Care to explain how? Have you ever actually made an RPM? I mean, opened up a specfile in an editor and made a piece of software to be packaged as an RPM? As someone who has, I can say that RPM is VERY full-featured. I suppose RPMs lack USE-flags, which is about the only thing I can think of that RPMs lack compared to Portage. But it's really easy to just download the source-RPM, edit the specfile and then rebuild it. Or, since it usually doesn't matter, just use the RPM as is. USE-flags often just bring in more complexity than benefit. And half the time, I end up having to recompile with new USE flags anyways because I realize that one USE flag I had disabled I actually ended up needing.
I'm a Gentoo user, BTW. Use Fedora and CentOS at work. Portage is frustrating. You can download a random RPM and have it work. You can't just download an ebuild and have it work.
No no no. You don't get it.
The average computer user wouldn't be installing RPMs from the command line. They'd be using the graphical tool which does the right thing. Rather, the complaints are from the people savvy enough to use the command line, understand package managers, but who won't bother to do one ounce of research to realize that the yum command line tool is preferred (in other words, people [geeks] who honestly SHOULD know better -- I'm talking about the Linux afficionados who are convinced that RPM sucks). Grandma won't be using the command line. Grandma will click on an RPM link in Firefox and it will open with "Software Installer" and everything will work fine. Or she will go to Add/Remove Software and click on checkboxes. At no time will she have to touch the command line or use the RPM tool.
Compared to DEB, RPM is a much superior format. The problem with RPM is not RPM itself but the idiots who try to use the rpm command-line tool like apt-get and then complain when it doesn't do what they expect it to do (because that's not what it's supposed to do). You are supposed to use "yum", which works just like apt-get. It even lets you install RPMs that you've already downloaded. E.g. "yum localinstall foo.rpm". It will even download dependencies for you! It's also really fast in fc6 and f7.
The only negative I can see is that there aren't as many packages available in the Fedora repositories. That's hardly a fault of RPM, though.
I guess I can agree with most of what you say, but I am puzzled by this statement:
d) There's still nothing in Unix that has the same handy role as a Graphics Device Context.
X does have Graphics Contexts and toolkits obviously build upon those as they see fit. It's a pretty standard part of a GUI these days, anyways. Perhaps you are annoyed that in X, the graphics context does exactly what it's supposed to...store graphics contextual information, rather than be a catch-all way to do graphics operations. Of course, then again, you can use the same graphics context with multiple drawables (windows, pixmaps) rather than having the GC be tied to one and only one drawable. I personally find the X system far more flexible than the Windows system, and not particularly more difficult to use or understand.
Ummm....all the other distros I've used have the same init system (except Gentoo), with symlinks from/etc/rc.d/rc?.d to/etc/init.d. In gentoo's case, they eschewed numbered runlevels and instead have named ones, but there are still symlinks.
Umm...no. Home users also generally are going to use one of the main distros. And again, they use the same libraries and packages. If you properly package your software and specify dependencies and such, it should just work on any distro (with a few minor niggles here and there, of course, but it's the same as making sure it works between win2k and winxp).
If you are using a distro beyond the big 3 (SuSE, RedHat, Ubuntu), then you are probably already smart enough to deal with any issues from installing 3rd party software...or you are too stupid to realize that starting with Linux From Scratch was a bad idea.
That's quite the misinterpretation of the name Unix. It really was just a joke: "Unix is one of whatever Multics is many of". It doesn't have anything to do with whether the system is multi-user or not. Unix is most definitely a multi-user system. The old style permissions are definitely becoming a problem, but there are solutions such as ACLs, SELinux and beyond. They have just yet to be used in any great degree on the desktop Linuxes. Perhaps incidents like this will push Linux distributors to start using these technologies.
BTW, for your little problem, just make sure you are in the disk group and everything will work. That's the whole point of why it is set that way...so that only users who are in that group can access the device (or root), and users outside of the group can't. Admittedly, it probably shouldn't be disk. That's a udev problem, but that can be fixed in a config file, which sets permissions and ownership for device nodes.
You do realize that userspace drivers and permissions are orthogonal concepts? Userspace drivers still would probably need to run as root to be able to properly access system resources.
