If Word just could create PDF files there would be no need for Acrobat is not true.I have done some support of print companies and one of the problems with many 3rd party PDF creation tools is that they don't output a pure black but a composite black in PDFs.
Well the main point I was trying to raise was that Microsoft might have undermined much of Adobe's business plan had they included a simple PDF export tool. I'm perfectly happy to acknowledge that Adobe products make a lot of sense for specialist printers and specialist publishers -- they are specialist publishing products, after all. I doubt PDF will die -- I just think it'll be seriously undermined, by Microsoft bundling its own substitute, in a large part of the market that PDF presently caters to.
The point I was trying to make, though, was that lots of people who generate PDF's simply don't need ultra high quality printable documents. A substitute that's not quite as good as that would do fine, especially if it costs less (or nothing). They need something that's going to keep its layout consistently so that they can send it to someone and be confident it'll look the same to the person they send it to. Word documents simply won't do this -- the layout isn't necessarily preserved if different machines have different settings, and they're also very volatile to someone else editing and breaking the layout of the document once it's been sent.
For people who only want the consistency of PDF's, a simple export tool makes perfect sense. Microsoft doesn't provide this, and so a lot of people and businesses have been giving money to Adobe for much more functionality than they really need. If Microsoft did provide a PDF export tool as part of Word, a significant amount of Adobe's revenue might well disappear.
Now that Microsoft's providing a new feature to preserve consistent layout, I'm willing to bet that lots of people will resort to using it. Specialist publishers probably won't, but there will be a lot of people who no longer need Adobe products because they can simply export to a Metro file and fire it off to someone else who can open it, confident that said person will be seeing the document as it was meant to be seen.
The recruiters I've come into contact with have disappointed me in several ways: [--snip--]
I couldn't agree with you much more. My experience with job hunting a couple of years ago resulted in me learning to absolutely hate recruitment agents. It came down to a couple of main things:
Most IT recruitment agents were more familiar with HR than they were with IT. They tended not to actually understand the subject they were recruiting for, and simply wanted suitable buzz-words with attached benchmarks (eg. 3 years of "commercial" "Java" experience). These days they probably barely look at most people without the word ".NET" on their record.
Very few of them wanted to actually take any risks. They'd rather not put forward someone's application if it didn't come supplied with the buzz-words they knew about. Of course, they're not going to tell you which company the're recruiting for, because you might apply directly and beat out another one of their proposed candidates.
Combining these two made things incredibly frustrating, because if you don't fit into the artificial mould they've been trained to identify, they're afraid of you.
One of my biggest problems at the time was that the small company for which I'd worked was eaten and dissolved by another company for its intellectual property before the main product had been released. Recruitment agents didn't care about commercial experience if it's not on a product that was actually released, irrespective of the product.
I did come across one agent out of about ten who seemed to actually know what he was talking about, but unfortunately by that time I'd already organised things myself.
I'm approaching another job search now, and I'm doing everything that I possibly can to avoid going through recruitment agents. Granted that this means being much more aggressive in directly approaching the organisations I want to work for, and calling in favours from a few friends, but I just can't be bothered dealing with thicko's unless I really have to. If you want a good job, it's worthwhile getting to know some of the people in the business beforehand, and asking for them to bring you into the loop at an appropriate time.
Just as a further note on this, recruitment agents are agents for the employer, not the job-hunter, however crappily they actually do it. Employers are the people who pay the agent if they supply someone who eventually gets a job. The irony is that many employers I've spoken to (including several friends) seem to feel exactly the same about them as I do. Sometimes I wonder how many of them manage to survive.
There are also conflicting interests for agents not to put you forward for a good job if they already have someone who they think is better, and if they think they can get you into another one instead. (That way you end up with a worse than ideal job, but they get two commissions.)
Building PDF capability into Word must strike Microsoft as being just a little too interoperable.
To be honest, I'd always assumed that the only reason Microsoft didn't provide a PDF export feature for Word was that the courts might rule them as being anti-competitive all over again. After all, if Microsoft Word were able to bundle a PDF export tool, a lot of users would suddenly have no reason to pay lots of money to Adobe.
This is all despite the fact that it would make logical sense for a Word Processor to be able to export to a consistently laid out format.
Word isn't a very impressive page layout application, but it's still "good enough" for a lot of tasks. Allowing it to export to PDF would completely undermine much of Adobe's business plan, and that wouldn't look good at a time when Microsoft has been trying to be very careful about encouraging its monopolistic image.
Personally, I'm wondering if Microsoft sees an advantage in competing with their own format rather than just using one that someone else invented. Assuming it beats PDF, perhaps Microsoft hopes to argue that it's winning because it's a better format rather than because it's bundled with the operating system... which would be a much more likely conclusion if they had simply bundled a PDF export tool.
