30 inch LCDs are available, with native resolution of 2560x1600. They're not cheap, of course.
If you need really big pixels for the vision-impaired, just run them at 1280x800 and there will be no artifacts (exactly 1:2 ratio), but still a tolerable resolution.
Let's see... what hasn't worked on Linux (and by working, I mean being able to use all of the core features): [list of stuff].
Either you're skilled at picking dodgy hardware, or unlucky, or perhaps you tackled things the wrong way.
Linux and free software are great, but if you're not willing to invest gobs of time to make it actually work, it's not worth it...
Curiously, it's never been an issue for me, and I don't restrict my hardware choices. I also don't regard myself as a Linux guru or expert.
Caldera OpenLinux worked fine on my Dell XPS T450 at home starting about 10 or 11 years ago, and supported all of its hardware, including thinwire ethernet LAN card, 33k modem internet, ATI Rage Pro graphics, HP Deskjet (maybe the HP 720) and HP scanner (I forget which model). This system was finally retired about 4 years ago, although its peripherals were donated to a local school before that.
About 4½ years ago, the beta of Ubuntu Breezy worked immediately and configured all of the hardware on my Sony laptop (which is now 6 years old and running Karmic flawlessly). The wireless LAN, wired LAN, bluetooth, 1920x1200 screen, wireless mouse, etc. were all configured automatically and worked correctly. The HP 4100c scanner and HP PhotoSmart 1218P printer both worked immediately over USB. The only thing I had to add manually was support for the stupid Sony media keys. Before Breezy, this laptop ran SuSE, which admittedly needed more manual setup.
More recently, 64bit Karmic is installed and working on our two no-name desktops, each with core 2 quad, 8 GB RAM, 2 TB disk, ATI4890 with dual screens, wireless keyboard+mouse, Logitech joystick, Wacom graphics tablet, and external speakers. Karmic 32 bit is also on our 5-year-old Dell GX260 with nVidia 9600GT (not used much nowadays, apart from web). The only manual configuration needed for the three desktops was selecting the binblob video driver via the Ubuntu GUI. All four systems had to be told about the network resources (HP7410 printer+scanner, Synology DS207 server, SMC2804 router/firewall) and each other's NFS exports, of course.
I use Windows systems at work; actually I have used Windows since v1, the MS-DOS Executive. In my experience, the investment of non-expert time to get a given functionality on comparable hardware was about the same on successive versions of Ubuntu and on contemporary versions of Windows (2000 or XP). Your experience seems to have been different.
This settlement allows Google to process copyrighted works with no license, so they should similarly be able to process GFDL works.
That's exactly the problem. It makes a mockery of all non-financial licenses to copyrighted works, by letting Google unilaterally make its own licensing terms.
Some licenses for copyrighted works have non-financial requirements on redistribution. One example is the Gnu Free Documentation License http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gfdl, which requires, among other conditions: "if produced in larger quantities (greater than 100), the original document or source code must be made available to the work's recipient". Source code must be made available if the document is a manual for a Gnu program, for instance. One suspects that Google would be producing more than 100 copies in most cases, and thus would be required to make the original document files and relevant source code available, and to plainly notify the recipient of such availability. Also, all copies and derivative works must be available under the same license.
Making the scanned documents available to other distributors is allowed, but only if accompanied by the GFDL text, and their redistribution is also governed by the GFDL conditions. An agreement with organizations which do not represent the copyright holders cannot absolve Google or any other distributor from these requirements. A financial agreement is irrelevant - actually payment for distribution is allowed by the GFDL, but does not cancel its other conditions.
Sounds really promising for those who want to be cannibals. Just grow it using samples from your tastier friends (or from yourself, for the ultimate: survivable self-cannibalism). The price might have to come down a little, of course, or it will remain an expensive delicacy.
No I think the idea here is that if you have done the time in jail then you should have the right to a normal life. This is the premise of our entire justice system. I can completely understand that.