With Gentoo, packages cannot modify anything in the outside system. I don't know what precautions the.deb package system has, but based on what I see with RPM, I'm guessing not much.
The NHC average track errors for 3-days out is now around 150 miles, which is about the distance from southern Miami to West Palm Beach. For three days out, that's nothing short of excellent. Remember, the eye is not the whole storm. There's often a huge band of windy storms within a radius of 25-100 miles of the eye that just as damaging. If the NHC says the storm will hit Miami three days out and it hits 50 miles north, that's pretty damn good. I'm sorry.
What the fuck are you talking about? As an avid watcher of hurricanes, not just those that hit Florida (have for ten years or so), NHC tracks are EXCELLENT within about 3 days. Now, if you go beyond that, then yes, expect track errors.
Perhaps you are confusing the media with the NHC? The media tends to hype landfalls at specific locations for longer than they should.
There's a REALLY easy way to make a distinction: you can say "the Linux kernel" if you want to refer to the kernel. It's not hard. When I see people talking on the internet (I'm sorry, web) about Linux and the kernel, that's what I see.
But if you're going to be really pedantic, remember that Linus didn't even really create all of Linux. He's only written a small portion of the kernel. So to be most technically correct, you would say "Linus created a small but significant portion of the Linux kernel".
The term Linux covers the OS as well. Despite what RMS may think, the fact is, most people use the term Linux to cover all components of the OS. This is valid for the same reason that "tree" means what it does -- because most people agree that "tree" refers to a thing with a trunk and leaves. RMS can rant and rave all he wants, but that doesn't make him right.
I don't think ext3cow has a nice Apple-like GUI (which personally make me want to vomit in terms of functionality and looks). It's a command line interface. So they clearly aren't even TRYING to steal anything from Apple.
Because it wasn't REVEALED until 2006, so even if Apple was working on it in 2002 (not likely, since Open Source projects generally have longer cycles than proprietary ones due to manpower issues), the ext3cow people would not have been aware of it.
Why do you think people are stealing this from Apple? It's a good idea that follows logically from ideas found in revision control software such as Subversion and its predecessors. And as others have pointed out, VMS had this 20 years ago. The idea certainly has been in existence for longer than Apple has. The wikipedia article indicates that the TENEX operating system in the 60s first had versioning filesystems.
In any case, Apple hardly invented it, Apple was hardly the first to use it, and Linux implementations have been released before Apple even demoed Time Machine.
So, basically, you are 100% wrong.
So I guess since it's old news, they just shouldn't bother right?
Nobody is claiming this as an innovation. It's just a good feature that's getting added finally. After all, as people have said, VMS had this 20 years ago. Even MS and Apple didn't add something like it until the past two years.
I should add that this project started back in 2005, so it's been worked on about during the same time Apple's stuff has.
That has to be one of the worst set of reasons for anything I've ever seen. We're not saying that old people have to resize windows that way. They don't have to do anything. But don't prevent the rest of us from resizing that way. Secondly, there's nothing about dragging to the "exact" size that's needed. Whenever I resize by dragging, it's ALWAYS approximate. I resize until it gets to about where I want it and leave it at that. Of course, if I do need it to resize up to the edge of another window, at least in KDE, there are sticky window borders, so the WM will automatically finish the resize if I drag it close to the edge of another window.
No, it's really not. They are designed to kill or injure other people or other living things. No question about that.
Although the vast majority of nuclear bombs have not been used, wouldn't you still say that the primary intent of a nuclear bomb is to kill a lot of people really fast?
The thing is, it's NOT simple to do it fast. Sure, you can theoretically emulate anything on anything, but in the real world, where there are finite limits on storage and how many instructions can be executed in a given time unit, effective virtualization is rather difficult to achieve, especially without hardware support.
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Care to explain how? Have you ever actually made an RPM? I mean, opened up a specfile in an editor and made a piece of software to be packaged as an RPM? As someone who has, I can say that RPM is VERY full-featured. I suppose RPMs lack USE-flags, which is about the only thing I can think of that RPMs lack compared to Portage. But it's really easy to just download the source-RPM, edit the specfile and then rebuild it. Or, since it usually doesn't matter, just use the RPM as is. USE-flags often just bring in more complexity than benefit. And half the time, I end up having to recompile with new USE flags anyways because I realize that one USE flag I had disabled I actually ended up needing.
