I am confused. The 100-GB Blu-ray disks that you buy cost about $20, which is much more expensive per GB than the cost of a 2.5" external drive. This is without counting the cost of your Blu-ray drive, the hassle of keeping around many more disks than hard drives (20 of your disks for a single 2 TB drive, for example), or the much lower read/write speed of the Blu-ray. And if portability is not an issue, you can get an even cheaper 3.5" external disk.
Back in August 2013 we promised to do Long Term Support for kde-workspace for 2 years.
This means this August is the last release for kde-workspace.
Anyone has a strong reason we should keep doing kde-workspace 4.11.x releases?
Yes, some distributions still offer KDE4, but i am wondering how secure it is when i read thingslikethis
"Many popular KDE applications use QtWebKit, which is old and deprecated. These deprecated versions of WebKit suffer from well over 100 remote code execution vulnerabilities fixed upstream that will probably never be backported. (100 is a lowball estimate; I would be unsurprised if the real number for QtWebKit was much, much higher."
"QtWebKit is still maintained in Qt and is getting some backports, but from a quick check of their git repository it’s obvious that it’s not receiving many security updates. This is hardly unexpected; QtWebKit is now years behind upstream, so providing security updates would be very difficult. There’s not much hope left for QtWebKit; these applications have hundreds of known vulnerabilities that will never be fixed."
I have been a longtime KDE user, and their refusal to continue supporting KDE4 while KDE5 is being developed is precisely what infuriated me to the point of wishing to abandon it and making me actively look into alternatives. Up until KDE3, i was willing to accept some bloatness and features that i never used because of KWin's configurability and internationalization (there was a time when other DEs would lock you out of your session for good if you were using a non-latin keyboard when you locked the screen!). Then i swallowed the fiasco of the transition from KDE3 to KDE4, during which KDE developers abandoned support of KDE3 long before KDE4 was in a usable form (except perhaps on their own laptops?) telling myself that perhaps this was an error in judgment caused by their inexperience (they are not professionals, after all), and that they would learn their lesson... And let's not even get into the semantic desktop crap...
So we finally arrive at KDE5, where KDE developers shove down their users' throats a half-baked product once again by refusing to keep maintaining KDE4. I cannot even remember how many bugs this thing had when i was forced to install it some months ago, many of which have not yet been fixed to this day... Konsole, my workhorse application, crashing with a mysterious combination of key strikes; the screen going black when opening a new window; things like the session manager autostart sometimes working and sometimes not; irritating taskbar bugs too many to mention here; "focus follows mouse" sometimes working and sometimes failing... To compound the misery, KDE settings are no longer saved under ~/.kde5 but are spread all over the place in ~/.config and other directories; possibly to comply to some desktop standard, except KDE is so bug it overwhelms these directories and it's no longer to rename ~/.kde5 to make an easy fresh start when trying to figure out what's wrong...
I reported some of these bugs, but i must confess that at this point i have very little good will vis a vis KDE to be a happy bug reporter! After all, i am not doing it out of my own free will: KDE5 was forced down my throat, and i find myself obliged to spend hours and hours on their project instead of *my* projects, and at a time that was certainly not of my own choos
AFAIK Skype is the only VoIP software that offers unlimited subscription rates to landline phones. One can make unlimited calls to landlines in many countries for around €5/month with an annual subscription.
When the per-minute rate of most other VoIP providers is a couple of cents/minute, it means that it takes on average less than 10 minutes per day to exceed Skype's unlimited offer, and it goes linearly in time from there.
For someone who averages 30 min per day or more, the savings are quite substantial.
Now that Skype is owned by Microsoft, i expect it to gradually become more problematic on Linux... I would therefore be extremely happy to hear of another option to make unlimited landline calls to a country for around €5/month.
I wonder: Could it be that when the OOo and the other spreadsheets convert the Excel format to a format they can internally work with, they miss some (a lot?) of the logic of the initial document, and hence cannot optimize?
This happens often, at least when converting between non-similar formats. e.g. from Word to HTML: the produced HTML is horrible. In the spreadsheet case, we remain in spreadsheet world, but still, if the Excel alternatives have a different internal way of doing things, it could screw things up.
