It's Free Software, it's non-evil and there are clients for every platform out there.
You can even use it for cool stuff like IM'ing system alerts to you, as a cheap replacement for SMS on mobile phones (AUD$0.02 vs AUD$0.25) and to publish and subscribe to news feeds.
Because your program is using copyrighted, trademarked material from FFG, there's no way you'll be able to sell it without either getting a licence to do so FFG or just selling the rights to them (then you won't be able to sell it anyway). It doesn't matter if it is open sourced or not. If you make money from their property without them getting anything out of it, expect to get sued.
What I'm doing is being content to make no money from my port whatsoever (i.e. doing it for the love) and hoping that will be good enough. It also helps that the company that orginially made the boardgame has said that people can use their material so long as they don't make any money from it.
Your game could still be a huge commercial success if it is open source, but you will still need a licence from FFG if you want to make a cent from it.
"Remember, there's nothing intelligent about syndication. It fits just as well into the "well formed web" as it does the "semantic web"."
Sure, syndication is a specialization of the semantic web in general, but when you come down to it, that's all the semantic web is: machine readable information about a web-accessable resource. There's nothing special or crazy or obtuse going on, it's that simple.
"But then, your average web designer isn't thinking about RDF, so the message is either getting lost or ignored somewhere."
Maybe, but only because we are driven by what our customers want. But the demand is there, and growing. Many companies and government organisations want compusory metadata for their {Inter|intra|extra}net web sites. It is interesting to note that it is required that all Australian Government web sites provide DC metadata. That trend is going to continue.
"1) RDF, without a dramatic reduction of complexity, coupled with real applications that can only be done with RDF, not merely well-formed XML, is doomed for failure."
Heh. Well, I assert it isn't doomed to failure. I think we need to provide some evidence here.
"2) Trustworth metainformation is valuable. However, it's also extremely rare. Many of the "cool things" that the semantic web was supposed to enable require trusted metainformation."
As I said, it isn't about trusting the metadata, it is about trusting the source. If you trust the source, you trust the metadata. This situation isn't any different to what we have today with human-readable web pages.
Out of curiosity, what are these cool things that require technology based/provided trust?
"3) Until there are real applications for Semantic Web technologies, people won't Semantic Web enable their software in any substantial way."
There already is and they already do, as I said before.
"Therefore, if you want the Semantic Web to happen you either need to find a way to make existing metadata RDF-accessible"
Sure, HTML meta tags can be assumed to be statements about the HTML resource that contains them, Atom data may be able to be coerced to RDF as well, but you also have to have, say, a metadata-smart search engine that lets you search over this metadata. I.e. we still need better tool support.
" or you need to make one with existing technology"
"as far as I can tell, the vast majority of folks who actually are in a position to output semantic information suffer eye-glaze-over when they try to understand RDF."
That's interesting, do you have some figures to back that up? I'm a generic web developer from a small city in a backwards country, and I get it. Are you saying that RDF is harder to learn then say, writing a POSIX or Windows application? A FPS? A Java web-app? A Linux kernel module? Because plenty of people do those things, every day.
"Furthermore, the problem is not just that you need to have the tools output the semantics, but you have to get people to put them in the document."
If you don't want to provide metadata, then fine, don't do it. But if you don't provide metadata, it doesn't matter if you don't provide it RDF or don't provide it some other format. Aren't you arguing against RDF, not metadata in general?
"So, sure Dreamweaver could put Dublin Core metadata there, but people won't use it. In fact, they'll probably complain if it's there because it'll either bloat the size of their documents"
If size is a concern, then you can provide the RDF in a separate file and use a HTML link element to point to it. In fact IIRC, for HTML documents and for XHTML served as text/html, this is the only correct way of embedding serialized RDF in a web page.
"I don't implictly trust EBay or Amazon.com. However, I do trust that there's at least some modicum of crap-removal at play. Remember, the problem with the web isn't just finding stuff. It's finding stuff without finding crap."
Right, so you have to trust an RDF-aggregation-based auction site or search engine as well. Maybe you'll trust the auction site because they have similar policies and procedures as EBay and Amazon, maybe you won't. Search engines have to deal with metadata spam in the same way they deal with keyword spam in the HTML document's body or with link farms. How is any of that that RDF's (or metadata in general's) problem?
"The problem is that there's a log of different tools for building sites."
There certainly is a lot of tools for building sites, but how is that a problem? If people want to publish metadata, they can choose a tool to allow them to do so, or to modify their existing tools and/or practices.