I'm a Gentoo user, BTW. Use Fedora and CentOS at work. Portage is frustrating. You can download a random RPM and have it work. You can't just download an ebuild and have it work.
No no no. You don't get it. The average computer user wouldn't be installing RPMs from the command line. They'd be using the graphical tool which does the right thing. Rather, the complaints are from the people savvy enough to use the command line, understand package managers, but who won't bother to do one ounce of research to realize that the yum command line tool is preferred (in other words, people [geeks] who honestly SHOULD know better -- I'm talking about the Linux afficionados who are convinced that RPM sucks). Grandma won't be using the command line. Grandma will click on an RPM link in Firefox and it will open with "Software Installer" and everything will work fine. Or she will go to Add/Remove Software and click on checkboxes. At no time will she have to touch the command line or use the RPM tool.
Talk to the patent owners or the legal system, not the distros. They're just doing what they have to do.
Compared to DEB, RPM is a much superior format. The problem with RPM is not RPM itself but the idiots who try to use the rpm command-line tool like apt-get and then complain when it doesn't do what they expect it to do (because that's not what it's supposed to do). You are supposed to use "yum", which works just like apt-get. It even lets you install RPMs that you've already downloaded. E.g. "yum localinstall foo.rpm". It will even download dependencies for you! It's also really fast in fc6 and f7.
The only negative I can see is that there aren't as many packages available in the Fedora repositories. That's hardly a fault of RPM, though.
A kilobyte means 1024 bytes among programmers. Any programmer that doesn't know that would likely not know what a kibibyte is either.
I guess I can agree with most of what you say, but I am puzzled by this statement:
d) There's still nothing in Unix that has the same handy role as a Graphics Device Context.
X does have Graphics Contexts and toolkits obviously build upon those as they see fit. It's a pretty standard part of a GUI these days, anyways. Perhaps you are annoyed that in X, the graphics context does exactly what it's supposed to...store graphics contextual information, rather than be a catch-all way to do graphics operations. Of course, then again, you can use the same graphics context with multiple drawables (windows, pixmaps) rather than having the GC be tied to one and only one drawable. I personally find the X system far more flexible than the Windows system, and not particularly more difficult to use or understand.
Ummm....all the other distros I've used have the same init system (except Gentoo), with symlinks from /etc/rc.d/rc?.d to /etc/init.d. In gentoo's case, they eschewed numbered runlevels and instead have named ones, but there are still symlinks.
Umm...no. Home users also generally are going to use one of the main distros. And again, they use the same libraries and packages. If you properly package your software and specify dependencies and such, it should just work on any distro (with a few minor niggles here and there, of course, but it's the same as making sure it works between win2k and winxp). If you are using a distro beyond the big 3 (SuSE, RedHat, Ubuntu), then you are probably already smart enough to deal with any issues from installing 3rd party software...or you are too stupid to realize that starting with Linux From Scratch was a bad idea.
That's quite the misinterpretation of the name Unix. It really was just a joke: "Unix is one of whatever Multics is many of". It doesn't have anything to do with whether the system is multi-user or not. Unix is most definitely a multi-user system. The old style permissions are definitely becoming a problem, but there are solutions such as ACLs, SELinux and beyond. They have just yet to be used in any great degree on the desktop Linuxes. Perhaps incidents like this will push Linux distributors to start using these technologies. BTW, for your little problem, just make sure you are in the disk group and everything will work. That's the whole point of why it is set that way...so that only users who are in that group can access the device (or root), and users outside of the group can't. Admittedly, it probably shouldn't be disk. That's a udev problem, but that can be fixed in a config file, which sets permissions and ownership for device nodes.
You do realize that userspace drivers and permissions are orthogonal concepts? Userspace drivers still would probably need to run as root to be able to properly access system resources.
With Gentoo, packages cannot modify anything in the outside system. I don't know what precautions the .deb package system has, but based on what I see with RPM, I'm guessing not much.