A (hard-to-test?) corrolary would be that, had you created your 17-Mb Excel document in OOo in the first place, it would have worked about as fast. That said, if the Excel alternatives were only tested in the most common, small-document case, it's possible they missed optimization problems in their code.
MS Office compatibility is (hopefully) meant to facilitate transition to non-MS software. Apparently this would not work in your case.
I have a dual Opteron running Gentoo. "emerge" is indeed kind of slow to get going, and there's no zappy feeling to it when it starts. Perhaps because it involves launching the python interpreter, and possibly some initialization stuff. But once it gets going, "emerge --search" returns the results within *seconds*. I am not sure why it takes your machine minutes!
Nitpicking: I think emerge being slow is not exactly an issue of bloatness... An interpreted language will always be slower. But we usually associate bloatness with, e.g., OO applications having to load tons of probably useless objects, just to say hello...
However, "emerge --sync" does have a speed issue. Check out this discussion forum and, in particular, this bug report.
You are indeed wrong. The two rovers are identical (PDF file). And indeed, they are trying to make sure that what happened to Spirit won't happen to Opportunity as well.
Well,
that's RedHat's choice isnt it? And its the small customer's choice to
not buy it, to instead buy Mandrake or SuSe or whatever.
Sure. The point is that, on the one hand, this transition is going to
leave "up in the air" a number of small/medium users (some of whom did
pay RH but apparently "not enough for GROWTH!" --how much growth is
enough growth?) who will not be happy with RH any more; and on the
other hand, it is not clear (from what i read) that RH will be "saved"
by their Enterprise edition, esp. if they lose the small/medium guy who
often was the key for introducing RHL to many businesses.
So we end up with the worse of both worlds: RH ends up losing karma
with the small guys (and linux loses steam with the masses), while its
future with Big Business is probably not guaranteed either...
Of course, since Szulik knows more about his company than i do, i hope
he made the right decision and i'm wrong. And i agree with you here. In
fact, if we could know that a new company (or other entity) will emerge
to fill in the small user gap, i would be as happy as anyone.
Go and use debian for free and you/still/
benefit from the "Big Business" which has chosen to fund people to work
on Linux.
Obviously, the reason why i (and many other people) have been using
RH linux is b/c we saw advantages to it which we could not find in
Debian or other distros. However, these advantages are not worth the
price of RHEL. So what i (and others) may end up doing is precisely
what you are suggesting, but it is so obvious to many of us that this
is the wrong thing for RH's (and linux's) own interests to do, that it
hurts seeing it happen, that's all.
As
for "RHEL", well if you can obtain it, you should still be able to use
it, apart from one or two rpms, its all freely distributable software.
See this post
of mine where I ponder on some of the legalities.
The thing is that it is not clear that your suggestion works
(technically or legally)! See all the discussions left and right on
this topic... This is actually part of the reason why so many people
are pissed off, because we are left with so many scattered pieces to
make sense out of... RH just dumped their small users (and i'm talking
about paying small users now!) w/o any backup plan other than
Betadora...
Yes,
but Fedora is being opened back up to the community - slow process, but
it's happening. So instead of moaning about it being a toy, why dont
you get off your soap-box and get involved to actually make it better?
Also, there is the Fedora Legacy project, community driven, which will
try to provide long-term updates for Fedora releases, ie backport
patches and rebuild RPMs for older Fedora's - something that a lot of
reasonably experienced Linux users could help with.
This all sounds so great and right, so let's see how it rolls
out.... I guess it's just hard for me to imagine that the quality of
"boring" (for geeks) things like bugfixes and security updates could
work out so smoothly and securely and expediently without the backing
of a company.
Which customers have they dumped? The ones who bought into RedHat Network and bought boxed sets can surely continue to buy RHEL. The ones who did not, well why should RedHat lose/too/ much sleep about "customers" who dont pay?
Until now, small customers could buy RH for a few dozen $$. With RHEL this is not possible.
And to be really fair to RedHat, they did still think of the hobbyist/non-paying "customers", they will hosting and developing for Fedora, which is free and will have updates. They did not have to do that.
Yeah, very nice, they now want to milk the community for beta testing without offering back a stable product. Besides, Fedora will probably not be usable for any serious setup (see below)...
Loyal customer base of which the vast majority did not contribute to revenue.
Problem is, they now offer no solution for the little guy. It's all about Big Business. Sorry, Fedora does not sound like an option, it's more like a toy for eternal beta testing.
