Well, debian does backport all relevant security bugfixes. That aside, there will always be newer, bugfixed software. Debian stable focuses in being a bugfree distribution, not a distribution comprised only of bugfree software. Which means there are, ideally, no version incompatibilities nor out-of-the-box misconfigurations. Given Debian's almost inconceivably big repositories, that's quite the herculean task.
For the record, KDE has been stuck in 4.8.4 for about six months, since the freeze started, but since 4.8.4-2, all bugs that initially affected my machine seem to have been ironed out. Whether that's because they have implemented upstream bugfixes or because they were actually Debian bugs to begin with I can't really say, but if you campare it to, say, Fedora 17's or even Kubuntu 12.04's KDE 4.8, you'll realize how marvelously quirkless Debian's KDE is and why it pays to have stabler distributions.
Bioshock, by itself, could be much better were it quite a lot harder. If you felt like you couldn't survive another encounter (or could not spare the resources for it), like System Shock 2, then navigating the hallways would be a lot more memorable and enemies would be more frightening. I also think Big Daddies should have been treated like those monster-thingies from Amnesia: something you could not defeat. It would add a much needed layer of caution to a game that's already incredibly atmospheric and involving but doesn't exploit those characteristics often enough.
That's what I hate about perceptive generous people and their expensive and thoughtful gifts. They always manage to get whatever you need almost right. That "almost" part is enough to leave you slightly uncomfortable with what you have but not enough to invest money into something better, since your gains would now be disproportionate to the amount spent. Just give me a cheap, ugly fucking novelty tie I can throw away and we'll both be a lot happier.
Not the only competition, though, If that's a factor on your choice of phone, wait a bit and buy comething with Tizen, Ubuntu, Firefox OS etc. Because, from an user's - and society's - point of view, there's good and bad competition. And competition that litigates aggressively to ban competitors, like Apple, or to extort competitors, like Microsoft, is surely bad competition.
Not on the desktop nor mobile markets, no. However, given that IOS, due to its widespread adoption, constitutes a big market for apps itself, and one that's artificially limited by Apple to have only one store - theirs. It could be argued that Apple's SDK provides a means to installing third-party apps, but it's not freely available. I don't see it as a big issue for consumers because it's easy enough today to jump to another similarly capable mobile platform (unlike moving away from PCs with Windows, which is/was a de facto standard).
I'm from São Paulo, too. I have been around, though. Brazilians are very funny when it comes to patriotism. We run around telling jokes about the country and making fun of our politicians, customs et al. However, we're extremely protective when it comes to foreigners. Stallone made a borderline derogatory comment aout Brazil a few years ago and he was immediately and publically vilified. It's not outspoken or even acknowledged like US patriotism, but it's definitely there. And it's worse when it comes to Portugal, due to our history and how it's taught in schools.
Yes, I am. I also know he visited for a while. However, his contact with the country has been certainly limited. He often mistakes european Portuguese with brazilian Portuguese (he probably did some language research prior to writing the book, but neglected to account for the plethora of major differences between the two dialects, making the end result a jumble that's funny to both kinds of portuguese speakers), makes cultural/historical blunders like a bunch of space brazilians naming a colony Lusitânia when it's somewhat ludicrous to name a colony after your colonizers, especially with the overall sentment towards Portugal being quite adversarial. Not major faults and they don't make the book unreadable*, it just breaks immersion every page or so with nonsensical names (they are all hilarious), misspelled words, bad grammar, bizarre, archaic diminutives, bad translations and so on (often complete with explanations that only make it worse for being plain wrong).
*not for me, at least - I still thought it was a good book, but my girlfriend (who really liked Ender's Game) couldn't get past the second chapter. She read the portuguese version, which is arguably worse as you're reading your native language being weirdly distorted in your own native language.
I didn't really see it in Speaker, so I guess you're thinking of a later novel. What did put me off in Speaker was the atrocious Portuguese. You don't really tie in so many cultural and linguistic references if you're not familiar with them. Really, that whole aspect of the book was very badly done.
