Posts by Steve McIntyre 60 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Nov 2007
Debian was the first distro to support this, to the best of my knowledge. I wrote a trivial kernel patch and some grub changes to make it work better!
We still support this feature today, although most of the machines that ever needed it will have been killed off by now.
>Audio firmware? I don't believe there is a text to speech reader (Knoppix Adriane is pretty good for those >interested)
The Debian installer has included text-to-speech for a number of years already. Newer machines are starting to need audio firmware to be able to use that at all, and we care about supporting blind / partially sighted users.
Yes, seriously - programmers are that bad. All of us. I've been a professional software engineer for 25 years, doing lots of C (and other languages) along the way. I've genuinely described myself as "thinking in C" at various points.
However, I've lost count of the number of times that I've seen *good* programmers make mistakes, myself included. C makes it *very* easy to make certain kinds of mistake, and as an industry we *keep on* making those mistakes. Rather than just push the "find better programmers" argument, can't we try and improve the tools too?
Absolutely this. Think very carefully about your choice of license.
Don't just follow the herd if you're going to care about how and when others can use and distribute your software. Equally, do *not* come up with your own special-snowflake license unless you have *very* good reasons...
There are options to run a 64-bit OS on top of those even so - I made Debian installation work on Bay Trail machines for exactly this setup. Grab a multi-arch netinst image and you're good. It just needs a 32-bit version of Grub, then everything above that is 64-bit.
PDF used to be a nice, simple format that you could trust. But that wasn't enough for Adobe to continue to sell new versions, so they started adding extra crap like Javascript. Guys, we DO NOT NEED scripting in documents we're sharing.
Now your options are to continue on the Adobe treadmill (spending more time downloading and installing updates than actually using the software), or to switch to something more secure instead.
"If you've paid for software and it doesn't work, then you shout down the phone till someone fixes it."
Or until you shout yourself hoarse, maybe. The vast majority of *all* software sucks. Whether open source or proprietary. There are big wins with the open stuff, though, including:
1. typically you've not just paid a fortune and locked yourself in to it;
2. even if *you* can't fix the code yourself, it's possible to find somebody else who *can* if the original vendor can't / won't / goes bust
But as you're yet another person who seems to claim / believe that open source == free in cost and therefore worthless, I doubt you'll even understand the argument here.
I know it's not the main part of what you're saying here, but please try to be correct in what you're writing as background material too...
"NAND flash cells have a finite life, in that they only support a specific number of writes": Surely you mean "limited" here rather than "specific"?
"Flash is not byte-addressable, unlike disk drives and DRAM." Last time I checked, disks need to be read/written in (typically 512-byte or more recently 4096-byte) sectors.
"It also makes a nice contrast to Canonical's Ubuntu, which has a habit of taking Fedora's upstream contributions, wrapping them in a prettier package and stealing the limelight. There's nothing wrong with that, it's the nature of open source software - you can do what you want with it. It's just that Fedora rarely ends up getting the credit it deserves for making desktop Linux as usable as it has become over the years."
All of the Linux distros tend to work with upstream, providing new features and bugfixes. Your words make it sound like only Fedora are doing that.
If you insist on looking for magic bullet solutions like webmin (like the "Microsoft Management Console"), you're never going to learn how to admin systems well. You're coming from the Windows side of the fence and complaining that because Linux and Solaris are different, they're inferior (e.g. "Clustering systems has traditionally been a special magic power reserved for those who type arcane things into a command line and mutter to themselves a lot.") As an example, using a web-based log-viewing tool will *always* leave you missing the power of the unix command line. Does it give you regular expression searching so that you can work out which external mail systems connected to yours in a given hour? Can you track which systems are trying to brute-force attack your sshd? Etc...
As an aside, if you've picked Linux spam filtering services that are using Sendmail then you've just made things harder for yourself. Try learning more about the problem space and you'd do much better.
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