I suggest the EXT4 devs take time off permanently and save us from their folly.
Why a desktop layer like KDE should have to detect the filesystem type and run disk syncs(!) to avoid data corruption is beyond me. I could get better results running OS X on top of UFS.
The EXT4 devs are blaming KDE for something that has nothing to do with them, and the former are actually repeating errors from the early releases of Reiserfs v3. Astoundingly, they refuse to take responsibility and blame the F&%&$ desktop layer. Lesson: Your apps are simply not safe on EXT4 using typical desktop hardware.
Truly, the BSD world is looking better and better all the time.
OSS 3 did on FreeBSD too. It's not a technical limitation of the hardware or the interfaces, it's a symptom of the NIH mentality on Linux. FreeBSD has supported software sound mixing with OSS since around 2000. I you want to play sound, just open/dev/dsp and write data there (on FreeBSD 4 and earlier you had a different device node for each virtual channel, so you needed to tell xmms, aRts and so on to each use a different one, with 5 and later the kernel does this for you). The problem with Linux sound is that, when 4Front decided to make the next OSS release proprietary, they decided to deprecate it in the kernel, rather than just maintain the open source fork. The FreeBSD folks kept developing their version and adding features, maintaining parity with the proprietary version. Now OSS4 is open source it's merged into OpenSolaris and FreeBSD has pulled in the relevant features ALSA looks both dated and nonportable, but the Linux devs have invested a lot in it so they don't want to throw it away.
Well when X applications become usable over a LAN link let me know, mmkay?
When X permits efficient sharing of a window or desktop between multiple users in a teleconference, do let me know! (Even the NX people say that X prevents this feature.)
Because I won't be holding my breath for it and you shouldn't either.
And that's over a LAN connection. OTOH the NX stuff doesn't work just fine, as it dictates that you run the ssh server a very specific way. Plus its proprietary and relatively difficult to setup.
By comparison the remote Windows and Mac protocols are a dream. They allow things like multi-user sharing of a single app instance... without resorting to 1980s raster technology like VNC. About 5 years ago I hoped NX would get the ability to share sessions without using VNC, but I've since given up and the NX authors say that the limitation is X11's fault.
To sort of summarize here: You have to be a very sheltered Unix user if you think remote X compares well with the standard bearers on the desktop.
Thank you, now I know that I'm a fascist. Problem, though. Which fascist power do I support? You might propose a group of fascist-like politicians who would like to be in power.
Yeah, because fascists have always been in power and didn't launch campaigns to intimidate the populations of liberal democracies undergoing financial crisis. And they sure didn't regard citizenry with an aversion to violent solutions as 'pansies'.
As with the fallacy of market fundamentalism where all actors are assumed to be perfectly rational and necessarily have access to information needed to make sound decisions, gun fundamentalism holds that the gun increases safety because the gun holders will simply know the right thing to do without gross misunderstandings or overriding passions.
I am not going any further with this because you haven't shown the least bit of intellectual honesty. For instance, you assert that the nutbagger "protesters" appeared with guns where there was nothing to fear in an attempt to insinuate it was the gun-less people who had a problem with fear. What twisted, awful double-talk.
However, it is interesting to know that guns are your antidote to fear.
That is a ridiculously long-winded attempt to deny that the behavior of those nutbaggers was not an intimidation tactic used to prevent other citizens from discussing an issue. In your view it was perfectly legal, but your fascist tendency is blinding you from the reality that it was disturbance of the peace AND a violation of others' First Amendment rights.
And I'm sorry to tell you that where the rest of humanity is concerned, respect for free speech is a much more basic indicator of an open democratic society than is personal ownership of guns. The latter hardly rates at all because violent revolutionary action against a government (esp. an elected one) will make criminals out of the revolutionaries anyway.
Or it could be that people are shying away from something that is coming under heavy surveillance.
Lately the free I2P network has seen a lot of new activity on iMule... their anonymized version of eMule. There is also a bittorrent site on there called "thepiratebay.i2p" which looks the same and claims to be adding much of TPB's listings.
The down side is of course speed and I2P is really only 'convenient' for stuff like mp3 files; otherwise you have to be very patient for 2 hour movie to download.
you didn't read my original post, or you would have realized it wasn't so much about the interpretation of the Constitution, but they way that even its most vague statements are worshiped as immutable gospel.
The Constitution is amendable and should be brought up to date to address how industry has made arms both more vicious and numerous.
