If I have to hand-hold one more CS graduate who spends 2 days agonizing over whether to use a quicksort of a bubblesort when faced with an unordered list of 10 items, I'm gonna kill somebody.
Indeed. Why should a student even consider bubble sort at all? Insertion sort is held in better regard for small sets than either quicksort or bubble sort.
But the more important question is, which organization teaches spelling?
So imagine you're Square-Enix. You know you can sell two million of your game, assuming there's enough machines to play them on. Would you rather sell your game on this new platform or would you rather risk long term sales and release for the current most popular system close to compatible with your game idea?
Okay, fine. Should reporters from Washington no longer report on what the president says, unless backed up by multiple sources? What about when the event isn't a fact, but that someone claimed it to be a fact? I don't think Larry King is a journalist. He's looking for people's opinions rather than objective truth. Therefore, I can't see why journalistic constraints should apply here. This isn't a case of "I'm Larry King, renowned journalist, interviewer and talk radio host, and I've just been told, Ken Mehlman is gay." To an interviewer, The Truth isn't as important as the subject's perspective on the truth. About the worst you can accuse him of is not pushing Bill further on whether that was true or not.
What if it turns out to be true? Do you sacrifice some timely information presented in a tangential supporting argument on a talk show because it doesn't adhere to journalistic standards?
Journalists have an obligation to present to the public a factual depiction of events. Here, the event is the interview. Bill Maher is not the host of this show, and is not depicted as a reporter on events within the context of the show. If he was the host or depicted as a reporter, this would be a sound decision. But Larry King Live is an interview show; is it ethical to edit an interview to remove statements someone made?
I thought most linux geeks did this already, shoot with my 1999 IBM laptop i got a 130$ refund for windows ME same thing for my Compaq Desktop, since i did not need windows, i had linux and a bought copy of windows i told them ship it without a OS and ill do the rest
Of course not; most linux geeks buy their own PC then dual boot with their favorite.iso of WinXP or Vista. But I'd definately ask for a refund on Windows ME too;)
Recall that when asked about price this summer, they stated that the price of the dollar had slid, so they priced the Wii accordingly. Since that time, the dollar has become about five to ten percent stronger against the Yen. If the price point currently known was made assuming no significant changes in the dollar's value, it's possible they could drop the price and still make a profit. Whether they want to is another story. Like I said, you can drop the price any time, but adding new features is hard. I wonder whether HD-DVD really is a firmware update, as you seem to suggest.
I'd heard a rumor that NOA had one last surprise announcement to make about the Wii's features. Most people on that thread thought it would be that Wii Play was bundled, but perhaps the recent rise in the dollar against the Yen means that Nintendo can add in DVD functionality and not change the price. Of course, they could simply lower the price, but they're not really in a position where they can make more than they can sell right now. You can lower the price at any time, but with a console, you only get one good chance to add in new features.
It's already like Windows at system76.com: everything already installed when you buy it. Becuase lets face it, most software on windows comes pre-installed. In fact, you can also currently download a.deb from the web and install it by double clicking on it. A window comes up describing the software and whether the depenencies it has can be met from the current repos. It's all quite simple, if developers are willing to front a small amount of effort to make a.deb.
That said, the Windows philsophy has its downsides. First off, upgrading means reinstalling. Secondly, the lack of trusted software sources like archive.ubuntu.com means users must go about installing software from suspicious 3rd parties. It only takes one bad kazaa install to start the rapid descent into spyware hell. Even downloading.debs from a site isn't immune to this. Offering a nearly comprehensive archive of open source software allows Ubuntu to take a broad based attack against spyware: secure the OS, secure the software, secure the installers. The real trouble with the current Debian / Ubuntu approach is promoting the software they provide: there's a ton of free software and you never know which ones best accomplish what you want to do. Google is rarely appropriate because most software searches return software that doesn't run on linux. And when you do put in "what i need" + "linux", google doesn't know whether a program is new, old, stable, pre-alpha, or even if it has a.deb available anywhere! There are search tools for apt, and while they're often better than a simple google search, they also fail to accurately describe software you don't know much about already. It would be interesting to see what techniques for accurately describing software can be learned from Linspire's approach.
