I doubt websites will require IPv6 for quite some years, as nobody would be stupid enough to just cut of a large percentage of the userbase. Where IP addresses will run out is at the user side, people are already behind dynamic IP addresses for that reason, in the future they might be behind a provider-NAT or transparent proxy and no longer get a public IP at all. That setup would still keep old gear running and allow access to IPv4 webpages and give plenty of time to fix/upgrade old router gear. Lets not forget that a random home router goes for as little as $20, so its quite affordable and without much upgrade pressure it shouldn't be that big of a deal. It might however mean that the IPv6 transition might take a long long.
DD-WRT is a lot more complicated then any proprietary router I have ever used, sure, it also can do a lot more, but even as experienced user I feel kind of lost between the hundreds (or thousands?) of configuration options. It is simply to much stuff at once to be really considered easy to use.
He did that on the advise of his lawyer and also to avoid having to face worse (register as sex offender, etc.), as after all he was clearly guilty of the crimes" he commited, its just that those things shouldn't have been a crime in the first place. Max Hardcore is a similar case.
This is nonsense.. once a cell has worn out it is dead; and the disk capacity is reduced by that amount.
Sure about that? Your average file system won't like it very much if you just "reduce the disk capacity", so having some spare blocks around to take the place of failed one would make a lot of sense if the whole drive shouldn't be unusable once the first failed block appears.
That won't work. First of you want your outfile (of) to be the drive, not the infile (in), as writing your drives content to/dev/random won't do any harm. Secondly you really don't want to use/dev/random, as real randomness is extremely slow on your average system, in the order of 5bytes/second, which would take some 500 years to fill up your 80GB SSD drive. So:
But it is noticable that the Heydey of Zelda was 1995 when Capcom have released the best handheld Zeldas under Nintendos Name and Occarina of Time borrowed a lot of the Capcom elements and added 3d to it.
You got your dates wrong, the Oracle of Ages/Season games where released in 2001, over two years after Ocarina of Time (1998) and they borrowed very heavily from Links Awakening (1993), as they used basically the same engine and graphics.
I thought PS3 system software 3.50 and later had rejected unlicensed controllers [gamasutra.com].
That locked out counterfeit controllers, not unlicensed one. You can still stick any random PC USB controller into the PS3 and it will work (sometimes not very well as the axis and button order might be jumbled up).
What counterpart does any current PlayStation product have to Microsoft's XNA Game Studio
None (when we don't count Linux), but XNA isn't exactly a shiny showcase of freedom either. It cost $99 a year, in addition to the $50 for XboxLive and you have to use C# along with the XNA API (i.e. no easy ports of Linux, mediaplayers or anything else). It is still nice that it exists, but it doesn't cause all the other Microsoft screw ups to disappear.
Of the three major video game console makers, the console division of Microsoft is the least evil.
Microsoft is easily by far most evil of them. PS3 supports standard Blutooth, USB storage and USB controllers and lets you exchange your harddrive. Xbox360 on the other side has a proprietary wireless protocol, a proprietary USB protocol that is specifically designed to block third party controllers, requires proprietary memory cards (recently fixed) and still only works with horrendously overpriced special Microsoft harddrives. Their online service also cost money (and games will still get disabled on that) and they never did offer a recall for those red ringing Xbox360 which have a ridiculous high failure rate (no, three year warranty is not a recall).
The thing that sucks with Sony is that they bit by bit are taking away the freedom they offered. Microsoft on the other side never offered any freedom in the first place, quite the opposite, their console is pretty much as locked down as it can be.
Nintendo might still be somewhat acceptable, they at least did offer free strap-replacements and silicon rubber gloves for the Wiimotes when that turned out to be an issue, but even they throw lawsuits at you when you try to sell an flash card.
I upgraded the hard drive, and discovered that I had to re-download and re-play all of my games from the beginning (waste of time not advertised at time of purchase).
There are plenty of well-known programming practices that make SQL injections and XSS attacks a thing of the distant past.