That political groups can show up armed at town hall discussions and shout everyone down with rhetoric about the need for bloodshed unchallenged is a clear example of the Constitution's failing to protect democratic processes from "threatening and belligerent behavior".
So what I'd like to know is where's the literacy on your part? Am I to understand that you are here to spout your point of view without more than a cursory reading or understanding of what others are saying?
Please try not to be so presumptuous and sneering when you are asking someone for more information, at least if you want people to think you're at all sincere in considering their side of an issue.
...but somewhat old-fashioned in its terminology and imagery.
The role of having one's "fingers on every button" suggests today's large conglomerated corporations, as it is they who intimately and inescapably interact multiple times per day with each adult citi^H^H^H^Hconsumer with many divisions that now even directly provide us with government services.
Today's government is a sham (or 'cover') in the business of legitimizing corporate initiatives and power, and has been outsourcing so many of its functions that a corporate elite could easily putsch Washington D.C. aside and resume with business (assuming they could market this new authority to the populace, which is conceivable IMO).
The ultimate bureaucrat is a private corporate functionary who is so removed from public accountability that they make publicly appointed bureaucrats look like paragons of respect and efficacy.
Is that why a particular group of people are showing up at healthcare town hall discussions with firearms (incl. semi-automatic) on display and shouting about bloodshed? I suppose you think opposing groups should show up with firearms and do the same?
The problem with the U.S. Constitution today is that its worshiped by a fundamentalist cult that makes meaningful changes to the power structure impossible. And as long as firearms are treated as an individual right, the oft vaguely-defined 'bad guys' will be assumed as armed to the teeth and the government will have all the public support they need for the continued militarization of domestic police forces.
It's a scary thing when what you think is gone and hidden can suddenly be dredged up by accident at inopportune times.
Indeed, its a big security and privacy issue that extends to other software too.
For instance, some relatively popular Linux distros used to buffer all sound output if there was a blockage at/dev/dsp. Then when the blocking program was closed, you would hear all of the buffered sound output from the other programs.
Also with Linux distros, which is still a problem on some misc systems, you will not infrequently see random bits of images from the current/last session when logging out or in. Very unsettling as I never experienced these A/V buffer management oversights with Windows =>2000 or OS X.
Authentication protocols like PKI that use encryption would make many sources of malware unambiguous. The pretty much leaves email and discs as the only malware carriers that are hard to track.
Um, according to the article the new Theora is targetted at small videos embedded in web pages. Acceleration hardly matters there. Indeed, most of the overhead experienced with Flash-based stuff is inefficiency in passing through from flash to the browser window (that is why playing a saved FLV uses about 1/4 the CPU power that flash+browser needed to play it).
Theora is not being targetted at large, hi-def formats yet so you can save the hot air for now.
The answer to problems created by government regulation is not more regulation.
This is one of the more dumbed-down and destructive libertarian slogans being regurgitated by pro-corporate toadies.
A "100% pure" (read: extremist) de-regulated market cannot produce a cable TV or ISP period. So yes, the answer to abuses created by monopoly conditions is indeed government regulation of an industry that government made possible.
As consumers we have zero power in this market. As citizens we have a chance to rectify an intolerable situation.
Anyway, if you actually want to give people a way to run encryption software on their PCs, while ensuring that anyone who seizes their machine cannot tell that any encryption has been going on, these are the hurdles that you'd have to clear.
I don't think any computer manufacturer or application vendor is going to enable encryption by default. And in the case of P2P, encryption doesn't help much without an anonymizer like I2P (which has gotten rather good lately, but still at least an order of magnitude slower than regular sharing so something on the 2-10MB range is relatively quick but full length videos take days).
I do find Soulskill's words on the subject less than well thought out, as I thought it would be obvious to techies that only an encrypted partition (not a volume file) automatically created during the initial computer setup / unpackaging would provide the kind of deniability needed escape persecution in Britain.
This is unlikely to happen unless A) PC makers somehow make it a selling point, or B) applications that want to setup an encrypted partition encourage users to "Now connect a blank external drive" for encrypted formatting and normal use with the app.
Incidentally, its trivial to turn on whole disk encryption with an Ubuntu install disc (as long as you have the alternate version)... you could even do it by accident. I wonder how such an Ubuntu setup would fare in the British courts.
I didn't appreciate OSX until I had to port our software over to it. It was painful at first, but in the process, I fell hard-core in love with OSX. Except for the dated Unix command line, it's everything that Fedora Core ever dreamed of.
