Which is all to say that refusing plugsched has driven everyone to analyze and improve the CFS through criticism (the trouble being that CREDITS is about source code, not complaints). More importantly, that everyone forks the kernel, and that CK got upset when he realized his fork would likely never be unforked. This is probably a much, much better way to demonstrate why Infoworld's infamous scribbler was wrong than to describe Linus' preferences for things desktop.
I'm sorry for doing a bad job of summarizing. The "who" was their parents. I.e. owning books is correlated with test scores while reading to your child is not. They make certain to mention that this is aggregate data, and that correlation is not causation. More importantly, having a high socioeconomic status affects test grades, while spanking does not. It's entirely possible that they're data mining favorable answers to meet their expectations here (even the book vs reading could be confirmation bias of looking for an example of something that illustrates correlation vs causation), but but I'm not sure how your single family qualifies as a "study" worthy of countering the ECLS.
At any rate, my point was that one can go overboard, and it'll take a village to indulge such parents. If parental involvement was overwhelmingly critical and completely linear, then we should expect homeschooled students to kick ass and take names in all fields. I don't think this is the case.
Nobody mentioned success but you. Some parents, in their quest for morally right upbringing, will choose to exclude vast kinds of media. Should a child decide to struggle against that, as teens are wont to do, it'll take a lot of collusive effort to stop them 24/7. This doesn't contradict your data, but it might contradict your perception of it, so let me add another fact: Freakanomics cites a study about Chicago students suddenly given the chance to enroll in any school. Since more people asked for the best schools than were given them, and surprisingly, neither winners nor losers of the resulting lottery did better than the other. However, they both did better than those who didn't ask to change schools.
My point is that while parental involvement statistically helps, it doesn't necessarily mean parental choices made are effective, and if society doesn't aid them in their quests, their child may still be well off after all. Freakanomics suggests it has more to do with who you are, than what you do.
Which is why Vista Business comes without DVD or much multimedia support. One quickly finds oneself resorting to the same "codec packs". The difference being that Ubuntu makes them available as packages, and Microsoft is glad to let you seek k-lite or whatever else is infested with spyware.
Fluendo already has rights to mp3. http://www.fluendo.com/resources/fluendo_mp3.php. I believe ubuntu put it in universe, though it may be better placed in multiverse. You'll have to ask someone else why it's not in restricted and in by default.
Synaptic is something of a beast -- it's a bit slow and not very intuitive. It's improved a lot since I first used it, but I imagine it doesn't get the attention of many people because of its existing flaws.
The Add/Remove dialog of the Applications menu is a rather well done system. What I find interesting is that ubuntu-restricted-extras has a popularity of 1 star. This package basically adds all the stuff you find yourself hunting for in Windows or Ubuntu (sans this package). Java, flash, several AV codecs (including mp3), and dvd playback. I suspect it's caused by being a virtual package that simply brings in all these optional components. Anyways, in contrast to standard installers, Add/Remove rarely asks questions or shows EULAs, or indeed, any sort interaction about the installation.
In a lot of ways, package management systems can be more usable than the Windows method of "download whatever untrusted crap you find on the internet and click next".
That's sort of the point he brings up at the end of the article -- you can get things work, if you spend an hour on a forum. I sort of wish he'd brought up launchpad, as it's designed specifically to turn that sort of traffic into results. Bug reports are filed, it checks for dupes, people can read them and suggest fixes and developers can indicate how much progress has been made into fixing the problem. It can even tie into upstream defect trackers so if upstream fixes it, you can be notified.
By and large this happens with the betas, so while stable releases get some attention, don't be surprised to be asked to check in the development version if it works. And he's certainly right when he says that very few people in Free Software aren't held to high levels of quality. Theoretically, this is what distributions are about -- providing support for unsupported upstreams. 250 dollars for basic desktop support. They don't seem to discriminate whether you're Dell looking to sell tens of thousands of computers or just your own desktop, but the downside is that they don't seem to make many guarantees on fixing upstream bugs. If gnome-mouse-preferences requires some deep detection and connection with synaptics devices, it might be up to you or upstream to figure it out.