Executive summary: You'd be a damned fool to "make it like Windows."
I'm pretty sure that quake didn't earn its place in computer graphics history for the compelling color scheme. Really, Serious Sam and Far Cry were both fairly well recieved for choosing an environment that was bright and colorful, even if there was a ridiculus amount of violence and gore. Ubuntu's troubles on the theme probably revolved around several things. First, if you want to be visually distinct from Windows and OSX, so you have to throw out blue. Greens are nice, but perhaps recall the stereotypical green on black terminal screens, which I think they want to get away from to fix Bug #1. Most programs use black, white, and gray liberally, so neutral tones are out. Red would probably have been even worse than brown, as would yellow (I don't care how great you think BeOS was).
Second, prevailant theme coloors, as you suggested, something soft. Orange is probably too bright -- dapper feels like something of a step back with it's bright orange gel theme. I'm not sure why they abandoned the knowledge they clearly used in their first themes, unless they felt a need to emulate OS X's bright gel style themes (which works better partly because blue is not as easily percieved in most people's eyes).
Thirdly, Mark Shuttleworth is a rich white man in South Africa. Their current theme is called Human, and has subtle themes of equality, diversity and harmony in its artwork(and maybe nudism;)). I don't know if I'd go so far as to call it "white guilt," but its probably a pretty easy argument to make, and the decision to go for brown meets the other requirements while still fitting into this theoretical third influence.
Also, I've never seen a green theater curtains. I've seen red ones, and black ones though. Are theater gowns different than theater curtains?
I vaguely recall a combination of the two concepts from Nerf a while back; a football that recorded how far you threw it. Obviously nerf footballs differ from the real thing, even without a few extra silicon wafers. But it would be neat to come up with a faster game than football. American football is a very slow paced affair, really. Stand around for 30 seconds, sit still for ten, move around for 15, repeat. There was a game we played in school with a football, where you were allowed two steps after a catch, and no downs. An accelerometer would be well suited to enabling those sorts of rules. However, tying the idea to a playstation indoors seems short sighted and stupid. Playing catch in the house is the 2nd fastest way to break things known to children.
I think your grandma would prefer 6.06 LTS anyways. 3 years support on desktop, 5 on server, if I recall correctly. But remember that the community involvement is the single greatest advantage to open source. When your grandma, or you, or anyone, goes to the trouble of complaining to slashdot or their favorite forum site, Ubuntu has failed to educate and integrate what could otherwise be productive conversation. If you want to complain, absolutely do so. But why waste your time when you could be complaining to people who can hear and solve your problems?
Indeed, it takes more than just software to fix bugs. It will always take people who are both interested in fixing them and capable of doing so. Ubuntu has a BugSquad Team that does some good work; if you're interested in learning about what is probably the strongest volunteer driven effort to manage bugs in Open Source Software, I suggest you sign up and participate for a short while. Their main goal is to fix bugs, though their strongest approach to this problem is making it easier for other developers to fix bugs, and to be personable enough that bug reporters don't disappear before someone interested in fixing it needs log reports they have. But its becoming clear that in a volunteer based system the only people interested in fixing a specific are those people affected by it -- there are ~14,000 bug reports that are unassigned to any particular developer or team, and nearly ten thousand who's status has not been changed from "unconfirmed". I can't tell you how many of those bugs have never been looked at, or any other more specific measure of bugs to effort coverage, because launchpad has decided , it seems, that knowing things like which bugs have the most subscribers would inappropriately influence the bug-fixing process. So for better or worse, a weird icon problem in gnome-network-applet gets more eyeballs than a crasher resulting from a software RAID configuration, but nobody is officially allowed to recognize it might be fine.
It does split files to fill in the gaps, but when that happens, throughput goes down. CPU time isn't a big concern on modern hardware as far as time taken, but if you have to do multiple seeks for a single write it becomes worse. The whole point of ext is to make as much of the system contiguous as possible. Eventually that's going to get harder.
