My main question here would be why the hell are you still using OpenOffice.org anyway? I've been on LibreOffice for ages now, and (in Debian at least, as far as I can tell) LibreOffice Calc does not require any sort of Java runtime.
This would make sense given that one of the aims of LibreOffice is to "reduce Java dependency".
Talking of extensions (I believe the above poster is actually referring to extensions rather than plugins, plugins generally don't break with new versions), is there any easy way to determine whether or not my current set of extensions are compatible with a given version? I'm on Debian so all of my updates come through my package manager, and the 'easiest' way at the moment seems to be cross-referencing each extension (all twenty-six of them) with Firefox Add-ons, which tedious in the extreme.
Is there just some tool which can scan through my extensions and report back on which aren't marked as compatible with 6.0 or above?
Many people have suggested what you just have. It's never worked before and there's no reason to think it will work now.
Your statement about running KDE apps on GNOME and vice-versa does puzzle me though. Right now I've got a complete mix of KDE/Qt and GNOME/GTK+ applications running on my KDE 4.6 desktop, and all is well. They may be using slightly more resources than strictly necessary, but I don't really care about that. Stuff like the Portland Project and the Tango Desktop Project seem to have done their work in making applications both function correctly and look right on my desktop, and Oxygen-Gtk is taking that even further by making GTK+ apps look nearly indistinguishable from Qt apps. Probably best to ask someone else what's going on with the GNOME/Xfce side though.
I really don't think a merger is possible or necessary, what is necessary is more communication and cooperation between developers of various desktop environments, and in the five years I've been using Linux (sorry, GNU/Linux, I am a Debianite now...) I've seen massive strides in this. I can comfortably use whatever applications seem best regardless of widget toolkit with no worries about whether it will all function correctly, and that's good enough for me.
It would be awesome if 5.0 were more like 3.5 again (its behaviour and settings), but with the modern graphics features of 4.0:)
In a way, it might be.
From my understanding (and from having used both KDE 3.5 and 4.2 through to 4.6) the main problem with KDE 4.x was that it was a complete rewrite from the 3.x series, and to say the transition was rough would be an understatement.
But if what I heard earlier is correct, KDE 5 will be more like KDE 3 in that it will extend from the KDE 4 codebase rather than dumping everything and starting from scratch. Hopefully resulting in a smoother transition and less crippling bugs.
And shouting down skeptics is, in fact, the opposite of the scientific method. Rather than shouting them down, they should be welcomed and addressed with all sincerity and substance as possible. For if your theory is correct - your proof in the face of skepticism will show it, unequivocally.
I agree, up to a point. Skeptics should be welcomed and engaged, as anyone trying to figure out the truth behind a complex subject should.
But how many 'skeptics' in climate change debates are actually skeptics as opposed to concern trolls and deniers who refuse to look at any evidence you present? What do you do when it becomes clear the person you're debating with has no interest in a reasoned debate and simply wants to try and discredit you as much as possible?
I don't know about VMware, but FireGestures already has an update out for Firefox 5 compatibility, it's just waiting for Mozilla to review and approve it.
This is what I'd want myself. Mandate that ISPs implement an anti-pornography filter on their side that is activated on a strictly opt-in basis. So if I don't think to ask for filtering, I don't get any.
Given that the Tories are supposed to be all about 'personal responsibility', this should be absolutely perfect for them. Responsible parents get the tools they need to help keep pornography away from their children, but the ultimate responsibility is on the parents to be vigilant and aware.
The deniers set up multiple goalposts. There are the ones who deny it's happening at all (a favorite tactic of this group is to start their time series with 1998, which was an unusally warm year, to insist that there's been no warming trend in the last 10^H^H11^H^H12 years)
Funny coincidence, I spotted James Delingpole doing this today, while cramming as many denialist canards as possible into a single Telegraph opinion piece. Brilliantly, he actually goes even further than usual with:
If it's "global warming" you're worried about, it stopped in 1998. Global cooling is a much more imminent and serious problem. Recent changes in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation mean that we're now set for a 30 year cooling period guaranteed to make a mockery of all our fears about "global warming." Yet here we are, embarked on a policy guaranteed to raise our energy bills to unaffordable levels, as we enter a period of colder winters.
...that's still too expensive for Joe Shiftworker. Doesn't it just give you a warm fuzzy to see people driving past you in cars that you can't afford to buy because the Government gouged you so hard in order to give your tax money to the people who can afford to buy them?