I can understand that they want a relatively normal life. Serving time in prison perhaps covers part of their "debt to society" (or punishment or rehabilitation or whatever you choose to call it). Making their victim whole again is the other part. In a property-related crime, some financial restitution is possible, but not entirely in cases of nonlethal injury caused by deliberate violent assault. Adequate restitution to the victim is not at all possible in cases of murder.
So, do they deserve their crime to be swept away and forgotten, granting them a normal life? Answer this instead: is their victim alive again? Both questions get the same answer, in my opinion.
Ask yourself if you were introduced to a person and you found out that they were murderers would you think of them the same way? Probably not and that is the problem and why the German law exists.
It is not a problem at all. The German law is sensible for many classes of crime (larceny, drunk driving, fraud, bigamy, and so forth). It would arguably make sense for cases of accidental manslaughter in which the perpetrator's intent was not violent. It is utterly repugnant when applied to a crime of deliberate violence which resulted in death, mutilation, or permanent disabling of a victim.
If even 10% of encryption software owners use the product to kill defenseless civilians, or if accidents with a 5 year old boy finding a PGP CD-ROM in dad's drawer and accidentally killing his 3 year old system are widespread, I would certainly support strict licensing requirements and usage restrictions on encryption.
It's unlikely to reach even 0.01%, since almost every browser and email program supports encryption. Every time you conduct a transaction over https, you're using encryption. Same for email login using TLS, and possibly also for accessing your home wireless network. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Https
Your proposal for restricting encryption is presumably made from ignorance. It would greatly hinder online banking, online shopping, or anything else requiring secure login or identification. Even a slashdot login...
I doubt if Murdoch wants to block Google's access at all (he'd need a morons.txt file instead). He wants them to pay: this would give the hit-count of a free-access google-indexed site (preserving advertising rates), but the direct revenue per view of a paywalled site.
His web admins and business managers probably understand robots.txt quite well, and have made it consistent with their business intentions. Just for giggles, here is the robots.txt from Fox News:
Note that there are entries explicitly allowing the Google indexers...
FWIW, that's the first time in years that I've looked at anything at a fox site.
I'm not a mechanical engineer nor did any of my college coursework overlap with that but my gut feeling was pure skepticism and doubt. At least it's a long long way off if they follow through.
Thats what people thought about powered flight. Maybe you should leave this sort of thing to the engineers.
If they were planning to keep the inside air warmer than the outside air, then they'd find themselves covered by the top half of a hot-air balloon.
The outside air can change temperature very quickly. In winter it can shift by more than 20C between day and night here in Finland, and New England could be similar. Balancing the thermal buoyancy of the air with the mass of the dome would need some skill and unreasonably fast temperature controls to prevent lift-off or collapse. It's feasible for smaller domes, but at the kilometer scale it would be a real challenge. Buckminster Fuller was right - it would need good tethering to keep it down at times. The membrane tensions might also be quite large in places, with interesting dynamics, so that the mechanical design near tethers would also be interesting.
Well, Karmic seems happy enough on VMware.
I occasionally recommend VMware Server to people, but this is not through great knowledge of different VM platforms. Rather, it's because I'm familiar with it, and it tends to work fairly well for me. My main quibble is with the "improved" admin interface which came in version 2.
VMware Server is not OSS, but it is free for personal use (registration needed), and there are versions for Linux as well as Windows. At work, I have VMware Workstation on XP, which involves license fees. VMs can be exchanged between most flavours of VMware.
I can't help but think it's more a PR prank than a real spotted issue.
Possibly true. The Register is almost the internet's equivalent of The Sun tabloid. They can produce garbage out, whatever is put in.
it may be more due to a ATI-card weirdness.
FWIW my two Karmic-amd64 systems (1 upgrade, 1 install/migrate) both have ATI 4890 cards with ATI's proprietary binblob driver, while one Karmic-i386 upgrade was to a 7-year-old laptop with ATI mobility radeon 9600 with FOSS driver. The other Karmic-i386 upgrade has nVidia 9600GT graphics with proprietary binblob driver. I encountered no problems on any of them. Then again, anecdotes are not necessarily statistics, although The Register and The Sun remain blissfully unaware of this.
