1. The over 67% P-grade members criterion to be amended as "Positive votes corresponding to over 67% of the total population represented". Populous natins like India, China, the UK, Brazil have all voted No. The present ISO rules allow this popular opinion to be sidelined.
That would give too much power for the government of populous countries (and I'm not saying this because I live in a small country. I live in Brasil, a quite big country). I, as a techie, would suggest some kind of middle ground: for example, the number of votes could be proportional to the square root of the population of each country.
2. Secondly, lots of new 'countries' have opted for voting and P-status. None of these have participated or voted in any other sphere of the ISO actvities. This points strongly to financial inducements and corruption, and cannot be dismissed as coincidence. The rules must be altered before the BRM in February.
But what if some country, which is small and not a P-member, realizes that this new standard proposal is really important to it? I think it would be bad to stop this country from voting. Anyway, the point #1 would mostly avoid this "buying votes from banana republics" situation. If you think this is not enough, I again suggest a middle ground: only a maximum of N new countries could vote. Today, N is infinite. You are suggesting that N should be 0. I suggest something in between. This, coupled with #1, would mostly eliminate the problem.
3. Thirdly, Microsoft has admitted to wrong-doing in the voting process in Sweden. This alone ought to be sufficient for the ISO to null and void the entire submission, and debar said firm for a minimum period. There is no credibility if rules are blindly applied, when benefitting parties themselves are guilty of subversion. This is similar to the submission of licenses to the OSI - the standards bodies must take into account past conduct and sincerity; not just rule on technicalities.
I agree 100% with you.
5. The ISO must take a clear stance wrt patents. Any patent-encumbered submission must be rejected until: a. The submission is amended so as to be patent-free b. The patents in question have expired all over the world.
I am not sure if I agree with you. Perhaps for things like MPEG-4 patents are not so evil, provided the royalties are cheap, non-discriminatory and have exemptions for e.g. educational purposes. Also, some provision that allowed the technology to be used by free software would be very welcome. AFAIK, if the patent holder demands a per-copy royalty than this prohibits someone from distributing the software under the GPL; so perhaps, there should exist the possibility of making a one-time payment for a specific project like Mplayer, and the value should not be esoteric, so hopefully a company like Canonical or Mandriva could pay it. In any event, a proposal for an open document format should never be allowed to have patents. In this case I agree 100% with you.
My sister complained that the picture in the MSN client was too small... If they think you are shoveling it down their throats, they will complain about each small difference.
I'm not sure if a complete OS reinstall is necessary. The last time I switched HDs, I just copied every files, with care to preserve permissions, ownerships and all, and installed GRUB. I don't know about Windows 98 though.
In any event, give Ubuntu a try. If your parents are willing to learn something new (which is a very psychological thing... you must convince them slowly instead of trying to shovel it down their throats), it is easier than Windows.
Although, for such a slow computer, perhaps Xubuntu would be better than Ubuntu.
Considering the small amount of memory, a bigger and, more importantly, faster hard drive would probably help a lot! Also, the current old HD has a greater chance of failing (AFAIK).
So, do your parents a favor and buy a faster HD for them...
Regarding memory, I can't believe you can't find an old compatible memory on Ebay or something.
The "it isn't a database" flaw encompasses all other flaws. When you point out the flaws of something, you point the flaws in the most general possible way. About a computer without a processor, you don't say 1) It can't execute Firefox 2) It can't execute Emacs... 999) It can't execute gedit...
You simply say
1) It can't execute anything.
The point of my comparison (donut x PostgreSQL) is that "number of flaws" is a ridiculous way of measuring quality.
I heard there was some VBA compatibility in OpenOffice. Perhaps it was StarOffice from SUN, or Novell's edition of OpenOffice. I recommend you to research this, and/or contact Sun and/or Novell.
I wonder if number of bacteria is a reasonable measure for what matters: the danger of getting sick and the seriousness of the resulting sickness.
As someone pointed out, PostgreSQL, even though is a nice database, has many flaws. A donut has one flaw as a database: it isn't a database. That does not make it a good database.
If you think about it, a toilet looks like it was designed to drown small animals. It is totally slippery, wet, and because of its shape, there is nothing for the pet to hold and get out. It is like a trap.
Imagine if you as a human fell into a giant toilet. There would be nothing you could do to get out of it, and you would eventually die unless someone rescued you.