Oh, I would love to hear you detail exactly how the government has been gouging you in particular. You know... new taxes, increases in old taxes, cuts in benefits, and how each one you list affects your bottom line. I'm sure lots of people here would like to hear all of the juicy details. So, let's hear it.
Or you could try a Debian testing/unstable mix, so you get most packages from the somewhat more stable testing, but have the ability to install newer packages from unstable whenever you feel you need to. I'm using it right now, and it seems to work well.
I respect that they're aiming for stability (quite different from what KDE did), but I'm not sure I like the direction their UI is going. I'll probably hop to KDE or LXDE.
So it's finally happened. After months of "I hate where KDE is going with KDE 4, I'm switching to GNOME!", now it's GNOME that's making unpopular changes and people are saying "I hate where GNOME is going with GNOME 3, I'm switching to KDE!".
Ext4 has been mature and stable for at least 3 years now.
No, it's been in the kernel for three years but was developmental for most of that. It was only declared stable with 2.6.28, which was released just over one year ago. Personally, I'm going to wait another year or two here. When it comes to file systems, I tend to be on the conservative side.
If communism and Nazism could leave tens of millions dead, what will be the death toll if the evil freaks driving the environmentalism movement get the leverage to inflict their anti-Western and antihuman fantasies?
This leaves little doubt as to their interpretation of The Guardian's article. I responded with:
Nowhere in the article is there a call for mass extermination, you're being completely ridiculous in that. They may call for people to have less children, but killing children already here? Are you so deluded that you actually think a major British newspaper could call for such a thing and get away with it?
I quickly got a response:
The word "cull" is used by the author in the piece, and it's definition is the reduction in the size of a herd through killing some members of it. The author may have been unaware of the proper definition, but it is the word he used.
Obviously they must have been calling for genocide! Why else would they say "cull" unless they intended for millions of children to die?
My point is that grabbing a dictionary and harping on forever isn't the best way to ascertain extent. Sometimes people are being satirical. Sometimes people use the wrong word. Trying to say The Pirate Bay must be made to help piracy because it's The Pirate Bay isn't an argument, it's just noise.
Considering that this is the 21st century, I'm guessing that/dev/Sda would have been a lot more useful:-)
Additionally, the GNU version of rm treats root as special, so "rm -rf --no-preserve-root/" would actually be necessary on most Linux systems, otherwise I believe it would just output a message saying something along the lines of "root cannot be removed" (I'm not going to find the exact message by actually trying this command myself, for obvious reasons).
Because people using the same computer will see their porn bookmarks. Embarrassing for a 15 year old when their mothers find the carefully hidden list by typing in something innocent in the address bar.
I think you mean embarrassing for a stupid 15 year old who has no idea how to use multiple user accounts or Firefox 3.5's Private Browsing mode.
They serve no purpose other than giving people a way to distribute malicious links.
I get around this by using the TinyURL Decoder script for Greasemonkey. It's explicitly designed to dynamically change shortened links back to the full-length originals, telling you exactly where they go without you having to visit the page itself.
There are only two disadvantages I've found. First, there is a marked delay before it actually decodes the URL, but that's unavoidable. I found the second when visiting the Katawa Shoujo Dev Blog. It seems for reasons related to limitations of Blogspot the link to the IRC server was encoded with TinyURL, because Blogspot wasn't happy with an irc:// link. Unfortunately, the decoder script decoded the URL producing a prompt from Firefox to open the link in an IRC client, then it somehow got re-encoded, the decoder script decoded it again, and I ended up in an infinite loop with Firefox opening up a new prompt every 10 seconds or so.
I managed to fix the second problem by blacklisting the site in TinyURL Decoder's preferences, and they seem to have since fixed the code on their end. But still, that was pretty fucking annoying.
On the contrary, the megaphone vans is an excellent system for weeding out bad candidates.
In the days before an election, I'd sleep in in the morning, with a notepad next to my bed. Every time I'm awakened by one of those vans, I write the candidate's name on the notepad and go back to sleep. Come election day, I go to the voting booth and pick the best guy on the ballot who is NOT on the notepad. Serves the sleep-disturbing selfish dickwads right.