What they mean is, all versions of Firefox put together (2, 3, 3.5) have surpassed one version of Internet Explorer (6), the oldest one.
It's also something that varies by region. Looking at browser versions in Europe, Firefox 3 is on the heels of IE 7, and well ahead of IE 6, which is then followed by Opera 9.6 and Firefox 2. Safari, Chrome, and Opera 9.2 are well behind. Firefox 3.0 and 3.5 are not differentiated, nor are sub-versions of IE 6. Opera 10 and IE 8 do not show yet - they are probably bundled in the "others" category.
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-eu-monthly-200902-200902-bar
You put the car in neutral and the engine goes to 8000RPM. That will freak you out, I guarantee.
Not really. I had a 1980 Ford Granada (US/Canadian model with 4.1L 6 cylinder automatic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Granada_(North_America), a totally different car to the European model) in the early 80s. Its throttle was entirely mechanical, and the linkage to the butterfly valve involved a rod which twisted when the gas pedal was pushed down. One of the cheap clips holding this rod at one end got broken, and as a result, when I floored the throttle (required for manoevering in fast traffic on urban expressways), one of the engine hoses got jammed under it, effectively locking the trottle wide open.
I think the other highway users were more freaked out than I was, since I was driving with the brake lights on while holding the car at the speed of the traffic (65-75mph). There was no shoulder to stop on, but it was only a few km to the next exit ramp, where I dropped to neutral and then switched off the motor (as it raced towards bursting speed) and coasted to a safe halt with manual brakes and manual steering. A quick look under the hood revealed the problem, but I waited a few minutes extra to allow the motor and brakes to cool properly, before continuing home.
Despite driving more cautiously, I had the same thing happen two more times, before the clip was replaced a couple of days later.
Which VM platform did it fail on?
I installed one Karmic amd64 alpha in a VM on a PC at home, and it worked fine. This was done with VMware Server 64bit on Jaunty-amd64. I later replaced it with Karmic RC, which also went fine, and was easily upgraded to the release version. That's how I checked it out before upgrading the base OS to Karmic. The Karmic i386 RC is also running in a VM on my work PC, using VMware Workstation on Windows XP SP3. I'll upgrade it soon to the final release.
The Register failed to notice the text in red boldface on that ubuntuforums.org page which states:
"*** Disclaimer for those willing to analyse this poll ***
Most of users voting here are users with issues.
Users with painless experience are not likely to come here."
The statistics derived by The Register are thus invalid, and probably quite wrong, being from a nonrepresentative self-selected subset of Karmic installations or upgrades.
Here's another nonrepresentative data set: I have installed or upgraded 4 PCs from Jaunty to Karmic at home (2 upgrade 32bit, 1 upgrade 64bit, 1 conversion 32bit to 64bit). All went flawlessly, even the migration of user accounts and reinstallation of applications (including commercial paid-for apps) on the 32bit to 64bit reinstallation. Being a self-selected non-representative dataset, would that entitle me to proclaim that every Karmic upgrade or installation was flawless? Obviously such a conclusion would be unfounded, and so are those of The Register.
It's tricky to get reliable statistics on Ubuntu installations. According to an unofficial monitor on the official torrent tracker, there were over 16 million torrent downloads as of today http://spreadubuntu.neomenlo.org/. The number of direct downloads from the servers is unknown, and the average number of installations per download is also unknown. BTW, I've uploaded more than 60GB on these two torrents in the last several days from home, and the upload rate is still humming along (I limit each of the torrents to below 1Mbit/sec upload).
It's also tricky to get reliable statistics on Ubuntu installation problems. The forum mentioned by The Register probably has only a fraction of those with problems, and that came to about 1400 as of yesterday. Comparing this number to the number of torrent downloads would give 1 in 10,000 but that would also be an example of bad statistics, since both of the numbers are incomplete to an unknown extent or nonrepresentative to an unknown extent.
Systematically incomplete nonrepresentative data produces incorrect statistics. It's the old adage: GIGO.