And do not forget that many of those customers who "did not contribute to revenue" are actually those who push for RH Linux in enterprises which do contribute to revenue.
Further, I dont see anyone being forced to work on Fedora for free.
True. It will be interesting to see how it turns out.
It's a strange ecology. To stereotype and oversimplify, it is composed of big business aka the enterprise and the hackers.
I think you are oversimplifying too much!
There's a whole range of users between big business and the hacker, even excluding the home user, whom RH has "officially" abandoned.
These are the tech-savvy users (scientists, engineers, hobbyists even) who do NOT want to EXPERIMENT with their computer system but be PRODUCTIVE with it, and they can certainly NOT afford to pay for the RHEL!!!
Most of these users loathe having to "change version" of their linux system every 6 months, when it's well-known that for every new version, one has to wait for several months to get a number of non-distro packages up in sync. I'm talking about different packages that different folks use --be it the Real player binary, audacity or something else.
I am not saying that RH should be obliged to support these users, although I'd think that they *would* benefit from their advocacy... At any rate, these users have now been abandoned by RH, period, for better or worse.
In fact, it's easier to say who *will* be supported by RH from now on, rather than who will not: Big Business is, the rest of us are not.
The rest of us are left figuring out what the heck is behind the various code names and acronyms: Fedora, FreshRPM, FBT2SORHD (Folks Banding Together to Support Older Red Hat Distributions), other distros....
I think this is an excellent question, which I also had. The best answer that I was offered is that they *can* say that the *RHEL* is void if you install on more machines than you bought it for, *including* the machines for which you *did* paid for!
Can someone please confirm or refute this?
I find it amazing that RH did not even bother setting up some FAQ somewhere to address these (and many similar) questions related to this "transition". I hope I'm wrong, but I think I can smell the various marketoids and MBAs putting their signature on what RH does... Why bother explaining all this when it's not revenue-producing? Sigh...
I disagree. I think this was one of the worst interviews that I've seen on slashdot. I think this would be a great opportunity for RH to set some things straight and to fix the recently-tarnished image of RH in the tech community and he more-or-less blew it up...
The disinterest in universities is particularly striking... And it's not just universities: Can I, as a university member, have my home or laptop Linux covered under the university's policy? If not, then I am one more of the sorry-but-we-do-not-cover-you-any-more victims, along with the home user... And what about other tech-savvy people who need a *working* system (no Fedoras please!) but cannot afford an Enterprise license?
I found it disconcerting that he thinks that "for the 'average' reader of Slashdot, the Fedora Project is the ideal Linux distribution"! I need a system that *works*, I don't want a system to experiment with, which seems to be what Fedora will mostly be about! And I think there are many other such/. users in a similar position. And RHEL is *not* an option!
Somehow, until this came out, I thought I was having a bad dream, that RH could not be shooting itself so foolishly. Now, after reading what the RH CEO thinks, I am disillusioned... I just hope there are enough people affected by this, that some folks more savvy than me will be able to put some robust security- and bug-update system in place without any major upheavals, and let RH go the way it came (sadly...)
Re:Coming from a store owner...
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 1
I won't comment on this classic piece of british-centered hysteria... I've been constantly amazed at the depth of hate (yes, i think this is the proper word to use) towards anything european, and most of all the euro. Just read what british traditionalists (for lack of better word?) say at e.g. BBC's bulletin boards related to the euro... Especially their triumphant statements when the euro was losing ground to the US dollar! Anyway, i could go on forever with this so i'd rather stop here.
But let me get to the point of this posting: i was just wondering, why on earth would a business in London accept euros anyway? Do they accept dollars? Or any other foreign currency for that matter? I don't think so. So why accept the euro, which is a foreign currency for Britain?
As to the UK banks charging for converting euros to pounds: well, of course they will do, as they charge for the conversion of any other foreign currency! So what is the point of complaining?
I have the feeling that the majority of the british is so negative about the euro that it's best for both them and the euro to stay out of it. Besides, the euro is just the tip of the iceberg. It signifies the will of EU citizens to tie their futures closer together (with respect to each one's cultural identity nonetheless!) as the best way to survive and succeed in the future. We all give up something to gain something else, hopefully greater. A large fraction (majority?) of the british obvisouly does not want that, and they have been a constant pain in the butt when it comes to taking decisions at the european level. So if they do not want to be part of it all, why do they not just move out? If all they want is the customs union let them keep it, but let them not interfere with anything else. I feel it will be best for the peace of mind of a large number of british folks but also for the rest of us!