In a related story, I was watching television at about 5PM here in Staffordshire just before the 2007 local elections when I heard one of those vans. This was unusual and annoying as we don't seem to get them much around here (I'd never heard one before, and I've never heard one since). I heard it loud and clear over the television though, telling me to vote for the "Ratepayers' Association" in the coming election. I did vote, I saw their candidates, and did not vote for any of them (I had three votes to give, one went to Labour, the other two to Tories). Curiously, I later saw a local newspaper headline while I was in the supermarket. The Ratepayers' Association had lost all of their council seats in the election.
I would certainly image it does feel faster than Firefox on Linux x64. As per bug #489146, TraceMonkey is still not enabled on x64 Linux builds. This does make it feel rather sluggish on any page with serious amounts of JavaScript (i.e. any Slashdot story), and is something that really bugs me about the 3.5 release. I'm sure I'll really enjoy it someday, but not until I can actually use the biggest enhancement of the release.
I'd like to agree with the willfail tag, alas, this is BSkyB, the UK's favourite waste of money, murdoch is far, far more popular than the BBC with a certain, very large, braindead section of the british public.
To add to this, I'll agree with the 'braindead' part of your post. I can't see why people would praise BSkyB over the BBC, the BBC at least provide the service we're paying them for. Here, I bought a new Sky+ HD box and an HD subscription, planning to replace an old Sky+ box with a shiny new HD box and replace a regular Sky box downstairs with the old Sky+ box, giving both our upstairs and downstairs TV the ability to pause and record programs. Sky seemed absolutely fine with all this, so far so good.
First screw up now. We should've received two new Sky cards, one for the new HD box and another for the old Sky+ box. We didn't. No problem the installers said, we'll just use the card from the regular old Sky box, put it in the HD box, call Sky so they can transfer the old card over, and we'd have full Sky HD in about four hours! We didn't. All we got were the free-to-air/view HD channels and the regular SD package channels, but none of the HD package channels, nor would the box operate as a Sky+ box, giving error messages telling us to upgrade our subscription whenever we tried to use such functions.
What follows now is a month and no less than five calls to Sky, where we were told (and I quote) getting the box actually working "could be a week, could be a month". Despite this, Sky wasted no time in debiting my account for the full amount, including the extra £10 for the HD channels I'm not getting. We would fight for a refund, except that we tried that once when Sky mistakenly debited us for an installation that never actually happened and only ended up wasting money on phone calls only for Sky to tell us they couldn't give us our money back but they could 'credit our account' for the amount, meaning they wouldn't charge us for our subscription for a while, but Sky simply don't do refunds (I phrase it as Sky getting confused, after all we give them money, how could it possibly work the other way around?).
As I type this, it has now been one month since I got Sky+ HD, and there is still no indication that Sky are actually going to activate the functions I'm paying them extra for. The lack of Sky+ is especially ridiculous as Sky actually changed their system so anyone with a Sky+ or Sky+ HD box (which I have) and a subscription to at least one channel package (we have four) automatically gets Sky+ without needing an additional subscription! So why do I still hit pause only to get:
Live Pause is not available
Call 08705 800800
to upgrade your Sky+ subscription
All Sky can tell us is that they're "having some problems" and will send an email to get some form filled out so they can actually provide us with the service as promised. We'd move television providers except that Sky has no competition here. Freeview isn't available due to the local transmitter not being upgraded and doesn't provide a fraction of the channels anyway. Cable is simply not available here in any way, shape, or form. So unlike with gas, electricity, broadband, or phone, there is no competition and we can't move. If this is somehow supposed to be better than the TV licence, I'm not seeing it.
Maybe using an "old style" keyboard had become something of a game, something that engineering students would compete on to prove they were hard core.
Or maybe, just maybe, it is only a piece of entertainment. If you are going to fail to suspend disbelief at the moment Scotty is able to use a keyboard proficiently how did you get through the previous scenes like the time travel thing, the whales communicating with aliens, and so on.
Actually, I think it's more (as I heard before) that it's OK to expect audiences to believe the impossible, but not the improbable. So it's fine that the crew of the Enterprise just time-travelled back to 1986 on a Bird of Prey, but it's not fine that a 23rd century engineer is able to touch type and operate a mid-80s Mac like he'd done this all his life.
It may not be completely logical, but since when is the human mind completely logical?
Scroll down to firefox-3.5. Stupidly, this package doesn't overwrite the firefox package, meaning that applications will still use 3.0 to open links. Even if you remove the firefox package, firefox-3.5 is still not used.
In Jaunty, this is because Firefox 3.0 remains the default version of Firefox (and the firefox package always points towards the default version of Firefox for that release). In Karmic, this is because the developers haven't switched the default from 3.0 to 3.5 yet, though they will soon.