Submitting a good bug report is a fair amount of work: you need to check for dupes, lay out the conditions necessary to reproduce it, give details like your hardware, etc. This is a lot more work than the work necessary to, say Google something, or read a man page, yet we already know that this is too much to expect from most users. If Ubuntu wants things to be easy enough for people that don't know how to google something, then they cannot reasonably expect everyone to submit bug reports.
This is a perception that we need to try very hard to dispel. The most important aspect of a bug tracker is bring people together in one place. A bug is a jigsaw puzzle, with different people having different parts of the puzzle. Some people find ways to trigger the bug, others find ways to accomplish the same thing without triggering the bug, some people fix the flaw in the source code that caused the bug, and some people find how other people fixed the bug. We absolutely need as many people as possible coming together to solve a given bug, in hopes of finding the right combination of the above sets. What we find is that people are perfectly willing to write nasty things on a forum, but for some reason they won't put in the same level of effort into a bug report. This effectively divides that community we needed to build, where people who find bugs complain in one place, people who come up with workarounds and find patches in another, and programmers hiding elsewhere. Writing software to find probable duplicate bug reports should not be a significant challenge in 2006. You said yourself, Google is a good tool used to find how other people solved a bug. It stands to reason that much of the same technology can be applied within say, Launchpad. If writing good bug reports is too hard, we should find ways to make it easier, or find ways to use "bad" bug reports, rather than let everyone give up in isolated desperation.
The one word answer is: fragmentation. Once your drive reaches a certain percentage full, finding suitable free disk space becomes more and more challenging. If you don't like how the net upgrade process works, allow me to suggest what I think you'll find a suitable alternative: download the.iso, and pull packages from it instead. Hopefully you have that much freespace lying around SOMEWHERE. If not, use ship-it.
How about SSL? Does the fact that millions of credit card transactions occurring over the internet are protect by public-key tech not register for you?
In buying a company like redhat, there's no guarentee that the people you need will stay on. You can usualy put in clauses reguarding "key personnell" but that typically means CxO. The people who count there are the sales staff (many of whom would likely stay on if bought by oracle), and technical staff (many of whom I suspect would leave the company before working for Oracle). Moreover, there's people in the company you want, and people you don't want. If Redhat is in a precarious situation, it may be possible to cherry pick top sales people quite easily (selling a cheaper product has to be an easier target, and there's the lucrative 200k oracle support contract as well) and hire key technical staff when approached in person. I mean, wait six months for Dave Jones to train his apprentice, then steal the guy. Or Dave Jones, for that matter.
It might very well come out cheaper to hire the people you want directly from your competitor in the same way Google hired people from Microsoft.
That is a really weird bug. You should try searching http://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+bugs/ for similar bugs already filed. I've not had that happen to me with my usb thumb drive. Ubuntu uses hal, dbus and pmount to make dynamic mounts accessible to the current desktop user. What that means is plug something in, and it sets the "owner" to whoever is currently using the computer.
The best way to find out and/or fix this problem is to file a bug and be prepared to answer questions about your installation.
maybe after someone figures out how to do that in a secure manner, and how to build the torrent in a way that makes sense? One torrent per package won't save much, and torrent for all packages fundamentally breaks the idea that all users in a torrent want all blocks in the set.
I realize it's not as dead-easy perfect as it could be, but have you tried "gksudo update-manager -c" ? It does exactly what you're asking for. I have no idea why it doesn't do it automatically however. Perhaps they want to cushion the load by letting early adopters grab first, then push out the automatic upgrade a week later after a few thousand successful installs/upgrades?
Dapper has something like a 3 year support cycle. Should we be recommending edgy or dapper to new users?
Slashdot Mirror
If I have to hand-hold one more CS graduate who spends 2 days agonizing over whether to use a quicksort of a bubblesort when faced with an unordered list of 10 items, I'm gonna kill somebody.
Indeed. Why should a student even consider bubble sort at all? Insertion sort is held in better regard for small sets than either quicksort or bubble sort.