My laptop runs Ubuntu. I am however, a techie. In contrast with his complaints, I find my own touchpad undersensetive. This supports his assertion that there should be a configuration tool for this setting. If I go to System->Preferences->Mouse, I find three tabs: Buttons, Motion and Touchpad. None are very complicated menus, and almost all work. Even the handedness setting is smart about things, accepting both right and left click as toggle. I can certainly toggle edge scrolling and tap to click with it, which was part of his complaint.
One caveat: I'm currently running Gutsy, and I haven't tested his specific problem out of box. One thing that doesn't work, is the sensetivity setting. It isn't clear to me why this is the case. It's neither reported in xserver-xorg-input-synaptics or in gnome-control-center. I went ahead and filed the bug, but from the sound of it, it'll require a lot more than a two line patch to fix.
Certainly, the initial Dell release sounds rough, and I don't think many people are sitting around looking at every minor detail. Gutsy's an improvement, and hopefully Hardy will do great things to improve the little details. I imagine as a result Dell's going to be sticking an engineer on the task to fix as many Mossberg mentioned as possible. At least two of the bugs he highlighted don't have high-tech workarounds. They have rather simple steps that Dell or Ubuntu could do. Ubuntu chooses not to enable mp3 or dvds as they're committed to free and liberated software. But if Dell's worth its commercial salt they'll grab onto that void between consumer and producer and add in those packages. I do hope Mossburg lives up to his suggestion that he'll continue to watch Ubuntu, as I think it will improve greatly within a short time (as it already has!)
I imagine there's a balancing act involved here. I don't buy enterprise bandwidth or press CDs, but I can imagine it being just as cheap or cheaper to offer downloads as it is to press CDs. Certainly, after you consider the cost in warehousing and retailer's cuts, it seems reasonable to assume that it's cheaper. I imagine it's also a pathway to test selling downloads, in hopes of improving bargaining with retailers. Not to mention you can release games in VC when they're ready, and have recieved ESRB ratings. Imagine trying to get a rating for a "150 in 1!" game. Negotiating property rights for a "every NES game ever made on one disc" product would also be a nightmare, and you'd probably get knocks from having to charge more for the entire NES library disc than the Wii itself costs.
From the demand side, they're faced with a rather difficult scenario of bundling games into a collection. Maximizing profit in this case is the same as maximizing bundles sold, so expect bundles with one good hit and several also rans. VC doesn't force this bundling -- people bitched about bundling a few years ago with CDs being a factor in pirating an album instead of paying 2 dollars for the one song they cared about. I'm sure they also love that their anti-piracy measures also make it so you can't transport VC games from one console to another.
From a technological standpoint, VC offers a kind of traceable identification and encryption that mass produced DVDs do not. As far as I know, each VC downloaded is encrypted for a different Wii. Don't ask me how the other side knows the key. I hear they've actually done the technology to put games on reusable carts in Japan, but the US is a much larger region, so again negotiations break down. You can't just walk up to 7-11, ink a deal and call it good, since for example, the nearest 7-11 to me is 60 miles away. It's possible they could do something with McDonalds, but the franchise nature makes it slightly problematic.
If you want examples, look at the bug list for compiz. 175 bugs. You can't even configure compiz by default, beyond "none, some, and more". The fire module tends to choke up starting apps that start maximized. The optional preferences manager in universe hates gconf. And it doesn't even call the burn module by the same name, sometimes calling it fire. And of course, it breaks GL apps that don't do some fullscreen magic. It resets your number of workspaces to 1, and doesn't replace them with viewports. But most of all, it won't really work out of the box in most cases. They try to detect when it won't work and prevent it from activating in those situations. Only the Intel integrated stuff will likely be able to handle it out of the box. Compiz won't be enabled by default if you upgrade, I hear.
These are nitpicks and serious bugs I've found while testing for a few hours. Most are already in launchpad. Bugs don't go away because you don't like me. If you want people like me to go away, report and fix bugs. There's nothing wrong with the software existing -- it's a great tool to experiment with, and impress people. And it's certainly better than what Vista provides. I just think it's important to provide people with a flawless experience out of the box, and let them explore the more adventurous packages Ubuntu provides at leisure.