Ditto. My mother couldn't even transition to a laptop, since she uses e-mail a lot and demands a full-sized keyboard (preferably far from a trackpad, since it's easy to touch or rub it by mistake and move your cursor and/or click to somewhere it's not supposed to). A tablet left her profoundly disgusted with the experience of typing on an unergonomical hard surface, so a PC it is. And, after lots of time spent maintaining her XP machine, I did the unthinkable: set up Debian stable for her. Works like a charm, breakage of whatever kind is nonexistant and I don't have to worry about viruses. It did take a while to set up initially (while I figured all her use-cases and adjusted the machine accordingly), but from there it has been smooth sailing.
For the submitter, that's what I'd add: any sort of transition will demand lots of your time, don't fool yourself. You can either try to instruct her, which will take very long, or pull an Apple and lock her machine down in a way that she can only use whatever you want her to. As long as you do a good job of predicting her needs, it's far less hassle in the long run.
A final thought: educating an elderly citizen to use VMs is easier than one might think.
Yeah, every freeze sucks, and it's been hard to stomach this last one. glibc6 2.13 and buggy KDE 4.8 (4.7 was great) are really getting on my nerves. I've heard wonderful stuff about Sabayon and loved the live session. If I can't make it to Wheezy's release, I'll give it a serious try (probably in conjunction with Mint 14).
* and should you succede against all odds, we would all benefit.
It's possible they have a small team who has overcome all the corner cases discovered by the Xorg, XBC, and Wayland folks over the past couple decades by fundamentally re-factoring the problem into a more correct solution and have achieved excellent performance by doing so.
It's also possible that space aliens gave them this technology, but that's only slightly more likely.
The last time I bought an LG phone it died 4 times in 2 months and then battery broke a few months later. I've never seen a decent LG smart phone.
If they're shotgunning the OSes hoping for success then they're barking up the wrong tree. LG is the problem not Android, Windows, Ubuntu or Firefox and the solution needs to be from LG: better devices.
Hum... LG does make crappy phones, but I have never had a problem with their reliability. In fact, from what I've seen, they seem to be quite durable and well-built. The problem is what they're built of. LG has beautiful phones with 4.3" screens, ICS and Adreno 200 - a GPU which was already obsolete in 2010. ( see Optimus L7). The whole L line is utter crap, in fact, being incredibly underspecced. Except for the L3, which would be cheap enough to be a good contender if not for that hideous screen. Really, they can't get any device entirely right. I have an Optimus Hub, an almost decent phone. Its only fault is having 150Mb of internal memory, which is unthinkable for a smartphone. I can, of course, just use a memory card partition for my apps but it's not a very elegant solution and tends to cause all kinds of weird read errors. On top of all that, their Optimus UI is pretty heavy and uglier than stock Android.
Also, the Linux Defenders 911 is made in Flash, which was recently discontinued for Linux as a whole. Really, I think it's a good idea, but it's leaking irony all over.
...which also doesn't work. I think people just aren't designed to grasp a community as big as the one we have. When you live in a village, you see the consequences of your actions, so you avoid shitting in the pond. Today, we have no idea where our shit comes from and who's dying in the manufacturing process. It's not just that there's no available time in our lives to inspect what we buy (both because we buy too much crap and because our time is limited and information simply isn't readily available). We don't even follow politics anymore, because everything is too big and bureaucratic. We can dismiss everything because we live very abstracted lives, so lots of people do it.
Phoronix isn't exactly a good news site. Nevertheless, it's probably the only site that does Linux hardware reviews, follows the progress of various open source initiatives and does that having a single semi-journalist. Good, properly staffed computer news sites out there like Anand and Tom's Hardware completely ignore Linux, Unix, BSD and what have you, therefore, inaccurate as it can be, Phoronix is the best source of information we have. Plus, bitching about inaccuracies on slashdot is borderline hilarious. This is the holy grail of fabricated flamebaits.
but you still in principle are not against taking the movie or novel that my brother put his heart, soul, and financial future into making and giving it away to anybody who wants it, because in your theory he has no particular right to the fruits of such labor because it's bits on a disk instead of, say, a piece of hardware like your the expensive computers and smartphones middle-class users use to view the content, right?
