions changing has a lot to do with this. Of course, blaming Debian for this is not fair, but expecting users to suddenly know everything about the kernel version, the module loading/management procedure and the deep changes to the/etc directory is a little much.
I don't care about a GUI installer. I do care about Debian's stability between versions. I used to think Debian's upgrade process flawed (speed of releases) but essentially fine for those people who didn't want to think about dependency hell when using an online upgrading service. But now I am wondering if they really have it under control; I think they've taken policy as far as they can go.
They should commit to a regular timeframe for stable/server/stale versions and stick to it. Once a year is plenty of time.
Sorry , I should have been more explicit: I actually saw a 404 error inside Slashdot itself (!!)... not the 'Nothing to see here' message you mention. I have seen the latter on previous visits, infrequently, but I just thought it ironic that the 'Read More' link just... didn't work at all.
All of this was inside of Slashdot, not going externally to a non-existent site as you say:)
The BSD distributions were thought of as good kernel bases for the Debian userspace applications during 1999-2002. So Debian maintainers would rip out the Linux kernel infrastructure and replace it with a BSD variant.
A similar attempt has been ongoing with the HURD kernel for at least the last decade.
Packaging attempts were made with FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
I don't know the status of the Debian/FreeBSD port but the Debian/OpenBSD port was abandoned when Andreas Schuldei, the maintainer of the port, realised that the kernel had shitloads of race conditions and offered no real advantages on its own over properly configured Linux kernels (such as those from Debian itself).
He also believed that the Debian/Linux userspace was not any better or worse in any real sense over the OpenBSD userspace (the ports and packages systems on OpenBSD are not audited, for the most part).
Squatting on your old customers and letting a burst of yellow water go.
Why? Because IE upgrades themselves drive other upgrades for Microsoft products. For the vast majority of people, nonIE choices simply aren't an option, particularly for users wanting to use the Windows Update site. (Yes, I know that you can use the Mozilla Firefox extension for Windows Update, but my point is that many people don't)
Windows Update is actually usable now -- something I never thought I would have seen only a few years ago.
I understand that MS has to draw the line somewhere; I understand that MS has to support a huge array of old code; I just wish they would be a touch more responsible about it.
I have been dealing with this exact issue all this week for various clients, and I really wish I could just simply get them all to move off Windows permanently. Wishful thinking...
I've put you down as a friend, I think what you're saying is important. To respond:
If you check out the Debian Reference, you'll see that one of the main Debian developers openly advocates using Testing as a workstation platform. Given that the Reference forms one of the key documents of the Project (IMHO, the only one you'll really need). In other words, they admit that what you are saying about the upgrade cycle is essentially correct. I don't think they have a real clue as to how to do it, for a couple of reasons.
Previous releases need to be upgradeable in order to smooth transitions from one to the other. The problem is that the testing they undertake is so arduous so as to render the latest stable release almost obsolete as soon as it is launched to the world.
In some cases, for specific parts of the project, this isn't such a big deal -- the kernel and X come to mind -- for X, they actually test the components on more architectures than the XFree86 project itself does.
I'm actually in a similar state to you, I download over a painfully-slow ISDN link. I haven't been able to upgrade Testing in 2 months or so. I have a number of apt and dpkg addons that make fetching packages easier (in the sense that I don't have to troubleshoot the process), but it is *fucking* frustrating to wait 2 or 3 weeks to download stuff and then have the apt tool tell me that perl is broken, mc will be removed, and God knows what else is wrong this week with the distro.
I do remember it being less of a problem during the previous release cycle, but am fairly sure it stems from the fact that having a fast connection makes all the difference.
I am also certain that other distros still do not handle upgrading issues as well (and this is saying something, after the above), mainly because they don't have ironclad policy in the same way as Debian. The other distros have lifted apt, as is their right under the GPL, but because they don't have policy that is consistent, don't do as much QA, and lack the developer base, crazy bugs often appear right after a release.
The free vs nonfree -- in the definition of the Debian people -- is actually quite important. I don't agree with it all the time either, but I see the value of doing it anyway. If you look for the new definitions of the FDL, they say that there are such things called Invariant Sections -- things that have no direct relevance to the subject matter and cannot be changed. Big deal, you say. But it is: I can't 'fork' the paperwork by releasing a stripped version, I have to include the original authors' dedications to Mom, their spouses and their dog Fluffy. Or their paeans to how we should protest the war in Bosnia, or Iraq, or start killing all infidel Christians. Or raping Chinese girls. You see?