If we don't get it out it'll never be good enough The basic idea here is that by shipping it with bugs, you'll motivate a few people who wouldn't have otherwise used it to investigate. In some cases, this is true. But realistically, we're not sitting on a pile of unused openGL / video driver development talent. Any such slack was picked up by Intel and put to work on what they felt pressing, and as such is not available to meet Canonical's unpaid requests.
We don't even know how bad it is There are 150 open bugs against compiz, and only 3 labelled critical. But we really don't know how perception of compiz affects bug reporting. We know not all bugs found are reported by it's finder. It's possible that compiz is known to be unstable and rather than report, people just disable and get on with life, assuming compiz stability will continue to be a back burner issue. Dropping compiz into gutsy by default would likely expose more users to bugs. This exposure is theoretically what testing is for, but for various reasons, hasn't come to fruition. One is that upgrades don't enable compiz. Another is that people come to testing not for Ubuntu's sake but for theirs. They're interested in significant new software, or preserving some hardware compatibility.
Or it's simply possible that that's all the bugs there are. But I doubt that.
However Ubuntu does have a significant support structure in place capable of dealing with all but the most egreious failures (think broken X server pushed out). Launchpad does a good job of searching for duplicate bug reports to bring people together, and test workarounds / patches. It's also got a way to attach to upstream bugs to follow on with. This is good because compiz's bugzilla is a nightmare.
Well, that only matters if the fallback manager is triggered. If all you get is a black screen, that's not X crashing, and you'll never trigger the recovery mode.
Actually, I'd say the technology is being tried by nearly every desktop user. And subsequently disabled. My roommate turned it off because it was too distracting. I keep it off because it tends to freeze X on me on feisty.
The techniques are known, as QNX originated from ideas the developers were taught in university. Implementation details are interesting, but several other projects exist with similar goals.
What's more interesting is that with QNX source opened, one can scan for defects via Coverty or other static source analysis tools.
At some point, your LCD has to toggle pixels in the "cleartext" not the "ciphertext". At that point you can decode the signal. Just crack open the case, and try to find the easiest place to tap the unencrypted signal (1600x1200 wires is a bit tedius to solder).
I can't say much about the specifics, but if the situation validly could be optimized by storing in a local variable, I'd hope that your compiler is already doing the duty for you. Available expressions is a fairly simple calculation to make.
The code in question is dual licensed. Many people interpret that to mean you can accept the code under just one of two alternatives, such as the GPL. And then the GPL requires you to offer changes under the GPL, not the BSD license. Partly this matter is confused because the BSD and GPL are very similar, with only a few minor distinctions to be made, both in theory and in practice.
The insurance part is a bit of a red herring, because in a libertopia, odds are good that nobody would have or want it. I know that if I had a choice, I wouldn't carry auto insurance at all (or I'd carry an extremely limited form that only covers things like personal injury suits). It'd save me about $2,200 a year. And I could always roll that money straight into a "personal insurance account" which makes interest. And if your daughter gets a car?
Insurance companies provide a real service. They not only spread risk, but they determine how risky you are. They employ all sorts of actuaries to calculate that your risk should be balanced by say, 2k a year. This is of course the lowest offer they can accept, and only if the barrier to entry is low and the market healthy will you find such a competitive offer. If you can't afford insurance, there's a decent chance you can't afford to take the risk of driving. Not that this stops people. In contrast to insurance companies, you have no idea how much each year to set aside, or how to reduce risk. And given the number of people who already drive uninsured (while against the law!), I'd dare say there'd be a fair number who'd forgoe insurance and neglect to save anything for liability. I sort of wonder if you've ever been hit by an uninsured motorist.
If Linux developers were choosing to make their changes private, this might be an ethical misdeed by developers. Instead, it's a dilemma for BSD: their preferred methods involve giving others the right to act selfish, and Linux developers wish to stop it. Theo labels the Linux developers as selfish, for not accommodating BSD's slightly contradictory principles. He's right, but it's not a matter of sharing code, it's matter of BSD not liking the flavor that was shared.
One way to solve it is to make everyone write BSD code. Another is to make them all write copyleft'd code. It seems that the dual license, what was thought to be a compromise, is little more than the first solution with the appearance of choice. The GPL is supposed to stop
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Which is all to say that refusing plugsched has driven everyone to analyze and improve the CFS through criticism (the trouble being that CREDITS is about source code, not complaints). More importantly, that everyone forks the kernel, and that CK got upset when he realized his fork would likely never be unforked. This is probably a much, much better way to demonstrate why Infoworld's infamous scribbler was wrong than to describe Linus' preferences for things desktop.
