Ahhh, another AC spreading FUD...
The whole Reuters article is FUD. Novell has not crossed any license, nor anybody at FSF thinks they can ban Novell from anything. What they are thinking about, is including something in GPLv3 to forbid wording that may suggest OSS breaking patents in those public deals. They even already posted a clarification!
Your solution doesn't scale to thousands of machines.
While I could agree with much of what you've written, this last point got me a little puzzled. How come upgrading a system on a thousand machines is so much worse than upgrading it on one machine? I mean, if it's the same system, then you simply distribute the update you have prepared on the one machine among the other ones. If you've got to administer a thousand of different systems, then you're already screwed up, no matter what you're trying to do...
Gentoo has proven all right in my production enviroment - and that is an ISP.
First reason, is that you don't have to upgrade those production machines all that often. I sit down and read any security advisory that seems to affect me. And, not surprisngly, there are actually very few remote vulnerabilities that hit Gentoo-hardened. Furthermore, those tend to be in software right in a leaf of the dependency tree, or software I might consider disabling (or limiting to trusted hosts) to the next maintainance cycle.
And there comes it - once in 6 months a massive emerge -uDB world && emerge -uDk world && revdep-rebuild && perl-cleaner (better don't omit the latter two). The system is nicely trimmed down and the build runs on a few machines I have available, so it doesn't take any epic amounts of time. In fact, I even seen it done within half an hour. Still, back when it did take a better part of the day, I simply run the first command a day earlier and then used the packages, what of course is a breeze.
Finally comes the configuration updating. I haven't seen it easier anywhere. The first nice thing is that Gentoo developers don't toy around them - they usualy come as the original software developers intended. But what really makes a difference is the toolchain. By far, I have seen no other distro that automagicaly within the standard package system uses revision control for configs. And then, it gets the trivial updates done for me, and puts me into vimdiff anytime any decision is required.
At most times, this means no downtime at all, as everything runs smoothly. In case of a kernel upgrade, or anything going wrong (once till now), we still have redundancy. So there are no visible drawbacks of using Gentoo on those servers... Unless I, and my boss, am missing something.
Also, good luck with suing in Poland. Sharing your music, and breaking the DRM, is perfectly legal here as long as you don't make money (or other material gains) on it.
There is a good example what can be done within 192 mb what is the smallest practical size - the size of small CD. And the example: http://slax.org/ it is a microlinux with KDE and lot's of useful stuff, also modificable with some 800 packages ready to add.
Unless things have changed in the past few months, IE7 is not standards compliant.
AFAIK they could have changed. Friend has submitted a bug report about a particular site that had issues with broken CSS support and in the next release it got fixed. If this was not an isolated case, IE7 should be already as standards compliant, as the others are.
So you'll be perfectly happy when next version of IE gets even more integrated into Vista, just because it respects W3C standards. And, as I know from some beta testers, it really does.
Oh, so ACM is nothing? So let's look at TopCoder rankings, where none of your points apply. And what countries we see at the top?
1. Poland (Central Europe)
2. Russia (Eastern Europe)
3. Canada (Northern America)
4. USA (Northern America)
5. China (Eastern Asia)
Surprising?;)
Given that he steered the mafia for 50 years, evading the police and keeping control over the organisation at the same time, furthermore without usage of any modern technology including cryptography... Well, I would call him a good leader. Probably way better than your typical manager with a bucket load of certificates.
Well yes. But the basic reason for buying anything that's Chinese is that it's cheaper. When it comes to Thinkpads, they're both Chinese _and_ expensive. That's why they have hard time on European/American markets.
Here in Poland it's quite a popular practice among small ISPs to open internal p2p services within the ISPs network. In the ISP I work for this makes it economically sustainable to have the "p2p hogs" browse the net at 1mbps (up to 2mbps) while downloading something from outer p2p at 0.5mbps (up to 3mbps) and from inner p2p at 30mbps (up to 100mbps) all at the same time for ~15$/month. And yes, the trafic is shaped, but that leaves everyone happy. They can download popular things at great speeds from local. Downloading rare files would always be slow due to limited seeders.
The truth is, every distro that doesn't give you X up and running in default install teaches you how to configure it. The same can be applied almost to every other app.
I will always feel that Slackware (and others like Gentoo, or home-rolled linux) will matter because installing and using these sorts of distros really do give you an understanding into how Linux works(tm)
I'm using Gentoo for almost a year now, and I'm not so sure I would put it into this group. When it's already installed, emerge teaches you more or less the same things you would learn with apt. The installation and initial configuration used to force people into learning something, but now there are some efforts for graphical automagic installer, so even this will eventualy become untrue.
And this always could be the other way round. Maybe we should feel bad for the engineers who had to work long hours to get their product ready for launch date, only to get blamed for buggy software run on it...
Slashdot Mirror
It was early alpha back in 2005: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/26/russian_spammer_killed/
Ahhh, another AC spreading FUD...