I can't speak for him, but I, particularly, have nothing agains that sort of distribution. For different reasons, though. Movies and novels aren't necessary. They're either entertainment or propaganda (by that I merely mean something that conveys a political message or social commentary). In the first case, it should be relegated to hobbyists, partly because I think profit is a lousy motive for quality writing (see: Dan Brown, Stephanie Meyer, a bunch of other crap) and partly because the Shire is a very comfortable environment for writing. In the second case, novels and movies (particularly documentaries) are socially useful to us, but they still should be done in the name of its message, not for profit. Otherwise you're tempted to distort your views for market acceptance, which is counterproductive for fomenting honest social debate.
Agreed. You can disable it. And you don't even have to fiddle around with apt or anything, it's an option present in their own GUI. Slashdot, Google and the whole rest of the internet is much more annoying, since to disable ads you have to download AdBlock. Canonical is giving you a choice. "Here, use our ad-supported OS. You don't want ads? Ok, then, just use the damn thing entirely free anyway!" I fail to see how that can be anything other than completely ethical.
All joking aside, though, I also got curious. And, as I went to Google College, unlike some underprivileged folks, let me share my inaccessible knowledge: http://genetics.thetech.org/ask/ask68
Will someone with a better understanding of genetics please explain how a genetic test is even possible?
My understanding is that identical twins -- arising from the same zygote -- are genetically identical. Not just "pretty much identical" as the article states.
What possible "genetic test" is being proposed that could differentiate between the brothers? Is the town being scammed?
Of course not! Modern laboratories are equipeed with new, state-of-the-art dice for such quandries.
The cost seems a little inflated, though. I could do the same test for a penny (that would luckily also cover all equipment expenses).
No, import fees are 60% of the product's value. The tricky part is that shipping is included in the price when applying the tax. Which means bigass importers get much lower prices than your average Joe (average Joe can't order enough to fill a freighter and distill the shipping taxes). Also, microprocessors are exempt from import taxes (motherboards and GPUs are still crazy expensive, though). I have no idea how they deal with smartphones' SoCs, but I know they don't pay the full 60%.
For purposes of comparison, A Galaxy S3 in Brazil costs about R$1600 or $800, versus $549 in the US. An interesting thing about the brazilian market, though, is that electronics do not get progressively cheaper once better/newer stuff is released. You can still buy a Galaxy Nexus for the same price of a Nexus S. A motorola RAZR XT910 still costs the same as a RAZR i. A used, defective product is still sold for 60-80% of its retail value (no joke - you can see lots of ads for broken notebooks, and they are incredibly funny. Most of them read "it won't turn on, I don't know what happened". An obsolete notebook (Turion, IIRC) had had its screen torn off, but it was being sold for about 70% of its original retail value. The seller's rationale was that it worked if you plugged it to a monitor.)
To be completely fair, that's not a just comparison. Windows should be compared to a distribution, not to the Linux kernel. Windows $version is a fixed release, with ABIs well defined. The same is true for any stable version of Debian or CentOS. What happens is Linux is in constant development and the myriad of distros advance too fast. If we all ran RHEL, we would have absolutely no problem with Xorg ABI changes and drivers. But developers build for the latest libraries, thus the distros have to keep fairly current and the end result is the mess we find ourselves in. That's why the push for good open drivers is important - closed source is ok, but it hardly ever keeps the pace with free software, resulting in woe for the users. A distribution's work is exactly filtering the chaos and presenting us harmonic packages, which is easier said than done. Also, remember Vista faced difficulties - IIRC, because there were almost no drivers for it and the few that existed were mostly crap. Microsoft learned, though, and never broke driver ABI since.
Though your complaint makes sense, I'm positive there's a practical reason why Xorg and kernel developers often break driver ABIs. I know Xorg 1.11 broke driver ABI to correct a bug, I don't know about the more recent instances of breakage. If it's a question of organizational culture as you pose, then Wayland might sidestep it. We can hope, at least.
Slashdot Mirror
I think a better toilet-related analogy for slow intake and fast discharge would be someone at an all-you-can-eat taco buffet.