Most people I know don't use Debian anymore because stable is SO old, can't, or don't want to bother using testing or unstable. If they want money, make a damn release, or die.
Most people I know well who use linux run Debian sarge, or a hybrid system, including me. (That's about four or five people.) It still works great for a personal workstation and whatever the label, it is relatively stable compared with some other distros.
Support isn't an issue because it's a personal workstation in a distro that's realisically aimed at people who have some level of technical competancy to manage their systems and resolve problems from time to time. If you can deal with the package maintainers and the upstream developers, let alone post the odd question in a forum, you're still getting large amounts of unofficial support that (in most cases) beats anything official.
The installer isn't an issue because, for me at least, it's already installed... and the unofficial Debian installer (in sarge) is still quite reasonable if it isn't perfect.
As another response said, I really don't get this attitude. Debian might not be the best distro for you, or "stable" Debian might not be the best distro for you, and there are certainly some policies that may need reviewing for the future.
Claiming it's going to die, however, just because you personally and friends in your local community see no use for it, is silly. Sarge is still a perfectly workable and mostly up-to-date distro for a lot of people, even if it's somehow trendy on slashdot to bash the project right now. For many, including myself, making it officially stable is irrelevant. All that will do from my perspective is allow for some new packages to flood into testing and unstable.
I haven't tried this, but isn't there some special way to set up a virtual 32 bit userspace? It's the main suggestion being given, with some quite detailed instructions, for running OpenOffice in a 64 bit userspace. OO is one of the major applications that won't yet compile for 64 bit systems. (I understand this is being fixed for the v2 release.)
This was a multibillion dollar company that somehow MISSED THE WHOLE INTERNET THING.
I'm not sure if it's quite correct to say they missed the Internet... it's more like they underestimated it and made a bad decision about dealing with it. Instead of embracing the open-ness of the Internet, Microsoft decided to try and undermine and compete with the Internet by effectively creating its own, Microsoft controlled Internet.
Remember The Microsoft Network? At the time, Microsoft managed to make some exclusive deals with certain entities (the official Star Trek franchise was the one that comes to mind), so that they would only provide online content on the Microsoft Network and nowhere else, forcing people to pay money to Microsoft if they wanted access.
I presume you've read the actual study, then, and would be able to confirm for all of us that it hasn't been mis-reported in popular media, as studies related to topics like this so often are.
Could you please let me know where I can find the study? The article wasn't very specific about where it's published or the details of exactly what it claims, and I'd like to see for myself.
that allowing computers to constantly shift your focus from one thing to the other, impairs your long term ability to focus on one thing and imprint it on your brain in serious depth.
I haven't read the study beyond the linked article, but personally I suspect that the whole problem extends far beyond email use.
Western society is built on distractions, and on interrupting people from what they're doing, much of which is to do with commercialism. For instance:
Television, which the vast majority of people base their lives around, interrupts everything for commercial breaks every few minutes. People are being asked to concentrate for short spurts of time and then switch off or do something else.
The standard formula for popular music is to produce songs that last about three to five minutes. Commercial radio often plays one song at a time, and then encourages listeners to switch modes by playing commercials. Some albums are still designed so that the entire album is an experience to listen to, but with others the disjointed focus of the music still completely changes between tracks. Compare this with older forms of classical music, for instance, for which it's common for some movements and symphonies to last tens of minutes or hours.
Modern communication devices such as telephones, especially mobile phones, encourage people to be on demand all the time to deal with new problems and tasks immediately and as they arise. Technologies such as SMS encourage people to divide their attention even further, having a conversation in many very short messages and often when also doing something else. Compare this with some time ago when it would often be common to be out of contact except for particular times. (eg. Reading snail mail, or arriving at the office.)
Personal computers, at least the ones that most people owned, used to be very bad at multitasking. This made it necessary to only run one main application at a time. It wasn't possible to use a computer for word processing at the same time as spreadsheeting, without fully closing down one and starting the other. Today, typical workstations allow people to easily and frequently switch between many tasks at once.
It doesn't surprise me at all that people's attitudes to doing things have been changing quite dramatically, and it seems quite feasible that the effects of this on people's wellbeing could be negative. Emails popping up and being addressed are just an extension of everything else that's been happening with advances in technology and societial attitudes.
I would love a tool, similar to the one that you suggest, that encourages being able to focus on things. I'm not entirely sure how it could be guaranteed to work, though. To me, many of the possible problems seem to be embedded quite heavily in the way that society now works.
Meanwhile, I think I'll try forcing myself to concentrate more by shutting down lots of other things while I'm browsing slashdot. It's a shame they're so easy to start up again.