"No, folks have been moaning for several years now that we need to RDF enable stuff. It's not going to happen."
Err, it has already happened. Blogging has made RDF-based syndication a must-have feature for web based applications and has shown how the semantic web can make life a lot easier.
The question is, where is it going to spread to next?
"The problem is, that doesn't require the semantic web or any sort of semantic technologies."
You're right of course, but for any such initative to be successful, it needs to use a standard (or at least widely-known and stable) format/grammar/etc so that thrid-party systems can understand your data.
This is where RDF, OWL and the other semamtic web technologies come into it. Why invent another system when there is already one there?
"The problem is that RDF is wounded by having an incredibly ugly syntax."
No, you're confusing the XML syntax with the model. RDF isn't the XML format, that's just one way to serialise an RDF graph. You also have the n-triple format and others. Ideally, XML serialised RDF would never be hand-written, it _is_ a pig to do so. But is a convenient way to dump an RDF graph in such a way that it can be reliably machine read (which is the whole point of the semantic web).
Notice also how OPML, RDF2 and Atom are never generated by hand? Given the format is best generated by a computer and best consumed by a computer, what's the problem with the format?
It would be nice if there were one canonical way to serialise the graph, thus making processing with tools that aren't RDF-aware easier (eg, an XSLT processor), but I don't think that is a show-stopper.
"I think the biggest problem is that you can't trust metadata blindly. And most of the big "semantic web" stuff assumes that you can, or that figuring out trust can be "solved"."
So why are places like Ebay, Amazon and so on trusted? How is buying something directly via the Ebay web interface any different from buying it via Google, which picked up the same auction from EBay's RDF feed?
There's a lot of places where trust comes into it. Do you trust Google? Do you trust EBay? Do you trust the seller? The semantic web doesn't solve this problem, but it can make it much easier for you to locate the thing in the first place.
"And there is metadata that's trusted. EXIF tags are trusted, simply because there's no benefit in lying."
Right, so why not make the EXIF data available via RDF anyway? Even though it can't be trusted, at least I would be able to search for images that proport to be of a sunset taken between between 17:00 and 18:00, using a Canon IXUS II? That's more than I can do now.
"If you don't have RDF-format data, can't send out jack-booted thugs to force people to make RDF-format data, and need some of it to make things work properly, you need to figure out how to generate it."
Well, that's main problem the sematic web faces today, lack of tool support. Why doesn't Dreamweaver people to embed Dublin Core RDF into every document it produces? Why don't the endless numbers of slide-show gallery generators do the same for EXIF data?
Note however that this isn't a problem caused by the XML RDF serialisation format.
"The problem is, nobody's bothered to work on a tool to make tuple-spidering code to generate tuples for RDF."
Honestly, what's the point? It would be much more producive to refit authoring and content management tools so they produce RDF and search engines and the like to consume RDF. We'd me much better off.
"Oh, so you, on your system, have replicated every major bug in all the software you use?"
No, but given the large number of people that use tbird and the very small number of people who have encountered your bug, it is most probably statstically insignificant (I'll do the stats and work out how insignificant it actually is, if you want). So it isn't surprising that it hasn't been fixed.
To go about saying "don't use tbird because of this bug" is akin to saying "don't fly in an aircraft because I was almost in an air crash once" or "don't go swimming because I almost drowned once".
In the computer industry, this this is known as spreading FUD.
/mike
PS: I don't own a car because I'm not a selfish bastard, and I've never driven one drunk, again because I'm not a selfish bastard. Have you?
No, but you're spreading FUD. I've used TBird since the first Linux build came out and I've never encountered the problem you described. Neither has the vast majority of tbird's other users, or else the bug would have been fixed by now.
It's not the extra paperwork that bothers me, it's the loss of privacy (having fingerprints, photo taken on entry) and the loss of rights and freedom (as imposed by the Patriot act and others) that is stopping me.
Actually, I was thinking of tourism. You know - that thing where I spend my money in the US, thereby making the US richer and in return I get to see some stuff I wouldn't otherwise have seen in Real Life.
If I was going to work overseas, I'd much prefer to work in England or Scotland. I could easily get a job there and I can spend my weekends hanging out on the continent.
But hey, if you want to head back into isolationism, please be my guest. The rest of the world prefer that too, I think.