Well, debian does backport all relevant security bugfixes. That aside, there will always be newer, bugfixed software. Debian stable focuses in being a bugfree distribution, not a distribution comprised only of bugfree software. Which means there are, ideally, no version incompatibilities nor out-of-the-box misconfigurations. Given Debian's almost inconceivably big repositories, that's quite the herculean task.
For the record, KDE has been stuck in 4.8.4 for about six months, since the freeze started, but since 4.8.4-2, all bugs that initially affected my machine seem to have been ironed out. Whether that's because they have implemented upstream bugfixes or because they were actually Debian bugs to begin with I can't really say, but if you campare it to, say, Fedora 17's or even Kubuntu 12.04's KDE 4.8, you'll realize how marvelously quirkless Debian's KDE is and why it pays to have stabler distributions.
Bioshock, by itself, could be much better were it quite a lot harder. If you felt like you couldn't survive another encounter (or could not spare the resources for it), like System Shock 2, then navigating the hallways would be a lot more memorable and enemies would be more frightening. I also think Big Daddies should have been treated like those monster-thingies from Amnesia: something you could not defeat. It would add a much needed layer of caution to a game that's already incredibly atmospheric and involving but doesn't exploit those characteristics often enough.
That's what I hate about perceptive generous people and their expensive and thoughtful gifts. They always manage to get whatever you need almost right. That "almost" part is enough to leave you slightly uncomfortable with what you have but not enough to invest money into something better, since your gains would now be disproportionate to the amount spent. Just give me a cheap, ugly fucking novelty tie I can throw away and we'll both be a lot happier.
Not the only competition, though, If that's a factor on your choice of phone, wait a bit and buy comething with Tizen, Ubuntu, Firefox OS etc. Because, from an user's - and society's - point of view, there's good and bad competition. And competition that litigates aggressively to ban competitors, like Apple, or to extort competitors, like Microsoft, is surely bad competition.
Not on the desktop nor mobile markets, no. However, given that IOS, due to its widespread adoption, constitutes a big market for apps itself, and one that's artificially limited by Apple to have only one store - theirs. It could be argued that Apple's SDK provides a means to installing third-party apps, but it's not freely available. I don't see it as a big issue for consumers because it's easy enough today to jump to another similarly capable mobile platform (unlike moving away from PCs with Windows, which is/was a de facto standard).
I'm from São Paulo, too. I have been around, though. Brazilians are very funny when it comes to patriotism. We run around telling jokes about the country and making fun of our politicians, customs et al. However, we're extremely protective when it comes to foreigners. Stallone made a borderline derogatory comment aout Brazil a few years ago and he was immediately and publically vilified. It's not outspoken or even acknowledged like US patriotism, but it's definitely there. And it's worse when it comes to Portugal, due to our history and how it's taught in schools.
Here, this mini-review actually gets more in-depth about the language problems, complete with some funny examples: http://www.thingsmeanalot.com/2009/02/speaker-for-dead-by-orson-scott-card.html
Yes, I am. I also know he visited for a while. However, his contact with the country has been certainly limited. He often mistakes european Portuguese with brazilian Portuguese (he probably did some language research prior to writing the book, but neglected to account for the plethora of major differences between the two dialects, making the end result a jumble that's funny to both kinds of portuguese speakers), makes cultural/historical blunders like a bunch of space brazilians naming a colony Lusitânia when it's somewhat ludicrous to name a colony after your colonizers, especially with the overall sentment towards Portugal being quite adversarial. Not major faults and they don't make the book unreadable*, it just breaks immersion every page or so with nonsensical names (they are all hilarious), misspelled words, bad grammar, bizarre, archaic diminutives, bad translations and so on (often complete with explanations that only make it worse for being plain wrong).
*not for me, at least - I still thought it was a good book, but my girlfriend (who really liked Ender's Game) couldn't get past the second chapter. She read the portuguese version, which is arguably worse as you're reading your native language being weirdly distorted in your own native language.
I didn't really see it in Speaker, so I guess you're thinking of a later novel. What did put me off in Speaker was the atrocious Portuguese. You don't really tie in so many cultural and linguistic references if you're not familiar with them. Really, that whole aspect of the book was very badly done.