Most of the problems pointed out should never hit the database engine and if they do, you get what you deserve.
Of course they shouldn't hit the database engine. When they do, however, I'd like to know about it rather than have the database engine silently determine the semantics of something that's supposed to be undefined.
It sounds as if MySQL 5 has dealt with a large amount of this criticism, now, which is good.
Isn't the law already open source? Sure, there are maintainers, but it's possible to submit changes and get them approved.
I can't speak for the US, but in New Zealand (where I'm from), certain segments of our law aren't open. It's the distribution that's the issue, because they're sometimes covered by someone else's copyright.
Our rode code is a good example. It's credited in law as being the authoritative road rules, and to a certain extent there's a public and open process to writing and amending it. But the official rode code, itself (including all of the official wording), is printed by a particular publishing company that owns the copyright.
You can buy it for a reasonable price, you can probably go and view it in a display cabinet somewhere in a government cellar, and I think it's now also available on the web. But you can't simply reproduce and redistribute the official source a-la most typical open source software licences.
If you want them to spell out how they work for you, you'll have to play by their rules. If you don't like that, that's fine too. You don't have to know now their file formats work to use their product, and when it comes down to it you don't even have to use their product.
The problem that I have with this is that these required agreements are, more often than not, absolutely one-sided and presented as non-negotiable.
Even if the proposed agreements are legally dubious when considering the requirements they place upon the reader, it's unrealistic for most potential readers to challenge Microsoft and expect to get anywhere, let along negotiate.
I hope these to get into Sarge before it goes stable.
If the next one is going to take as long as this one, I'd be concerned about such things, too. There will always be new releases of some packages, though, and the line has to be drawn somewhere. With any luck, Branden's going to be able to speed up the release process somewhat and it won't be an issue.
The thing advertisers don't seem to get is that you don't sell products by annoying the hell out of people.
While I agree with you for the most part, I don't think you're entirely correct. A lot of ads (web and otherwise) are not designed to sell things directly -- they're to ensure brand recognition.
Marketers want to make sure that you have knowledge that their product exists and don't forget it. Simply remembering is much more important than liking or disliking.
I think you'll find that a lot of ads are designed with the intention of being disliked, on the theory that people tend to remember things they dislike more than things they like. Later on, there's still a chance you won't remember (or care) that you hated their ad, but if the ad makes no impression, they won't have a chance of selling it anyway.
Later on when something to do X is wanted, a lot of people will tend to trust something they've heard of moreso than something they haven't. Any publicity is good publicity.
I hate all the annoying advertising on the web and I have no problems with using AdBlock, but I don't think the effectiveness of this advertising can be measured simply by click-through purchases.
I asked this in the earlier Debian/Ubantu article but I think I was a bit late for it to be seen, so I'll try again.
Is there much of a reason to actually switch from Sarge to Ubantu? Right now I'm running a workstation and a laptop on Sarge. It seems to work very nicely, and it's very up-to-date because I keep it up to date with the Sarge repository, which with the occasional exception (eg. still waiting for x.org), is about as up-to-date as most other distros.
I was quite surprised to see the total bashing of Debian in the earlier article in favour of Ubantu. Complaining about Debain and its slow official releases might be justified for everyone who needs official support, but the only advantages I was really able to discern from people's posts was that the installer is apparently a lot nicer, and that it has official releases more often.
In my case at least, the installer isn't an issue. I already have Sarge installed and configured and it works very well. As a home user running it on my desktop, I'm also not too concerned about the official-ness of the distribution. Although "official support" doesn't yet exist for Sarge, there's stacks of unofficial support out there, whether it comes from the community in general or the Debian maintainers who are looking to keep their packages working.
I'm really just interested if it's worth me bothering to nuke Sarge to try out Ubantu. Is there anything other than its regular official releases and and an installer that makes it worth switching?
To write a thorough entry, quite a bit of research must be done.
One of the important things about research, though, is that you really need to cite where you get information from. (Proper research, anyway.)
Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but the last time I checked I don't believe that Wikipedia had any formal way to cite sources -- at least not one that anyone's seriously using if it's there. There are plenty of indirect and informal methods, such as the External Links sections that might sometimes indirectly imply that information was gathered from them, but this isn't proper or reliable citing.
I do use Wikipedia a lot and I've written several articles for it, but this is one thing I still think it seriously needs. Once it has a mechanism like this and it's straightforward to use, I'll feel much better about it.
Gee, I wish all "Ask Slashdot" postings were this easy..
I filtered Ask Slashdot and YRO from my front page a long time ago. What I'd really like to be able to do, though, is filter all stories that have a question mark at the end of the story title. A regular expression filter would do the trick, if not too inefficient.