Let's just say I liked the Sci-Fi channel's miniseries better than that monstrosity that David Lynch did. Every time I catch sight of it on TV I want to gut Sting and punch that little girl playing Alia in the face.
The portrayal of Thufir Hawat was the low point of Lynch's production for me. It went beyond "wooden" acting into a whole new class of badness. There are a few fan re-edits of the 1984 Dune (some apparently received approval from Lynch), which resequence some scenes, and merge in scenes which appeared in different theatrical releases and the TV edition and other footage to which access was possible. In particular, the edit by Spicediver is better than the original release in many ways - but is still stuck with Thufir Hawat acting like an stiffer than usual Al Gore marionette.
I also agree that the miniseries was a better adaptation than Lynch's shoot, although also a bit imperfect. Its CGI was better, of course, the technology having improved quite a lot. The miniseries casting was generally better as well, especially for emperor Shaddam IV and the Harkonnen clan, but not for Stilgar or the reverend mother.
This seems a bit of a stretch, since Americans embrace Science and Technology readily.
Almost all Americans are willing to embrace technology, but few really embrace science. In fact, a large number are overtly hostile to some branches of science (especially the biological sciences). The majority seems content to retain an ignorance of science in general, or perhaps fear that they are incapable of understanding it.
Slashdot Mirror
30 inch LCDs are available, with native resolution of 2560x1600. They're not cheap, of course.
If you need really big pixels for the vision-impaired, just run them at 1280x800 and there will be no artifacts (exactly 1:2 ratio), but still a tolerable resolution.
Let's see... what hasn't worked on Linux (and by working, I mean being able to use all of the core features): [list of stuff].
Either you're skilled at picking dodgy hardware, or unlucky, or perhaps you tackled things the wrong way.
Linux and free software are great, but if you're not willing to invest gobs of time to make it actually work, it's not worth it...
Curiously, it's never been an issue for me, and I don't restrict my hardware choices. I also don't regard myself as a Linux guru or expert.
Caldera OpenLinux worked fine on my Dell XPS T450 at home starting about 10 or 11 years ago, and supported all of its hardware, including thinwire ethernet LAN card, 33k modem internet, ATI Rage Pro graphics, HP Deskjet (maybe the HP 720) and HP scanner (I forget which model). This system was finally retired about 4 years ago, although its peripherals were donated to a local school before that.
About 4½ years ago, the beta of Ubuntu Breezy worked immediately and configured all of the hardware on my Sony laptop (which is now 6 years old and running Karmic flawlessly). The wireless LAN, wired LAN, bluetooth, 1920x1200 screen, wireless mouse, etc. were all configured automatically and worked correctly. The HP 4100c scanner and HP PhotoSmart 1218P printer both worked immediately over USB. The only thing I had to add manually was support for the stupid Sony media keys. Before Breezy, this laptop ran SuSE, which admittedly needed more manual setup.
More recently, 64bit Karmic is installed and working on our two no-name desktops, each with core 2 quad, 8 GB RAM, 2 TB disk, ATI4890 with dual screens, wireless keyboard+mouse, Logitech joystick, Wacom graphics tablet, and external speakers. Karmic 32 bit is also on our 5-year-old Dell GX260 with nVidia 9600GT (not used much nowadays, apart from web). The only manual configuration needed for the three desktops was selecting the binblob video driver via the Ubuntu GUI. All four systems had to be told about the network resources (HP7410 printer+scanner, Synology DS207 server, SMC2804 router/firewall) and each other's NFS exports, of course.
I use Windows systems at work; actually I have used Windows since v1, the MS-DOS Executive. In my experience, the investment of non-expert time to get a given functionality on comparable hardware was about the same on successive versions of Ubuntu and on contemporary versions of Windows (2000 or XP). Your experience seems to have been different.
What's so special about 139 and 445? What do they do normally, and why would blocking them help?
Here's a list of assigned port numbers: https://www.arin.net/knowledge/rfc/rfc1700.txt
This settlement allows Google to process copyrighted works with no license, so they should similarly be able to process GFDL works.
