It isn't the packaging tools that make Debian and the BSDs more consistent in package installation. If anything, RPM has more advanced features than either debs or ports. The Debian and various ports repositories have standard practices for naming, versioning, dependencies, and integration that are adhered to year after year. It is concern for the long term integrity of these package repositories AS A WHOLE that make them easy to deal with. But bullet point differences between Deb and RPM? Not so much.

Debian based distros also tend to limit themselves in how they diverge from the Debian Mothership and periodically resync in any case. I routinely port source packages between Ubuntu and Debian all the time. Since the naming and dependency maps don't diverge much, I mostly succeed at doing this. On the other hand, a SUSE SRPM isn't likely to port easily to Fedora absent a lot of low level surgery on the package metadata. Each RPM distro tends to be an island universe. Deb based distros all have Debian for a parent or grandparent hence the high compatibility at the source level.

For that matter RHEL and spinoffs like Centos and Scientific mostly achieve this as well though the experience is mostly like using Debian Stable without the option of (easily) backporting SRPMS from newer distros.

I believe you are talking about Hot Bulb engines.

The marketshare and insane profits came before the lawsuits. Those lawsuits appeared because of copycat products. Android is a perfect example.

Um......no.

http://www.osnews.com/story/25264/Did_Android_Really_Look_Like_BlackBerry_Before_the_iPhone_

Do you understand the concept that when you find yourself at the bottom of a hole, first stop digging (unless you plan to be buried down there)?

Just because we find ourselves in a bad situation does not mean we should do nothing and just make the problem worse.

The problem is that ALL the major CO2 producers have to agree or it won't work. If the West caps their economies in the back of the head, India and China will gleefully take up the slack. Until everyone capable of Industrial Revolution actually goes through and it and arrives where the West is now, there really isn't much point in directly attacking CO2 emissions.

What COULD work is a viable technological replacement for energy from hydrocarbons. This would have to be something on the order of practical and competitive fusion or efficient and safe fission that has a high degree of resilience in the face of the profit motive. Those are very tall orders. But making either work would do far more good then token reductions in CO2 emission that will be extensively howled over.

And yes, yes, there are wind, solar, geothermal, etc. These means have yet to compete in terms of cost, energy density, and demand at any time.

I looked. The Trillion Dollar Question is the poll on the Individual Mandate. The panel there is pretty much split 50/50 which means even those in the know don't know how this is going to turn out.

Those scientists speak very articulately and in a very informed way among peers, that is people who need that.

So shut the heck up, you overmodded idiot.

He is just a sellout, who exchanged his education for a dubious profession of science popularizer.

That is a very shortsighted attitude. An ignorant public is guaranteed to be hostile to funding pure research. Europe got the LHC while we left the SSSC half built and rotting in the ground. A major reason for it is the difference in regard for science and especially what science research leads to in the long term.

And as the public's scientific literacy degrades so to will our ability to come up new tech or even maintain what we have. It will be very easy to convince people ignorant of the methods and findings of science that all scientists are boondoggling eggheads who hate Jesus.

Scientists are supposedly intelligent, educated, and good at reasoning. Why they make a team sport of denegrating popularizers baffles me. Science needs freedom and funding to do it's work. Cheerleading for ignorance just so one can feel like he has a bigger brainpan than a "mere popularizer" is so stupid on multiple levels.

They took our tax dollars to build the networks and often get subsidies and incentives from the government. Long as that is going, I'm not going to begin to listen to how telcos are entitled to all the benefits of free markets while the subscribers get stuck with all the liabilities.

I wouldn't recommend Dell to anyone either. For some reason I just think "creaky fragile plastic" anytime I hear "Dell". We have been generally pleased with the Lenovo and Toshiba kit we've bought over the years. I wouldn't call Dell a "quality vendor".

Perhaps they aren't hostile to individual consumers. But to organizations like us, it feels like unrelieved hostility. There is a heavy attempt ongoing by IT vendors to deprecate the whole idea of "enterprise management". Once some Shiney wears off, this is going to blow up in their faces but they are going to do a lot of damage in the meantime. Perhaps Apple can get away with it but it loses them us as a customer. And no we don't care if that means they don't want our custom either.