Seeing how Fedora has brought roughly zero innovation to the desktop, I think its safe to say that OS X somewhat surpasses the Fedora developers' imaginations.
Would a Microsoft backdoor / killswitch be considered a fraudulently concealed bug?
Very interesting question. Its not inconceivable that a closed-source vendor like MS would 'harvest' undisclosed bugs as they found them, for use as backdoors (with a kill switch being a specific kind of backdoor) at some later time. Then in an emergency a special client like the US Government could "stumble" upon the vulnerability and exploit it.
The DNS servers that Comcast passes to the home router and PCs via normal DHCP can take as long as 8 or 9 seconds to resolve, making many web pages unbearably slow to surf. This is intentional PUNISHMENT for not installing their creep-ware on your computer which then switches DNS settings to their faster servers.
Comcast's DNS service is terrible by default, and adding DNS hijacking with a "nice" opt-out process only makes it worse not better.
Save me from the polish
on
KDE 4.3 Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I like GUIs as much as anyone (and its the reason why the last system I bought is a Mac) but as a 10-year Linux user I already know this new package of FOSS loveliness is not going to save Kubuntu from being truly awful. It doesn't change the fact that so much in the Kubuntu GUI is broken (like not being able to set a static IP).
And I suspect this release will not suddenly display some inspiration or direction for either of those projects. What I will have, yet again, is a pile of (sometimes brilliantly coded) pieces that don't quite fit together or come together to make end users say, "Oh, I get it!"
There is a heap of stuff that KDE (and Gnome, and the distros) won't do because no one (not a single soul) will ever take responsibility for facilitating critical use cases across these projects. And that is why after all these years, the Linux desktop still "feels wrong" to most techies (and more confounding to average users than other OSes).
Some weeks back I was considering a switch to Gnome, but then a story popped up on Slashdot (with impeccable timing) announcing that Gnome will be put through the same whole-integer re-write process that KDE just went through.
Think installing newer MS Office screws up your IE, or the other way around.
Not on a Mac it won't. But why bother yourself with the gold standard for the desktop when MS's poor engineering can be used as an excuse for poor engineering in FOSS.
Installing the newer Firefox (3.5) from repositories was not a problem.
Excuse you, but: * Renaming the browser to "Shiretoko" is a problem * Nor is the icon recognizable to a Firefox user * Not having it replace 3.0 (and having it run in tandem with 3.0) is a problem * Pulling in most of the Gnome desktop on a KDE system is a problem * If you're on a netbook or similarly space-constrained system, having the whole.mozilla folder duplicated might not be the best idea, depending on what extensions are being used. Likewise, a user that is uncertain about the tandem Firefoxes might lose data by saving new info in the Firefox profile that doesn't get carried forward.
Installing the newer Firefox was also not a problem from the tarball (just untar and run).
Did you even stop to think about what condition that will leave the browser plugins and file associations?
And what is the user supposed to click on when they untar the upgrade? Who is going to tell them what it is and explain why they lost their icon??
Just stop and look at the broken-ness I've outlined above. These problems are the result of not having a feature-stable platform and I didn't encounter anything like them when upgrading Firefox on Windows and OS X.
Even worse, there is everyone like you in your tiny Linux corner steadfastly glossing over each and every user-hostile pothole on this lovely road that only sysadmins and their grannies ever seem to enjoy.
But Ubuntu doesn't offer many recent app versions (like Firefox 3.5) for an OS that is merely 18 months old. You have to be fairly expert to do the upgrades yourself, downloading and resolving dependencies or finding a source for backports... and both options are often pretty unsatisfactory even to those of us with the know-how (lack of proper testing, subtly botched compiler and integration options, packages that cause headaches on subsequent system updates, etc.).
In the case of upgrading Firefox, you must untar the binaries to somewhere in/bin and then properly re-integrate the plugin directories and other details like DE integration (way, way beyond what an earnest novice will put up with). If you do this for someone else, you'll be left with an app that needs frequent security updates but no way to do them without your personal intervention.
Acknowledging this, the way that 'Linux' has evolved is pretty hostile to desktop applications, even an app as commonly 'tied' to the OS as the web browser.
Slashdot Mirror
I suggest the EXT4 devs take time off permanently and save us from their folly.
Why a desktop layer like KDE should have to detect the filesystem type and run disk syncs(!) to avoid data corruption is beyond me. I could get better results running OS X on top of UFS.