"1. it's source based which can mean less stable / well tested ultimately gentoo is a source based dist, which means any binary files you end up with won't have been tested and there's no guarantee of behavior as it all depends on how things have been linked" I can't see how source-based means that it is less stable. If you mess with CFLAGS and USE flags without really knowing what you are doing, it can be unstable. But if you accept the defaults, why would this be any less stable than binary? If you care about stability, you should not mess with what you don't understand; Gentoo makes it easy for you to shoot your foot, but if you don't want to shoot yourself, it is easy not to.
"t takes ages to compile / install etc" In my Athlon XP 2600+, most packages compile under 10 minutes; many compile under 1 minute. Normally, the compilation time is quite smaller than download time. The only things that take a lot to compile are GCC and Glibc (some 2 hours I believe), but they don't get updated often. OpenOffice and Firefox are provided as binaries. I don't use KDE or GNOME, so I don't know about those.
"2. rpm's do some amount of checking when installing the binary, with gentoo it's assumed that whatever has been compiled is correct" I can't see how could a makefile generate a corrupted binary, unless you mess it up. If you accept the defaults, why would compiling in your computer generate a different binary than compiling in the developer's computer?
"Personally I'm confident I can fix most things when they go wrong in the portage tree, via an overlay (or at least have the patience to wait for it to be fixed). but for the average Joe user in an office that couldn't give a monkey's for that sort of thing something binary / rpm is better suited" What has source to do with this? Gentoo is not targeted at newbies, but that doesn't mean that source-based is always difficult. Gentoo just happens not to be targeted at newbies.
I assume you could : 1)Downgrade SSL, fetch everything, then resume the upgrade; or 2)Recompile wget (that is, the current version of wget, from the source in/usr/portage/distfiles). or 3)Downgrade SSL, then upgrade wget, then re-update SSL.
Also, if you have problems with emerge world, and you pin down the problem, you don't have to re-issue emerge world immediately after. You can 1)manually update only the individual packages you need and/or 2)wait until the bug is fixed.
"And once a package is dropped because it's obsolete, sooner or later other packages won't take account of the older versions quirks and version dependencies become at least partly down to luck." I didn't understand this.
"Note that I've omitted "keep a copy of every package you install" or "make a note of the version of every package you install". These are effectively useless because ebuilds frequently use the packages sourceforge site to download the code from, and if the package moves or the version that you have in your (old) copy of the portage database is removed from sourceforge, you can't install that package" Huh? Portage automatically saves the downloaded files in/usr/portage/distfiles. I don't understand you. Additionally, it is trivial to tell portage to automatically save a copy of the compiled package for you to quickly reinstall later. It avoids the need to recompile if you need to reinstall.
" and you've got to do an emerge --sync to get an updated ebuild (and an updated everything else in the process)." emerge --sync updates only the portage tree. I don't understand you. Perhaps you are talking about the fact the emerge --sync updates the whole Portage tree, not just a specific ebuild. But if you need a specific ebuld, you can set up an overlay.
"It's not like any other distribution where the mirrors keep a copy of every package so it doesn't much matter if the upstream server on which the project is hosted breaks somehow. Unless you keep every package from day 1 complete with all its dependencies, you're screwed." I don't understand you. All you have to do is not do delete the files in/usr/portage/distfiles.
There is also RTFM. The absence of RTFM is one of the greatest things about the Gentoo community. I do research before posting, because I don't want to waste the time of those nice people, but I'm confident I can post just about any question there without people getting angry at me.
"not be worth the hassle of compiling from scratch." What hassle? For me it is automated and trouble-free. It is also fast: in my Ahtlon XP 2600+, most things compile in under 10 minutes; many compile in under a minute. Only GCC and Glibc take a long time to compile (2 hours, I think). Firefox and Openoffice are provided as binaries. For mostly everything, the time compiling is quite smaller than the time downloading.
"spending more time trying to get it working then I spend using it." What maintenance does Gentoo need? You run into trouble if you put crazy USE flags or CFLAGS without understanding them; or otherwise mess with something which you don't know. But if you simply accept the defaults, than "maintenance" will be
"Hum, i want to change Sylpheed to claws-mail" sudo emerge -aCv sylpheed sudo emerge -av claws-mail
As NeoThermic has said, you can also enable parallell-fetching. Situations like yours are already very unlikely (first time I've heard), and paralell-fetching makes it even more so. Perhaps there was something wrong with your setup. I had never heard of this before. In any event, why didn't you just downgrade SSL? Also, perhaps you could have solved the problem by simply recompiling wget?