But the more important question is, which organization teaches spelling?
So imagine you're Square-Enix. You know you can sell two million of your game, assuming there's enough machines to play them on. Would you rather sell your game on this new platform or would you rather risk long term sales and release for the current most popular system close to compatible with your game idea?
Okay, fine. Should reporters from Washington no longer report on what the president says, unless backed up by multiple sources? What about when the event isn't a fact, but that someone claimed it to be a fact? I don't think Larry King is a journalist. He's looking for people's opinions rather than objective truth. Therefore, I can't see why journalistic constraints should apply here. This isn't a case of "I'm Larry King, renowned journalist, interviewer and talk radio host, and I've just been told, Ken Mehlman is gay." To an interviewer, The Truth isn't as important as the subject's perspective on the truth. About the worst you can accuse him of is not pushing Bill further on whether that was true or not.
What if it turns out to be true? Do you sacrifice some timely information presented in a tangential supporting argument on a talk show because it doesn't adhere to journalistic standards?
Journalists have an obligation to present to the public a factual depiction of events. Here, the event is the interview. Bill Maher is not the host of this show, and is not depicted as a reporter on events within the context of the show. If he was the host or depicted as a reporter, this would be a sound decision. But Larry King Live is an interview show; is it ethical to edit an interview to remove statements someone made?
;)
Also, can they still call themselves Live?
I thought most linux geeks did this already, shoot with my 1999 IBM laptop i got a 130$ refund for windows ME same thing for my Compaq Desktop, since i did not need windows, i had linux and a bought copy of windows i told them ship it without a OS and ill do the rest
.iso of WinXP or Vista. But I'd definately ask for a refund on Windows ME too ;)
Of course not; most linux geeks buy their own PC then dual boot with their favorite
Recall that when asked about price this summer, they stated that the price of the dollar had slid, so they priced the Wii accordingly. Since that time, the dollar has become about five to ten percent stronger against the Yen. If the price point currently known was made assuming no significant changes in the dollar's value, it's possible they could drop the price and still make a profit. Whether they want to is another story. Like I said, you can drop the price any time, but adding new features is hard. I wonder whether HD-DVD really is a firmware update, as you seem to suggest.
I'd heard a rumor that NOA had one last surprise announcement to make about the Wii's features. Most people on that thread thought it would be that Wii Play was bundled, but perhaps the recent rise in the dollar against the Yen means that Nintendo can add in DVD functionality and not change the price. Of course, they could simply lower the price, but they're not really in a position where they can make more than they can sell right now. You can lower the price at any time, but with a console, you only get one good chance to add in new features.
It's already like Windows at system76.com: everything already installed when you buy it. Becuase lets face it, most software on windows comes pre-installed. In fact, you can also currently download a .deb from the web and install it by double clicking on it. A window comes up describing the software and whether the depenencies it has can be met from the current repos. It's all quite simple, if developers are willing to front a small amount of effort to make a .deb.
.debs from a site isn't immune to this. Offering a nearly comprehensive archive of open source software allows Ubuntu to take a broad based attack against spyware: secure the OS, secure the software, secure the installers. The real trouble with the current Debian / Ubuntu approach is promoting the software they provide: there's a ton of free software and you never know which ones best accomplish what you want to do. Google is rarely appropriate because most software searches return software that doesn't run on linux. And when you do put in "what i need" + "linux", google doesn't know whether a program is new, old, stable, pre-alpha, or even if it has a .deb available anywhere! There are search tools for apt, and while they're often better than a simple google search, they also fail to accurately describe software you don't know much about already. It would be interesting to see what techniques for accurately describing software can be learned from Linspire's approach.
That said, the Windows philsophy has its downsides. First off, upgrading means reinstalling. Secondly, the lack of trusted software sources like archive.ubuntu.com means users must go about installing software from suspicious 3rd parties. It only takes one bad kazaa install to start the rapid descent into spyware hell. Even downloading
Executive summary: You'd be a damned fool to "make it like Windows."