If you can't actually justify what you're reporting as more than rumours, you shouldn't bother reporting it. At the very least, reporting unresearched stuff and asking slashdot readers to verify its worth is lazy, and a poor substitute for the submitter and editors actually doing the easy research themselves and telling people about it instead of asking them.
Yeah, I know. This is slashdot. But if editors won't stop posting stupid headlines with stupidly phrased stories, I'd still like a regex filter.
Keep in mind the volume of a sphere is 4/3 pi r^3, so the volume of space that this would take up is increased by a factor of 8,000,000. I'd say, that the chance of this happening to us, therefore is increased by a factor of 8 million.
If the 6,000 LY limit is justifiable, I don't think it's quite as bad as you make out... at least not without some much more definitive research.
6,000 Light Years is practically next door on the galactic scale. It's certainly not infeasible (for someone qualified) to simply look at a survey of what's in our local space and determine immediately if we're at risk based on anything that looks unstable. (I'm not a professional astronomer, so someone's welcome to correct me if they know otherwise.)
The most obvious potential threat that's relatively close is probably Eta Carinae, which is about as massive as it's possible to get, and it's been hypothesised in the past that there's a small chance we might be at risk from a sudden gamma ray burst from it. But it's still about 8,000 light years away and there's still not enough known about it to have any accurate idea of when it's going to blow itself apart, either tommorrow or millions of years from now.
If there's still a reasonable chance that it could happen at some point in the future, this doesn't mean that there's any chance at all of it happening tommorrow. Stars orbit move a lot relative to each other sa they orbit the galactic centre. Our Sun does that in about 226 million years, but in the space of hundreds of thousands of years, galactic material barely moves relative to each other at all. It's feasible that at some time in the next few million years or more we will be close to something dangerous for some period of time. If we're not close enough to it now, though, the chance of that happening is still zero.
This is all dependent on that 6,000 Light Year limit being correct, of course. Clearly it's still all subject to change as we learn more about the Universe, which we still know next-to-nothing about. I don't think there's much point worrying about the great unknown, though, at least until we know enough to know that there's actually a risk. Otherwise it would just lead to paranoia.
A better option might be for generic Debian to stop trying to support desktop users. The way things are stacking up now, generic Debian-stable is a great server OS, but a lousy dekstop OS. People who want to run the latest bleeding-edge version of Gnome or whatever are switching to Ubuntu. So what's the point of having generic Debian keep trying to support the latest bleeding-edge GUI packages?
I'm currently running Debian sarge on my desktop with a few sid packages here and there, and I haven't yet had a good opportunity to take a proper look at Ubantu. Sarge presently works really well for me as it is, and I keep it updated with recent packages. Apart from perhaps a more streamlined installation process and a more recent "official" release, what does Ubantu offer? I'm not trying to criticise -- I'm just interested in whether it's worth me switching.
Personally, I'm not hugely motivated by the official support that Debian offers for stable, although I accept that some people might treat it as important. Being my desktop machine, it's not absolutely critical to me that it doesn't break from time to time. If it does break, there's still substantial unofficial support out there from both the debian package maintainers, and from the upstream open source community.
Does Ubantu offer much over Debian sarge apart from a more recent official release? I'm wondering if it's worth my time and effort to rebuild my sarge workstation as Ubantu.
Perhaps part of the reason is that many e-mail clients have better filtering mechanisms in them now than in previous years.
I use filtering as much as everyone else I know, but I guess I still find it insulting that I should have to. That I'm able to filter email on my end doesn't change:
the fact that some of it still gets through to annoy me and waste my time.
the fact that I'm likely to occasionally miss important emails because filters occasionally get false positives.
the fact that dealing with spam is still using resources on my connection and ultimately costing me money for traffic charges.
the fact that the vast clogginess of spam creates major problems for my ISP upstream, causing my monthly Internet bill to be substantially higher than it might be otherwise.
the fact that a small portion of morons out there are making millions of dollars off my inconvenience.
Filters are getting better, but as long as it's still possible for spammers to keep fighting them, and as long as they keep diverting attention from the realisation that we wouldn't need an imperfect filter solution if we didn't have a spammer problem, I'm not personally going to be happy about how things are going.
Don't believe me? Re-listen to the radio play, and attempt to visualize it as scenes from a movie. I defy you to do so without it being a mind-numblingly slow paced film.
I actually thought that the 6 episode BBC television series, which was released shortly after the radio series, did a very good job of it. It wasn't slow-paced at all.
A movie wouldn't be exactly the same as television, but it seems a bit far-fetched to claim that it's so complicated to get it working in a visual medium. Maybe they just can't figure out how to do it well with such a high budget.