Slashdot Mirror
But I don't want Napster! What's going on?!?
My main question here would be why the hell are you still using OpenOffice.org anyway? I've been on LibreOffice for ages now, and (in Debian at least, as far as I can tell) LibreOffice Calc does not require any sort of Java runtime.
This would make sense given that one of the aims of LibreOffice is to "reduce Java dependency".
Talking of extensions (I believe the above poster is actually referring to extensions rather than plugins, plugins generally don't break with new versions), is there any easy way to determine whether or not my current set of extensions are compatible with a given version? I'm on Debian so all of my updates come through my package manager, and the 'easiest' way at the moment seems to be cross-referencing each extension (all twenty-six of them) with Firefox Add-ons, which tedious in the extreme.
Is there just some tool which can scan through my extensions and report back on which aren't marked as compatible with 6.0 or above?
Many people have suggested what you just have. It's never worked before and there's no reason to think it will work now.
Your statement about running KDE apps on GNOME and vice-versa does puzzle me though. Right now I've got a complete mix of KDE/Qt and GNOME/GTK+ applications running on my KDE 4.6 desktop, and all is well. They may be using slightly more resources than strictly necessary, but I don't really care about that. Stuff like the Portland Project and the Tango Desktop Project seem to have done their work in making applications both function correctly and look right on my desktop, and Oxygen-Gtk is taking that even further by making GTK+ apps look nearly indistinguishable from Qt apps. Probably best to ask someone else what's going on with the GNOME/Xfce side though.
I really don't think a merger is possible or necessary, what is necessary is more communication and cooperation between developers of various desktop environments, and in the five years I've been using Linux (sorry, GNU/Linux, I am a Debianite now...) I've seen massive strides in this. I can comfortably use whatever applications seem best regardless of widget toolkit with no worries about whether it will all function correctly, and that's good enough for me.
In a way, it might be.
From my understanding (and from having used both KDE 3.5 and 4.2 through to 4.6) the main problem with KDE 4.x was that it was a complete rewrite from the 3.x series, and to say the transition was rough would be an understatement.
But if what I heard earlier is correct, KDE 5 will be more like KDE 3 in that it will extend from the KDE 4 codebase rather than dumping everything and starting from scratch. Hopefully resulting in a smoother transition and less crippling bugs.
I agree, up to a point. Skeptics should be welcomed and engaged, as anyone trying to figure out the truth behind a complex subject should.
But how many 'skeptics' in climate change debates are actually skeptics as opposed to concern trolls and deniers who refuse to look at any evidence you present? What do you do when it becomes clear the person you're debating with has no interest in a reasoned debate and simply wants to try and discredit you as much as possible?
I don't know about VMware, but FireGestures already has an update out for Firefox 5 compatibility, it's just waiting for Mozilla to review and approve it.
Yeah, telling all those congressmen that they "must agree" to uphold the constitution, you'll never get liberty through coercion like that!
This is what I'd want myself. Mandate that ISPs implement an anti-pornography filter on their side that is activated on a strictly opt-in basis. So if I don't think to ask for filtering, I don't get any.
Given that the Tories are supposed to be all about 'personal responsibility', this should be absolutely perfect for them. Responsible parents get the tools they need to help keep pornography away from their children, but the ultimate responsibility is on the parents to be vigilant and aware.
Funny coincidence, I spotted James Delingpole doing this today, while cramming as many denialist canards as possible into a single Telegraph opinion piece. Brilliantly, he actually goes even further than usual with:
The man really is unbelievable.
desktops have been unable to shake their one glaring deficiency -- they're chained to your desk
If it's not chained to your desk, then it is not -- by definition -- a desktop.
...that's still too expensive for Joe Shiftworker. Doesn't it just give you a warm fuzzy to see people driving past you in cars that you can't afford to buy because the Government gouged you so hard in order to give your tax money to the people who can afford to buy them?
Oh, I would love to hear you detail exactly how the government has been gouging you in particular. You know... new taxes, increases in old taxes, cuts in benefits, and how each one you list affects your bottom line. I'm sure lots of people here would like to hear all of the juicy details. So, let's hear it.
Or you could try a Debian testing/unstable mix, so you get most packages from the somewhat more stable testing, but have the ability to install newer packages from unstable whenever you feel you need to. I'm using it right now, and it seems to work well.
