Posts by Republican

Fedora 14: haven for Ubuntu's homeless GNOMEs

Desktop ready?

For many years (since the mid ninetees) I try each and every release of the major distro's, including Fedora. Yet for desktop users Fedora still isn't the thing to advise. Ouf the box less hardware works with it and less software (and particularly multimedia too) works, making it more difficult for users who just want to use it.

The mentioned configurability (being so great in the Fedora installer), when's the last time you tried Slackware for example ?! I know this is not the most common adopted Linux distro, but I still like it nevertheless.

Personally: for most people Mint Linux works best out of the box: no distro has more hardware working out of the box (and yes: this makes use of proprietary drivers sometimes, so if you don't like that this is not the distro for you), but mostly (as a PC user, not a hard-core developer) it is the only distro to have all media codecs etc in default install to play just about any media that is out on the Internet... easier then that it not possible. (it also has some nice tools for doing certain taks)

http://www.linuxmint.com/

Proprietary software puts pacemaker users at risk

@Paul

Try it for yourselves, like Philips, Ericsson, Logica, Bosch Security Systems etc. who use it (and have experienced the power of it (and that it works...))

And yes, maths by itself is not patentable, the magic triangle of correctness is. But it is better to start using it, like I do too, and find out for yourself. The only person to convince you on anything, is you.

It's about formal verification not if it's open source or not

Even though open source does have the potential to have a positive influence on the code quality, it does not always work that way. But, even i the case it makes it better, that is still not good enough for Medical and many other appliances. What the Software Industry needs is engineering, not craftsmanship/programming.

By use of Formal Verification ALL defects can be eliminated instead of improving with Open Source.

Verum has the solution for this with their next generation Model Driven Design tooling based on formal verification. Patented software that guarantees defect free behavior in software. ( www.verum.com )