I'm really curious how you arrived at the conclusion that linux is easier to set up than Windows.
Without meaning to criticise you at all, I'm quite confused about why some people seem to be so intent on comparing Linux setup with Windows setup.
The vast majority of Windows users I know never have to install Windows anyway. They either switch on their new computer and it works, or an IT admin has already installed it for them.
Linux installation is an important thing to talk about for as long as most linux users will need to install their own system, but comparing it with the Windows setup doesn't seem to make sense. Comparing general maintenance of the OS once installed might be a little more useful.
More than anything else, even more than Microsoft, closed drivers will be the downfall of Linux and open source. [...] When the ATI and nVidia say, we can't be bothered with writing Linux drivers anymore, but we still won't open the source, what are you going to do?
Couldn't they stop providing drivers even if they've previously been providing source? Open source drivers might help, but if the manufacturer simply decides to stop providing specifications for new products, source for old drivers probably won't help for long.
The lock-in is more about providing specifications than providing open or closed source drivers.... which doesn't make the situation any better.
I only saw this site for the first time when you pointed it out -- it looks as if they generate the stats from unique-within-a-day visitors recorded in their own server logs (and mirrors).
Are stats from a single website worth much, particularly when its focus is providing news on distros and ranking Linux their popularity? It does seem likely to be somewhat biased to me.
Ubantu sounds like a great distro from what I've heard of it, but these stats could be equally consistent with Ubantu users simply spending a lot more time visiting this site. Being a relatively new distribution that has a significant following, Ubantu's high rating on DistroWatch shouldn't really be surprising.
Perhaps DistroWatch or the DistroWatch ranking itself is publicised more on the mailing lists and websites that Ubantu users visit, for all I know. It could be the same people visiting day after day, either to see how far their distribution has risen up the ranks, or to read other new things on DistroWatch.
The rankings would be more representative if stats were collated from a variety of sources whose visitors aren't likely to be as biased given the website content. Hopefully it's also a reasonable assumption that a choice of distro won't hugely affect someone's web usage in general.
Slashdot Mirror
Well the main point I was trying to raise was that Microsoft might have undermined much of Adobe's business plan had they included a simple PDF export tool. I'm perfectly happy to acknowledge that Adobe products make a lot of sense for specialist printers and specialist publishers -- they are specialist publishing products, after all. I doubt PDF will die -- I just think it'll be seriously undermined, by Microsoft bundling its own substitute, in a large part of the market that PDF presently caters to.
The point I was trying to make, though, was that lots of people who generate PDF's simply don't need ultra high quality printable documents. A substitute that's not quite as good as that would do fine, especially if it costs less (or nothing). They need something that's going to keep its layout consistently so that they can send it to someone and be confident it'll look the same to the person they send it to. Word documents simply won't do this -- the layout isn't necessarily preserved if different machines have different settings, and they're also very volatile to someone else editing and breaking the layout of the document once it's been sent.
For people who only want the consistency of PDF's, a simple export tool makes perfect sense. Microsoft doesn't provide this, and so a lot of people and businesses have been giving money to Adobe for much more functionality than they really need. If Microsoft did provide a PDF export tool as part of Word, a significant amount of Adobe's revenue might well disappear.
Now that Microsoft's providing a new feature to preserve consistent layout, I'm willing to bet that lots of people will resort to using it. Specialist publishers probably won't, but there will be a lot of people who no longer need Adobe products because they can simply export to a Metro file and fire it off to someone else who can open it, confident that said person will be seeing the document as it was meant to be seen.
I couldn't agree with you much more. My experience with job hunting a couple of years ago resulted in me learning to absolutely hate recruitment agents. It came down to a couple of main things:
Combining these two made things incredibly frustrating, because if you don't fit into the artificial mould they've been trained to identify, they're afraid of you.
One of my biggest problems at the time was that the small company for which I'd worked was eaten and dissolved by another company for its intellectual property before the main product had been released. Recruitment agents didn't care about commercial experience if it's not on a product that was actually released, irrespective of the product.
I did come across one agent out of about ten who seemed to actually know what he was talking about, but unfortunately by that time I'd already organised things myself.
I'm approaching another job search now, and I'm doing everything that I possibly can to avoid going through recruitment agents. Granted that this means being much more aggressive in directly approaching the organisations I want to work for, and calling in favours from a few friends, but I just can't be bothered dealing with thicko's unless I really have to. If you want a good job, it's worthwhile getting to know some of the people in the business beforehand, and asking for them to bring you into the loop at an appropriate time.
Just as a further note on this, recruitment agents are agents for the employer, not the job-hunter, however crappily they actually do it. Employers are the people who pay the agent if they supply someone who eventually gets a job. The irony is that many employers I've spoken to (including several friends) seem to feel exactly the same about them as I do. Sometimes I wonder how many of them manage to survive.