The Patriot act has made me decide to never go to the US. There's a lot of stuff I'd like to see and do there, but I will never enter the US as long as Bush is in power and legislation like the DCMA and the Patriot Act are law.
No no, I have this great idea that will save me lots of money!
I'll have these wireless lcd/keyboard/mouse devices all connected to one big computer that does all the work. That way I save on hardware, maintenance, and all that.
"This is, for all intents and purposes, the same as ghosting, which is seeing a similar image shifted from the original as well as the original."
The manifestation is similar (except that with ghosting, the *entire* screen is ghosted maybe only once, with motion blur only the moving objects are blurred many times over) but given the two have completely different causes (eg, broken VGA cable vs pixel unlit speed) I would say it is more than just a matter of semantics.
"/me patiently awaits the return of monitors with replacable, BNC-equipped cables..."
Those were the days! I remember my old 21" trinitron had BNC in, but I've never seen a PC equipped with BNC out. Or maybe the old 3dfx daughter cards did? Can't remember.
Still, I'm waiting for some wireless monitor technology to come out. Why have a PC in every room when you can just walk around with a wireless LCD, keyboard and mouse?
Hmm, I think we are both half correct. DVI can carry an analogue VGA as well as digital if you get a DVI-I cable. If you get a plain DVI-D cable, it can only do digital. Have a look at this overview.
I knew ADC also carried power and the expansion buses, but I thought DVI may also carried at least USB. Oh well.
Come on people, get the terminology right. Ghosting and motion blur are not the same thing!
Ghosting is when you get a faint duplicate of the entire on-screen image, slightly offset from what it should be. I don't think this can even occur on LCDs, I think it is a CRT-only problem, but if you use crappy analogue VGA cables, then who knows?
Motion blur is what you thing ghosting is. It is caused by poor refresh times, more specifically it is caused the amount of time it takes for a pixel to become unlit, or "switch off". So LCD screens that have a poor response time often show a trail after a moving object that looks like a ghost of the object.
Understandable that you could get the two confused, but still wrong.
"To qualify the comment about Gnome on Ubuntu, any newbie is going to be irritated as hell about the lack of a straight-forward browse mode as root (to give easy access to config files et cetera - don't talk to me about using the command line)"
This argument has always been preety moot in Gnome - just use the context menu to open a browser window instead of a spatial one.
Still, anyone who needs to use a file browser as root to edit some configuration files does not know enough to actually be doing so - they should be using graphical system configuration tools instead.
Also, using a file browser as root is one of the single most stupid things you could do in general. I actively tell people they should *never* do this.
Yes, but the difference being that MEPIS is built for people that use and know Linux, if not some other flavour of UN*X. Ubuntu is built for these people, but it is also built for users who don't know about Linux or UN*X. For example there's no GUI for, say, "Installing a Lilo bootloader" or "Install X Config" because unless you already know that Lilo or X is, then such a tool is useless and if you do know, you're not likely to want to use a GUI tool (I wouldn't).
The other reason is that Ubuntu's default desktop is well thought out. There aren't more than 15 entries on any panel menu, and they aren't nested more that one or two levels. It is easy for users to find applications and tools there. The default panel config and desktop is uncluttered as well.
So, I'd be happy telling my Dad to go install Ubuntu, but I don't think he could cope with MEPIS (or MDK, or RH, or Debian, or whaetever). I think Ubuntu may be the first version of Linux actually ready for the Desktop.
/Mike
PS: No, I don't work for them, I'm just *really* impressed by the distro.:)
Because it rocks! It's based on Debian, but stable *and* up-to-date. It is the only distro that Just Works.
My friend (just enough technical knowledge to set up a Windows machine) successfully installed Ubuntu last night by himself, the first time he has managed to successfully install a Linux distro.
The desktop is well thought out, it comes with graphical tools to do most common system configuration and there aren't several billion menus of applications to wase through - there's just one each of what is commonly needed.
Download the live cd and try it out without having to install it. I'll be worth it!/Mike
Slashdot Mirror
Why aren't you using Jabber instead?
It's Free Software, it's non-evil and there are clients for every platform out there.
You can even use it for cool stuff like IM'ing system alerts to you, as a cheap replacement for SMS on mobile phones (AUD$0.02 vs AUD$0.25) and to publish and subscribe to news feeds.
Heh, I'm doing the same thing: SWars
Because your program is using copyrighted, trademarked material from FFG, there's no way you'll be able to sell it without either getting a licence to do so FFG or just selling the rights to them (then you won't be able to sell it anyway). It doesn't matter if it is open sourced or not. If you make money from their property without them getting anything out of it, expect to get sued.