Your post made me curious: what happens when a lib changes its API? For example, package P depends on library L; a new version of libary L comes with a different ABI (say, the size of a certain struct has changed) but the API is the same; so package P should stop working until I recompile, yes?
Weird. I think this should happen, but I don't remember it ever happening to me (I use Gentoo for years) and I have never heard of it in the forums.
"It's absolutely terrible as a general purpose distro where you want low maintenance and security only updates." Why? Can't you just update only the packages flagged by GLSA? Portage has a feature for that AFAIK. I update everything every week, but that is because I want to, not because I have to.
Interesting. It surprises me that someone who has actually used Gentoo says this about "wait on everything to compile". This compilation time joke is just a very stupid joke on Slashdot. I use Gentoo for years and I know that nearly all packages compile in less than 10 minutes; many of them compile in under a minute. In the vast majority of cases, the compilation time is quite smaller than the download time. My PC is an Athlon XP 2600+ with 512 MB RAM.
The only thing that takes a lot of time to compile is GCC and Glibc. GCC takes some two hours (I haven't ctually measured it, I'm telling from memory). Since they don't get updated often, I see no problem with it. Xorg used to take a lot of time, but the new modular design of Xorg solved the problem. I know that Firefox would take a lot of time (some 4 hours, I believe), and Openoffice would take a ridiculous amount of time (10 hours, I believe). Fortunately Gentoo offers pre-compiled versions of Firefox and Openoffice. And I use Swiftfox anyway.
I don't use GNOME or KDE, so I can't answer for them.
Not every distribution makes easy the life of someone who wants to customize. There is a difference between "possible", "easy", and "not time consuming". Something may be easy but time-consuming; or possible but not easy.
Many customizations that you can do easily and quickly in Gentoo would be hard or time consuming in other distros.
Why is it a pain to install? I have installed easily by following the instructions. It's all spelled there... With the plus that it actually explains each step, and you can do anything you want (if you don't want to exactly perform what's in the handbook).
Not to mention, I heard there is now a GUI installer...
Slashdot Mirror
That would give too much power for the government of populous countries (and I'm not saying this because I live in a small country. I live in Brasil, a quite big country). I, as a techie, would suggest some kind of middle ground: for example, the number of votes could be proportional to the square root of the population of each country.
But what if some country, which is small and not a P-member, realizes that this new standard proposal is really important to it? I think it would be bad to stop this country from voting. Anyway, the point #1 would mostly avoid this "buying votes from banana republics" situation. If you think this is not enough, I again suggest a middle ground: only a maximum of N new countries could vote. Today, N is infinite. You are suggesting that N should be 0. I suggest something in between. This, coupled with #1, would mostly eliminate the problem.
I agree 100% with you.
I am not sure if I agree with you. Perhaps for things like MPEG-4 patents are not so evil, provided the royalties are cheap, non-discriminatory and have exemptions for e.g. educational purposes. Also, some provision that allowed the technology to be used by free software would be very welcome. AFAIK, if the patent holder demands a per-copy royalty than this prohibits someone from distributing the software under the GPL; so perhaps, there should exist the possibility of making a one-time payment for a specific project like Mplayer, and the value should not be esoteric, so hopefully a company like Canonical or Mandriva could pay it. In any event, a proposal for an open document format should never be allowed to have patents. In this case I agree 100% with you.
My sister complained that the picture in the MSN client was too small...
If they think you are shoveling it down their throats, they will complain about each small difference.
I'm not sure if a complete OS reinstall is necessary. The last time I switched HDs, I just copied every files, with care to preserve permissions, ownerships and all, and installed GRUB. I don't know about Windows 98 though.
In any event, give Ubuntu a try. If your parents are willing to learn something new (which is a very psychological thing... you must convince them slowly instead of trying to shovel it down their throats), it is easier than Windows.
Although, for such a slow computer, perhaps Xubuntu would be better than Ubuntu.
Considering the small amount of memory, a bigger and, more importantly, faster hard drive would probably help a lot! Also, the current old HD has a greater chance of failing (AFAIK).
So, do your parents a favor and buy a faster HD for them...