I'm sorry for doing a bad job of summarizing. The "who" was their parents. I.e. owning books is correlated with test scores while reading to your child is not. They make certain to mention that this is aggregate data, and that correlation is not causation. More importantly, having a high socioeconomic status affects test grades, while spanking does not. It's entirely possible that they're data mining favorable answers to meet their expectations here (even the book vs reading could be confirmation bias of looking for an example of something that illustrates correlation vs causation), but but I'm not sure how your single family qualifies as a "study" worthy of countering the ECLS.
At any rate, my point was that one can go overboard, and it'll take a village to indulge such parents. If parental involvement was overwhelmingly critical and completely linear, then we should expect homeschooled students to kick ass and take names in all fields. I don't think this is the case.
Yes, yes it is. Which also means its not default in gutsy. I know, because I just filed a bug about how neither gnome nor gsynaptics work.
Nobody mentioned success but you. Some parents, in their quest for morally right upbringing, will choose to exclude vast kinds of media. Should a child decide to struggle against that, as teens are wont to do, it'll take a lot of collusive effort to stop them 24/7. This doesn't contradict your data, but it might contradict your perception of it, so let me add another fact: Freakanomics cites a study about Chicago students suddenly given the chance to enroll in any school. Since more people asked for the best schools than were given them, and surprisingly, neither winners nor losers of the resulting lottery did better than the other. However, they both did better than those who didn't ask to change schools.
My point is that while parental involvement statistically helps, it doesn't necessarily mean parental choices made are effective, and if society doesn't aid them in their quests, their child may still be well off after all. Freakanomics suggests it has more to do with who you are, than what you do.
Shenanigans!
Which is why Vista Business comes without DVD or much multimedia support. One quickly finds oneself resorting to the same "codec packs". The difference being that Ubuntu makes them available as packages, and Microsoft is glad to let you seek k-lite or whatever else is infested with spyware.
Fluendo already has rights to mp3. http://www.fluendo.com/resources/fluendo_mp3.php. I believe ubuntu put it in universe, though it may be better placed in multiverse. You'll have to ask someone else why it's not in restricted and in by default.
Synaptic is something of a beast -- it's a bit slow and not very intuitive. It's improved a lot since I first used it, but I imagine it doesn't get the attention of many people because of its existing flaws.
The Add/Remove dialog of the Applications menu is a rather well done system. What I find interesting is that ubuntu-restricted-extras has a popularity of 1 star. This package basically adds all the stuff you find yourself hunting for in Windows or Ubuntu (sans this package). Java, flash, several AV codecs (including mp3), and dvd playback. I suspect it's caused by being a virtual package that simply brings in all these optional components. Anyways, in contrast to standard installers, Add/Remove rarely asks questions or shows EULAs, or indeed, any sort interaction about the installation.
In a lot of ways, package management systems can be more usable than the Windows method of "download whatever untrusted crap you find on the internet and click next".
That's sort of the point he brings up at the end of the article -- you can get things work, if you spend an hour on a forum. I sort of wish he'd brought up launchpad, as it's designed specifically to turn that sort of traffic into results. Bug reports are filed, it checks for dupes, people can read them and suggest fixes and developers can indicate how much progress has been made into fixing the problem. It can even tie into upstream defect trackers so if upstream fixes it, you can be notified.
By and large this happens with the betas, so while stable releases get some attention, don't be surprised to be asked to check in the development version if it works. And he's certainly right when he says that very few people in Free Software aren't held to high levels of quality. Theoretically, this is what distributions are about -- providing support for unsupported upstreams. 250 dollars for basic desktop support. They don't seem to discriminate whether you're Dell looking to sell tens of thousands of computers or just your own desktop, but the downside is that they don't seem to make many guarantees on fixing upstream bugs. If gnome-mouse-preferences requires some deep detection and connection with synaptics devices, it might be up to you or upstream to figure it out.