The EXT4 devs are blaming KDE for something that has nothing to do with them, and the former are actually repeating errors from the early releases of Reiserfs v3. Astoundingly, they refuse to take responsibility and blame the F&%&$ desktop layer. Lesson: Your apps are simply not safe on EXT4 using typical desktop hardware.
Truly, the BSD world is looking better and better all the time.
OSS 3 did on FreeBSD too. It's not a technical limitation of the hardware or the interfaces, it's a symptom of the NIH mentality on Linux. FreeBSD has supported software sound mixing with OSS since around 2000. I you want to play sound, just open /dev/dsp and write data there (on FreeBSD 4 and earlier you had a different device node for each virtual channel, so you needed to tell xmms, aRts and so on to each use a different one, with 5 and later the kernel does this for you). The problem with Linux sound is that, when 4Front decided to make the next OSS release proprietary, they decided to deprecate it in the kernel, rather than just maintain the open source fork. The FreeBSD folks kept developing their version and adding features, maintaining parity with the proprietary version. Now OSS4 is open source it's merged into OpenSolaris and FreeBSD has pulled in the relevant features ALSA looks both dated and nonportable, but the Linux devs have invested a lot in it so they don't want to throw it away.
Indeed. One of the main reasons I wrote my sig:
Oh, dear.
Well when X applications become usable over a LAN link let me know, mmkay?
When X permits efficient sharing of a window or desktop between multiple users in a teleconference, do let me know!
(Even the NX people say that X prevents this feature.)
Because I won't be holding my breath for it and you shouldn't either.
And that's over a LAN connection. OTOH the NX stuff doesn't work just fine, as it dictates that you run the ssh server a very specific way. Plus its proprietary and relatively difficult to setup.
By comparison the remote Windows and Mac protocols are a dream. They allow things like multi-user sharing of a single app instance... without resorting to 1980s raster technology like VNC. About 5 years ago I hoped NX would get the ability to share sessions without using VNC, but I've since given up and the NX authors say that the limitation is X11's fault.
To sort of summarize here: You have to be a very sheltered Unix user if you think remote X compares well with the standard bearers on the desktop.
Thank you, now I know that I'm a fascist. Problem, though. Which fascist power do I support? You might propose a group of fascist-like politicians who would like to be in power.
Yeah, because fascists have always been in power and didn't launch campaigns to intimidate the populations of liberal democracies undergoing financial crisis. And they sure didn't regard citizenry with an aversion to violent solutions as 'pansies'.
As with the fallacy of market fundamentalism where all actors are assumed to be perfectly rational and necessarily have access to information needed to make sound decisions, gun fundamentalism holds that the gun increases safety because the gun holders will simply know the right thing to do without gross misunderstandings or overriding passions.
I am not going any further with this because you haven't shown the least bit of intellectual honesty. For instance, you assert that the nutbagger "protesters" appeared with guns where there was nothing to fear in an attempt to insinuate it was the gun-less people who had a problem with fear. What twisted, awful double-talk.
However, it is interesting to know that guns are your antidote to fear.
That is a ridiculously long-winded attempt to deny that the behavior of those nutbaggers was not an intimidation tactic used to prevent other citizens from discussing an issue. In your view it was perfectly legal, but your fascist tendency is blinding you from the reality that it was disturbance of the peace AND a violation of others' First Amendment rights.
And I'm sorry to tell you that where the rest of humanity is concerned, respect for free speech is a much more basic indicator of an open democratic society than is personal ownership of guns. The latter hardly rates at all because violent revolutionary action against a government (esp. an elected one) will make criminals out of the revolutionaries anyway.
Or it could be that people are shying away from something that is coming under heavy surveillance.
Lately the free I2P network has seen a lot of new activity on iMule... their anonymized version of eMule. There is also a bittorrent site on there called "thepiratebay.i2p" which looks the same and claims to be adding much of TPB's listings.
The down side is of course speed and I2P is really only 'convenient' for stuff like mp3 files; otherwise you have to be very patient for 2 hour movie to download.
you didn't read my original post, or you would have realized it wasn't so much about the interpretation of the Constitution, but they way that even its most vague statements are worshiped as immutable gospel.
The Constitution is amendable and should be brought up to date to address how industry has made arms both more vicious and numerous.
That political groups can show up armed at town hall discussions and shout everyone down with rhetoric about the need for bloodshed unchallenged is a clear example of the Constitution's failing to protect democratic processes from "threatening and belligerent behavior".
So what I'd like to know is where's the literacy on your part? Am I to understand that you are here to spout your point of view without more than a cursory reading or understanding of what others are saying?