First off, the MOST (Microgravity and Oscillations of Stars) telescope is not "a more humble version of Hubble". The Hubble space telescope is a more-or-less general purpose intrument. By contrast, MOST has a narrow focus: to make photometric measurements of tiny stellar oscillations. This is something that Hubble may not actually be properly equipped to do, and even if it is, its science mission is much more generic, and no observer could get so much HST time for a such a narrow-focus subject as MOST's.
Secondly, there are not "millions of astronomers" in the world! (at least not professional astronomers...) There are a few thousands at most...
The decrease in brightness could very well be from an orbiting brown dwarf.
Not really. The planet's mass was deduced to be only 0.6 Jupiter masses, which makes it too small to be a brown dwarf. Brown dwarfs are believed/defined to have a minimum of about 80 Jupiter masses. This is how much mass is needed to barely ignite *some* fusion reactions in the center, but not enough to really call it a star.
Wouldn't the planet allow some light to shine through it's body since it is a gas giant?
Not really: it may be a gas giant but the gas is so thick and dense that it is opaque. Besides, even gas giants (at least of the Jupiter variety) are believed to have metallic cores due to the extremely high pressures near their centers.
This would give an effect like the one when you put your finger on a lit light bulb--glowing edges of the planet! And the effect can be further enhanced if the planet has a large dense atmosphere. Wow!!
Do you mean seing a "glowing ring" surrounding the planet due to its dense atmosphere? Well, even assuming we could resolve the planet from such a big distance (which we cannot), the glowing ring could not be seen against the much brighter star disk. To see the ring one has to use the planet's disk to cover the star itself (which happened with spacecraft we sent to Jupiter and other giant planets). But to do this one would have to be much closer to the planet!
> The universe is probably expanding at a fast > enough rate that the distance between Earth and > that planet is increasing faster than you can > walk.
In fact, the expansion of the universe is relevant only for distances between galaxies that are far apart. It has no noticeable effect inside the Milky Way.
However, it is still true that, because both the Sun and that star orbit around the galactic center with different velocities, they are moving one with respect to the other.
> When you look in the night sky most of > the points of light you see aren't stars, > they're complete galaxies.
This is actually not quite true. All the stars that you see in the night sky are indeed stars like our Sun, and all belong to our Milky Way galaxy. The only other galaxy that we can see with the naked eye from midnorthern latitudes is the Andromeda galaxy, which appears as a dim little cloud if you know where to look at, on a dark, clear, moonless night. From a more southern location one can also see the two Magellanic Clouds, which are small satellite galaxies of our own Milky Way (Andromeda is actually bigger in size than the Milky Way, and something like 25-30 times further away than the Magellanic Clouds).
Although we can see, with the naked eye, some of the brightest individual stars in the Magellanic Clouds because they are relatively nearby, we cannot see any individual stars in Andromeda (with the naked eye). All we can see is the collective glow of the hundreds of billions of stars that make up that galaxy. We need telescopes to see individual stars in nearby galaxies. And even the largest telescopes are no help for more distant galaxies.
It is estimated that there are something like a trillion galaxies in the observable universe.
Anyone interested in a critique of libertarianism, check out this (and especially the FAQ).
The way the computer industry has developed has made it a breeding ground for libertarian ideas, perhaps because it is seen as an example of how libertarian principles presumably work in practice. But the computer industry is only a small part of the societal web and generalizations can be dangerous!
Libertarian theory, like unrestricted (laissez-faire-type) capitalism, is appealing because of its apparent simplicity. Alas, this simplicity hides away concerns about a number of issues, such as environmental protection or the (lack of) willingness on the part of many people to participate in a jungle society, whether they like it or not.
Hmmm, does this apparent simplicity ("user-friendliness") of libertarian theory, which however comes at the cost of ignoring important side-effects and their consequences, remind you of an operating system that we all love to hate?:)
Not necessarily. Unless they tune the algorithm badly to make it reproduce well today's climate, you can reasonably assume that it (the algorithmic model) is generic enough to apply to the future as well. Of course that would be modulo any catastrophic events between now and then... (massive volcano eruptions, forest fires etc.)