Apple's major OS releases have always caused me some headaches with directory servers and management in general which could be overcome with a bit of cut and try but Lion and the machines it is REQUIRED on have multiple Deal Breakers. If I could just load Snow Leopard on new kit and have everything work until the issues are all fixed in an OS that actually work then I wouldn't feel nearly as dissatisfied with Apple as I do now. As it is, I have no faith whatsoever Snow Lion will fix anything though I'll happily change my mind if it does.

But even if they do give me fixes for my issues, they've still priced themselves out of our reach. We are not and never have been fanbois. We were but are not now satisfied customers. Just because fanbois will lap up their every move, we won't. If we can get can get the sort of pricing and (organizational fleet) usability we've had of them in the past our minds may change about them. But right now we are EXTREMELY unhappy with them and no amount of Apple advocacy will change this. Only (sustained) changes in product and behavior from Apple themselves will do that.

Substandard my ass. Other than a bit of a firmware the only real difference between an iMac and any other x86 machine from a quality vendor is about $300 dollars which is the other thing getting them thrown out of here. We used to be able to buy decent Education Model iMacs for about $750 a pop in bulk. These now cost $995 and they only gave us a $20 dollar break on them in bulk. Also Lion remains a disaster with Active Directory due to Apple's GPL allergy and they also broke the netbooting solution that has worked with every other model of Mac we have around here going back to 2006.

So let's see: hideously expensive, harder to manage and provision, and critical functionality either doesn't work as well as it used to or not at all.
By putting even more expense and effort into them we MIGHT be able to work as well as they used to for us.

Being anti-Apple isn't a religion with me. Up till recently, I liked and recommended Macs with some reservations. It is Apple's behavior, pricing, and strategy that has changed this. If Apple turns around some of their customer hostile moves and maintains this turnaround then my opinion can change back. We bought two Late 11 iMacs and I put considerable effort into ameloriating the tech issues. I will continue to do so so you can also cram your charges of "laziness". However, the experience and the sticker shock they've imposed has very much soured me and my boss on them.

BTW. Domatic is a crystallography term I picked at random for a username. It is intended to communicate exactly nothing.

Cookware can either be good at storing heat or a good conductor both at the same time is a bit tricky. Cast iron's ability to store a lot of heat makes it the right tool for many jobs like frying where you want to avoid a large temperature drop when adding food.

http://www.osnews.com/story/25264/Did_Android_Really_Look_Like_BlackBerry_Before_the_iPhone_

That right. Apple didn't invent all that stuff either. iPhone/iPad is just what Apple has always dones. Add a few improvements to the hard core work of others and scream they invented the whole thing with lawyers. And people like you drink that Kool-Aid by the 55 gallon drum barrel.

Incidentally, I notice your name is Macs4all. The last straw in our K12 with iMacs is Apple deliberately gimping hard drives with non standard sensor pins on the SATA connection to force the use of "Apple Branded Parts". If a commodity SATA drive is put in a new iMac, the fans run at Jet Engine. A third party extension can force the OS to use S.M.A.R.T.

http://blog.macsales.com/10146-apple-further-restricts-upgrade-options-on-new-imacs

So it isn't just self-repair obsessed nerds. Behavior like this now has us eliminating Macs by attrition and we are also going to start resisting any further iDevice purchases.

You owe me for a new keyboard and monitor.

If they pick a day when the wind is blowing right, they could do an airburst of a 1MT or less weapon. That would flatten most of Tel Aviv and burn the parts that don't flatten and any fallout can blow out into Mediterranean sea.

Of course, there would be massive retaliation from Israel's two Dolphin class subs (at least). But then you can't have everything.

The Cuban ex-pat lobby has a lot to do with it as well. The Bacardi family in particular spreads around any loot required to keep the embargo in place. The way election politics work these days, that lobby can't be ignored. Florida Congressmen and Presidential candidates who might not care about Cuba otherwise are made to care.

There are native Linux binaries for RtCW. You don't have to run that one in Wine.