The NHC average track errors for 3-days out is now around 150 miles, which is about the distance from southern Miami to West Palm Beach. For three days out, that's nothing short of excellent. Remember, the eye is not the whole storm. There's often a huge band of windy storms within a radius of 25-100 miles of the eye that just as damaging. If the NHC says the storm will hit Miami three days out and it hits 50 miles north, that's pretty damn good. I'm sorry.
What the fuck are you talking about? As an avid watcher of hurricanes, not just those that hit Florida (have for ten years or so), NHC tracks are EXCELLENT within about 3 days. Now, if you go beyond that, then yes, expect track errors. Perhaps you are confusing the media with the NHC? The media tends to hype landfalls at specific locations for longer than they should.
There's a REALLY easy way to make a distinction: you can say "the Linux kernel" if you want to refer to the kernel. It's not hard. When I see people talking on the internet (I'm sorry, web) about Linux and the kernel, that's what I see. But if you're going to be really pedantic, remember that Linus didn't even really create all of Linux. He's only written a small portion of the kernel. So to be most technically correct, you would say "Linus created a small but significant portion of the Linux kernel".
The term Linux covers the OS as well. Despite what RMS may think, the fact is, most people use the term Linux to cover all components of the OS. This is valid for the same reason that "tree" means what it does -- because most people agree that "tree" refers to a thing with a trunk and leaves. RMS can rant and rave all he wants, but that doesn't make him right.
It's short for Gasoline and is 100% correct in America, just as Petrol is 100% correct in Britain and Benzin is 100% correct in Germany.
I don't think ext3cow has a nice Apple-like GUI (which personally make me want to vomit in terms of functionality and looks). It's a command line interface. So they clearly aren't even TRYING to steal anything from Apple.
Because it wasn't REVEALED until 2006, so even if Apple was working on it in 2002 (not likely, since Open Source projects generally have longer cycles than proprietary ones due to manpower issues), the ext3cow people would not have been aware of it. Why do you think people are stealing this from Apple? It's a good idea that follows logically from ideas found in revision control software such as Subversion and its predecessors. And as others have pointed out, VMS had this 20 years ago. The idea certainly has been in existence for longer than Apple has. The wikipedia article indicates that the TENEX operating system in the 60s first had versioning filesystems. In any case, Apple hardly invented it, Apple was hardly the first to use it, and Linux implementations have been released before Apple even demoed Time Machine. So, basically, you are 100% wrong.
Actually, the project started in 2003. So they were ahead of the game. Apple didn't demonstrate Time Machine until 2006.
So I guess since it's old news, they just shouldn't bother right? Nobody is claiming this as an innovation. It's just a good feature that's getting added finally. After all, as people have said, VMS had this 20 years ago. Even MS and Apple didn't add something like it until the past two years. I should add that this project started back in 2005, so it's been worked on about during the same time Apple's stuff has.
That has to be one of the worst set of reasons for anything I've ever seen. We're not saying that old people have to resize windows that way. They don't have to do anything. But don't prevent the rest of us from resizing that way. Secondly, there's nothing about dragging to the "exact" size that's needed. Whenever I resize by dragging, it's ALWAYS approximate. I resize until it gets to about where I want it and leave it at that. Of course, if I do need it to resize up to the edge of another window, at least in KDE, there are sticky window borders, so the WM will automatically finish the resize if I drag it close to the edge of another window.
And yet it is etymologically correct, as verbs in -ize come from Greek -izein.
No, it's really not. They are designed to kill or injure other people or other living things. No question about that. Although the vast majority of nuclear bombs have not been used, wouldn't you still say that the primary intent of a nuclear bomb is to kill a lot of people really fast?
The thing is, it's NOT simple to do it fast. Sure, you can theoretically emulate anything on anything, but in the real world, where there are finite limits on storage and how many instructions can be executed in a given time unit, effective virtualization is rather difficult to achieve, especially without hardware support.
It's actually 1/35th of a mile. Think about it. One second at 70 mph is 1/70th of a mile, so two seconds is 2/70ths of a mile or 1/35 of a mile.