And that is part of the problem. A lot of security is still only based on "good programming practice" and while it really should be just giving the user a compile errors.
Yeah, try doing that with a really large group of recipients on a regular basis. BCC still has a valuable place for some of us who need to send out "broadcast" emails without having every yahoo knowing the whole list of recipients (and don't want to be limited to 140 characters).
Yes, thats why I mentioned it right in the next paragraph. However even that use isn't necessarily a good reason for BCC, as that could be implemented on the client side. Nothing stops a mail client from providing a feature that sends the same mail to multiple recipients without help from the mail server and BCC, it would waste a bit more of a users bandwidth, but maybe that wouldn't even be a bad idea, as it would make the cost of mass mail a bit more obvious to the user.
I don't know why people hate Majora's Mask so much
The problem with MM was that it required far to much planing and provided far to much room to screw up. Forgot to use that spell that slows done time? Have fun seeing time run out and playing all that stuff over again. It also introduced one of the most horrible mechanic ever seen in a Nintendo game: It delete your savegames. You can store your state an an owl statue, but when you load that state the game deletes it, thus you have to go back to another statue to save again. If you forget that you can lose many hours of playtime and have to redo everything. Incredible stupid design decision.
From a pure concept perspective MM is easily the most interesting Zelda game, but it also is by far the most punishing and annoying Zelda game, which is why I never finished it. I still would love to see that concept realized properly.
In any case, I for one, have no issue with old franchises maintaining their core mechanics from one release to another.
The problem is that they maintain to much of the core mechanics. Pushing blocks around on a grid for example feels really really old, why haven't Zelda games taken some inspiration from other modern games and use a proper physics engine instead? That was one of the things that really impressed me back when Tomb Raider: Legend came out, you still pushed blocks, but they where no longer fixed to a grid, they could be thrown around, used to block traps and many other things. It felt dynamic and fresh. That's what I would expect from a new Zelda. How about the Portal gun? Would make a great fit for a Zelda game that could be used in a ton of puzzles. How about finally providing a real open world and not just a collection of small rooms with forest-decoration? The world of Shadow of the Colossus feels far bigger, far more impressive and far more realistic then anything modern 3D Zeldas have ever come up with. Wind Waker kind of had an open world, but it was a boring one, why was water in there just a plain blue area of boredom? Why not WaveRace style water physics?
Basically Zelda used to be at the forefront of game development and offered exciting worlds to explore, today it just feels really old school and I would have a really hard time naming anything original the series has done in the last ten years, which is sad, given that there are so many things the series could do instead of just giving you yet another boomerang.
Everything from start to finish feels polished and you just want to explore.
Polish doesn't make we want to explore, it is the mystery and the unknown that makes me want to explore things and Zelda games spend far to much time in very familiar "been there, done that" territory, devoid of any mystery or surprise. For example there is no doubt that Zelda:TP was an masterfully crafted game, but playing it where also the most boring 35h I ever spend with a brilliantly designed game.
The biggest problem with the Zelda series is that it hasn't really advanced, it still uses at its core the same game mechanics and story elements that it did 25 years ago and while that wasn't a problem for say the first 15 years of Zelda (tech improved, 3D, etc. made it still feel fresh enough), the series really shows its age by now, not so much because its bad, but because we have seen the same old stuff for the last two decades. Fighting Ganon again and rescuing Zelda again, just is kind of a snore by now and the Zelda games haven't been all that great when it comes to story telling to begin with (Links Awakening being the exception, loved the ending).
Anyway, I can certainly see why those games have been popular in the good old days, I used to love them myself and Link to the Past is worth a play, but these days I just don't care for the newer ones, to much of the same old stuff and I doubt that a little watercolor effect and being able to swing the sword horizontally in the next one will change that.
