L-P Huberdeau

This is nothing important, I just think it’s funny to see how busy Richard M. Stallman can be. He just blogged about his visit in Montreal, which was 2 months ago. There was actually an update on some of the topics he discussed about during the conference.

Windows Vista is due late this year and the recommanded requirements have been released. I made a few clicks to build a Dell system to meet those requirements (Dual core processor, 2 gigs of RAM, 256 mb video card) and the price went up to little over 3000$ CDN. I have to admit I did not try to optimize the solution, but it seems to be a high retail price just to run the new operating system. I’m certain the graphic effects on the desktop will be very nice, but do average office users need all this eye candy?

I bought my desktop system three years ago and it still performs all the tasks I need (I’m not a huge gamer). Why would I go out and spend 3000$ just to get all their new fancy stuff? Why would a company spend so much on hardware for employees when they can currently get a desktop that can do a lot more than office work for less than 600$?

Hardware prices dropped a lot recently, but I don’t expect the high end hardware to drop enough to be affordable by christmas. I know a thing for sure, I will stick to Gentoo for a long while.

PEAR, PHP’s library repository, is entering a new step. The current had quality controls and not every packages were accepted in, often because there was already an equivalent. Version 1.4 of the PEAR tools add new features to support multiple repositories. Tobias Schlitt announced a new repository aggregator website called Pearadise.

This is basically a unified way to publish PHP applications and library and allow users to install them easily using the PEAR tools. Anyone can now open a PEAR channel and distribute their work. Both PEAR 1.4 and Pearadise are still in beta stage, but this is all for the best. The amount of packages included should grow much faster as less control will be placed on the content, like Perl’s CPAN.

Why is less control good? The community can evaluate the packages themselves. There is nothing wrong in having multiple alternatives. I don’t know what will happen with the current PEAR repository, but I expect to see it die slowly. It’s not that there is nothing good in it, it’s simply because all libraries are built for PHP 4 using the base PEAR and PEAR_Error classes.