That's exactly the problem. It makes a mockery of all non-financial licenses to copyrighted works, by letting Google unilaterally make its own licensing terms.
Some licenses for copyrighted works have non-financial requirements on redistribution. One example is the Gnu Free Documentation License http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gfdl, which requires, among other conditions: "if produced in larger quantities (greater than 100), the original document or source code must be made available to the work's recipient". Source code must be made available if the document is a manual for a Gnu program, for instance. One suspects that Google would be producing more than 100 copies in most cases, and thus would be required to make the original document files and relevant source code available, and to plainly notify the recipient of such availability. Also, all copies and derivative works must be available under the same license.
Making the scanned documents available to other distributors is allowed, but only if accompanied by the GFDL text, and their redistribution is also governed by the GFDL conditions. An agreement with organizations which do not represent the copyright holders cannot absolve Google or any other distributor from these requirements. A financial agreement is irrelevant - actually payment for distribution is allowed by the GFDL, but does not cancel its other conditions.
Sounds really promising for those who want to be cannibals. Just grow it using samples from your tastier friends (or from yourself, for the ultimate: survivable self-cannibalism). The price might have to come down a little, of course, or it will remain an expensive delicacy.
No I think the idea here is that if you have done the time in jail then you should have the right to a normal life. This is the premise of our entire justice system. I can completely understand that.
I can understand that they want a relatively normal life. Serving time in prison perhaps covers part of their "debt to society" (or punishment or rehabilitation or whatever you choose to call it). Making their victim whole again is the other part. In a property-related crime, some financial restitution is possible, but not entirely in cases of nonlethal injury caused by deliberate violent assault. Adequate restitution to the victim is not at all possible in cases of murder.
So, do they deserve their crime to be swept away and forgotten, granting them a normal life? Answer this instead: is their victim alive again? Both questions get the same answer, in my opinion.
Ask yourself if you were introduced to a person and you found out that they were murderers would you think of them the same way? Probably not and that is the problem and why the German law exists.
It is not a problem at all. The German law is sensible for many classes of crime (larceny, drunk driving, fraud, bigamy, and so forth). It would arguably make sense for cases of accidental manslaughter in which the perpetrator's intent was not violent. It is utterly repugnant when applied to a crime of deliberate violence which resulted in death, mutilation, or permanent disabling of a victim.
If even 10% of encryption software owners use the product to kill defenseless civilians, or if accidents with a 5 year old boy finding a PGP CD-ROM in dad's drawer and accidentally killing his 3 year old system are widespread, I would certainly support strict licensing requirements and usage restrictions on encryption.
It's unlikely to reach even 0.01%, since almost every browser and email program supports encryption. Every time you conduct a transaction over https, you're using encryption. Same for email login using TLS, and possibly also for accessing your home wireless network. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Https
Your proposal for restricting encryption is presumably made from ignorance. It would greatly hinder online banking, online shopping, or anything else requiring secure login or identification. Even a slashdot login...
You don't become a billionaire by sharing anything with anyone
Unless you can share your debts with suckers^Wtaxpayers.
I doubt if Murdoch wants to block Google's access at all (he'd need a morons.txt file instead). He wants them to pay: this would give the hit-count of a free-access google-indexed site (preserving advertising rates), but the direct revenue per view of a paywalled site.
/printer_friendly_story /projects/livestream /printer_friendly_story /google_search_index.xml /google_news_index.xml /*.xml.gz
His web admins and business managers probably understand robots.txt quite well, and have made it consistent with their business intentions. Just for giggles, here is the robots.txt from Fox News:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Disallow:
#
User-agent: gsa-crawler
Allow:
Allow:
Allow:
Allow:
#
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_search_index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.foxnews.com/google_news_index.xml
Note that there are entries explicitly allowing the Google indexers...
FWIW, that's the first time in years that I've looked at anything at a fox site.
Giant lasers or masers from space!
But how will they get the giant sharks up there to aim them?
I'm not a mechanical engineer nor did any of my college coursework overlap with that but my gut feeling was pure skepticism and doubt. At least it's a long long way off if they follow through.