I'd say it was "killed", if one wants to call it that, simply by not being very useful in the first place. The article itself gives the answer already: "Send a message to X, copy and paste it, and send it to Y.", that serves the same as BCC, allows you to add additional information and is far easier to understand for both the sender and receiver, thus people use that instead of BCC. Also I don't think the original design purpose for BCC was to allow easy sending of nasty messages while letting a third party know about it in the first place, so if that abuse of that feature dies out, so be it.
The only valid reason I see for using BCC is the case of mail announcements, where you don't want to go the trouble of setting up a mailing list, but still want to get mail to a few hundred people without giving the recipients away to everybody. Thus you use BCC instead of CC. No confusion on the recipient side and everything works as intended.
They don't allow used games. They don't allow to decouple games from an account. They don't allow lending games. They disallow you to import your games by blocking the CD keys. All their regular non-special sales prices are quite expensive and almost always above what you pay at Amazon (the German one, things might differ elsewhere).
Steam makes a lot of things right from a usability perspective, but it takes your freedom away just like any other Internet activated DRM scheme.
They're all equally time sinks with the onley upside being people get some enjoyment from them.
I can't answer the question for Mafia Wars, as I haven't played that, but the problem with FarmVille is that it works on real time. You can't switch it off, do something else and come back in three days as you can with regular games, as by then all your plants in the game will have died. Leaving the game doesn't stop the clock, it just keeps ticking. The game requires constant attention to keep your plants alive and harvest them in time. In that sense FarmVille is a hell of a lot closer to a Tamagotchi then it is to your average round of Call of Duty.
The total time required to play FarmVille isn't event very long, as a single session might only take something like 15min. After that you have done everything you can and are forced to wait for your plants to grow (or pay them real money for virtual one). It is the dependency it creates that is the real issue.
No, it wasnt. other than (you need to get from point A, to point B) and so the endpoints are fixed.
Not really, it pretty much was a "one true path" game by design and while you could here and there add in a bit variation, that variation never was very large. What you do in time trial is very different, as there you have the time to do the exploration and try dozens of times, also you don't have enemies to worry about, on a single playthrough of the game you are never ever going to find many of those paths or even any add all. Adding a few hidden path just doesn't make it a non-linear game, more the opposite, it just goes to show that those hidden paths are something special to be discovered, not but of the main gameplay.
That said, I never had an issue with that fact, its an environment puzzle game, very much like Prince of Persia, Another World, etc. and finding the one true path is pretty much what you do in those games.
Indeed. And it ensures that proper dependencies graphs can be built. IMO, this is the better solution than a mix with unintended consequences.
You wouldn't have any issues with dependency graph if you wouldn't lump everything into a single namespace.
Ignoring the fact that I have six different sources in my sources.list at this time and mix from them without problems,
Thats because you have been lucky, not because there is anything stopping one of those repositories from totally fucking up your system. What I am hinting at is a system where you could mix and match everything, enter Ubuntu in your sources.list, do "apt-get install ubuntu/gnome" and have that work fine without breaking your current Debian Gnome installation or the rest of the system.
I am intrigued. Define this "should" you are speaking of. What's the rationale? What's the incentive?
The incentive? Cleanup up the distribution mess that Linux is and providing the best system possible?
What mess?
And then at one future day you might want to install a new piece of hardware or install a new piece of software not supported by the by now year old stable release. What are your options then? Either wait till the new stable is out, which could be month or years, or completly bypass everything Debian provides and manually hack stuff into the system. Thats what I call a mess. A proper system should allow you to install new stuff when you need it without dist-upgrading the whole system.
Name any other desktop OS that has seen half as much stability testing as
You are thinking to much in competitive terms. Just because other are worse doesn't mean Debian couldn't be a whole lot better.
Simply create package1 and package2 for versions 1 & 2
Thats not two versions of the same package but two different packages. Small, but very important difference.
Every distribution has a graph of dependencies.
Yes, that flaw isn't a Debian issue, it affects basically every Linux distribution out there.