Regarding memory, I can't believe you can't find an old compatible memory on Ebay or something.
The "it isn't a database" flaw encompasses all other flaws. When you point out the flaws of something, you point the flaws in the most general possible way. About a computer without a processor, you don't say ... ...
1) It can't execute Firefox
2) It can't execute Emacs
999) It can't execute gedit
You simply say
1) It can't execute anything.
The point of my comparison (donut x PostgreSQL) is that "number of flaws" is a ridiculous way of measuring quality.
I heard there was some VBA compatibility in OpenOffice. Perhaps it was StarOffice from SUN, or Novell's edition of OpenOffice. I recommend you to research this, and/or contact Sun and/or Novell.
I wonder if number of bacteria is a reasonable measure for what matters: the danger of getting sick and the seriousness of the resulting sickness.
As someone pointed out, PostgreSQL, even though is a nice database, has many flaws. A donut has one flaw as a database: it isn't a database. That does not make it a good database.
If you think about it, a toilet looks like it was designed to drown small animals. It is totally slippery, wet, and because of its shape, there is nothing for the pet to hold and get out. It is like a trap.
Imagine if you as a human fell into a giant toilet. There would be nothing you could do to get out of it, and you would eventually die unless someone rescued you.
If you have to use Windows, you can at least use good tools for it.
Firefox, Openoffice, and (relevant to your case) EMACS are available to Windows.
Of course, using GNU/Linux is much better.
That is weird. I have never heard of that.
If you ever find any similar situation ever again, I recommend you to go to the forums. They will answer you very quickly.
"1. it's source based
which can mean less stable / well tested
ultimately gentoo is a source based dist, which means any binary files you end up with won't have been tested
and there's no guarantee of behavior as it all depends on how things have been linked"
I can't see how source-based means that it is less stable. If you mess with CFLAGS and USE flags without really knowing what you are doing, it can be unstable. But if you accept the defaults, why would this be any less stable than binary? If you care about stability, you should not mess with what you don't understand; Gentoo makes it easy for you to shoot your foot, but if you don't want to shoot yourself, it is easy not to.
"t takes ages to compile / install etc"
In my Athlon XP 2600+, most packages compile under 10 minutes; many compile under 1 minute. Normally, the compilation time is quite smaller than download time. The only things that take a lot to compile are GCC and Glibc (some 2 hours I believe), but they don't get updated often. OpenOffice and Firefox are provided as binaries. I don't use KDE or GNOME, so I don't know about those.
"2. rpm's do some amount of checking when installing the binary, with gentoo it's assumed that whatever has been compiled is correct"
I can't see how could a makefile generate a corrupted binary, unless you mess it up. If you accept the defaults, why would compiling in your computer generate a different binary than compiling in the developer's computer?
"Personally I'm confident I can fix most things when they go wrong in the portage tree, via an overlay (or at least have the patience to wait for it to be fixed). but for the average Joe user in an office that couldn't give a monkey's for that sort of thing something binary / rpm is better suited" What has source to do with this? Gentoo is not targeted at newbies, but that doesn't mean that source-based is always difficult. Gentoo just happens not to be targeted at newbies.
I assume you could : /usr/portage/distfiles).
1)Downgrade SSL, fetch everything, then resume the upgrade;
or
2)Recompile wget (that is, the current version of wget, from the source in
or
3)Downgrade SSL, then upgrade wget, then re-update SSL.
Also, if you have problems with emerge world, and you pin down the problem, you don't have to re-issue emerge world immediately after. You can
1)manually update only the individual packages you need
and/or
2)wait until the bug is fixed.
Remember, you are not obligated to emerge world.
"And once a package is dropped because it's obsolete, sooner or later other packages won't take account of the older versions quirks and version dependencies become at least partly down to luck."
/usr/portage/distfiles. I don't understand you. Additionally, it is trivial to tell portage to automatically save a copy of the compiled package for you to quickly reinstall later. It avoids the need to recompile if you need to reinstall.
/usr/portage/distfiles.
I didn't understand this.