Slashdot Mirror
I am confused. The 100-GB Blu-ray disks that you buy cost about $20, which is much more expensive per GB than the cost of a 2.5" external drive. This is without counting the cost of your Blu-ray drive, the hassle of keeping around many more disks than hard drives (20 of your disks for a single 2 TB drive, for example), or the much lower read/write speed of the Blu-ray. And if portability is not an issue, you can get an even cheaper 3.5" external disk.
KDE4 is still maintained for a long time, very stable and usable. Why not just keep using that?
How much i wish what you wrote were true, but i am afraid it isn't:
Back in August 2013 we promised to do Long Term Support for kde-workspace for
2 years.
This means this August is the last release for kde-workspace.
Anyone has a strong reason we should keep doing kde-workspace 4.11.x releases?
Yes, some distributions still offer KDE4, but i am wondering how secure it is when i read things like this
"Many popular KDE applications use QtWebKit, which is old and deprecated. These deprecated versions of WebKit suffer from well over 100 remote code execution vulnerabilities fixed upstream that will probably never be backported. (100 is a lowball estimate; I would be unsurprised if the real number for QtWebKit was much, much higher."
"QtWebKit is still maintained in Qt and is getting some backports, but from a quick check of their git repository it’s obvious that it’s not receiving many security updates. This is hardly unexpected; QtWebKit is now years behind upstream, so providing security updates would be very difficult. There’s not much hope left for QtWebKit; these applications have hundreds of known vulnerabilities that will never be fixed."
I have been a longtime KDE user, and their refusal to continue supporting KDE4 while KDE5 is being developed is precisely what infuriated me to the point of wishing to abandon it and making me actively look into alternatives. Up until KDE3, i was willing to accept some bloatness and features that i never used because of KWin's configurability and internationalization (there was a time when other DEs would lock you out of your session for good if you were using a non-latin keyboard when you locked the screen!). Then i swallowed the fiasco of the transition from KDE3 to KDE4, during which KDE developers abandoned support of KDE3 long before KDE4 was in a usable form (except perhaps on their own laptops?) telling myself that perhaps this was an error in judgment caused by their inexperience (they are not professionals, after all), and that they would learn their lesson... And let's not even get into the semantic desktop crap...
So we finally arrive at KDE5, where KDE developers shove down their users' throats a half-baked product once again by refusing to keep maintaining KDE4. I cannot even remember how many bugs this thing had when i was forced to install it some months ago, many of which have not yet been fixed to this day... Konsole, my workhorse application, crashing with a mysterious combination of key strikes; the screen going black when opening a new window; things like the session manager autostart sometimes working and sometimes not; irritating taskbar bugs too many to mention here; "focus follows mouse" sometimes working and sometimes failing... To compound the misery, KDE settings are no longer saved under ~/.kde5 but are spread all over the place in ~/.config and other directories; possibly to comply to some desktop standard, except KDE is so bug it overwhelms these directories and it's no longer to rename ~/.kde5 to make an easy fresh start when trying to figure out what's wrong...
I reported some of these bugs, but i must confess that at this point i have very little good will vis a vis KDE to be a happy bug reporter! After all, i am not doing it out of my own free will: KDE5 was forced down my throat, and i find myself obliged to spend hours and hours on their project instead of *my* projects, and at a time that was certainly not of my own choos
AFAIK Skype is the only VoIP software that offers unlimited subscription rates to landline phones. One can make unlimited calls to landlines in many countries for around €5/month with an annual subscription.
When the per-minute rate of most other VoIP providers is a couple of cents/minute, it means that it takes on average less than 10 minutes per day to exceed Skype's unlimited offer, and it goes linearly in time from there.
For someone who averages 30 min per day or more, the savings are quite substantial.
Now that Skype is owned by Microsoft, i expect it to gradually become more problematic on Linux... I would therefore be extremely happy to hear of another option to make unlimited landline calls to a country for around €5/month.
Sounds like a good idea.
I wonder: Could it be that when the OOo and the other spreadsheets convert the Excel format to a format they can internally work with, they miss some (a lot?) of the logic of the initial document, and hence cannot optimize?
