Slashdot Mirror
What Really Happened To Ubuntu's Edgy Artwork?
angrykeyboarder writes, "Many Ubuntu users expressed surprise, dismay, and disappointment when Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl) nixed the popular community-developed artwork during the beta phase of Ubuntu 6.10 ('The Edgy Eft'). Some Ubuntu community members were downright shocked, and many were ultimately dissatisfied with the final product. What exactly happened? Short answer: the Art Team was less disturbed than some other community members were. Linux.com has the scoop." Slashdot and Linux.com are both part of OSTG.
Is anyone surprised?
What a society - where killing untold thousands of people in far off lands is fine, but showing pictures of the human body is taboo.
this really pisses me off. Would it be so fucking hard to just fucking link to an example of "edgy art" Jesus. They have links that go to text, and links on the text pages go to more text. Hello? Don't waste my time with this. Just show me the art which is the subject of the article.
Of course Shuttleworth would hate the Blubuntu theme. My god, I mean, if that got out Ubuntu might actually look...good.
Ubuntu: If at first you don't succeed, blindly slap a sudo in front of it
That stuff looks really amatuerish
sorry, this is a part of OSS culture I entirely fail to understand. Like, when there is a new version of distro X and some OS News sites have nothing better to report than a 15 pages of hires screenshots of the default desktop etc.
You mean you install a new distro and then judge its worth by the look of the default theme? You don't change the theme first thing? You don't know how to install a custom theme if you don't like the preconfigured choices?
But then again, my boxen run headless 98% of the time, so why should I care...
605413? Yes, it's a prime.
I don't know what direction was required for the art, but the samples have that "ooohhh shiny" web 2.0 feel to them so they just must be better :p
Meeehhh, it will all change again anyway when everyone jumps on the Web 3.0 graphic design bandwagon or whatever the next hot trend will be.
Why should this happen? Why should "some community members" be shocked if Ubuntu is being developed as "an Open Source OS?" And I guess they were following Ubuntu's development pretty closely.
I need this question answered: Is Mark Shuttleworth a benevolent dictator in Ubuntu's Development?
Chief artist head honcho summed it up: "We set out to start from scratch and to top Dapper, while Dapper was arguably very close to what Mark had in mind."
Hmm...sort of reminds me of the Slashdot CSS Redesign Contest. Need the Slashdot "Shade of Green" and Coliseo font. Basically it has to be very similar to the old one, but better. Sometimes it fades into the background once the hubbub dies down...as people realize that visual continuity and product branding do count for something...
This sig donated to Pater. Long live
As for the complaining, I'm a bit perplexed: That sounds like a legitimate enough problem. Unfinished artwork and effects can make a distro look amateurish.
Besides, I thought the point of OSS is the flexibility that comes with it? Are these Ubuntu users going to be forced to use it.
Quack, quack.
I always found it annoying that Windows by default shows nothing but a little green/blue thingy scrolling around -- that doesn't even show boot progress.
Before Edgy, Ubuntu has always showed nonverbose messages about which services it's starting, etc. I couldn't understand these messages when I first started using Linux (I started with Ubuntu Breezy) but after 6 months they were informative and useful to me -- it's always nice to know what service is taking a long time and things like that.
That's why I was dismayed when Edgy replaced the old boot screen with one that mimics Windows's boot screen. It's only marginally more helpful by showing boot progress (not that that's very accurate).
Now I have to resort to remove the "quiet splash" option in the Grub menu. The disadvantage to this is it's too verbose -- it shows all sort of output, causing messages to scroll by faster than I can read them.
I never thought that it was overly confusing/distracting to have the messages...I wonder what percentage of Ubuntu users share your opinion.
How the hell did this crap get modded insightful?
1) Shuttleworth is the CREATOR of Ubuntu. Head honcho. What he did was to roll back the artwork to a Dapper variant, CHANGING the DEFAULT theme that was to be in Edgy.
2) Blubuntu is in the repositories. If you want to use it, then install it and use it. Like you said, Linux is about choice. But at least know what you are bitching about.
WTF? Thanks for the links. When I heard that Ubuntu was not going to include some of the contributions from the community, I began to wonder what Ubuntu was really all about then anyway....until I read on and saw what the material in question is. There's a big flap about THAT!?!? Jiminy Christmas, so what???? I'll still probably continue to try new Ubuntu distros (and promptly dump them because they don't seem to like my hardware, ever) since the lack of some boring, mediocre wallpaper and minor eye candy won't phase me a bit.