What I'm doing is being content to make no money from my port whatsoever (i.e. doing it for the love) and hoping that will be good enough. It also helps that the company that orginially made the boardgame has said that people can use their material so long as they don't make any money from it.
Your game could still be a huge commercial success if it is open source, but you will still need a licence from FFG if you want to make a cent from it.
/me waves
For Mozilla, it's easy. For IE, you'll need a XBL compatibility layer from some guy grazy enough to hack one up.
You create an XBL file that transforms all "a" tags. You can entirely replace them, swap attributes, etc. easily.
"Remember, there's nothing intelligent about syndication. It fits just as well into the "well formed web" as it does the "semantic web"."
Sure, syndication is a specialization of the semantic web in general, but when you come down to it, that's all the semantic web is: machine readable information about a web-accessable resource. There's nothing special or crazy or obtuse going on, it's that simple.
"But then, your average web designer isn't thinking about RDF, so the message is either getting lost or ignored somewhere."
Maybe, but only because we are driven by what our customers want. But the demand is there, and growing. Many companies and government organisations want compusory metadata for their {Inter|intra|extra}net web sites. It is interesting to note that it is required that all Australian Government web sites provide DC metadata. That trend is going to continue.
"1) RDF, without a dramatic reduction of complexity, coupled with real applications that can only be done with RDF, not merely well-formed XML, is doomed for failure."
Heh. Well, I assert it isn't doomed to failure. I think we need to provide some evidence here.
"2) Trustworth metainformation is valuable. However, it's also extremely rare. Many of the "cool things" that the semantic web was supposed to enable require trusted metainformation."
As I said, it isn't about trusting the metadata, it is about trusting the source. If you trust the source, you trust the metadata. This situation isn't any different to what we have today with human-readable web pages.
Out of curiosity, what are these cool things that require technology based/provided trust?
"3) Until there are real applications for Semantic Web technologies, people won't Semantic Web enable their software in any substantial way."
There already is and they already do, as I said before.
"Therefore, if you want the Semantic Web to happen you either need to find a way to make existing metadata RDF-accessible"
Sure, HTML meta tags can be assumed to be statements about the HTML resource that contains them, Atom data may be able to be coerced to RDF as well, but you also have to have, say, a metadata-smart search engine that lets you search over this metadata. I.e. we still need better tool support.
" or you need to make one with existing technology"
Sorry, I couldn't grok that, make one what?
"as far as I can tell, the vast majority of folks who actually are in a position to output semantic information suffer eye-glaze-over when they try to understand RDF."
That's interesting, do you have some figures to back that up? I'm a generic web developer from a small city in a backwards country, and I get it. Are you saying that RDF is harder to learn then say, writing a POSIX or Windows application? A FPS? A Java web-app? A Linux kernel module? Because plenty of people do those things, every day.
"Furthermore, the problem is not just that you need to have the tools output the semantics, but you have to get people to put them in the document."
If you don't want to provide metadata, then fine, don't do it. But if you don't provide metadata, it doesn't matter if you don't provide it RDF or don't provide it some other format. Aren't you arguing against RDF, not metadata in general?
"So, sure Dreamweaver could put Dublin Core metadata there, but people won't use it. In fact, they'll probably complain if it's there because it'll either bloat the size of their documents"
If size is a concern, then you can provide the RDF in a separate file and use a HTML link element to point to it. In fact IIRC, for HTML documents and for XHTML served as text/html, this is the only correct way of embedding serialized RDF in a web page.
"I don't implictly trust EBay or Amazon.com. However, I do trust that there's at least some modicum of crap-removal at play. Remember, the problem with the web isn't just finding stuff. It's finding stuff without finding crap."
Right, so you have to trust an RDF-aggregation-based auction site or search engine as well. Maybe you'll trust the auction site because they have similar policies and procedures as EBay and Amazon, maybe you won't. Search engines have to deal with metadata spam in the same way they deal with keyword spam in the HTML document's body or with link farms. How is any of that that RDF's (or metadata in general's) problem?
"The problem is that there's a log of different tools for building sites."
There certainly is a lot of tools for building sites, but how is that a problem? If people want to publish metadata, they can choose a tool to allow them to do so, or to modify their existing tools and/or practices.