This happens often, at least when converting between non-similar formats. e.g. from Word to HTML: the produced HTML is horrible. In the spreadsheet case, we remain in spreadsheet world, but still, if the Excel alternatives have a different internal way of doing things, it could screw things up.
A (hard-to-test?) corrolary would be that, had you created your 17-Mb Excel document in OOo in the first place, it would have worked about as fast. That said, if the Excel alternatives were only tested in the most common, small-document case, it's possible they missed optimization problems in their code.
MS Office compatibility is (hopefully) meant to facilitate transition to non-MS software. Apparently this would not work in your case.
THE VISION OF "GREATER MACEDONIA"
If you have no time to read all of it, you may at least click on the Figure links, and read the captions.
Granted, this is not territorial disputes through official channels (yet), but the raw material is there for this to occur, if it does not stop now.
Nitpicking: I think emerge being slow is not exactly an issue of bloatness... An interpreted language will always be slower. But we usually associate bloatness with, e.g., OO applications having to load tons of probably useless objects, just to say hello...
However, "emerge --sync" does have a speed issue. Check out this discussion forum and, in particular, this bug report .
Hopefully things will get fixed soon...
You are indeed wrong. The two rovers are identical (PDF file). And indeed, they are trying to make sure that what happened to Spirit won't happen to Opportunity as well.
Well, that's RedHat's choice isnt it? And its the small customer's choice to not buy it, to instead buy Mandrake or SuSe or whatever.
/still/
benefit from the "Big Business" which has chosen to fund people to work
on Linux.
Sure. The point is that, on the one hand, this transition is going to leave "up in the air" a number of small/medium users (some of whom did pay RH but apparently "not enough for GROWTH!" --how much growth is enough growth?) who will not be happy with RH any more; and on the other hand, it is not clear (from what i read) that RH will be "saved" by their Enterprise edition, esp. if they lose the small/medium guy who often was the key for introducing RHL to many businesses.
So we end up with the worse of both worlds: RH ends up losing karma with the small guys (and linux loses steam with the masses), while its future with Big Business is probably not guaranteed either...
Of course, since Szulik knows more about his company than i do, i hope he made the right decision and i'm wrong. And i agree with you here. In fact, if we could know that a new company (or other entity) will emerge to fill in the small user gap, i would be as happy as anyone.
Go and use debian for free and you
Obviously, the reason why i (and many other people) have been using RH linux is b/c we saw advantages to it which we could not find in Debian or other distros. However, these advantages are not worth the price of RHEL. So what i (and others) may end up doing is precisely what you are suggesting, but it is so obvious to many of us that this is the wrong thing for RH's (and linux's) own interests to do, that it hurts seeing it happen, that's all.
As for "RHEL", well if you can obtain it, you should still be able to use it, apart from one or two rpms, its all freely distributable software. See this post of mine where I ponder on some of the legalities.
The thing is that it is not clear that your suggestion works (technically or legally)! See all the discussions left and right on this topic... This is actually part of the reason why so many people are pissed off, because we are left with so many scattered pieces to make sense out of... RH just dumped their small users (and i'm talking about paying small users now!) w/o any backup plan other than Betadora...
Yes, but Fedora is being opened back up to the community - slow process, but it's happening. So instead of moaning about it being a toy, why dont you get off your soap-box and get involved to actually make it better? Also, there is the Fedora Legacy project, community driven, which will try to provide long-term updates for Fedora releases, ie backport patches and rebuild RPMs for older Fedora's - something that a lot of reasonably experienced Linux users could help with.
This all sounds so great and right, so let's see how it rolls out.... I guess it's just hard for me to imagine that the quality of "boring" (for geeks) things like bugfixes and security updates could work out so smoothly and securely and expediently without the backing of a company.
Until now, small customers could buy RH for a few dozen $$. With RHEL this is not possible.
And to be really fair to RedHat, they did still think of the hobbyist/non-paying "customers", they will hosting and developing for Fedora, which is free and will have updates. They did not have to do that.
Yeah, very nice, they now want to milk the community for beta testing without offering back a stable product. Besides, Fedora will probably not be usable for any serious setup (see below)...
Loyal customer base of which the vast majority did not contribute to revenue.
Problem is, they now offer no solution for the little guy. It's all about Big Business. Sorry, Fedora does not sound like an option, it's more like a toy for eternal beta testing.
