I tend to agree with the mass consensus, Ubuntu has gone a long way to bringing home the Linux desktop but still needs work in some areas. One such area is laptop support.
When you try to install Ubuntu on a random laptop, of course, it's not going to work some of the time.
Ubuntu can't address that, only you can. How? Buy a laptop that comes with Ubuntu preinstalled. There are some vendors that offer it.
I think it crossed that fine line between control and ease of use.
Ubuntu gives you as much or as little control as the packages that make it up. And those packages are pretty much standard Debian packages, except that they're more up-to-date than Debian Stable and less buggy than Debian Unstable.
After all, I would have thought that people opposed to mining would have avoided products that were built using mined materials.
Doubtlessly, you would have, if you view everything in black-and-white terms.
However, more thoughtful people realize that these things are a balance. Mining raw materials can be done responsibly and at moderate levels (far below current levels). But we won't get there if the mining industry just pretends there's no problem.
And this particular criticism was directed at coal mining. Everybody can certainly express their disapproval of coal mining by choosing products and energy providers that don't rely on it as much as possible. Note that some traditionally strong coal mining countries are giving up all coal mining over the next decade.
Can we determine the best way to make artificial shepherd moons to steer the particles into large ore harvesting facilities?
Yes, if we have about another century of experience with robotic spacecraft. Of course, we won't get that if we burn most of our space budget on joy rides to the moon and Mars, both of which will likely get canceled before they ever get off the ground.
The term "threat" suggests that something Microsoft legitimately owns or does is at risk. But this is no "threat", it's merely fair competition and should have happened a decade ago.
Microsoft can easily implement ODF. Microsoft will probably lose some marketshare, but they will do that anyway, and Office will probably still remain the dominant office suite either way.
Saying that they are "hardwired to believe in a supernatural god" makes it sounds like that's its purpose. However, evolution doesn't work with purpose or goals in mind, it simply uses what works. That is, the evolutionarily important part is that you feel someone is watching you (that keeps people in line), the supernatural part is simply a post-hoc rationalization that people come up with to explain that feeling.
That's true but not relevant. What I'm saying is that for every software development job, there is a language that's better than Perl. Perl had a good run and it was far better than shell+awk, which it replaced, but by now, it's obsolete and there are better tools. The only thing that keeps the language going is inertia and a few libraries that haven't been ported to other languages.
I mean, come on, look at the "upcoming" release. Is anybody waiting with bated breath for Perl 6? Is it even being used in any significant numbers?
Isn't it easier just to have university policy say "This university best viewed using Internet Explorer"?
Yes, it is. And it might even be reasonable if Microsoft weren't a convicted monopoly that charged $500+ for less functionality than people get free from other sources.
Therefore, it might be even more reasonable to say "This university best viewed using Firefox (if you are using IE, please upgrade _here_)."
Trying to ascertain truth of any document based on the credentials of its authors is a losing proposition. You might use credentials as a shortcut (say, when picking a doctor), but Wikipedia entries don't need such shortcuts since there is plenty of time for their creation.
So, rather than advertising with the credentials of contributors, efforts like Wikipedia should probably discourage or forbid any mention of credentials.
You managed to get to college (I assume) without realizing that no encyclopedia should be cited in a paper?
You misunderstood. The rules for citing encyclopedias are no different than for any other source: you must cite it if you base an argument on it, or if you quote it. If you don't, you're committing academic fraud.
The reason why you don't see a lot of citations of encyclopedias is because you should be identifying, and relying on, original sources. Once you do, there is no need to cite the encyclopedia. Note that there is no guarantee that the original sources are any more accurate than the encyclopedia.
You wouldn't cite a textbook either; they're tertiary sources, and mostly useless for getting a deep, accurate view of any topic.
Many advanced textbooks are, in fact, the definitive reference on a subject, and are widely cited. In some cases, they even contain original research published nowhere else. Even when they don't, in many cases, they contain more elegant proofs, better expositions, etc. It is entirely appropriate to cite such textbooks.
Of course, you shouldn't cite first year college math or chemistry textbooks, but for the stuff they contain, you usually don't need to cite anything at all.
Xcerion is merely jumping onto the XML bandwagon and doing some nimble marketing around it.