I've tried out OpenBSD, and respect it, and like it, but I'd never want to use it for workstation stuff.
I think they should move to a more fixed release cycle, every six -- or even eight -- months like the OpenBSD system would work well. They would have to accept the consequences, though : probably less architectures, or redivide the system into more shades of stability.
Never mind the fact that they're getting bucketloads of free publicity, a la SCO-stylee, through the lawsuit. Being an insurance company, you'd think they'd be a bit more cautious. Boo-hoo-hoo, AXA...
I hear what you're saying, I've been more than a little annoyed with Debian as well lately. But...
I don't use the Stable release, outside of sysadmins, I don't think I know anyone else who does.
They have an obligation to release free stuff that has only become stricter in the last few years. What they are saying about proprietary hardware is not, 'Fuck you, you are evil,' but rather, 'We're sorry, but we have no control nor proper information over the hardware you're using and can't really help you, because if we did have that information, we would be constrained by the makers of your hardware not to divulge it to you.'
To take a completely trivial example, the computer I'm typing this on has an NVidia video card, and I run Debian testing on it. I knew I'd have a hard time using Debian-only software on it, so off I went to Google. Within an hour I had everything downloaded and installed.
OK, perhaps not as easy as grabbing Fedora. But I know as a result of this what I have, what Debian can provide, and what they can't. In other words, I've learned something, and I didn't have it done for me.
A lot of times people forget or get confused as to what the Debian project is about. But they tell you this upfront: they aim to make a free computer operating system. Not to make the easiest, or most convenient -- though it would be nice -- or to make the most secure or most complete. Simply to make it free, so that when a new user, a business, an organisation or a government picks it up, they won't have to --ever-- worry about licensing costs or any other shit.
Limiting the GNU stuff to exclude FDL documentation is, I agree, a total pain in the ass. Granted, disk space is no problem for users these days. But what would be the alternative be? Gloss over the very real difference in opinion as to the modification of texts as just a side issue? It creates problems because the GNU project says 'You have to accept this part and parcel of the original package even if you don't agree with any of it nor does it have any real use'.
And no, this is not a flame, it's an honest question -- if this is really a problem, why aren't you using a FreeBSD system instead? They have ports. They have lots of free stuff. They have a large userbase, they have lots of online support and are pragmatic. What's the holdup?
So according to this interpretation an American woman wanting abortion in the US has no real guarantee of that 'right', because it's a judicially-imposed extension of the right to privacy.
Bit black-and-white, wouldn't you say?
Keep in mind that in the Anglo-American model of jurisprudence, where judges have been effectively cowed by the parliament (Congress), they demonstrate notoriously dino attitudes (England being perhaps the best example of this). Where they explicitly have been unleashed, they have shown remarkable intellectual growth (the US and Canada come to mind).
That's not his point. His point is that no person can comfortably read all that information -- never mind make sense of it all. When the person is the administrator of the box, as is the case with most home users, he or she has the very real problem of eyes glazing over prematurely because the information cannot be understood.
Eric Raymond talks about precisely this problem extensively in Chapter 10 of his Art of Unix Programming.
Slashdot Mirror
And if you didn't boot into Linux for many months resulting in lots of unpatched security holes, and there were a ton of people trying to attack Linux boxes because Linux controlled 95% of the market, you'd have the same experience there.
...
Sure, if the above were true, you'd be right in practical terms.
Honestly, though, can you see Linux ever getting to that stage?
Here's another thought: Just after the cleanup I installed Debian. In fact I'm typing from it now. I used a netinstall CD to get me up and running. It dates from June or July; I'm fairly sure it has bugs. Probably even security bugs. I did apt-get and upgraded to testing immediately.
If you look at some of my other comments on Debian you'll see that I couldn't even use older versions of the installer CDs -- though Debian prides itself on being able to upgrade directly from older CDs to the latest and greatest, even testing and unstable. And yet, and yet
My point is, no one should have to put up with all this insecure crap from Microsoft. Hearing about how great MS is from a shill is just salt in the wound, don't you think?
Actually, that's a very good idea and I thank you for it. I'll have to remember that.
I use XP for farting around with music samples with Ableton Live. If I could get Live to work under Linux/Wine/Cedega/Crossover Office, I'd drop XP like a shot.