And do not forget that many of those customers who "did not contribute to revenue" are actually those who push for RH Linux in enterprises which do contribute to revenue.
Further, I dont see anyone being forced to work on Fedora for free.
True. It will be interesting to see how it turns out.
I think you are oversimplifying too much!
There's a whole range of users between big business and the hacker, even excluding the home user, whom RH has "officially" abandoned.
These are the tech-savvy users (scientists, engineers, hobbyists even) who do NOT want to EXPERIMENT with their computer system but be PRODUCTIVE with it, and they can certainly NOT afford to pay for the RHEL!!!
Most of these users loathe having to "change version" of their linux system every 6 months, when it's well-known that for every new version, one has to wait for several months to get a number of non-distro packages up in sync. I'm talking about different packages that different folks use --be it the Real player binary, audacity or something else.
I am not saying that RH should be obliged to support these users, although I'd think that they *would* benefit from their advocacy... At any rate, these users have now been abandoned by RH, period, for better or worse.
In fact, it's easier to say who *will* be supported by RH from now on, rather than who will not: Big Business is, the rest of us are not.
The rest of us are left figuring out what the heck is behind the various code names and acronyms: Fedora, FreshRPM, FBT2SORHD (Folks Banding Together to Support Older Red Hat Distributions), other distros....
The end of the innocense, I guess...
I think this is an excellent question, which I also had. The best answer that I was offered is that they *can* say that the *RHEL* is void if you install on more machines than you bought it for, *including* the machines for which you *did* paid for!
Can someone please confirm or refute this?
I find it amazing that RH did not even bother setting up some FAQ somewhere to address these (and many similar) questions related to this "transition". I hope I'm wrong, but I think I can smell the various marketoids and MBAs putting their signature on what RH does... Why bother explaining all this when it's not revenue-producing? Sigh...
I disagree. I think this was one of the worst interviews that I've seen on slashdot. I think this would be a great opportunity for RH to set some things straight and to fix the recently-tarnished image of RH in the tech community and he more-or-less blew it up...
/. users in a similar position. And RHEL is *not* an option!
The disinterest in universities is particularly striking... And it's not just universities: Can I, as a university member, have my home or laptop Linux covered under the university's policy? If not, then I am one more of the sorry-but-we-do-not-cover-you-any-more victims, along with the home user... And what about other tech-savvy people who need a *working* system (no Fedoras please!) but cannot afford an Enterprise license?
I found it disconcerting that he thinks that "for the 'average' reader of Slashdot, the Fedora Project is the ideal Linux distribution"! I need a system that *works*, I don't want a system to experiment with, which seems to be what Fedora will mostly be about! And I think there are many other such
Somehow, until this came out, I thought I was having a bad dream, that RH could not be shooting itself so foolishly. Now, after reading what the RH CEO thinks, I am disillusioned... I just hope there are enough people affected by this, that some folks more savvy than me will be able to put some robust security- and bug-update system in place without any major upheavals, and let RH go the way it came (sadly...)
I won't comment on this classic piece of british-centered hysteria... I've been constantly amazed at the depth of hate (yes, i think this is the proper word to use) towards anything european, and most of all the euro. Just read what british traditionalists (for lack of better word?) say at e.g. BBC's bulletin boards related to the euro... Especially their triumphant statements when the euro was losing ground to the US dollar! Anyway, i could go on forever with this so i'd rather stop here.
But let me get to the point of this posting: i was just wondering, why on earth would a business in London accept euros anyway? Do they accept dollars? Or any other foreign currency for that matter? I don't think so. So why accept the euro, which is a foreign currency for Britain?
As to the UK banks charging for converting euros to pounds: well, of course they will do, as they charge for the conversion of any other foreign currency! So what is the point of complaining?
I have the feeling that the majority of the british is so negative about the euro that it's best for both them and the euro to stay out of it. Besides, the euro is just the tip of the iceberg. It signifies the will of EU citizens to tie their futures closer together (with respect to each one's cultural identity nonetheless!) as the best way to survive and succeed in the future. We all give up something to gain something else, hopefully greater. A large fraction (majority?) of the british obvisouly does not want that, and they have been a constant pain in the butt when it comes to taking decisions at the european level. So if they do not want to be part of it all, why do they not just move out? If all they want is the customs union let them keep it, but let them not interfere with anything else. I feel it will be best for the peace of mind of a large number of british folks but also for the rest of us!