"Note that I've omitted "keep a copy of every package you install" or "make a note of the version of every package you install". These are effectively useless because ebuilds frequently use the packages sourceforge site to download the code from, and if the package moves or the version that you have in your (old) copy of the portage database is removed from sourceforge, you can't install that package"
Huh? Portage automatically saves the downloaded files in
" and you've got to do an emerge --sync to get an updated ebuild (and an updated everything else in the process)."
emerge --sync updates only the portage tree. I don't understand you. Perhaps you are talking about the fact the emerge --sync updates the whole Portage tree, not just a specific ebuild. But if you need a specific ebuld, you can set up an overlay.
"It's not like any other distribution where the mirrors keep a copy of every package so it doesn't much matter if the upstream server on which the project is hosted breaks somehow. Unless you keep every package from day 1 complete with all its dependencies, you're screwed."
I don't understand you. All you have to do is not do delete the files in
"Removing blocking packages is the biggest weakness of portage that I see."
?
What blockage problems are there in Portage? How difficult is solving them?
There is also RTFM. The absence of RTFM is one of the greatest things about the Gentoo community. I do research before posting, because I don't want to waste the time of those nice people, but I'm confident I can post just about any question there without people getting angry at me.
"not be worth the hassle of compiling from scratch."
What hassle? For me it is automated and trouble-free. It is also fast: in my Ahtlon XP 2600+, most things compile in under 10 minutes; many compile in under a minute.
Only GCC and Glibc take a long time to compile (2 hours, I think).
Firefox and Openoffice are provided as binaries.
For mostly everything, the time compiling is quite smaller than the time downloading.
"spending more time trying to get it working then I spend using it."
What maintenance does Gentoo need? You run into trouble if you put crazy USE flags or CFLAGS without understanding them; or otherwise mess with something which you don't know. But if you simply accept the defaults, than "maintenance" will be
"Hum, i want to change Sylpheed to claws-mail"
sudo emerge -aCv sylpheed
sudo emerge -av claws-mail
As NeoThermic has said, you can also enable parallell-fetching. Situations like yours are already very unlikely (first time I've heard), and paralell-fetching makes it even more so. Perhaps there was something wrong with your setup. I had never heard of this before.
In any event, why didn't you just downgrade SSL?
Also, perhaps you could have solved the problem by simply recompiling wget?
Your post made me curious: what happens when a lib changes its API? For example, package P depends on library L; a new version of libary L comes with a different ABI (say, the size of a certain struct has changed) but the API is the same; so package P should stop working until I recompile, yes?
Weird. I think this should happen, but I don't remember it ever happening to me (I use Gentoo for years) and I have never heard of it in the forums.
"It's absolutely terrible as a general purpose distro where you want low maintenance and security only updates."
Why? Can't you just update only the packages flagged by GLSA? Portage has a feature for that AFAIK.
I update everything every week, but that is because I want to, not because I have to.
Interesting. It surprises me that someone who has actually used Gentoo says this about "wait on everything to compile". This compilation time joke is just a very stupid joke on Slashdot. I use Gentoo for years and I know that nearly all packages compile in less than 10 minutes; many of them compile in under a minute. In the vast majority of cases, the compilation time is quite smaller than the download time. My PC is an Athlon XP 2600+ with 512 MB RAM.
The only thing that takes a lot of time to compile is GCC and Glibc. GCC takes some two hours (I haven't ctually measured it, I'm telling from memory). Since they don't get updated often, I see no problem with it.
Xorg used to take a lot of time, but the new modular design of Xorg solved the problem.
I know that Firefox would take a lot of time (some 4 hours, I believe), and Openoffice would take a ridiculous amount of time (10 hours, I believe). Fortunately Gentoo offers pre-compiled versions of Firefox and Openoffice. And I use Swiftfox anyway.
I don't use GNOME or KDE, so I can't answer for them.
Not every distribution makes easy the life of someone who wants to customize. There is a difference between "possible", "easy", and "not time consuming". Something may be easy but time-consuming; or possible but not easy.
Many customizations that you can do easily and quickly in Gentoo would be hard or time consuming in other distros.
Why is it a pain to install?
I have installed easily by following the instructions. It's all spelled there... With the plus that it actually explains each step, and you can do anything you want (if you don't want to exactly perform what's in the handbook).
Not to mention, I heard there is now a GUI installer...
Why do you think that Gentoo would take more time than Debian?
I suppose by now you have either solved the problem or given up, but I have replied to your thread.
I'm afraid I did not understand your comment.
You are claiming that a difference from 4% to 6% is pretty small? It means that the effort is 1.5 times as likely to succeed. How is that small?