Crossover Office with Office XP works particularly well for the one thing that practically mandates you use Office : CVs, simply because recruiters often require applicants to submit editable documents that can have their contact details removed.
Yeah, that's right, from CompUSA ... in the UK. Congratulations for your assumptions.
I have a cracked copy of XP Professional. I think you can understand why I don't really want to be phoning up MS for free copies of SP2.
Ha ha ha!
Oh, I wish. No, I went to check on my Hotmail, and I think I surfed Slashdot.
Oh shit.
Do you think Slashdot has spybots on it?
Move along, people. Nothing to see here. There's no point in getting pissed off about this; Microsoft shills are liars and exaggerators.
...
I will never forget -- seeing as how it happened only on 19 December just gone -- about my broadband installation. Not wanting to rock the boat nor confuse the cable installer guy, I rebooted into XP just prior to his arrival. He hooked my old beater celery up with DHCP and I surfed for about ten minutes. I thanked him and he left.
So I figured I'd do the decent thing and do the security updates.
Eight hours later, I cleaned off the last of the spyware, adware, malware horseshit.
To Nick McGrath: Fuck off and die, you wanker. How much you want to bet your router at home runs a Linux variant for firewalling purposes?
Your first point: Ah, that must be it. I still have problems with it, on principle (I am now repeating myself, sorry).
I honestly believe these analysts would a much better time of it if they changed their titles to 'software shill'.
Your last point: Yeah. I had to give up on Linux advocacy when I realised that hand-holding is 95% of the job. Even with a restricted client base (such as I used to have) and a supportive-but-wary management I found myself losing weeks on simple things like, 'OK, click on the Red Hat Update icon in the lower part of the screen'.
As for Macs, they still are comparatively more expensive here in the UK, and my clients have half of the time balked at anything that isn't XP-stupid (ie/ dumb, not simple) in design and function. The other half of the time they reject macs simply because they are different.
Sigh.
You're right, of course. (Digression: I actually tried to install a cracked alpha/beta/whatever months ago for the hell of it. Wouldn't boot. Yes, I'm a hypocrite. Sue me.)
I meant, though, about the principle of review by government. Although it would make life much more difficult for the DOJ to control once Longhorn is released, I am wondering about the principle of fairness -- though I do not trust Microsoft at all, this smacks of software development by committee and I do have a problem with it.
OK. I live in the UK now, and while I applauded the European Commission's judgement against bundling Windows Media Player with Windows, the important detail or difference between the two cases is that in this the DOJ is trying to impose controls on Microsoft before they have even released the software. Doesn't that strike you as strange, in principle?
'review' a product that hasn't been released yet?
...
And why is the Yahoo article writer so keen to get opinions from that twit of an analyst Laura DiDio? I'm sure someone else here will point out her lovely work defending SCO
Finally, why the hell do I care about this? Oh yeah, that's it: because every single one of my clients continues to use MS. Arrgh.
Man, I should have posted something like this! I would have avoided starting a flame war ...
:)
I agree with you 100% on your assessments.
Trouble is, I still prefer Debian. Silly me
A quick rule of thumb is generally ...
OpenBSD for security, NetBSD for portability and FreeBSD for diffusion in the wider world (ie, comparable to Linux).
I have no need for portability, and FreeBSD didn't appeal to me, so OpenBSD it was -- five years ago. I don't think you'll go wrong with any of them, though. If I did it again to experiment I'd probably try FreeBSD out this time.
BSDs do generally have more thorough online and internal documentation than Linux for the core basics, so you won't miss with any of them.
Oh, I don't know. I heard a commentator on BBC World News here in London say this morning that the British actually have the highest number of patents taken out every year, of all countries and nationalities.
... the French themselves under Chirac and Sarkozy are actively trying to figure ways of importing and domesticating formerly-derided 'Anglo-Saxon capitalism' [their term] -- if they thought it really wasn't so appealing, they certainly wouldn't be doing it now.
;)
Of course, he didn't back it up with the references or citations to prove it, but I found it interesting.
To address your point, though
Finally, Germany, France and Italy (of the countries that spring to mind) all recognise that their economies lose far too many days to unnecessary strikes, and have to varying degrees all enabled measures in the last four years to get their workforces under control. While I don't normally have a rightwards-slant on workers' issues, all 3 countries have insane policies on long-term unemployment, retraining and hire/fire provisions, and they are all trying to import UK/US policies.