I respect that they're aiming for stability (quite different from what KDE did), but I'm not sure I like the direction their UI is going. I'll probably hop to KDE or LXDE.
So it's finally happened. After months of "I hate where KDE is going with KDE 4, I'm switching to GNOME!", now it's GNOME that's making unpopular changes and people are saying "I hate where GNOME is going with GNOME 3, I'm switching to KDE!".
Ext4 has been mature and stable for at least 3 years now.
No, it's been in the kernel for three years but was developmental for most of that. It was only declared stable with 2.6.28, which was released just over one year ago. Personally, I'm going to wait another year or two here. When it comes to file systems, I tend to be on the conservative side.
And that assumes it actually WAS set up to be a legal torrent tracker! As others have pointed out, it's called The PIRATE Bay!
This reminds me of a comment I made over at Moonbattery on a post entitled "Guardian Moonbat Calls for "Cull" of Western Children" where the post actually says:
If communism and Nazism could leave tens of millions dead, what will be the death toll if the evil freaks driving the environmentalism movement get the leverage to inflict their anti-Western and antihuman fantasies?
This leaves little doubt as to their interpretation of The Guardian's article. I responded with:
Nowhere in the article is there a call for mass extermination, you're being completely ridiculous in that. They may call for people to have less children, but killing children already here? Are you so deluded that you actually think a major British newspaper could call for such a thing and get away with it?
I quickly got a response:
The word "cull" is used by the author in the piece, and it's definition is the reduction in the size of a herd through killing some members of it. The author may have been unaware of the proper definition, but it is the word he used.
Obviously they must have been calling for genocide! Why else would they say "cull" unless they intended for millions of children to die?
My point is that grabbing a dictionary and harping on forever isn't the best way to ascertain extent. Sometimes people are being satirical. Sometimes people use the wrong word. Trying to say The Pirate Bay must be made to help piracy because it's The Pirate Bay isn't an argument, it's just noise.
I noticed this too, so I instinctively took a screenshot of my RSS reader to prove it did actually exist.
Anyone from Slashdot care to explain what the hell happened?
Considering that this is the 21st century, I'm guessing that /dev/Sda would have been a lot more useful :-)
Additionally, the GNU version of rm treats root as special, so "rm -rf --no-preserve-root /" would actually be necessary on most Linux systems, otherwise I believe it would just output a message saying something along the lines of "root cannot be removed" (I'm not going to find the exact message by actually trying this command myself, for obvious reasons).
Because people using the same computer will see their porn bookmarks. Embarrassing for a 15 year old when their mothers find the carefully hidden list by typing in something innocent in the address bar.
I think you mean embarrassing for a stupid 15 year old who has no idea how to use multiple user accounts or Firefox 3.5's Private Browsing mode.
They serve no purpose other than giving people a way to distribute malicious links.
I get around this by using the TinyURL Decoder script for Greasemonkey. It's explicitly designed to dynamically change shortened links back to the full-length originals, telling you exactly where they go without you having to visit the page itself.
There are only two disadvantages I've found. First, there is a marked delay before it actually decodes the URL, but that's unavoidable. I found the second when visiting the Katawa Shoujo Dev Blog. It seems for reasons related to limitations of Blogspot the link to the IRC server was encoded with TinyURL, because Blogspot wasn't happy with an irc:// link. Unfortunately, the decoder script decoded the URL producing a prompt from Firefox to open the link in an IRC client, then it somehow got re-encoded, the decoder script decoded it again, and I ended up in an infinite loop with Firefox opening up a new prompt every 10 seconds or so.
I managed to fix the second problem by blacklisting the site in TinyURL Decoder's preferences, and they seem to have since fixed the code on their end. But still, that was pretty fucking annoying.
On the contrary, the megaphone vans is an excellent system for weeding out bad candidates.
In the days before an election, I'd sleep in in the morning, with a notepad next to my bed. Every time I'm awakened by one of those vans, I write the candidate's name on the notepad and go back to sleep. Come election day, I go to the voting booth and pick the best guy on the ballot who is NOT on the notepad. Serves the sleep-disturbing selfish dickwads right.
In a related story, I was watching television at about 5PM here in Staffordshire just before the 2007 local elections when I heard one of those vans. This was unusual and annoying as we don't seem to get them much around here (I'd never heard one before, and I've never heard one since). I heard it loud and clear over the television though, telling me to vote for the "Ratepayers' Association" in the coming election. I did vote, I saw their candidates, and did not vote for any of them (I had three votes to give, one went to Labour, the other two to Tories). Curiously, I later saw a local newspaper headline while I was in the supermarket. The Ratepayers' Association had lost all of their council seats in the election.