In fact, we have an OS-independent XML-based layer, and it's called xulrunner (Firefox, Mozilla, and Thunderbird are popular applications written in it). It's getting a more powerful language with JIT support soon (ECMAScript 2.0).
Microsoft has already caught on an has been trying to develop their own, proprietary alternative, though they aren't as far along.
There are also some other attempts at this with slightly different perspectives on the same problem, like Konfabulator, Dashboard, Java, and.NET, but their success has been more limited in this area, although some of them have found other uses.
Actually, psychiatry contradicts the notion of there being multiple causes of APD.
Well, yeah, by definition. Trouble is that APD does not encompass all anti-social behavior; it is neither diagnostic nor predictive of anti-social behavior.
Empathy and the ability to understand consequences both seem to be deeply linked on some level.
Yeah, they are linked through unrepresentative sampling: one path to anti-social behavior is the combination of lack of empathy and lack of understanding the consequences. That combination is neither necessary nor sufficient, but it is reasonable that it would be overrepresented in a sample of criminals.
Look, if Solaris and java are released under the GPL, if you disagree with what they are doing, you can actually for the project and create your own.
Not realistically, since Sun always has the advantage over me that they have full control over the sources and can license it under different conditions.
The day they stop doing so the community goes and plays elsewhere.
The community can't because they only have GPL rights, while Sun has unrestricted rights.
What else do you foxy need?
Sun should subject themselves to the same license as everybody else, so they should accept patches under the GPL, and they should only ship GPL'ed versions of Solaris and Java themselves. But they have made it clear that they will not do that.
What I love is you avoid even commenting on the below because you know Solaris is more reliable and a better engineered kernel than Linux.
Because even if it were true, it wouldn't matter.
Not hard to believe when Sun spent 500 million on Solaris 10
Yeah, too much; it's basically an Edsel.
and have the best kernel developers in the world working on it
And what evidence is there for that, other than unfounded claims about Solaris quality? Your reasoning is circular.
AS A REAL JOB not part time hackers.
Most Linux development is done by people who do it as their job.
The reason why Solaris was the OS of the dot com era was because is was so reliable.
Don't try to rewrite history. I was there, and I was one of the people who picked Solaris for dot com companies. People picked it because they knew it, and they knew it because 5-10 years earlier they were using it at university. And they were using it at university because it was cheap. Other than that, it was merely "reliable enough". If reliability had been the primary consideration, people would have picked AIX or Irix, both of which were generally believed to be superior to Solaris (a lot of their technologies and code have made it into Linux, incidentally).
And that's why people pick Linux: it's widely used, its development is open, and it gets the job done; that's all that matters.
And remember Solaris was designed from the beginning to support SMP, threading, and soft real-time.
Bullshit. Solaris wasn't designed at all, it evolved out of SVR3, BSD, and SunOS, and each of those all evolved from the original V7 UNIX. Trying to portray Solaris as the herculean design and implementation effort of some elite group of kernel hackers at Sun simply has no basis in reality.
If you really think Linux is so great maybe you could give some examples of what makes Linux better than Solaris or Mac OS X?
It's "great" in the same sense that a Ford Escort is a better car compared to a Ford Edsel.
Now if only Stallman and the FSF would do the same.
They are: every single software project run by the FSF is single-licensed. That is, the FSF has no special control over the project than anybody else.
The issue is not whether you like the project management or the direction of the project, the issue is whether the current project management has special rights that others don't have. Sun does, the FSF doesn't.
Remember how happy everyone is about IBM's contributions even though all their profitable software remains proprietary.
People are happy with IBM's contributions because IBM actually makes contributions. That is, they contribute stuff to existing open source projects without demanding control over those projects.
Sun isn't doing that; both Solaris and Java are going to be dual licensed and controlled by Sun. That means that while the code happens to be released under a nominally open source license, the projects are not run as open source projects, and the exchange of code doesn't work for them as it would be in an open source project.
On balance, it's still good for Solaris and Java to be released under an open source license, but there are good reasons to be a whole lot happier with IBM than with Sun.
You have experience with Solaris but don't realize that Solaris is based on a different code base than predecessors from the early 80's?