Disclaimer: I am not British, though I moved back here after many years in the North American wilderness
What I would like to see is someone making these out of dope tins ...
Guess I ain't getting on no planes eeeeder.
I wish that were true ... it's just that I did multiple upgrades from whatever Debian stable was called to Woody ... they broke too.
Debian itself as a distribution is still my Linux of choice, but after experimenting with the greater ease of use of Mandrake and Fedora Core, I go back to it only with the upgrade path as my reason to sticking with it.
One of the things I've noticed of late with Debian is that their vaulted upgrade procedure between versions is definitely not working for Woody and Sarge.
/etc directory is a little much.
Upgrading from a fresh Woody install -- of 3.0r0, to be precise -- directly to Sarge as it now stands destroys Gnome completely. It will boot, start X11, but then die horribly for reasons I have yet to sort out fully. (I did this three weeks ago, for an old beater that was a gift) And it would die consistently only in that operating any Gnome application in tandem with another would do it.
The only way I could get the install procedure to update correctly was by using a sarge netinstall CD with a beta from August.
I believe the kernel versions changing has a lot to do with this. Of course, blaming Debian for this is not fair, but expecting users to suddenly know everything about the kernel version, the module loading/management procedure and the deep changes to the
I don't care about a GUI installer. I do care about Debian's stability between versions. I used to think Debian's upgrade process flawed (speed of releases) but essentially fine for those people who didn't want to think about dependency hell when using an online upgrading service. But now I am wondering if they really have it under control; I think they've taken policy as far as they can go.
They should commit to a regular timeframe for stable/server/stale versions and stick to it. Once a year is plenty of time.
Sorry , I should have been more explicit: I actually saw a 404 error inside Slashdot itself (!!) ... not the 'Nothing to see here' message you mention. I have seen the latter on previous visits, infrequently, but I just thought it ironic that the 'Read More' link just ... didn't work at all.
:)
All of this was inside of Slashdot, not going externally to a non-existent site as you say
... didn't seem to work and the link itself resulted in a 404 error. Nice recursiveness with the statement that Exeem isn't up yet!
The BSD distributions were thought of as good kernel bases for the Debian userspace applications during 1999-2002. So Debian maintainers would rip out the Linux kernel infrastructure and replace it with a BSD variant.
A similar attempt has been ongoing with the HURD kernel for at least the last decade.
Packaging attempts were made with FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
I don't know the status of the Debian/FreeBSD port but the Debian/OpenBSD port was abandoned when Andreas Schuldei, the maintainer of the port, realised that the kernel had shitloads of race conditions and offered no real advantages on its own over properly configured Linux kernels (such as those from Debian itself).
He also believed that the Debian/Linux userspace was not any better or worse in any real sense over the OpenBSD userspace (the ports and packages systems on OpenBSD are not audited, for the most part).
Squatting on your old customers and letting a burst of yellow water go.
Why? Because IE upgrades themselves drive other upgrades for Microsoft products. For the vast majority of people, nonIE choices simply aren't an option, particularly for users wanting to use the Windows Update site. (Yes, I know that you can use the Mozilla Firefox extension for Windows Update, but my point is that many people don't)
Windows Update is actually usable now -- something I never thought I would have seen only a few years ago.
I understand that MS has to draw the line somewhere; I understand that MS has to support a huge array of old code; I just wish they would be a touch more responsible about it.
I have been dealing with this exact issue all this week for various clients, and I really wish I could just simply get them all to move off Windows permanently. Wishful thinking...
Hey I'd love an invite!
northtwilight2003(at)yahoo.co.uk
Cheers!
I've put you down as a friend, I think what you're saying is important. To respond:
If you check out the Debian Reference, you'll see that one of the main Debian developers openly advocates using Testing as a workstation platform. Given that the Reference forms one of the key documents of the Project (IMHO, the only one you'll really need). In other words, they admit that what you are saying about the upgrade cycle is essentially correct. I don't think they have a real clue as to how to do it, for a couple of reasons.
Previous releases need to be upgradeable in order to smooth transitions from one to the other. The problem is that the testing they undertake is so arduous so as to render the latest stable release almost obsolete as soon as it is launched to the world.
In some cases, for specific parts of the project, this isn't such a big deal -- the kernel and X come to mind -- for X, they actually test the components on more architectures than the XFree86 project itself does.