To provide an analogy: Debian is basically the SVN of distributions, nice, solid, does 95% of what you want. I want the Git of distributions, that gives me all of that plus a lot of more freedom and less dependency on some single central repository.
Implying that Debian should limit itself so that others can more easily mooch is... strange?
First of all, just because Debian should be able to provide a proper base system doesn't stop it from providing a full distribution. Secondly, the whole "base system" thing wouldn't just benefit Ubuntu, but also Debian, as it could clean up the whole base stable vs unstable issues, like say you want to install a unstable Gnome on a stable system, currently that would be quite a mess, if there would be proper decoupling between components on the other side, such a thing might very well be possible. And while at it, how about allowing to install two packages with different versions at the time? This is really not just about making things easier for Ubuntu, but getting rid of the whole monolithic dependency tree in general.
That is how it should be, but that is not how it is. Debian is not some generic distribution-construction-kit, but instead Debian is a complete normal independent Linux distribution and that is exactly where I see the problems. Ubuntu, just as the other distributions based on Debian, isn't a real Debian with a few extra packages installed, but a completely different thing, having its own complete package dependency tree that is incompatible to that of Debian. You might have luck installing Ubuntu packages on Debian or visa versa, but you might as well have not. There is no Debian base system to which developers can develop their packages that will then automatically be compatible with all Debian based distribution, you still have to build every package for every distribution.And thats really the crux, instead of having a unified base with which you can reach a large part of Linux users, you have heavy fragmentation. See for example the whole Launchpad auto builder infrastructure, great for building stuff for Ubuntu, but wanna build something for another Debian based distro or even Debian itself? Tough luck, that stuff is Ubuntu only.
At this point I would really welcome it when Debian would work towards becoming a proper base system for other distributions to build on in a proper way, not the kind of hacky one that is practiced today.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt websites will require IPv6 for quite some years, as nobody would be stupid enough to just cut of a large percentage of the userbase. Where IP addresses will run out is at the user side, people are already behind dynamic IP addresses for that reason, in the future they might be behind a provider-NAT or transparent proxy and no longer get a public IP at all. That setup would still keep old gear running and allow access to IPv4 webpages and give plenty of time to fix/upgrade old router gear. Lets not forget that a random home router goes for as little as $20, so its quite affordable and without much upgrade pressure it shouldn't be that big of a deal. It might however mean that the IPv6 transition might take a long long.
DD-WRT is a lot more complicated then any proprietary router I have ever used, sure, it also can do a lot more, but even as experienced user I feel kind of lost between the hundreds (or thousands?) of configuration options. It is simply to much stuff at once to be really considered easy to use.
Normal users can't undelete articles, they can not even view them. A delete is something very different from an edit.
So he was an idiot.
He did that on the advise of his lawyer and also to avoid having to face worse (register as sex offender, etc.), as after all he was clearly guilty of the crimes" he commited, its just that those things shouldn't have been a crime in the first place. Max Hardcore is a similar case.
In the US such things are legal (see nudist websites).
Not quite, see Christopher Handley, who got into trouble for collecting manga.
This is nonsense.. once a cell has worn out it is dead; and the disk capacity is reduced by that amount.
Sure about that? Your average file system won't like it very much if you just "reduce the disk capacity", so having some spare blocks around to take the place of failed one would make a lot of sense if the whole drive shouldn't be unusable once the first failed block appears.
That won't work. First of you want your outfile (of) to be the drive, not the infile (in), as writing your drives content to /dev/random won't do any harm. Secondly you really don't want to use /dev/random, as real randomness is extremely slow on your average system, in the order of 5bytes/second, which would take some 500 years to fill up your 80GB SSD drive. So:
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdx
or just:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx
But it is noticable that the Heydey of Zelda was 1995 when Capcom have released the best handheld Zeldas under Nintendos Name and Occarina of Time borrowed a lot of the Capcom elements and added 3d to it.
You got your dates wrong, the Oracle of Ages/Season games where released in 2001, over two years after Ocarina of Time (1998) and they borrowed very heavily from Links Awakening (1993), as they used basically the same engine and graphics.