There are also conflicting interests for agents not to put you forward for a good job if they already have someone who they think is better, and if they think they can get you into another one instead. (That way you end up with a worse than ideal job, but they get two commissions.)
To be honest, I'd always assumed that the only reason Microsoft didn't provide a PDF export feature for Word was that the courts might rule them as being anti-competitive all over again. After all, if Microsoft Word were able to bundle a PDF export tool, a lot of users would suddenly have no reason to pay lots of money to Adobe.
This is all despite the fact that it would make logical sense for a Word Processor to be able to export to a consistently laid out format.
Word isn't a very impressive page layout application, but it's still "good enough" for a lot of tasks. Allowing it to export to PDF would completely undermine much of Adobe's business plan, and that wouldn't look good at a time when Microsoft has been trying to be very careful about encouraging its monopolistic image.
Personally, I'm wondering if Microsoft sees an advantage in competing with their own format rather than just using one that someone else invented. Assuming it beats PDF, perhaps Microsoft hopes to argue that it's winning because it's a better format rather than because it's bundled with the operating system... which would be a much more likely conclusion if they had simply bundled a PDF export tool.
Most people I know well who use linux run Debian sarge, or a hybrid system, including me. (That's about four or five people.) It still works great for a personal workstation and whatever the label, it is relatively stable compared with some other distros.
Support isn't an issue because it's a personal workstation in a distro that's realisically aimed at people who have some level of technical competancy to manage their systems and resolve problems from time to time. If you can deal with the package maintainers and the upstream developers, let alone post the odd question in a forum, you're still getting large amounts of unofficial support that (in most cases) beats anything official.
The installer isn't an issue because, for me at least, it's already installed... and the unofficial Debian installer (in sarge) is still quite reasonable if it isn't perfect.
As another response said, I really don't get this attitude. Debian might not be the best distro for you, or "stable" Debian might not be the best distro for you, and there are certainly some policies that may need reviewing for the future.
Claiming it's going to die, however, just because you personally and friends in your local community see no use for it, is silly. Sarge is still a perfectly workable and mostly up-to-date distro for a lot of people, even if it's somehow trendy on slashdot to bash the project right now. For many, including myself, making it officially stable is irrelevant. All that will do from my perspective is allow for some new packages to flood into testing and unstable.
I haven't tried this, but isn't there some special way to set up a virtual 32 bit userspace? It's the main suggestion being given, with some quite detailed instructions, for running OpenOffice in a 64 bit userspace. OO is one of the major applications that won't yet compile for 64 bit systems. (I understand this is being fixed for the v2 release.)
I'm not sure if it's quite correct to say they missed the Internet... it's more like they underestimated it and made a bad decision about dealing with it. Instead of embracing the open-ness of the Internet, Microsoft decided to try and undermine and compete with the Internet by effectively creating its own, Microsoft controlled Internet.
Remember The Microsoft Network? At the time, Microsoft managed to make some exclusive deals with certain entities (the official Star Trek franchise was the one that comes to mind), so that they would only provide online content on the Microsoft Network and nowhere else, forcing people to pay money to Microsoft if they wanted access.
I presume you've read the actual study, then, and would be able to confirm for all of us that it hasn't been mis-reported in popular media, as studies related to topics like this so often are.
Could you please let me know where I can find the study? The article wasn't very specific about where it's published or the details of exactly what it claims, and I'd like to see for myself.
I haven't read the study beyond the linked article, but personally I suspect that the whole problem extends far beyond email use.
Western society is built on distractions, and on interrupting people from what they're doing, much of which is to do with commercialism. For instance:
It doesn't surprise me at all that people's attitudes to doing things have been changing quite dramatically, and it seems quite feasible that the effects of this on people's wellbeing could be negative. Emails popping up and being addressed are just an extension of everything else that's been happening with advances in technology and societial attitudes.
I would love a tool, similar to the one that you suggest, that encourages being able to focus on things. I'm not entirely sure how it could be guaranteed to work, though. To me, many of the possible problems seem to be embedded quite heavily in the way that society now works.
Meanwhile, I think I'll try forcing myself to concentrate more by shutting down lots of other things while I'm browsing slashdot. It's a shame they're so easy to start up again.
Of course they shouldn't hit the database engine. When they do, however, I'd like to know about it rather than have the database engine silently determine the semantics of something that's supposed to be undefined.
It sounds as if MySQL 5 has dealt with a large amount of this criticism, now, which is good.
I can't speak for the US, but in New Zealand (where I'm from), certain segments of our law aren't open. It's the distribution that's the issue, because they're sometimes covered by someone else's copyright.