"No, folks have been moaning for several years now that we need to RDF enable stuff. It's not going to happen."
Err, it has already happened. Blogging has made RDF-based syndication a must-have feature for web based applications and has shown how the semantic web can make life a lot easier.
The question is, where is it going to spread to next?
"The problem is, that doesn't require the semantic web or any sort of semantic technologies."
You're right of course, but for any such initative to be successful, it needs to use a standard (or at least widely-known and stable) format/grammar/etc so that thrid-party systems can understand your data.
This is where RDF, OWL and the other semamtic web technologies come into it. Why invent another system when there is already one there?
"The problem is that RDF is wounded by having an incredibly ugly syntax."
No, you're confusing the XML syntax with the model. RDF isn't the XML format, that's just one way to serialise an RDF graph. You also have the n-triple format and others. Ideally, XML serialised RDF would never be hand-written, it _is_ a pig to do so. But is a convenient way to dump an RDF graph in such a way that it can be reliably machine read (which is the whole point of the semantic web).
Notice also how OPML, RDF2 and Atom are never generated by hand? Given the format is best generated by a computer and best consumed by a computer, what's the problem with the format?
It would be nice if there were one canonical way to serialise the graph, thus making processing with tools that aren't RDF-aware easier (eg, an XSLT processor), but I don't think that is a show-stopper.
"I think the biggest problem is that you can't trust metadata blindly. And most of the big "semantic web" stuff assumes that you can, or that figuring out trust can be "solved"."
So why are places like Ebay, Amazon and so on trusted? How is buying something directly via the Ebay web interface any different from buying it via Google, which picked up the same auction from EBay's RDF feed?
There's a lot of places where trust comes into it. Do you trust Google? Do you trust EBay? Do you trust the seller? The semantic web doesn't solve this problem, but it can make it much easier for you to locate the thing in the first place.
"And there is metadata that's trusted. EXIF tags are trusted, simply because there's no benefit in lying."
Right, so why not make the EXIF data available via RDF anyway? Even though it can't be trusted, at least I would be able to search for images that proport to be of a sunset taken between between 17:00 and 18:00, using a Canon IXUS II? That's more than I can do now.
"If you don't have RDF-format data, can't send out jack-booted thugs to force people to make RDF-format data, and need some of it to make things work properly, you need to figure out how to generate it."
Well, that's main problem the sematic web faces today, lack of tool support. Why doesn't Dreamweaver people to embed Dublin Core RDF into every document it produces? Why don't the endless numbers of slide-show gallery generators do the same for EXIF data?
Note however that this isn't a problem caused by the XML RDF serialisation format.
"The problem is, nobody's bothered to work on a tool to make tuple-spidering code to generate tuples for RDF."
Honestly, what's the point? It would be much more producive to refit authoring and content management tools so they produce RDF and search engines and the like to consume RDF. We'd me much better off.
How about art.gnome.org? That's where I get mine from.
-mike
"Oh, so you, on your system, have replicated every major bug in all the software you use?"
No, but given the large number of people that use tbird and the very small number of people who have encountered your bug, it is most probably statstically insignificant (I'll do the stats and work out how insignificant it actually is, if you want). So it isn't surprising that it hasn't been fixed.
To go about saying "don't use tbird because of this bug" is akin to saying "don't fly in an aircraft because I was almost in an air crash once" or "don't go swimming because I almost drowned once".
In the computer industry, this this is known as spreading FUD.
/mike
PS: I don't own a car because I'm not a selfish bastard, and I've never driven one drunk, again because I'm not a selfish bastard. Have you?
No, but you're spreading FUD. I've used TBird since the first Linux build came out and I've never encountered the problem you described. Neither has the vast majority of tbird's other users, or else the bug would have been fixed by now.
That old chestnut again?
Didn't I see you at the Microsoft campus the other day?
It's not the extra paperwork that bothers me, it's the loss of privacy (having fingerprints, photo taken on entry) and the loss of rights and freedom (as imposed by the Patriot act and others) that is stopping me.
/mike
Actually, I was thinking of tourism. You know - that thing where I spend my money in the US, thereby making the US richer and in return I get to see some stuff I wouldn't otherwise have seen in Real Life.
If I was going to work overseas, I'd much prefer to work in England or Scotland. I could easily get a job there and I can spend my weekends hanging out on the continent.
But hey, if you want to head back into isolationism, please be my guest. The rest of the world prefer that too, I think.
/mike
Sorry, did you have a point?
