The important part is that upgrades between releases have been tested and work has been done to ensure that your machines will continue to work after upgrading between releases.
Another thing is that people have worked to make sure that what is released is a coherent set of packages. This means that you don't get a mix of say Gnome 2.0, 2.2, 2.4 and 2.6, you just get Gnome 2.6. During the release cycle there is bound to be a mix of these in the distribution while bugs are fixed.
So while it is true that you can update at any time, it does make a difference to follow the releases.
One thing GNOME seems to have going for it in the context of government deployment is the accessibility of the desktop. It has been a high priority for a long time to make it easy (or even possible) for people with various disabilities to use it.
I read recently that a major KDE developer (sorry, don't remember who, might have been Waldo Bastian) said that accessibility was one thing KDE should focus, because it is a strict requirement for many organizations (including US federal ones as far as I know).
So true. The Debian install CD no 1 is a rescue disk in itself, so there is no need to create an extra floppy. If you have a Debian cd you can always just boot from that and get back up and running.
Both the milestones and daily builds are packaged by Debian. They naturally only appear in unstable (well, 0.9.5 made it to testing), but you can use the pinning feature of apt if you use testing to install mozilla from unstable.
Pffft, try fsck'ing a 384GB filesystem:-) Now that takes a while. (And yes, I have a very good reason for such a large partition (and no, it's not on a home system)).
Fans of UNIX will, of course, disagree. The popularity of archaic command-line interfaces in the UNIX subculture could perhaps be understood as a consequence of gamer-like behavior among hobbyists and tinkerers.
You forgot to mention the efficiency of the CLI when it is used by someone with decent typing speed (and accuracy) and some experience with it. There are many functions that take less time to type then to do through a GUI. Point-and-click is nice for some things, but it doesn't solve everything. Do you open a character table and click at the characters with your mouse when you write postings here? Sometimes using your keyboard is just faster and easier.
Judging from the players on the MUD I code on, I would have to say yes. We have lots of players in their teens. Sure, a substantial part of the players are older but most of the new players are below 20 years of age.
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The important part is that upgrades between releases have been tested and work has been done to ensure that your machines will continue to work after upgrading between releases.
Another thing is that people have worked to make sure that what is released is a coherent set of packages. This means that you don't get a mix of say Gnome 2.0, 2.2, 2.4 and 2.6, you just get Gnome 2.6. During the release cycle there is bound to be a mix of these in the distribution while bugs are fixed.
So while it is true that you can update at any time, it does make a difference to follow the releases.
Just a small correction:
LTO Ultrium is much faster than DLT. Uncompressed rates are:
DLT: 5 MB/s
ULTRIUM 1: 10 MB/s
ULTRIUM 2: 20 MB/s
Add compression on top of that and it makes a huge difference.
Nor is it far removed from what most governments do:
Try to punish as many law-breaking people as possible. Legal punishments have generally two purposes: 1) vengeance! and 2) deterrence.
Yeah, it is very terrorist-like to play on people's emotions and fears. We all do it, if your comparison with terrorism is to be used.
One thing GNOME seems to have going for it in the context of government deployment is the accessibility of the desktop. It has been a high priority for a long time to make it easy (or even possible) for people with various disabilities to use it.
I read recently that a major KDE developer (sorry, don't remember who, might have been Waldo Bastian) said that accessibility was one thing KDE should focus, because it is a strict requirement for many organizations (including US federal ones as far as I know).
PLATO is mentioned in the book.
Not true, there are security updates for testing as well as stable. Something like this should do:
deb http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main contrib non-free
Believable, sure...
An M3 costs 1,165,000 dkr in Denmark which is roughly around 153,000 USD at todays exchange rates.
But of course Denmark has insane taxes on cars...
Why bother downloading the entire first CD when you can just get two floppy images and install from those.
So true. The Debian install CD no 1 is a rescue disk in itself, so there is no need to create an extra floppy. If you have a Debian cd you can always just boot from that and get back up and running.
Both the milestones and daily builds are packaged by Debian. They naturally only appear in unstable (well, 0.9.5 made it to testing), but you can use the pinning feature of apt if you use testing to install mozilla from unstable.
Pffft, try fsck'ing a 384GB filesystem :-) Now that takes a while. (And yes, I have a very good reason for such a large partition (and no, it's not on a home system)).
You forgot to mention the efficiency of the CLI when it is used by someone with decent typing speed (and accuracy) and some experience with it. There are many functions that take less time to type then to do through a GUI. Point-and-click is nice for some things, but it doesn't solve everything. Do you open a character table and click at the characters with your mouse when you write postings here? Sometimes using your keyboard is just faster and easier.
Judging from the players on the MUD I code on, I would have to say yes. We have lots of players in their teens. Sure, a substantial part of the players are older but most of the new players are below 20 years of age.