Thats what people thought about powered flight. Maybe you should leave this sort of thing to the engineers.
If they were planning to keep the inside air warmer than the outside air, then they'd find themselves covered by the top half of a hot-air balloon.
The outside air can change temperature very quickly. In winter it can shift by more than 20C between day and night here in Finland, and New England could be similar. Balancing the thermal buoyancy of the air with the mass of the dome would need some skill and unreasonably fast temperature controls to prevent lift-off or collapse. It's feasible for smaller domes, but at the kilometer scale it would be a real challenge. Buckminster Fuller was right - it would need good tethering to keep it down at times. The membrane tensions might also be quite large in places, with interesting dynamics, so that the mechanical design near tethers would also be interesting.
How about non-stop playing gory video clips of people dying in car crashes? We could throw in some screams as well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSNVAA61MmM It has screams as well. The focus is on the aftermath, 'cos that's what the survivors have to live with.
Virtual Box (Sun's VM)
Well, Karmic seems happy enough on VMware.
I occasionally recommend VMware Server to people, but this is not through great knowledge of different VM platforms. Rather, it's because I'm familiar with it, and it tends to work fairly well for me. My main quibble is with the "improved" admin interface which came in version 2.
VMware Server is not OSS, but it is free for personal use (registration needed), and there are versions for Linux as well as Windows. At work, I have VMware Workstation on XP, which involves license fees. VMs can be exchanged between most flavours of VMware.
I can't help but think it's more a PR prank than a real spotted issue.
Possibly true. The Register is almost the internet's equivalent of The Sun tabloid. They can produce garbage out, whatever is put in.
it may be more due to a ATI-card weirdness.
FWIW my two Karmic-amd64 systems (1 upgrade, 1 install/migrate) both have ATI 4890 cards with ATI's proprietary binblob driver, while one Karmic-i386 upgrade was to a 7-year-old laptop with ATI mobility radeon 9600 with FOSS driver. The other Karmic-i386 upgrade has nVidia 9600GT graphics with proprietary binblob driver. I encountered no problems on any of them. Then again, anecdotes are not necessarily statistics, although The Register and The Sun remain blissfully unaware of this.
What they mean is, all versions of Firefox put together (2, 3, 3.5) have surpassed one version of Internet Explorer (6), the oldest one.
It's also something that varies by region. Looking at browser versions in Europe, Firefox 3 is on the heels of IE 7, and well ahead of IE 6, which is then followed by Opera 9.6 and Firefox 2. Safari, Chrome, and Opera 9.2 are well behind. Firefox 3.0 and 3.5 are not differentiated, nor are sub-versions of IE 6. Opera 10 and IE 8 do not show yet - they are probably bundled in the "others" category. http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-eu-monthly-200902-200902-bar
http://www.saveie6.com/
That's quite funny! More seriously, IE6 is one case where Ben Tre[*] logic is fully justified:
It must be destroyed to be saved.
[*] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Tre
http://www.ie6nomore.com/
Cure the pox. 'nuff said.
Opera is also listed as #3 for Europe, ahead of Safari and Chrome. The gap between Firefox (all versions) and IE (all versions) is also rather narrower for Europe than for North America.
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-eu-monthly-200902-200902-bar
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-na-monthly-200902-200902-bar
And Firefox has a 100.0% share in Antarctica (maybe just 1 user?) http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-an-monthly-200902-200902-bar
You put the car in neutral and the engine goes to 8000RPM. That will freak you out, I guarantee.
Not really. I had a 1980 Ford Granada (US/Canadian model with 4.1L 6 cylinder automatic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Granada_(North_America), a totally different car to the European model) in the early 80s. Its throttle was entirely mechanical, and the linkage to the butterfly valve involved a rod which twisted when the gas pedal was pushed down. One of the cheap clips holding this rod at one end got broken, and as a result, when I floored the throttle (required for manoevering in fast traffic on urban expressways), one of the engine hoses got jammed under it, effectively locking the trottle wide open.