Ditto. My mother couldn't even transition to a laptop, since she uses e-mail a lot and demands a full-sized keyboard (preferably far from a trackpad, since it's easy to touch or rub it by mistake and move your cursor and/or click to somewhere it's not supposed to). A tablet left her profoundly disgusted with the experience of typing on an unergonomical hard surface, so a PC it is. And, after lots of time spent maintaining her XP machine, I did the unthinkable: set up Debian stable for her. Works like a charm, breakage of whatever kind is nonexistant and I don't have to worry about viruses. It did take a while to set up initially (while I figured all her use-cases and adjusted the machine accordingly), but from there it has been smooth sailing.
For the submitter, that's what I'd add: any sort of transition will demand lots of your time, don't fool yourself. You can either try to instruct her, which will take very long, or pull an Apple and lock her machine down in a way that she can only use whatever you want her to. As long as you do a good job of predicting her needs, it's far less hassle in the long run.
A final thought: educating an elderly citizen to use VMs is easier than one might think.
Yeah, every freeze sucks, and it's been hard to stomach this last one. glibc6 2.13 and buggy KDE 4.8 (4.7 was great) are really getting on my nerves. I've heard wonderful stuff about Sabayon and loved the live session. If I can't make it to Wheezy's release, I'll give it a serious try (probably in conjunction with Mint 14).
* and should you succede against all odds, we would all benefit.
It's possible they have a small team who has overcome all the corner cases discovered by the Xorg, XBC, and Wayland folks over the past couple decades by fundamentally re-factoring the problem into a more correct solution and have achieved excellent performance by doing so.
It's also possible that space aliens gave them this technology, but that's only slightly more likely.
Shuttlework did go to space, after all...
The last time I bought an LG phone it died 4 times in 2 months and then battery broke a few months later. I've never seen a decent LG smart phone.
If they're shotgunning the OSes hoping for success then they're barking up the wrong tree. LG is the problem not Android, Windows, Ubuntu or Firefox and the solution needs to be from LG: better devices.
Hum... LG does make crappy phones, but I have never had a problem with their reliability. In fact, from what I've seen, they seem to be quite durable and well-built. The problem is what they're built of. LG has beautiful phones with 4.3" screens, ICS and Adreno 200 - a GPU which was already obsolete in 2010. ( see Optimus L7). The whole L line is utter crap, in fact, being incredibly underspecced. Except for the L3, which would be cheap enough to be a good contender if not for that hideous screen. Really, they can't get any device entirely right. I have an Optimus Hub, an almost decent phone. Its only fault is having 150Mb of internal memory, which is unthinkable for a smartphone. I can, of course, just use a memory card partition for my apps but it's not a very elegant solution and tends to cause all kinds of weird read errors. On top of all that, their Optimus UI is pretty heavy and uglier than stock Android.
Also, the Linux Defenders 911 is made in Flash, which was recently discontinued for Linux as a whole. Really, I think it's a good idea, but it's leaking irony all over.
...which also doesn't work. I think people just aren't designed to grasp a community as big as the one we have. When you live in a village, you see the consequences of your actions, so you avoid shitting in the pond. Today, we have no idea where our shit comes from and who's dying in the manufacturing process. It's not just that there's no available time in our lives to inspect what we buy (both because we buy too much crap and because our time is limited and information simply isn't readily available). We don't even follow politics anymore, because everything is too big and bureaucratic. We can dismiss everything because we live very abstracted lives, so lots of people do it.
Phoronix isn't exactly a good news site. Nevertheless, it's probably the only site that does Linux hardware reviews, follows the progress of various open source initiatives and does that having a single semi-journalist. Good, properly staffed computer news sites out there like Anand and Tom's Hardware completely ignore Linux, Unix, BSD and what have you, therefore, inaccurate as it can be, Phoronix is the best source of information we have. Plus, bitching about inaccuracies on slashdot is borderline hilarious. This is the holy grail of fabricated flamebaits.
but you still in principle are not against taking the movie or novel that my brother put his heart, soul, and financial future into making and giving it away to anybody who wants it, because in your theory he has no particular right to the fruits of such labor because it's bits on a disk instead of, say, a piece of hardware like your the expensive computers and smartphones middle-class users use to view the content, right?