You misread that. What I was saying was that I have experience with Solaris starting from the early 80's, until now.
Solaris is built upon SVR4 while SunOS 4.x and before were based on BSD.
Indeed. And while SVR4 was slightly less buggy, it was a worse OS than BSD. The BSD/SVR4 switch was when many people (myself included) started seriously exploring alternatives.
Solaris 10 is so far ahead of Linux that it's not even worth comparing the two but if you must just look at these New features.
Quite right: Solaris has even more useless crap in it than Linux. That's a good reason to stay away. See, more features is generally not a good thing in a kernel or OS.
Sun has promised that they will open up Java in Java 7, but current versions are still not fully available under an open source license. For better or for worse, I expect that Java 7 will be incorporated into Debian and other distros.
I would recommend against making any plans that depend on Sun actually delivering a fully open source Java implementation: even assuming Sun is being completely honest, there are still things beyond their control that might jeopardize it.
I've experienced Solaris and its predecessors from the early 80's. Their kernels used to crash from memory leaks, corrupt data, contain Trojans, use linear search in inappropriate places, crash on bad system call arguments, fold under load, and lots of other problems. It's good that after 20 years, they finally got most of the bugs out, but it's never going to be "amazing work". From a practical point of view, Linux has matured much faster, and I don't think Linux has anything to learn from Solaris.
In the end, the differences between the current crop of UNIX-like kernels won't matter much. All of them have roughly the same functionality, most of them are fairly mature and stable, and all of them give you performance close to machine. And under the hood, they're all ugly and messy.
So, personally, I'm sticking with Linux. Solaris might be slightly "better", but not in a way that matters, and far more people are contributing to Linux (in particular, drivers).
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I tend to agree with the mass consensus, Ubuntu has gone a long way to bringing home the Linux desktop but still needs work in some areas. One such area is laptop support.
When you try to install Ubuntu on a random laptop, of course, it's not going to work some of the time.
Ubuntu can't address that, only you can. How? Buy a laptop that comes with Ubuntu preinstalled. There are some vendors that offer it.
I think it crossed that fine line between control and ease of use.
Ubuntu gives you as much or as little control as the packages that make it up. And those packages are pretty much standard Debian packages, except that they're more up-to-date than Debian Stable and less buggy than Debian Unstable.
After all, I would have thought that people opposed to mining would have avoided products that were built using mined materials.
Doubtlessly, you would have, if you view everything in black-and-white terms.
However, more thoughtful people realize that these things are a balance. Mining raw materials can be done responsibly and at moderate levels (far below current levels). But we won't get there if the mining industry just pretends there's no problem.
And this particular criticism was directed at coal mining. Everybody can certainly express their disapproval of coal mining by choosing products and energy providers that don't rely on it as much as possible. Note that some traditionally strong coal mining countries are giving up all coal mining over the next decade.
Can we determine the best way to make artificial shepherd moons to steer the particles into large ore harvesting facilities?
Yes, if we have about another century of experience with robotic spacecraft. Of course, we won't get that if we burn most of our space budget on joy rides to the moon and Mars, both of which will likely get canceled before they ever get off the ground.
The term "threat" suggests that something Microsoft legitimately owns or does is at risk. But this is no "threat", it's merely fair competition and should have happened a decade ago.
Microsoft can easily implement ODF. Microsoft will probably lose some marketshare, but they will do that anyway, and Office will probably still remain the dominant office suite either way.
So, let's go easy on language like "threat".
CGI scripts are nice and easy to code, but for heaven's sake, use PHP or Python.
Saying that they are "hardwired to believe in a supernatural god" makes it sounds like that's its purpose. However, evolution doesn't work with purpose or goals in mind, it simply uses what works. That is, the evolutionarily important part is that you feel someone is watching you (that keeps people in line), the supernatural part is simply a post-hoc rationalization that people come up with to explain that feeling.
No language is a perfect fit for every job
That's true but not relevant. What I'm saying is that for every software development job, there is a language that's better than Perl. Perl had a good run and it was far better than shell+awk, which it replaced, but by now, it's obsolete and there are better tools. The only thing that keeps the language going is inertia and a few libraries that haven't been ported to other languages.