I'm actually in a similar state to you, I download over a painfully-slow ISDN link. I haven't been able to upgrade Testing in 2 months or so. I have a number of apt and dpkg addons that make fetching packages easier (in the sense that I don't have to troubleshoot the process), but it is *fucking* frustrating to wait 2 or 3 weeks to download stuff and then have the apt tool tell me that perl is broken, mc will be removed, and God knows what else is wrong this week with the distro.
I do remember it being less of a problem during the previous release cycle, but am fairly sure it stems from the fact that having a fast connection makes all the difference.
I am also certain that other distros still do not handle upgrading issues as well (and this is saying something, after the above), mainly because they don't have ironclad policy in the same way as Debian. The other distros have lifted apt, as is their right under the GPL, but because they don't have policy that is consistent, don't do as much QA, and lack the developer base, crazy bugs often appear right after a release.
The free vs nonfree -- in the definition of the Debian people -- is actually quite important. I don't agree with it all the time either, but I see the value of doing it anyway. If you look for the new definitions of the FDL, they say that there are such things called Invariant Sections -- things that have no direct relevance to the subject matter and cannot be changed. Big deal, you say. But it is: I can't 'fork' the paperwork by releasing a stripped version, I have to include the original authors' dedications to Mom, their spouses and their dog Fluffy. Or their paeans to how we should protest the war in Bosnia, or Iraq, or start killing all infidel Christians. Or raping Chinese girls. You see?
I've tried out OpenBSD, and respect it, and like it, but I'd never want to use it for workstation stuff.
I think they should move to a more fixed release cycle, every six -- or even eight -- months like the OpenBSD system would work well. They would have to accept the consequences, though : probably less architectures, or redivide the system into more shades of stability.
Never mind the fact that they're getting bucketloads of free publicity, a la SCO-stylee, through the lawsuit. Being an insurance company, you'd think they'd be a bit more cautious. Boo-hoo-hoo, AXA...
I hear what you're saying, I've been more than a little annoyed with Debian as well lately. But...
I don't use the Stable release, outside of sysadmins, I don't think I know anyone else who does.
They have an obligation to release free stuff that has only become stricter in the last few years. What they are saying about proprietary hardware is not, 'Fuck you, you are evil,' but rather, 'We're sorry, but we have no control nor proper information over the hardware you're using and can't really help you, because if we did have that information, we would be constrained by the makers of your hardware not to divulge it to you.'
To take a completely trivial example, the computer I'm typing this on has an NVidia video card, and I run Debian testing on it. I knew I'd have a hard time using Debian-only software on it, so off I went to Google. Within an hour I had everything downloaded and installed.
OK, perhaps not as easy as grabbing Fedora. But I know as a result of this what I have, what Debian can provide, and what they can't. In other words, I've learned something, and I didn't have it done for me.
A lot of times people forget or get confused as to what the Debian project is about. But they tell you this upfront: they aim to make a free computer operating system. Not to make the easiest, or most convenient -- though it would be nice -- or to make the most secure or most complete. Simply to make it free, so that when a new user, a business, an organisation or a government picks it up, they won't have to --ever-- worry about licensing costs or any other shit.
Limiting the GNU stuff to exclude FDL documentation is, I agree, a total pain in the ass. Granted, disk space is no problem for users these days. But what would be the alternative be? Gloss over the very real difference in opinion as to the modification of texts as just a side issue? It creates problems because the GNU project says 'You have to accept this part and parcel of the original package even if you don't agree with any of it nor does it have any real use'.
And no, this is not a flame, it's an honest question -- if this is really a problem, why aren't you using a FreeBSD system instead? They have ports. They have lots of free stuff. They have a large userbase, they have lots of online support and are pragmatic. What's the holdup?
So according to this interpretation an American woman wanting abortion in the US has no real guarantee of that 'right', because it's a judicially-imposed extension of the right to privacy.
Bit black-and-white, wouldn't you say?
Keep in mind that in the Anglo-American model of jurisprudence, where judges have been effectively cowed by the parliament (Congress), they demonstrate notoriously dino attitudes (England being perhaps the best example of this). Where they explicitly have been unleashed, they have shown remarkable intellectual growth (the US and Canada come to mind).
Not after today there isn't
That's not his point. His point is that no person can comfortably read all that information -- never mind make sense of it all. When the person is the administrator of the box, as is the case with most home users, he or she has the very real problem of eyes glazing over prematurely because the information cannot be understood.
Eric Raymond talks about precisely this problem extensively in Chapter 10 of his Art of Unix Programming.