My laptop runs Ubuntu. I am however, a techie. In contrast with his complaints, I find my own touchpad undersensetive. This supports his assertion that there should be a configuration tool for this setting. If I go to System->Preferences->Mouse, I find three tabs: Buttons, Motion and Touchpad. None are very complicated menus, and almost all work. Even the handedness setting is smart about things, accepting both right and left click as toggle. I can certainly toggle edge scrolling and tap to click with it, which was part of his complaint.
One caveat: I'm currently running Gutsy, and I haven't tested his specific problem out of box. One thing that doesn't work, is the sensetivity setting. It isn't clear to me why this is the case. It's neither reported in xserver-xorg-input-synaptics or in gnome-control-center. I went ahead and filed the bug, but from the sound of it, it'll require a lot more than a two line patch to fix.
Certainly, the initial Dell release sounds rough, and I don't think many people are sitting around looking at every minor detail. Gutsy's an improvement, and hopefully Hardy will do great things to improve the little details. I imagine as a result Dell's going to be sticking an engineer on the task to fix as many Mossberg mentioned as possible. At least two of the bugs he highlighted don't have high-tech workarounds. They have rather simple steps that Dell or Ubuntu could do. Ubuntu chooses not to enable mp3 or dvds as they're committed to free and liberated software. But if Dell's worth its commercial salt they'll grab onto that void between consumer and producer and add in those packages. I do hope Mossburg lives up to his suggestion that he'll continue to watch Ubuntu, as I think it will improve greatly within a short time (as it already has!)
And if parents don't want a child to play a game, then it'll take a village to restrain them.
I imagine there's a balancing act involved here. I don't buy enterprise bandwidth or press CDs, but I can imagine it being just as cheap or cheaper to offer downloads as it is to press CDs. Certainly, after you consider the cost in warehousing and retailer's cuts, it seems reasonable to assume that it's cheaper. I imagine it's also a pathway to test selling downloads, in hopes of improving bargaining with retailers. Not to mention you can release games in VC when they're ready, and have recieved ESRB ratings. Imagine trying to get a rating for a "150 in 1!" game. Negotiating property rights for a "every NES game ever made on one disc" product would also be a nightmare, and you'd probably get knocks from having to charge more for the entire NES library disc than the Wii itself costs.
From the demand side, they're faced with a rather difficult scenario of bundling games into a collection. Maximizing profit in this case is the same as maximizing bundles sold, so expect bundles with one good hit and several also rans. VC doesn't force this bundling -- people bitched about bundling a few years ago with CDs being a factor in pirating an album instead of paying 2 dollars for the one song they cared about. I'm sure they also love that their anti-piracy measures also make it so you can't transport VC games from one console to another.
From a technological standpoint, VC offers a kind of traceable identification and encryption that mass produced DVDs do not. As far as I know, each VC downloaded is encrypted for a different Wii. Don't ask me how the other side knows the key. I hear they've actually done the technology to put games on reusable carts in Japan, but the US is a much larger region, so again negotiations break down. You can't just walk up to 7-11, ink a deal and call it good, since for example, the nearest 7-11 to me is 60 miles away. It's possible they could do something with McDonalds, but the franchise nature makes it slightly problematic.
Maybe after labels and bands themselves stop trying to create distinctive band sounds, I'll care about whatever changes you're attempting to defend.
If you want examples, look at the bug list for compiz. 175 bugs. You can't even configure compiz by default, beyond "none, some, and more". The fire module tends to choke up starting apps that start maximized. The optional preferences manager in universe hates gconf. And it doesn't even call the burn module by the same name, sometimes calling it fire. And of course, it breaks GL apps that don't do some fullscreen magic. It resets your number of workspaces to 1, and doesn't replace them with viewports. But most of all, it won't really work out of the box in most cases. They try to detect when it won't work and prevent it from activating in those situations. Only the Intel integrated stuff will likely be able to handle it out of the box. Compiz won't be enabled by default if you upgrade, I hear.
These are nitpicks and serious bugs I've found while testing for a few hours. Most are already in launchpad. Bugs don't go away because you don't like me. If you want people like me to go away, report and fix bugs. There's nothing wrong with the software existing -- it's a great tool to experiment with, and impress people. And it's certainly better than what Vista provides. I just think it's important to provide people with a flawless experience out of the box, and let them explore the more adventurous packages Ubuntu provides at leisure.