I'm pretty sure that quake didn't earn its place in computer graphics history for the compelling color scheme. Really, Serious Sam and Far Cry were both fairly well recieved for choosing an environment that was bright and colorful, even if there was a ridiculus amount of violence and gore. Ubuntu's troubles on the theme probably revolved around several things. First, if you want to be visually distinct from Windows and OSX, so you have to throw out blue. Greens are nice, but perhaps recall the stereotypical green on black terminal screens, which I think they want to get away from to fix Bug #1. Most programs use black, white, and gray liberally, so neutral tones are out. Red would probably have been even worse than brown, as would yellow (I don't care how great you think BeOS was).
;)). I don't know if I'd go so far as to call it "white guilt," but its probably a pretty easy argument to make, and the decision to go for brown meets the other requirements while still fitting into this theoretical third influence.
Second, prevailant theme coloors, as you suggested, something soft. Orange is probably too bright -- dapper feels like something of a step back with it's bright orange gel theme. I'm not sure why they abandoned the knowledge they clearly used in their first themes, unless they felt a need to emulate OS X's bright gel style themes (which works better partly because blue is not as easily percieved in most people's eyes).
Thirdly, Mark Shuttleworth is a rich white man in South Africa. Their current theme is called Human, and has subtle themes of equality, diversity and harmony in its artwork(and maybe nudism
Also, I've never seen a green theater curtains. I've seen red ones, and black ones though. Are theater gowns different than theater curtains?
I vaguely recall a combination of the two concepts from Nerf a while back; a football that recorded how far you threw it. Obviously nerf footballs differ from the real thing, even without a few extra silicon wafers. But it would be neat to come up with a faster game than football. American football is a very slow paced affair, really. Stand around for 30 seconds, sit still for ten, move around for 15, repeat. There was a game we played in school with a football, where you were allowed two steps after a catch, and no downs. An accelerometer would be well suited to enabling those sorts of rules. However, tying the idea to a playstation indoors seems short sighted and stupid. Playing catch in the house is the 2nd fastest way to break things known to children.
I think your grandma would prefer 6.06 LTS anyways. 3 years support on desktop, 5 on server, if I recall correctly. But remember that the community involvement is the single greatest advantage to open source. When your grandma, or you, or anyone, goes to the trouble of complaining to slashdot or their favorite forum site, Ubuntu has failed to educate and integrate what could otherwise be productive conversation. If you want to complain, absolutely do so. But why waste your time when you could be complaining to people who can hear and solve your problems?
Indeed, it takes more than just software to fix bugs. It will always take people who are both interested in fixing them and capable of doing so. Ubuntu has a BugSquad Team that does some good work; if you're interested in learning about what is probably the strongest volunteer driven effort to manage bugs in Open Source Software, I suggest you sign up and participate for a short while. Their main goal is to fix bugs, though their strongest approach to this problem is making it easier for other developers to fix bugs, and to be personable enough that bug reporters don't disappear before someone interested in fixing it needs log reports they have. But its becoming clear that in a volunteer based system the only people interested in fixing a specific are those people affected by it -- there are ~14,000 bug reports that are unassigned to any particular developer or team, and nearly ten thousand who's status has not been changed from "unconfirmed". I can't tell you how many of those bugs have never been looked at, or any other more specific measure of bugs to effort coverage, because launchpad has decided , it seems, that knowing things like which bugs have the most subscribers would inappropriately influence the bug-fixing process. So for better or worse, a weird icon problem in gnome-network-applet gets more eyeballs than a crasher resulting from a software RAID configuration, but nobody is officially allowed to recognize it might be fine.
It does split files to fill in the gaps, but when that happens, throughput goes down. CPU time isn't a big concern on modern hardware as far as time taken, but if you have to do multiple seeks for a single write it becomes worse. The whole point of ext is to make as much of the system contiguous as possible. Eventually that's going to get harder.
Compared with FAT, it doesn't. But still, as you fill space, it becomes harder to find contiguous regions ("extents") enough to hold it all.