This may be news, I suppose, but it hardly matters.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
I don't believe anyone was talking about violent emulations, thought that's happened more than enough to prove you wrong. The above specifically addresses desensitization and emotional conditioning. I find it quite disturbing that seeing someone brutally murdered has become so commonplace as to produce little to no emotional response, particularly among the young. Any number of studies back this up.
To extend your (flawed) scenario: Are you seriously suggesting that you have no problem with little Johnny being incrementally conditioned to view killing as less a horror and more of an entertaining thrill, simply because he lacks the immediate means to re-enact a particular act out of tens of thousands viewed in his short life? There is not (nor have any peer-reviewed studies suggested) a long-term one-to-one correspondence between specific imagery and perpetrated criminally violent activities with any regularity (though isolated copy-cats have certainly been documented.) It's a cumulative effect that leads a subject to an emotional state that can quite casually entertain the thought of violence.
What this gets at in lay terms is that after decades of exposure to realistic violent imagery, a person is orders of magnitude more likely to be psychologically capable of perpetrating a violent act on another human being. This is mainstream modern psychology, here, not my personal opinion. See Grossman, Davis, Rothesburg etc etc etc. (Or read up on the psychology of advertising, which uses similar techniques and they actually WANT you to emulate what they are showing (i.e. use of their product or service)! The proof is in the pudding. Beyond the psychology, why do ad firms make billions a year if they can't influence your behavior? Yet when was the last time you lapsed into a zombie state after seeing a single ad and did exactly what they told you? The effect is cumulative, and very very real.)
The best examples of this are the training methods and technologies employed by modern military forces (specifically during and subsequent to Viet-Nam.) Non-firing rates of soldiers (percentages of soldiers not aiming at or firing on a human enemy with intent to kill - i.e. not shooting or intentionally missing) during large scale military engagements around the world since the US's Revolutionary War historically were between 50-95%. Killing another human is simply contrary to most people's innate behavior patterns. Most people just can't do it naturally. Starting in the 1960s, training techniques began to include use of film to illustrate techniques used in actual combat footage, using human silhouettes as targets instead of bullseyes, snipers schools using mannequins filled with cabbage and ketchup so the student isn't shocked in the field after a shot (the most vulnerable time for a sniper), and on and on. Non-firing rates have dropped DRAMATICALLY - down to 5-10% in some studies. The last 15 years has seen much of the virtual reality and computer driven training technology used in "kill houses" and mock urban-warfare environments applied directly to video games and special effect technology in films.
I have personally been through the "House of Horrors" at Bragg (about 5 years ago) and can tell you that there are a number of FPSs that get eerily close to that experience. Scan, shoot, move, "pie" around the corner, watch out for "death funnels" - even a ten year old understand the basics of clearing a room and target discrimination - and has been told its just a game! No reason to feel bad! No, feeling bad comes later when you must deal with the emotional fallout of what you've done without conscious thought because of conditioning. To wit, the catastrophic rise in psychological problems among vets returning from Vietnam, Panama, Iraq 1, Iraq 2 when compared to WWII and Korea. Coincidence? Not a chance, according to the military's own psychologists and academicians who have studied this for decades.
Sorry to ambush you here and go off, but I am a combat vet with a bachelors in psycholo
Welcome to Slashdot. I've been a loyal Apple user since the days of the IIe, but if I say anything negative about Apple, odds are good I'll get modded into oblivion. Likewise, I despise Microsoft, but if I suggest that perhaps they are not always pure evil, I better watch my ass. Go against groupthink and fanboys at your peril.
The sad thing is that most people who read this will now side with the tone set in the summary (that Shuttlesworth is wrong and/or a bad person).
Sometimes I think the folks who edit slashdot get a story and roll the dice to see if they are going to give it a positive or negitave slant, and then monitor their success rate of getting the larger part of the community to agree with them.
I guess Ubuntu's success upset ./ so it is time we turn on them too in keeping with our underdog mentality, but last I checked OSTG no garage based effort either. Maybe it is time for ./ to turn on itself?
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
And it is even cheaper to educate people about sex in the first place.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.