If we don't get it out it'll never be good enough
The basic idea here is that by shipping it with bugs, you'll motivate a few people who wouldn't have otherwise used it to investigate. In some cases, this is true. But realistically, we're not sitting on a pile of unused openGL / video driver development talent. Any such slack was picked up by Intel and put to work on what they felt pressing, and as such is not available to meet Canonical's unpaid requests.
We don't even know how bad it is
There are 150 open bugs against compiz, and only 3 labelled critical. But we really don't know how perception of compiz affects bug reporting. We know not all bugs found are reported by it's finder. It's possible that compiz is known to be unstable and rather than report, people just disable and get on with life, assuming compiz stability will continue to be a back burner issue. Dropping compiz into gutsy by default would likely expose more users to bugs.
This exposure is theoretically what testing is for, but for various reasons, hasn't come to fruition. One is that upgrades don't enable compiz. Another is that people come to testing not for Ubuntu's sake but for theirs. They're interested in significant new software, or preserving some hardware compatibility.
Or it's simply possible that that's all the bugs there are. But I doubt that.
However
Ubuntu does have a significant support structure in place capable of dealing with all but the most egreious failures (think broken X server pushed out). Launchpad does a good job of searching for duplicate bug reports to bring people together, and test workarounds / patches. It's also got a way to attach to upstream bugs to follow on with. This is good because compiz's bugzilla is a nightmare.
Well, that only matters if the fallback manager is triggered. If all you get is a black screen, that's not X crashing, and you'll never trigger the recovery mode.
Actually, I'd say the technology is being tried by nearly every desktop user. And subsequently disabled. My roommate turned it off because it was too distracting. I keep it off because it tends to freeze X on me on feisty.
It's neat, but I suspect that it's not very well engineered.
The techniques are known, as QNX originated from ideas the developers were taught in university. Implementation details are interesting, but several other projects exist with similar goals.
What's more interesting is that with QNX source opened, one can scan for defects via Coverty or other static source analysis tools.
I think that's his point -- that QNX would have been a superior OS on the PC but for their pricing.
What I'd heard was that they developed it, but in the end couldn't justify the amount of effort supporting it would require (various libc's, etc).
At some point, your LCD has to toggle pixels in the "cleartext" not the "ciphertext". At that point you can decode the signal. Just crack open the case, and try to find the easiest place to tap the unencrypted signal (1600x1200 wires is a bit tedius to solder).
I can't say much about the specifics, but if the situation validly could be optimized by storing in a local variable, I'd hope that your compiler is already doing the duty for you. Available expressions is a fairly simple calculation to make.
The code in question is dual licensed. Many people interpret that to mean you can accept the code under just one of two alternatives, such as the GPL. And then the GPL requires you to offer changes under the GPL, not the BSD license. Partly this matter is confused because the BSD and GPL are very similar, with only a few minor distinctions to be made, both in theory and in practice.
Insurance companies provide a real service. They not only spread risk, but they determine how risky you are. They employ all sorts of actuaries to calculate that your risk should be balanced by say, 2k a year. This is of course the lowest offer they can accept, and only if the barrier to entry is low and the market healthy will you find such a competitive offer. If you can't afford insurance, there's a decent chance you can't afford to take the risk of driving. Not that this stops people. In contrast to insurance companies, you have no idea how much each year to set aside, or how to reduce risk. And given the number of people who already drive uninsured (while against the law!), I'd dare say there'd be a fair number who'd forgoe insurance and neglect to save anything for liability. I sort of wonder if you've ever been hit by an uninsured motorist.
If Linux developers were choosing to make their changes private, this might be an ethical misdeed by developers. Instead, it's a dilemma for BSD: their preferred methods involve giving others the right to act selfish, and Linux developers wish to stop it. Theo labels the Linux developers as selfish, for not accommodating BSD's slightly contradictory principles. He's right, but it's not a matter of sharing code, it's matter of BSD not liking the flavor that was shared.
One way to solve it is to make everyone write BSD code. Another is to make them all write copyleft'd code. It seems that the dual license, what was thought to be a compromise, is little more than the first solution with the appearance of choice. The GPL is supposed to stop