... and who doesn't live in the country:
The Patriot act has made me decide to never go to the US. There's a lot of stuff I'd like to see and do there, but I will never enter the US as long as Bush is in power and legislation like the DCMA and the Patriot Act are law.
/mike
No no, I have this great idea that will save me lots of money!
I'll have these wireless lcd/keyboard/mouse devices all connected to one big computer that does all the work. That way I save on hardware, maintenance, and all that.
I'll call them network computers... oh.. wait...
"This is, for all intents and purposes, the same as ghosting, which is seeing a similar image shifted from the original as well as the original."
The manifestation is similar (except that with ghosting, the *entire* screen is ghosted maybe only once, with motion blur only the moving objects are blurred many times over) but given the two have completely different causes (eg, broken VGA cable vs pixel unlit speed) I would say it is more than just a matter of semantics.
/mike
"/me patiently awaits the return of monitors with replacable, BNC-equipped cables..."
Those were the days! I remember my old 21" trinitron had BNC in, but I've never seen a PC equipped with BNC out. Or maybe the old 3dfx daughter cards did? Can't remember.
Still, I'm waiting for some wireless monitor technology to come out. Why have a PC in every room when you can just walk around with a wireless LCD, keyboard and mouse?
/mike
Hmm, I think we are both half correct. DVI can carry an analogue VGA as well as digital if you get a DVI-I cable. If you get a plain DVI-D cable, it can only do digital. Have a look at this overview.
I knew ADC also carried power and the expansion buses, but I thought DVI may also carried at least USB. Oh well.
/mike
"In a vaguely related topic, does anybody know why DVI cables are so freakin' expensive?"
I think it's because they are really five billion cables in one: analogue VGA, digital VGA, a few USB, a few firewire,, something like that.
/mike
Come on people, get the terminology right. Ghosting and motion blur are not the same thing!
Ghosting is when you get a faint duplicate of the entire on-screen image, slightly offset from what it should be. I don't think this can even occur on LCDs, I think it is a CRT-only problem, but if you use crappy analogue VGA cables, then who knows?
Motion blur is what you thing ghosting is. It is caused by poor refresh times, more specifically it is caused the amount of time it takes for a pixel to become unlit, or "switch off". So LCD screens that have a poor response time often show a trail after a moving object that looks like a ghost of the object.
Understandable that you could get the two confused, but still wrong.
/mike
"To qualify the comment about Gnome on Ubuntu, any newbie is going to be irritated as hell about the lack of a straight-forward browse mode as root (to give easy access to config files et cetera - don't talk to me about using the command line)"
This argument has always been preety moot in Gnome - just use the context menu to open a browser window instead of a spatial one.
Still, anyone who needs to use a file browser as root to edit some configuration files does not know enough to actually be doing so - they should be using graphical system configuration tools instead.
Also, using a file browser as root is one of the single most stupid things you could do in general. I actively tell people they should *never* do this.
You should *never* be doing this!
Yes, but the difference being that MEPIS is built for people that use and know Linux, if not some other flavour of UN*X. Ubuntu is built for these people, but it is also built for users who don't know about Linux or UN*X. For example there's no GUI for, say, "Installing a Lilo bootloader" or "Install X Config" because unless you already know that Lilo or X is, then such a tool is useless and if you do know, you're not likely to want to use a GUI tool (I wouldn't).
:)
The other reason is that Ubuntu's default desktop is well thought out. There aren't more than 15 entries on any panel menu, and they aren't nested more that one or two levels. It is easy for users to find applications and tools there. The default panel config and desktop is uncluttered as well.
So, I'd be happy telling my Dad to go install Ubuntu, but I don't think he could cope with MEPIS (or MDK, or RH, or Debian, or whaetever). I think Ubuntu may be the first version of Linux actually ready for the Desktop.
/Mike
PS: No, I don't work for them, I'm just *really* impressed by the distro.
Because it rocks! It's based on Debian, but stable *and* up-to-date. It is the only distro that Just Works.
/Mike
My friend (just enough technical knowledge to set up a Windows machine) successfully installed Ubuntu last night by himself, the first time he has managed to successfully install a Linux distro.
The desktop is well thought out, it comes with graphical tools to do most common system configuration and there aren't several billion menus of applications to wase through - there's just one each of what is commonly needed.
Download the live cd and try it out without having to install it. I'll be worth it!
That's why you run Debian, so it sorts all of this stuff out for you, right?