I mean, come on, look at the "upcoming" release. Is anybody waiting with bated breath for Perl 6? Is it even being used in any significant numbers?
Isn't it easier just to have university policy say "This university best viewed using Internet Explorer"?
Yes, it is. And it might even be reasonable if Microsoft weren't a convicted monopoly that charged $500+ for less functionality than people get free from other sources.
Therefore, it might be even more reasonable to say "This university best viewed using Firefox (if you are using IE, please upgrade _here_)."
Google and Microsoft will advertise if you don't pay them, as well they should. Getting a free service from a company isn't "outsourcing".
Outsourcing means you pay market rates for the service. Then, your students won't be subjected to advertising.
(As an aside, the ads are easy to kill.)
Trying to ascertain truth of any document based on the credentials of its authors is a losing proposition. You might use credentials as a shortcut (say, when picking a doctor), but Wikipedia entries don't need such shortcuts since there is plenty of time for their creation.
So, rather than advertising with the credentials of contributors, efforts like Wikipedia should probably discourage or forbid any mention of credentials.
You managed to get to college (I assume) without realizing that no encyclopedia should be cited in a paper?
You misunderstood. The rules for citing encyclopedias are no different than for any other source: you must cite it if you base an argument on it, or if you quote it. If you don't, you're committing academic fraud.
The reason why you don't see a lot of citations of encyclopedias is because you should be identifying, and relying on, original sources. Once you do, there is no need to cite the encyclopedia. Note that there is no guarantee that the original sources are any more accurate than the encyclopedia.
You wouldn't cite a textbook either; they're tertiary sources, and mostly useless for getting a deep, accurate view of any topic.
Many advanced textbooks are, in fact, the definitive reference on a subject, and are widely cited. In some cases, they even contain original research published nowhere else. Even when they don't, in many cases, they contain more elegant proofs, better expositions, etc. It is entirely appropriate to cite such textbooks.
Of course, you shouldn't cite first year college math or chemistry textbooks, but for the stuff they contain, you usually don't need to cite anything at all.
Outsourcing mail makes sense, but outsourcing to a service that doesn't support POP or IMAP doesn't.
Your university might want to consider outsourcing to Google Mail...
Xcerion is merely jumping onto the XML bandwagon and doing some nimble marketing around it.
.NET, but their success has been more limited in this area, although some of them have found other uses.
In fact, we have an OS-independent XML-based layer, and it's called xulrunner (Firefox, Mozilla, and Thunderbird are popular applications written in it). It's getting a more powerful language with JIT support soon (ECMAScript 2.0).
Microsoft has already caught on an has been trying to develop their own, proprietary alternative, though they aren't as far along.
There are also some other attempts at this with slightly different perspectives on the same problem, like Konfabulator, Dashboard, Java, and
Just use wifi phones and put wifi repeaters on the campus.
Actually, psychiatry contradicts the notion of there being multiple causes of APD.
Well, yeah, by definition. Trouble is that APD does not encompass all anti-social behavior; it is neither diagnostic nor predictive of anti-social behavior.
Empathy and the ability to understand consequences both seem to be deeply linked on some level.
Yeah, they are linked through unrepresentative sampling: one path to anti-social behavior is the combination of lack of empathy and lack of understanding the consequences. That combination is neither necessary nor sufficient, but it is reasonable that it would be overrepresented in a sample of criminals.
Look, if Solaris and java are released under the GPL, if you disagree with what they are doing, you can actually for the project and create your own.
Not realistically, since Sun always has the advantage over me that they have full control over the sources and can license it under different conditions.
The day they stop doing so the community goes and plays elsewhere.
The community can't because they only have GPL rights, while Sun has unrestricted rights.
What else do you foxy need?
Sun should subject themselves to the same license as everybody else, so they should accept patches under the GPL, and they should only ship GPL'ed versions of Solaris and Java themselves. But they have made it clear that they will not do that.
What I love is you avoid even commenting on the below because you know Solaris is more reliable and a better engineered kernel than Linux.
Because even if it were true, it wouldn't matter.