First off, the MOST (Microgravity and Oscillations of Stars) telescope is not "a more humble version of Hubble". The Hubble space telescope is a more-or-less general purpose intrument. By contrast, MOST has a narrow focus: to make photometric measurements of tiny stellar oscillations. This is something that Hubble may not actually be properly equipped to do, and even if it is, its science mission is much more generic, and no observer could get so much HST time for a such a narrow-focus subject as MOST's.
Secondly, there are not "millions of astronomers" in the world! (at least not professional astronomers...) There are a few thousands at most...
Our Sun would be too bright and would block even the amplified light of the planet...
Not really. The planet's mass was deduced to be only 0.6 Jupiter masses, which makes it too small to be a brown dwarf. Brown dwarfs are believed/defined to have a minimum of about 80 Jupiter masses. This is how much mass is needed to barely ignite *some* fusion reactions in the center, but not enough to really call it a star.
Not really: it may be a gas giant but the gas is so thick and dense that it is opaque. Besides, even gas giants (at least of the Jupiter variety) are believed to have metallic cores due to the extremely high pressures near their centers.
This would give an effect like the one when you put your finger on a lit light bulb--glowing edges of the planet! And the effect can be further enhanced if the planet has a large dense atmosphere. Wow!!
Do you mean seing a "glowing ring" surrounding the planet due to its dense atmosphere? Well, even assuming we could resolve the planet from such a big distance (which we cannot), the glowing ring could not be seen against the much brighter star disk. To see the ring one has to use the planet's disk to cover the star itself (which happened with spacecraft we sent to Jupiter and other giant planets). But to do this one would have to be much closer to the planet!
> The universe is probably expanding at a fast
> enough rate that the distance between Earth and
> that planet is increasing faster than you can
> walk.
In fact, the expansion of the universe is relevant only for distances between galaxies that are far apart. It has no noticeable effect inside the Milky Way.
However, it is still true that, because both the Sun and that star orbit around the galactic center with different velocities, they are moving one with respect to the other.
> When you look in the night sky most of
> the points of light you see aren't stars,
> they're complete galaxies.
This is actually not quite true. All the stars that you see in the night sky are indeed stars like our Sun, and all belong to our Milky Way galaxy. The only other galaxy that we can see with the naked eye from midnorthern latitudes is the Andromeda galaxy, which appears as a dim little cloud if you know where to look at, on a dark, clear, moonless night. From a more southern location one can also see the two Magellanic Clouds, which are small satellite galaxies of our own Milky Way (Andromeda is actually bigger in size than the Milky Way, and something like 25-30 times further away than the Magellanic Clouds).
Although we can see, with the naked eye, some of the brightest individual stars in the Magellanic Clouds because they are relatively nearby, we cannot see any individual stars in Andromeda (with the naked eye). All we can see is the collective glow of the hundreds of billions of stars that make up that galaxy. We need telescopes to see individual stars in nearby galaxies. And even the largest telescopes are no help for more distant galaxies.
It is estimated that there are something like a trillion galaxies in the observable universe.
Anyone interested in a critique of libertarianism, check out this (and especially the FAQ).
The way the computer industry has developed has made it a breeding ground for libertarian ideas, perhaps because it is seen as an example of how libertarian principles presumably work in practice. But the computer industry is only a small part of the societal web and generalizations can be dangerous!
Libertarian theory, like unrestricted (laissez-faire-type) capitalism, is appealing because of its apparent simplicity. Alas, this simplicity hides away concerns about a number of issues, such as environmental protection or the (lack of) willingness on the part of many people to participate in a jungle society, whether they like it or not.
Hmmm, does this apparent simplicity ("user-friendliness") of libertarian theory, which however comes at the cost of ignoring important side-effects and their consequences, remind you of an operating system that we all love to hate? :)
Not necessarily. Unless they tune the algorithm badly to make it reproduce well today's climate, you can reasonably assume that it (the algorithmic model) is generic enough to apply to the future as well. Of course that would be modulo any catastrophic events between now and then... (massive volcano eruptions, forest fires etc.)
We don't care if they shoot cyanide, just as long as they emit radio signals.