I can't speak for him, but I, particularly, have nothing agains that sort of distribution. For different reasons, though. Movies and novels aren't necessary. They're either entertainment or propaganda (by that I merely mean something that conveys a political message or social commentary). In the first case, it should be relegated to hobbyists, partly because I think profit is a lousy motive for quality writing (see: Dan Brown, Stephanie Meyer, a bunch of other crap) and partly because the Shire is a very comfortable environment for writing. In the second case, novels and movies (particularly documentaries) are socially useful to us, but they still should be done in the name of its message, not for profit. Otherwise you're tempted to distort your views for market acceptance, which is counterproductive for fomenting honest social debate.
Agreed. You can disable it. And you don't even have to fiddle around with apt or anything, it's an option present in their own GUI. Slashdot, Google and the whole rest of the internet is much more annoying, since to disable ads you have to download AdBlock. Canonical is giving you a choice. "Here, use our ad-supported OS. You don't want ads? Ok, then, just use the damn thing entirely free anyway!" I fail to see how that can be anything other than completely ethical.
Gotta give people what they want. And we often want crap. See Justin Bieber et al.
All joking aside, though, I also got curious. And, as I went to Google College, unlike some underprivileged folks, let me share my inaccessible knowledge: http://genetics.thetech.org/ask/ask68
Will someone with a better understanding of genetics please explain how a genetic test is even possible?
My understanding is that identical twins -- arising from the same zygote -- are genetically identical. Not just "pretty much identical" as the article states.
What possible "genetic test" is being proposed that could differentiate between the brothers? Is the town being scammed?
Of course not! Modern laboratories are equipeed with new, state-of-the-art dice for such quandries.
The cost seems a little inflated, though. I could do the same test for a penny (that would luckily also cover all equipment expenses).
No, import fees are 60% of the product's value. The tricky part is that shipping is included in the price when applying the tax. Which means bigass importers get much lower prices than your average Joe (average Joe can't order enough to fill a freighter and distill the shipping taxes). Also, microprocessors are exempt from import taxes (motherboards and GPUs are still crazy expensive, though). I have no idea how they deal with smartphones' SoCs, but I know they don't pay the full 60%.
For purposes of comparison, A Galaxy S3 in Brazil costs about R$1600 or $800, versus $549 in the US. An interesting thing about the brazilian market, though, is that electronics do not get progressively cheaper once better/newer stuff is released. You can still buy a Galaxy Nexus for the same price of a Nexus S. A motorola RAZR XT910 still costs the same as a RAZR i. A used, defective product is still sold for 60-80% of its retail value (no joke - you can see lots of ads for broken notebooks, and they are incredibly funny. Most of them read "it won't turn on, I don't know what happened". An obsolete notebook (Turion, IIRC) had had its screen torn off, but it was being sold for about 70% of its original retail value. The seller's rationale was that it worked if you plugged it to a monitor.)
To be completely fair, that's not a just comparison. Windows should be compared to a distribution, not to the Linux kernel. Windows $version is a fixed release, with ABIs well defined. The same is true for any stable version of Debian or CentOS. What happens is Linux is in constant development and the myriad of distros advance too fast. If we all ran RHEL, we would have absolutely no problem with Xorg ABI changes and drivers. But developers build for the latest libraries, thus the distros have to keep fairly current and the end result is the mess we find ourselves in. That's why the push for good open drivers is important - closed source is ok, but it hardly ever keeps the pace with free software, resulting in woe for the users. A distribution's work is exactly filtering the chaos and presenting us harmonic packages, which is easier said than done. Also, remember Vista faced difficulties - IIRC, because there were almost no drivers for it and the few that existed were mostly crap. Microsoft learned, though, and never broke driver ABI since.
Though your complaint makes sense, I'm positive there's a practical reason why Xorg and kernel developers often break driver ABIs. I know Xorg 1.11 broke driver ABI to correct a bug, I don't know about the more recent instances of breakage. If it's a question of organizational culture as you pose, then Wayland might sidestep it. We can hope, at least.
Either that's no longer true or they got enough 3d stuff working to support 2d already:
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-ati/commit/?id=a60d2152e928a7011fc7c44a885a34c3cdd4f0fe