Please try not to be so presumptuous and sneering when you are asking someone for more information, at least if you want people to think you're at all sincere in considering their side of an issue.
Nevertheless...
http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-08-17-voa45.cfm
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/17/man-carrying-semi-automat_n_261279.html
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2009/08/11/Obama-town-hall-meeting-draws-protesters/UPI-61621250011836/
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/editorial/bal-ed.guns21aug21,0,1613427.story
...but somewhat old-fashioned in its terminology and imagery.
The role of having one's "fingers on every button" suggests today's large conglomerated corporations, as it is they who intimately and inescapably interact multiple times per day with each adult citi^H^H^H^Hconsumer with many divisions that now even directly provide us with government services.
Today's government is a sham (or 'cover') in the business of legitimizing corporate initiatives and power, and has been outsourcing so many of its functions that a corporate elite could easily putsch Washington D.C. aside and resume with business (assuming they could market this new authority to the populace, which is conceivable IMO).
The ultimate bureaucrat is a private corporate functionary who is so removed from public accountability that they make publicly appointed bureaucrats look like paragons of respect and efficacy.
Oh.
Is that why a particular group of people are showing up at healthcare town hall discussions with firearms (incl. semi-automatic) on display and shouting about bloodshed? I suppose you think opposing groups should show up with firearms and do the same?
The problem with the U.S. Constitution today is that its worshiped by a fundamentalist cult that makes meaningful changes to the power structure impossible. And as long as firearms are treated as an individual right, the oft vaguely-defined 'bad guys' will be assumed as armed to the teeth and the government will have all the public support they need for the continued militarization of domestic police forces.
It's a scary thing when what you think is gone and hidden can suddenly be dredged up by accident at inopportune times.
Indeed, its a big security and privacy issue that extends to other software too.
For instance, some relatively popular Linux distros used to buffer all sound output if there was a blockage at /dev/dsp. Then when the blocking program was closed, you would hear all of the buffered sound output from the other programs.
Also with Linux distros, which is still a problem on some misc systems, you will not infrequently see random bits of images from the current/last session when logging out or in. Very unsettling as I never experienced these A/V buffer management oversights with Windows =>2000 or OS X.
Authentication protocols like PKI that use encryption would make many sources of malware unambiguous. The pretty much leaves email and discs as the only malware carriers that are hard to track.
Um, according to the article the new Theora is targetted at small videos embedded in web pages. Acceleration hardly matters there. Indeed, most of the overhead experienced with Flash-based stuff is inefficiency in passing through from flash to the browser window (that is why playing a saved FLV uses about 1/4 the CPU power that flash+browser needed to play it).
Theora is not being targetted at large, hi-def formats yet so you can save the hot air for now.
Would you care to read the article and address the claims that the NEW Theora is just as good as H264 for web video (small formats) but not hi-def?
No?? Then you are OT.
The answer to problems created by government regulation is not more regulation.
This is one of the more dumbed-down and destructive libertarian slogans being regurgitated by pro-corporate toadies.
A "100% pure" (read: extremist) de-regulated market cannot produce a cable TV or ISP period. So yes, the answer to abuses created by monopoly conditions is indeed government regulation of an industry that government made possible.
As consumers we have zero power in this market. As citizens we have a chance to rectify an intolerable situation.
Anyway, if you actually want to give people a way to run encryption software on their PCs, while ensuring that anyone who seizes their machine cannot tell that any encryption has been going on, these are the hurdles that you'd have to clear.
I don't think any computer manufacturer or application vendor is going to enable encryption by default. And in the case of P2P, encryption doesn't help much without an anonymizer like I2P (which has gotten rather good lately, but still at least an order of magnitude slower than regular sharing so something on the 2-10MB range is relatively quick but full length videos take days).
I do find Soulskill's words on the subject less than well thought out, as I thought it would be obvious to techies that only an encrypted partition (not a volume file) automatically created during the initial computer setup / unpackaging would provide the kind of deniability needed escape persecution in Britain.
This is unlikely to happen unless A) PC makers somehow make it a selling point, or B) applications that want to setup an encrypted partition encourage users to "Now connect a blank external drive" for encrypted formatting and normal use with the app.
Incidentally, its trivial to turn on whole disk encryption with an Ubuntu install disc (as long as you have the alternate version)... you could even do it by accident. I wonder how such an Ubuntu setup would fare in the British courts.