I would certainly image it does feel faster than Firefox on Linux x64. As per bug #489146, TraceMonkey is still not enabled on x64 Linux builds. This does make it feel rather sluggish on any page with serious amounts of JavaScript (i.e. any Slashdot story), and is something that really bugs me about the 3.5 release. I'm sure I'll really enjoy it someday, but not until I can actually use the biggest enhancement of the release.
I'd like to agree with the willfail tag, alas, this is BSkyB, the UK's favourite waste of money, murdoch is far, far more popular than the BBC with a certain, very large, braindead section of the british public.
To add to this, I'll agree with the 'braindead' part of your post. I can't see why people would praise BSkyB over the BBC, the BBC at least provide the service we're paying them for. Here, I bought a new Sky+ HD box and an HD subscription, planning to replace an old Sky+ box with a shiny new HD box and replace a regular Sky box downstairs with the old Sky+ box, giving both our upstairs and downstairs TV the ability to pause and record programs. Sky seemed absolutely fine with all this, so far so good.
First screw up now. We should've received two new Sky cards, one for the new HD box and another for the old Sky+ box. We didn't. No problem the installers said, we'll just use the card from the regular old Sky box, put it in the HD box, call Sky so they can transfer the old card over, and we'd have full Sky HD in about four hours! We didn't. All we got were the free-to-air/view HD channels and the regular SD package channels, but none of the HD package channels, nor would the box operate as a Sky+ box, giving error messages telling us to upgrade our subscription whenever we tried to use such functions.
What follows now is a month and no less than five calls to Sky, where we were told (and I quote) getting the box actually working "could be a week, could be a month". Despite this, Sky wasted no time in debiting my account for the full amount, including the extra £10 for the HD channels I'm not getting. We would fight for a refund, except that we tried that once when Sky mistakenly debited us for an installation that never actually happened and only ended up wasting money on phone calls only for Sky to tell us they couldn't give us our money back but they could 'credit our account' for the amount, meaning they wouldn't charge us for our subscription for a while, but Sky simply don't do refunds (I phrase it as Sky getting confused, after all we give them money, how could it possibly work the other way around?).
As I type this, it has now been one month since I got Sky+ HD, and there is still no indication that Sky are actually going to activate the functions I'm paying them extra for. The lack of Sky+ is especially ridiculous as Sky actually changed their system so anyone with a Sky+ or Sky+ HD box (which I have) and a subscription to at least one channel package (we have four) automatically gets Sky+ without needing an additional subscription! So why do I still hit pause only to get:
Live Pause is not available
Call 08705 800800
to upgrade your Sky+ subscription
All Sky can tell us is that they're "having some problems" and will send an email to get some form filled out so they can actually provide us with the service as promised. We'd move television providers except that Sky has no competition here. Freeview isn't available due to the local transmitter not being upgraded and doesn't provide a fraction of the channels anyway. Cable is simply not available here in any way, shape, or form. So unlike with gas, electricity, broadband, or phone, there is no competition and we can't move. If this is somehow supposed to be better than the TV licence, I'm not seeing it.
Maybe using an "old style" keyboard had become something of a game, something that engineering students would compete on to prove they were hard core.
Or maybe, just maybe, it is only a piece of entertainment. If you are going to fail to suspend disbelief at the moment Scotty is able to use a keyboard proficiently how did you get through the previous scenes like the time travel thing, the whales communicating with aliens, and so on.
Actually, I think it's more (as I heard before) that it's OK to expect audiences to believe the impossible, but not the improbable. So it's fine that the crew of the Enterprise just time-travelled back to 1986 on a Bird of Prey, but it's not fine that a 23rd century engineer is able to touch type and operate a mid-80s Mac like he'd done this all his life.
It may not be completely logical, but since when is the human mind completely logical?
Scroll down to firefox-3.5. Stupidly, this package doesn't overwrite the firefox package, meaning that applications will still use 3.0 to open links. Even if you remove the firefox package, firefox-3.5 is still not used.
In Jaunty, this is because Firefox 3.0 remains the default version of Firefox (and the firefox package always points towards the default version of Firefox for that release). In Karmic, this is because the developers haven't switched the default from 3.0 to 3.5 yet, though they will soon.