Our rode code is a good example. It's credited in law as being the authoritative road rules, and to a certain extent there's a public and open process to writing and amending it. But the official rode code, itself (including all of the official wording), is printed by a particular publishing company that owns the copyright.
You can buy it for a reasonable price, you can probably go and view it in a display cabinet somewhere in a government cellar, and I think it's now also available on the web. But you can't simply reproduce and redistribute the official source a-la most typical open source software licences.
The problem that I have with this is that these required agreements are, more often than not, absolutely one-sided and presented as non-negotiable.
Even if the proposed agreements are legally dubious when considering the requirements they place upon the reader, it's unrealistic for most potential readers to challenge Microsoft and expect to get anywhere, let along negotiate.
If the next one is going to take as long as this one, I'd be concerned about such things, too. There will always be new releases of some packages, though, and the line has to be drawn somewhere. With any luck, Branden's going to be able to speed up the release process somewhat and it won't be an issue.
Why?
While I agree with you for the most part, I don't think you're entirely correct. A lot of ads (web and otherwise) are not designed to sell things directly -- they're to ensure brand recognition.
Marketers want to make sure that you have knowledge that their product exists and don't forget it. Simply remembering is much more important than liking or disliking.
I think you'll find that a lot of ads are designed with the intention of being disliked, on the theory that people tend to remember things they dislike more than things they like. Later on, there's still a chance you won't remember (or care) that you hated their ad, but if the ad makes no impression, they won't have a chance of selling it anyway.
Later on when something to do X is wanted, a lot of people will tend to trust something they've heard of moreso than something they haven't. Any publicity is good publicity.
I hate all the annoying advertising on the web and I have no problems with using AdBlock, but I don't think the effectiveness of this advertising can be measured simply by click-through purchases.
I asked this in the earlier Debian/Ubantu article but I think I was a bit late for it to be seen, so I'll try again.
Is there much of a reason to actually switch from Sarge to Ubantu? Right now I'm running a workstation and a laptop on Sarge. It seems to work very nicely, and it's very up-to-date because I keep it up to date with the Sarge repository, which with the occasional exception (eg. still waiting for x.org), is about as up-to-date as most other distros.
I was quite surprised to see the total bashing of Debian in the earlier article in favour of Ubantu. Complaining about Debain and its slow official releases might be justified for everyone who needs official support, but the only advantages I was really able to discern from people's posts was that the installer is apparently a lot nicer, and that it has official releases more often.
In my case at least, the installer isn't an issue. I already have Sarge installed and configured and it works very well. As a home user running it on my desktop, I'm also not too concerned about the official-ness of the distribution. Although "official support" doesn't yet exist for Sarge, there's stacks of unofficial support out there, whether it comes from the community in general or the Debian maintainers who are looking to keep their packages working.
I'm really just interested if it's worth me bothering to nuke Sarge to try out Ubantu. Is there anything other than its regular official releases and and an installer that makes it worth switching?
Thanks muchly. I wasn't aware of that page.
One of the important things about research, though, is that you really need to cite where you get information from. (Proper research, anyway.)
Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but the last time I checked I don't believe that Wikipedia had any formal way to cite sources -- at least not one that anyone's seriously using if it's there. There are plenty of indirect and informal methods, such as the External Links sections that might sometimes indirectly imply that information was gathered from them, but this isn't proper or reliable citing.
I do use Wikipedia a lot and I've written several articles for it, but this is one thing I still think it seriously needs. Once it has a mechanism like this and it's straightforward to use, I'll feel much better about it.
I filtered Ask Slashdot and YRO from my front page a long time ago. What I'd really like to be able to do, though, is filter all stories that have a question mark at the end of the story title. A regular expression filter would do the trick, if not too inefficient.
If you can't actually justify what you're reporting as more than rumours, you shouldn't bother reporting it. At the very least, reporting unresearched stuff and asking slashdot readers to verify its worth is lazy, and a poor substitute for the submitter and editors actually doing the easy research themselves and telling people about it instead of asking them.
Yeah, I know. This is slashdot. But if editors won't stop posting stupid headlines with stupidly phrased stories, I'd still like a regex filter.
If the 6,000 LY limit is justifiable, I don't think it's quite as bad as you make out... at least not without some much more definitive research.
6,000 Light Years is practically next door on the galactic scale. It's certainly not infeasible (for someone qualified) to simply look at a survey of what's in our local space and determine immediately if we're at risk based on anything that looks unstable. (I'm not a professional astronomer, so someone's welcome to correct me if they know otherwise.)
