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Reiver_Fluffi

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Everything posted by Reiver_Fluffi

  1. Seriously neddie, I thought you were a bit more mature than that...
  2. No, but I have found times where logging into root has allowed me to get certain things done, with no significant risk (remember risk is a relative measure depending on the individals own risk preference). However. that is due to circumstances unique to me! My point was that everybody was quick to judge the O/P's practices without having a clue what the O/P was doing and trying to achieve it! We do not know that the O/P intends to log in as root daily, all we know is that he wants the option to log in as root. Everybody is too busy chastising the O/P rather than trying to see what logging as root is "enabling" for them and suggesting alternatives. Okay, so the last sentence of the original post isn't exactly filling us up with warm fuzzy feelings, but I thought we were capable of rising above it....
  3. Dangerous and unnecessary for who? There are a number of contextual factors unique to each scenario that determine the implications (and their associated risks) of logging in as root through a gui. We know nothing of these factors in this situation, yet people feel the need to pre-judge and decide that is is dangerous, full stop :huh: . If anything, people can do as much damage with the command line ("rm -rf ./*" without the period), therefore the "danger" is based on user experience, not the interface!
  4. Arrrgh, the bloody thing refuses to download anything. It keeps telling me to update flash, but it is up to date!!!
  5. Yeah good news (although we have been able to get it through a browser for a while now ;))
  6. Seriously don't know where you are going with this. I was discussing transparency (in terms of business), not a detailed analysis of operations and a breach of commercial confidentiality. Although I'm sure many directors (in general) will try to agree with you on the point of secrecy, as it means concealing their poor performance from the true owners of the company, the shareholders (increasing information asymmetry and furthering the agency problem) .
  7. I disagree, transparency is a fundamental aspect of corporate governance, not bad practice as you put it. If Mandriva were showing that they were working hard to impress global manufacturers and trying to get their foot in the door it would boost investor confidence in the company.
  8. That's the point Adam, it's a global market and Mandriva was not visible on the global scene in terms of OEM deals. Again this is where the company's lack of transparency lets it down, how are we to know if you are involved, it's a pretty safe bet that if we cant see it, then it didn't happen. Netbooks are pretty much in the mainstream, the key to mainstream exposure is OEM (Microsoft is a key example of how this is done), not through retail sales after the original hardware is purchased. These post-hoc installs are only of vaue to a minority of the mainstream who like to tinker, personally I believe trying to make a profitable strategy out targeting such a limited customer base will end up more hassle than it's really worth.
  9. Yes, but are the volumes involved anything by comparison to Xandros-Asus, Ubuntu-Dell, Linpus-Acer, or Suse-HP? They have global market exposure with large multi-national hardware manufacturers, not national with a little known manufacturer (at least I never heard of them, I doubt others outside France have either).
  10. When the first netbooks came out the majority were Linux only, now Linux netbooks are increasingly becoming a niche as the Windows marketing machine has grasped and taken hold of the netbook market with it's dirty fingers. The best time to get a foot in the door in this market was at the emergence of the market, with Microsoft out of the picture and the big players looking for distro's, but Mandriva (IMO) was nowhere to be seen (other than a partnership with some manufacturer nobody ever heard of). The big players have chosen their partners and established their working relationships, clearly Mandriva the company or the distro failed to impress these manufacturers before now. If these relationships are to cease in the near future it will be because of performance on the part either the distro/manufacturer or increasing pressure from the market to supply Windows netbooks. Waiting for the former is not an appropriate strategy for any business and TBH not much can be done about the latter in today's current climate. You might argue that the distro on it's own may be superior to those already use netbooks and be able fire off a list of selling points in terms of Mandriva's own tools such as the installer and the MCC, but how much of this is actually necessary or desireable for a netbook, and how much of it is unique to Mandriva today? True, but back in those days market information was not so readily available as it is today (ironically the PC is one of the technologies that had improved this over the years), therefore decision makers today are in a far better position to analyse markets and have the potential to make better decisions as a result. Although to be honest, I believe it took a while after that for the PC boom to emerge.
  11. The only OEM deals I can see are with netbooks, their low spec is exploited well by GNU/Linux, but Mandriva was far too slow to react to the netbook boom loosing out to Xandros, Linpus and Ubuntu, IMO the scope for new partnerships in this area very limited. As for your bog standard laptop/desktop, I can't see this area take off unless there's a major shift in legislation in favour of Microsofts competitors. Both Shuttleworth and Red Hat have stated there is no money in the desktop market. Shuttleworth says this despite creating and bringing a popular desktop distribution to the top within a year or so, if he was sitting on a potential gold mine, rest assured he would be the first to exploit it. Red Hat obviously knows where the real money is in terms of commercial linux products as they have focused on the key market area, servers, and made a fortune out of it. These people/organisations have proven that they know how to make money out of Linux, they have better knowledge of the prospective markets than you or I, therefore I am inclined to give significant weight towards their arguements.
  12. Problem is that in order to do such a thing you need a revenue stream typical of RedHat/Novell or some serious investment from another source. Mandriva's current revenue stream, is not sufficient IMO and I can't see them raising the money from other sources. Going up against the might of RedHat and Novell, replicating their business model is not a desireable investment opportunity (even for VCT's).
  13. Forget the desktop, the market is not enough to sustain a profitable product line for a company of Mandriva's size (this includes netbooks and OEM). I would be looking towards niche markets, possibly abandoning the management of the distro, and choosing to support the deployment of other commercial/non-commercial distros in a business environment until liquidity is restored to an adequate level. IMO this would be a more profitable use of the expertise Mandriva currently holds than maintaining a full distro that many do not pay for. They do not have the revenue base of the likes of Red Hat and SuSe to to invest heavily in the development of a distro that is given away for free, which IMO is reflected in Mandriva's bottom line.
  14. Steady now, I know that Mandriva have stooped to a new low, but not that low.
  15. What a disappointment! Sorry to hear that you have lost your appointment, good luck in the future! (yes no critique on management style from me, you guys have done enough for me )
  16. You would be right, nautilus is the file manager in Gnome. If you have started it up as root, you should be able to copy the files, provided that there isn't a weird permission preventing root from doing so. I believe the issue is how to copy and paste files, not text (but since it was brought up, the equivalent is gedit).
  17. That may be the case, but really was there any need for your ill-informed rant, over something that was simply "not practical"?
  18. You do realise that Fedora is sponsored and managed by Red Hat? A company operating in the US and bound by US law and protecting itself from litigation against patent infringement (I believe that once upon a time, Microsoft got stung for a patent infringement on an audio codec?). The situation is a little bit more complicated than opensource zealotry, yes they tout being open as a good thing, but they do not stop you from installing proprietary software on their distribution.
  19. Note the tongue....wasn't meant to be anything serious. Sigh!
  20. You're just envious of a superior marketing machine :P
  21. Now, there's no need to gloat! :cheeky: :cheeky: :cheeky:
  22. Never saw the attraction of such events, a bunch of grown men (maybe a few women) installing an OS and making a party of it. Does not sound like a highlight on the old social calendar to me, but then maybe I'm not geeky enough to appreciate the supposed merits of such an event. :unsure:
  23. The registration site has pretty much been down since 09:00 GMT, but I was lucky enough to get my serial before that site went down and Codeweavers have increased the period for activating serials by 48 hours.
  24. I suspect that you are using the rpm from sun to replace a Mandriva rpm, given by the fact that the test is reporting an earlier version . I believe that the sun rpm will not update the Mandriva rpm, Similarly when installing with the sun rpm you have to manually add the link between the plugins directory for Firefox and the plugin you have installed along with the runtime. what is the output of ls -la /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins
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