Not hard to believe when Sun spent 500 million on Solaris 10
Yeah, too much; it's basically an Edsel.
and have the best kernel developers in the world working on it
And what evidence is there for that, other than unfounded claims about Solaris quality? Your reasoning is circular.
AS A REAL JOB not part time hackers.
Most Linux development is done by people who do it as their job.
The reason why Solaris was the OS of the dot com era was because is was so reliable.
Don't try to rewrite history. I was there, and I was one of the people who picked Solaris for dot com companies. People picked it because they knew it, and they knew it because 5-10 years earlier they were using it at university. And they were using it at university because it was cheap. Other than that, it was merely "reliable enough". If reliability had been the primary consideration, people would have picked AIX or Irix, both of which were generally believed to be superior to Solaris (a lot of their technologies and code have made it into Linux, incidentally).
And that's why people pick Linux: it's widely used, its development is open, and it gets the job done; that's all that matters.
And remember Solaris was designed from the beginning to support SMP, threading, and soft real-time.
Bullshit. Solaris wasn't designed at all, it evolved out of SVR3, BSD, and SunOS, and each of those all evolved from the original V7 UNIX. Trying to portray Solaris as the herculean design and implementation effort of some elite group of kernel hackers at Sun simply has no basis in reality.
If you really think Linux is so great maybe you could give some examples of what makes Linux better than Solaris or Mac OS X?
It's "great" in the same sense that a Ford Escort is a better car compared to a Ford Edsel.
Now if only Stallman and the FSF would do the same.
They are: every single software project run by the FSF is single-licensed. That is, the FSF has no special control over the project than anybody else.
The issue is not whether you like the project management or the direction of the project, the issue is whether the current project management has special rights that others don't have. Sun does, the FSF doesn't.
Remember how happy everyone is about IBM's contributions even though all their profitable software remains proprietary.
People are happy with IBM's contributions because IBM actually makes contributions. That is, they contribute stuff to existing open source projects without demanding control over those projects.
Sun isn't doing that; both Solaris and Java are going to be dual licensed and controlled by Sun. That means that while the code happens to be released under a nominally open source license, the projects are not run as open source projects, and the exchange of code doesn't work for them as it would be in an open source project.
On balance, it's still good for Solaris and Java to be released under an open source license, but there are good reasons to be a whole lot happier with IBM than with Sun.
You have experience with Solaris but don't realize that Solaris is based on a different code base than predecessors from the early 80's?
You misread that. What I was saying was that I have experience with Solaris starting from the early 80's, until now.
Solaris is built upon SVR4 while SunOS 4.x and before were based on BSD.
Indeed. And while SVR4 was slightly less buggy, it was a worse OS than BSD. The BSD/SVR4 switch was when many people (myself included) started seriously exploring alternatives.
Solaris 10 is so far ahead of Linux that it's not even worth comparing the two but if you must just look at these New features.
Quite right: Solaris has even more useless crap in it than Linux. That's a good reason to stay away. See, more features is generally not a good thing in a kernel or OS.
Sun has promised that they will open up Java in Java 7, but current versions are still not fully available under an open source license. For better or for worse, I expect that Java 7 will be incorporated into Debian and other distros.
I would recommend against making any plans that depend on Sun actually delivering a fully open source Java implementation: even assuming Sun is being completely honest, there are still things beyond their control that might jeopardize it.
I've experienced Solaris and its predecessors from the early 80's. Their kernels used to crash from memory leaks, corrupt data, contain Trojans, use linear search in inappropriate places, crash on bad system call arguments, fold under load, and lots of other problems. It's good that after 20 years, they finally got most of the bugs out, but it's never going to be "amazing work". From a practical point of view, Linux has matured much faster, and I don't think Linux has anything to learn from Solaris.
In the end, the differences between the current crop of UNIX-like kernels won't matter much. All of them have roughly the same functionality, most of them are fairly mature and stable, and all of them give you performance close to machine. And under the hood, they're all ugly and messy.
So, personally, I'm sticking with Linux. Solaris might be slightly "better", but not in a way that matters, and far more people are contributing to Linux (in particular, drivers).
It's no longer first-to-invent, but first-to-file.
That doesn't mean what you apparently think it means.
and thanks for all the nectar. Bzzzzzzz.