The whole Reuters article is FUD. Novell has not crossed any license, nor anybody at FSF thinks they can ban Novell from anything. What they are thinking about, is including something in GPLv3 to forbid wording that may suggest OSS breaking patents in those public deals. They even already posted a clarification!
While I could agree with much of what you've written, this last point got me a little puzzled. How come upgrading a system on a thousand machines is so much worse than upgrading it on one machine? I mean, if it's the same system, then you simply distribute the update you have prepared on the one machine among the other ones. If you've got to administer a thousand of different systems, then you're already screwed up, no matter what you're trying to do...
Gentoo has proven all right in my production enviroment - and that is an ISP.
First reason, is that you don't have to upgrade those production machines all that often. I sit down and read any security advisory that seems to affect me. And, not surprisngly, there are actually very few remote vulnerabilities that hit Gentoo-hardened. Furthermore, those tend to be in software right in a leaf of the dependency tree, or software I might consider disabling (or limiting to trusted hosts) to the next maintainance cycle.
And there comes it - once in 6 months a massive emerge -uDB world && emerge -uDk world && revdep-rebuild && perl-cleaner (better don't omit the latter two). The system is nicely trimmed down and the build runs on a few machines I have available, so it doesn't take any epic amounts of time. In fact, I even seen it done within half an hour. Still, back when it did take a better part of the day, I simply run the first command a day earlier and then used the packages, what of course is a breeze.
Finally comes the configuration updating. I haven't seen it easier anywhere. The first nice thing is that Gentoo developers don't toy around them - they usualy come as the original software developers intended. But what really makes a difference is the toolchain. By far, I have seen no other distro that automagicaly within the standard package system uses revision control for configs. And then, it gets the trivial updates done for me, and puts me into vimdiff anytime any decision is required.
At most times, this means no downtime at all, as everything runs smoothly. In case of a kernel upgrade, or anything going wrong (once till now), we still have redundancy. So there are no visible drawbacks of using Gentoo on those servers... Unless I, and my boss, am missing something.
Also, good luck with suing in Poland. Sharing your music, and breaking the DRM, is perfectly legal here as long as you don't make money (or other material gains) on it.
There is a good example what can be done within 192 mb what is the smallest practical size - the size of small CD. And the example: http://slax.org/ it is a microlinux with KDE and lot's of useful stuff, also modificable with some 800 packages ready to add.
Unless things have changed in the past few months, IE7 is not standards compliant.
AFAIK they could have changed. Friend has submitted a bug report about a particular site that had issues with broken CSS support and in the next release it got fixed. If this was not an isolated case, IE7 should be already as standards compliant, as the others are.
So you'll be perfectly happy when next version of IE gets even more integrated into Vista, just because it respects W3C standards. And, as I know from some beta testers, it really does.
And why would one use such a weak name as Monad, when it can be brilliantly named Power Shell?
Oh, so ACM is nothing? So let's look at TopCoder rankings, where none of your points apply. And what countries we see at the top? ;)
1. Poland (Central Europe)
2. Russia (Eastern Europe)
3. Canada (Northern America)
4. USA (Northern America)
5. China (Eastern Asia)
Surprising?
Given that he steered the mafia for 50 years, evading the police and keeping control over the organisation at the same time, furthermore without usage of any modern technology including cryptography... Well, I would call him a good leader. Probably way better than your typical manager with a bucket load of certificates.
Well yes. But the basic reason for buying anything that's Chinese is that it's cheaper. When it comes to Thinkpads, they're both Chinese _and_ expensive. That's why they have hard time on European/American markets.
Here in Poland it's quite a popular practice among small ISPs to open internal p2p services within the ISPs network. In the ISP I work for this makes it economically sustainable to have the "p2p hogs" browse the net at 1mbps (up to 2mbps) while downloading something from outer p2p at 0.5mbps (up to 3mbps) and from inner p2p at 30mbps (up to 100mbps) all at the same time for ~15$/month. And yes, the trafic is shaped, but that leaves everyone happy. They can download popular things at great speeds from local. Downloading rare files would always be slow due to limited seeders.
Another nice one: SDL-Vexed
Is it only me, or the gauge suggests how long the GIMP project will last? ;)
Are we seeing "Once more unto the breach" press tactics or something?
My general feeling is that most software written seven years ago was faster (relatively to CPU power) and used far less RAM.
The truth is, every distro that doesn't give you X up and running in default install teaches you how to configure it. The same can be applied almost to every other app.
I will always feel that Slackware (and others like Gentoo, or home-rolled linux) will matter because installing and using these sorts of distros really do give you an understanding into how Linux works(tm)
I'm using Gentoo for almost a year now, and I'm not so sure I would put it into this group. When it's already installed, emerge teaches you more or less the same things you would learn with apt. The installation and initial configuration used to force people into learning something, but now there are some efforts for graphical automagic installer, so even this will eventualy become untrue.
And this always could be the other way round. Maybe we should feel bad for the engineers who had to work long hours to get their product ready for launch date, only to get blamed for buggy software run on it...