Submitting a good bug report is a fair amount of work: you need to check for dupes, lay out the conditions necessary to reproduce it, give details like your hardware, etc. This is a lot more work than the work necessary to, say Google something, or read a man page, yet we already know that this is too much to expect from most users. If Ubuntu wants things to be easy enough for people that don't know how to google something, then they cannot reasonably expect everyone to submit bug reports.
This is a perception that we need to try very hard to dispel. The most important aspect of a bug tracker is bring people together in one place. A bug is a jigsaw puzzle, with different people having different parts of the puzzle. Some people find ways to trigger the bug, others find ways to accomplish the same thing without triggering the bug, some people fix the flaw in the source code that caused the bug, and some people find how other people fixed the bug. We absolutely need as many people as possible coming together to solve a given bug, in hopes of finding the right combination of the above sets. What we find is that people are perfectly willing to write nasty things on a forum, but for some reason they won't put in the same level of effort into a bug report. This effectively divides that community we needed to build, where people who find bugs complain in one place, people who come up with workarounds and find patches in another, and programmers hiding elsewhere. Writing software to find probable duplicate bug reports should not be a significant challenge in 2006. You said yourself, Google is a good tool used to find how other people solved a bug. It stands to reason that much of the same technology can be applied within say, Launchpad. If writing good bug reports is too hard, we should find ways to make it easier, or find ways to use "bad" bug reports, rather than let everyone give up in isolated desperation.
The one word answer is: fragmentation. Once your drive reaches a certain percentage full, finding suitable free disk space becomes more and more challenging. If you don't like how the net upgrade process works, allow me to suggest what I think you'll find a suitable alternative: download the .iso, and pull packages from it instead. Hopefully you have that much freespace lying around SOMEWHERE. If not, use ship-it.
Then you better get ahold of EasyUbuntu and ask them to help solve your problem.
How about SSL? Does the fact that millions of credit card transactions occurring over the internet are protect by public-key tech not register for you?
Ah. I was wondering why I recalled a patch to update-manager that did exactly that. That makes some sense at least.
In buying a company like redhat, there's no guarentee that the people you need will stay on. You can usualy put in clauses reguarding "key personnell" but that typically means CxO. The people who count there are the sales staff (many of whom would likely stay on if bought by oracle), and technical staff (many of whom I suspect would leave the company before working for Oracle). Moreover, there's people in the company you want, and people you don't want. If Redhat is in a precarious situation, it may be possible to cherry pick top sales people quite easily (selling a cheaper product has to be an easier target, and there's the lucrative 200k oracle support contract as well) and hire key technical staff when approached in person. I mean, wait six months for Dave Jones to train his apprentice, then steal the guy. Or Dave Jones, for that matter.
It might very well come out cheaper to hire the people you want directly from your competitor in the same way Google hired people from Microsoft.
As optimistic as that page was, the market has a different opinion.
And we all know what happens when someone has a monopoly...
You start a low cost, open source fork of the product, ala CentOS? Monopolies can't easily happen in OSS.
That is a really weird bug. You should try searching http://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+bugs/ for similar bugs already filed. I've not had that happen to me with my usb thumb drive. Ubuntu uses hal, dbus and pmount to make dynamic mounts accessible to the current desktop user. What that means is plug something in, and it sets the "owner" to whoever is currently using the computer.
The best way to find out and/or fix this problem is to file a bug and be prepared to answer questions about your installation.
maybe after someone figures out how to do that in a secure manner, and how to build the torrent in a way that makes sense? One torrent per package won't save much, and torrent for all packages fundamentally breaks the idea that all users in a torrent want all blocks in the set.
I realize it's not as dead-easy perfect as it could be, but have you tried "gksudo update-manager -c" ? It does exactly what you're asking for. I have no idea why it doesn't do it automatically however. Perhaps they want to cushion the load by letting early adopters grab first, then push out the automatic upgrade a week later after a few thousand successful installs/upgrades?
Dapper has something like a 3 year support cycle. Should we be recommending edgy or dapper to new users?