The most obvious potential threat that's relatively close is probably Eta Carinae, which is about as massive as it's possible to get, and it's been hypothesised in the past that there's a small chance we might be at risk from a sudden gamma ray burst from it. But it's still about 8,000 light years away and there's still not enough known about it to have any accurate idea of when it's going to blow itself apart, either tommorrow or millions of years from now.
If there's still a reasonable chance that it could happen at some point in the future, this doesn't mean that there's any chance at all of it happening tommorrow. Stars orbit move a lot relative to each other sa they orbit the galactic centre. Our Sun does that in about 226 million years, but in the space of hundreds of thousands of years, galactic material barely moves relative to each other at all. It's feasible that at some time in the next few million years or more we will be close to something dangerous for some period of time. If we're not close enough to it now, though, the chance of that happening is still zero.
This is all dependent on that 6,000 Light Year limit being correct, of course. Clearly it's still all subject to change as we learn more about the Universe, which we still know next-to-nothing about. I don't think there's much point worrying about the great unknown, though, at least until we know enough to know that there's actually a risk. Otherwise it would just lead to paranoia.
I'm currently running Debian sarge on my desktop with a few sid packages here and there, and I haven't yet had a good opportunity to take a proper look at Ubantu. Sarge presently works really well for me as it is, and I keep it updated with recent packages. Apart from perhaps a more streamlined installation process and a more recent "official" release, what does Ubantu offer? I'm not trying to criticise -- I'm just interested in whether it's worth me switching.
Personally, I'm not hugely motivated by the official support that Debian offers for stable, although I accept that some people might treat it as important. Being my desktop machine, it's not absolutely critical to me that it doesn't break from time to time. If it does break, there's still substantial unofficial support out there from both the debian package maintainers, and from the upstream open source community.
Does Ubantu offer much over Debian sarge apart from a more recent official release? I'm wondering if it's worth my time and effort to rebuild my sarge workstation as Ubantu.
I use filtering as much as everyone else I know, but I guess I still find it insulting that I should have to. That I'm able to filter email on my end doesn't change:
the fact that some of it still gets through to annoy me and waste my time.
the fact that I'm likely to occasionally miss important emails because filters occasionally get false positives.
the fact that dealing with spam is still using resources on my connection and ultimately costing me money for traffic charges.
the fact that the vast clogginess of spam creates major problems for my ISP upstream, causing my monthly Internet bill to be substantially higher than it might be otherwise.
the fact that a small portion of morons out there are making millions of dollars off my inconvenience.
Filters are getting better, but as long as it's still possible for spammers to keep fighting them, and as long as they keep diverting attention from the realisation that we wouldn't need an imperfect filter solution if we didn't have a spammer problem, I'm not personally going to be happy about how things are going.
I actually thought that the 6 episode BBC television series, which was released shortly after the radio series, did a very good job of it. It wasn't slow-paced at all.
A movie wouldn't be exactly the same as television, but it seems a bit far-fetched to claim that it's so complicated to get it working in a visual medium. Maybe they just can't figure out how to do it well with such a high budget.
Without meaning to criticise you at all, I'm quite confused about why some people seem to be so intent on comparing Linux setup with Windows setup.
The vast majority of Windows users I know never have to install Windows anyway. They either switch on their new computer and it works, or an IT admin has already installed it for them.
Linux installation is an important thing to talk about for as long as most linux users will need to install their own system, but comparing it with the Windows setup doesn't seem to make sense. Comparing general maintenance of the OS once installed might be a little more useful.
Couldn't they stop providing drivers even if they've previously been providing source? Open source drivers might help, but if the manufacturer simply decides to stop providing specifications for new products, source for old drivers probably won't help for long.
The lock-in is more about providing specifications than providing open or closed source drivers.... which doesn't make the situation any better.
I only saw this site for the first time when you pointed it out -- it looks as if they generate the stats from unique-within-a-day visitors recorded in their own server logs (and mirrors).
Are stats from a single website worth much, particularly when its focus is providing news on distros and ranking Linux their popularity? It does seem likely to be somewhat biased to me.
Ubantu sounds like a great distro from what I've heard of it, but these stats could be equally consistent with Ubantu users simply spending a lot more time visiting this site. Being a relatively new distribution that has a significant following, Ubantu's high rating on DistroWatch shouldn't really be surprising.
Perhaps DistroWatch or the DistroWatch ranking itself is publicised more on the mailing lists and websites that Ubantu users visit, for all I know. It could be the same people visiting day after day, either to see how far their distribution has risen up the ranks, or to read other new things on DistroWatch.
The rankings would be more representative if stats were collated from a variety of sources whose visitors aren't likely to be as biased given the website content. Hopefully it's also a reasonable assumption that a choice of distro won't hugely affect someone's web usage in general.