I didn't appreciate OSX until I had to port our software over to it. It was painful at first, but in the process, I fell hard-core in love with OSX. Except for the dated Unix command line, it's everything that Fedora Core ever dreamed of.
Seeing how Fedora has brought roughly zero innovation to the desktop, I think its safe to say that OS X somewhat surpasses the Fedora developers' imaginations.
Would a Microsoft backdoor / killswitch be considered a fraudulently concealed bug?
Very interesting question. Its not inconceivable that a closed-source vendor like MS would 'harvest' undisclosed bugs as they found them, for use as backdoors (with a kill switch being a specific kind of backdoor) at some later time. Then in an emergency a special client like the US Government could "stumble" upon the vulnerability and exploit it.
The DNS servers that Comcast passes to the home router and PCs via normal DHCP can take as long as 8 or 9 seconds to resolve, making many web pages unbearably slow to surf. This is intentional PUNISHMENT for not installing their creep-ware on your computer which then switches DNS settings to their faster servers.
Comcast's DNS service is terrible by default, and adding DNS hijacking with a "nice" opt-out process only makes it worse not better.
I like GUIs as much as anyone (and its the reason why the last system I bought is a Mac) but as a 10-year Linux user I already know this new package of FOSS loveliness is not going to save Kubuntu from being truly awful. It doesn't change the fact that so much in the Kubuntu GUI is broken (like not being able to set a static IP).
And I suspect this release will not suddenly display some inspiration or direction for either of those projects. What I will have, yet again, is a pile of (sometimes brilliantly coded) pieces that don't quite fit together or come together to make end users say, "Oh, I get it!"
There is a heap of stuff that KDE (and Gnome, and the distros) won't do because no one (not a single soul) will ever take responsibility for facilitating critical use cases across these projects. And that is why after all these years, the Linux desktop still "feels wrong" to most techies (and more confounding to average users than other OSes).
Some weeks back I was considering a switch to Gnome, but then a story popped up on Slashdot (with impeccable timing) announcing that Gnome will be put through the same whole-integer re-write process that KDE just went through.
No thanks.
Think installing newer MS Office screws up your IE, or the other way around.
Not on a Mac it won't. But why bother yourself with the gold standard for the desktop when MS's poor engineering can be used as an excuse for poor engineering in FOSS.
Dude, the current version of Firefox is 3.5, not 3.0.11+build2+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.9.04.1.barf.barf.barf.
This is so pathetic. And no, your package manager + repo didn't even do a half-assed job.
Installing the newer Firefox (3.5) from repositories was not a problem.
Excuse you, but: .mozilla folder duplicated might not be the best idea, depending on what extensions are being used. Likewise, a user that is uncertain about the tandem Firefoxes might lose data by saving new info in the Firefox profile that doesn't get carried forward.
* Renaming the browser to "Shiretoko" is a problem
* Nor is the icon recognizable to a Firefox user
* Not having it replace 3.0 (and having it run in tandem with 3.0) is a problem
* Pulling in most of the Gnome desktop on a KDE system is a problem
* If you're on a netbook or similarly space-constrained system, having the whole
Installing the newer Firefox was also not a problem from the tarball (just untar and run).
Did you even stop to think about what condition that will leave the browser plugins and file associations?
And what is the user supposed to click on when they untar the upgrade? Who is going to tell them what it is and explain why they lost their icon??
Just stop and look at the broken-ness I've outlined above. These problems are the result of not having a feature-stable platform and I didn't encounter anything like them when upgrading Firefox on Windows and OS X.
Even worse, there is everyone like you in your tiny Linux corner steadfastly glossing over each and every user-hostile pothole on this lovely road that only sysadmins and their grannies ever seem to enjoy.
But Ubuntu doesn't offer many recent app versions (like Firefox 3.5) for an OS that is merely 18 months old. You have to be fairly expert to do the upgrades yourself, downloading and resolving dependencies or finding a source for backports... and both options are often pretty unsatisfactory even to those of us with the know-how (lack of proper testing, subtly botched compiler and integration options, packages that cause headaches on subsequent system updates, etc.).
In the case of upgrading Firefox, you must untar the binaries to somewhere in /bin and then properly re-integrate the plugin directories and other details like DE integration (way, way beyond what an earnest novice will put up with). If you do this for someone else, you'll be left with an app that needs frequent security updates but no way to do them without your personal intervention.
Acknowledging this, the way that 'Linux' has evolved is pretty hostile to desktop applications, even an app as commonly 'tied' to the OS as the web browser.