I think the other highway users were more freaked out than I was, since I was driving with the brake lights on while holding the car at the speed of the traffic (65-75mph). There was no shoulder to stop on, but it was only a few km to the next exit ramp, where I dropped to neutral and then switched off the motor (as it raced towards bursting speed) and coasted to a safe halt with manual brakes and manual steering. A quick look under the hood revealed the problem, but I waited a few minutes extra to allow the motor and brakes to cool properly, before continuing home.
Despite driving more cautiously, I had the same thing happen two more times, before the clip was replaced a couple of days later.
The Koala doesn't work even in a virtual machine.
Which VM platform did it fail on?
I installed one Karmic amd64 alpha in a VM on a PC at home, and it worked fine. This was done with VMware Server 64bit on Jaunty-amd64. I later replaced it with Karmic RC, which also went fine, and was easily upgraded to the release version. That's how I checked it out before upgrading the base OS to Karmic. The Karmic i386 RC is also running in a VM on my work PC, using VMware Workstation on Windows XP SP3. I'll upgrade it soon to the final release.
The Register failed to notice the text in red boldface on that ubuntuforums.org page which states:
"*** Disclaimer for those willing to analyse this poll ***
Most of users voting here are users with issues.
Users with painless experience are not likely to come here."
The statistics derived by The Register are thus invalid, and probably quite wrong, being from a nonrepresentative self-selected subset of Karmic installations or upgrades. Here's another nonrepresentative data set: I have installed or upgraded 4 PCs from Jaunty to Karmic at home (2 upgrade 32bit, 1 upgrade 64bit, 1 conversion 32bit to 64bit). All went flawlessly, even the migration of user accounts and reinstallation of applications (including commercial paid-for apps) on the 32bit to 64bit reinstallation. Being a self-selected non-representative dataset, would that entitle me to proclaim that every Karmic upgrade or installation was flawless? Obviously such a conclusion would be unfounded, and so are those of The Register.
It's tricky to get reliable statistics on Ubuntu installations. According to an unofficial monitor on the official torrent tracker, there were over 16 million torrent downloads as of today http://spreadubuntu.neomenlo.org/. The number of direct downloads from the servers is unknown, and the average number of installations per download is also unknown. BTW, I've uploaded more than 60GB on these two torrents in the last several days from home, and the upload rate is still humming along (I limit each of the torrents to below 1Mbit/sec upload).
It's also tricky to get reliable statistics on Ubuntu installation problems. The forum mentioned by The Register probably has only a fraction of those with problems, and that came to about 1400 as of yesterday. Comparing this number to the number of torrent downloads would give 1 in 10,000 but that would also be an example of bad statistics, since both of the numbers are incomplete to an unknown extent or nonrepresentative to an unknown extent.
Systematically incomplete nonrepresentative data produces incorrect statistics. It's the old adage: GIGO.
Let's just say I liked the Sci-Fi channel's miniseries better than that monstrosity that David Lynch did. Every time I catch sight of it on TV I want to gut Sting and punch that little girl playing Alia in the face.
The portrayal of Thufir Hawat was the low point of Lynch's production for me. It went beyond "wooden" acting into a whole new class of badness. There are a few fan re-edits of the 1984 Dune (some apparently received approval from Lynch), which resequence some scenes, and merge in scenes which appeared in different theatrical releases and the TV edition and other footage to which access was possible. In particular, the edit by Spicediver is better than the original release in many ways - but is still stuck with Thufir Hawat acting like an stiffer than usual Al Gore marionette.
I also agree that the miniseries was a better adaptation than Lynch's shoot, although also a bit imperfect. Its CGI was better, of course, the technology having improved quite a lot. The miniseries casting was generally better as well, especially for emperor Shaddam IV and the Harkonnen clan, but not for Stilgar or the reverend mother.
This seems a bit of a stretch, since Americans embrace Science and Technology readily.
Almost all Americans are willing to embrace technology, but few really embrace science. In fact, a large number are overtly hostile to some branches of science (especially the biological sciences). The majority seems content to retain an ignorance of science in general, or perhaps fear that they are incapable of understanding it.