I thought PS3 system software 3.50 and later had rejected unlicensed controllers [gamasutra.com].
That locked out counterfeit controllers, not unlicensed one. You can still stick any random PC USB controller into the PS3 and it will work (sometimes not very well as the axis and button order might be jumbled up).
What counterpart does any current PlayStation product have to Microsoft's XNA Game Studio
None (when we don't count Linux), but XNA isn't exactly a shiny showcase of freedom either. It cost $99 a year, in addition to the $50 for XboxLive and you have to use C# along with the XNA API (i.e. no easy ports of Linux, mediaplayers or anything else). It is still nice that it exists, but it doesn't cause all the other Microsoft screw ups to disappear.
Of the three major video game console makers, the console division of Microsoft is the least evil.
Microsoft is easily by far most evil of them. PS3 supports standard Blutooth, USB storage and USB controllers and lets you exchange your harddrive. Xbox360 on the other side has a proprietary wireless protocol, a proprietary USB protocol that is specifically designed to block third party controllers, requires proprietary memory cards (recently fixed) and still only works with horrendously overpriced special Microsoft harddrives. Their online service also cost money (and games will still get disabled on that) and they never did offer a recall for those red ringing Xbox360 which have a ridiculous high failure rate (no, three year warranty is not a recall).
The thing that sucks with Sony is that they bit by bit are taking away the freedom they offered. Microsoft on the other side never offered any freedom in the first place, quite the opposite, their console is pretty much as locked down as it can be.
Nintendo might still be somewhat acceptable, they at least did offer free strap-replacements and silicon rubber gloves for the Wiimotes when that turned out to be an issue, but even they throw lawsuits at you when you try to sell an flash card.
I upgraded the hard drive, and discovered that I had to re-download and re-play all of my games from the beginning (waste of time not advertised at time of purchase).
Doesn't the PS3 have a backup function for that?
There are plenty of well-known programming practices that make SQL injections and XSS attacks a thing of the distant past.
And that is part of the problem. A lot of security is still only based on "good programming practice" and while it really should be just giving the user a compile errors.
Yeah, try doing that with a really large group of recipients on a regular basis. BCC still has a valuable place for some of us who need to send out "broadcast" emails without having every yahoo knowing the whole list of recipients (and don't want to be limited to 140 characters).
Yes, thats why I mentioned it right in the next paragraph. However even that use isn't necessarily a good reason for BCC, as that could be implemented on the client side. Nothing stops a mail client from providing a feature that sends the same mail to multiple recipients without help from the mail server and BCC, it would waste a bit more of a users bandwidth, but maybe that wouldn't even be a bad idea, as it would make the cost of mass mail a bit more obvious to the user.
I don't know why people hate Majora's Mask so much
The problem with MM was that it required far to much planing and provided far to much room to screw up. Forgot to use that spell that slows done time? Have fun seeing time run out and playing all that stuff over again. It also introduced one of the most horrible mechanic ever seen in a Nintendo game: It delete your savegames. You can store your state an an owl statue, but when you load that state the game deletes it, thus you have to go back to another statue to save again. If you forget that you can lose many hours of playtime and have to redo everything. Incredible stupid design decision.
From a pure concept perspective MM is easily the most interesting Zelda game, but it also is by far the most punishing and annoying Zelda game, which is why I never finished it. I still would love to see that concept realized properly.
In any case, I for one, have no issue with old franchises maintaining their core mechanics from one release to another.
The problem is that they maintain to much of the core mechanics. Pushing blocks around on a grid for example feels really really old, why haven't Zelda games taken some inspiration from other modern games and use a proper physics engine instead? That was one of the things that really impressed me back when Tomb Raider: Legend came out, you still pushed blocks, but they where no longer fixed to a grid, they could be thrown around, used to block traps and many other things. It felt dynamic and fresh. That's what I would expect from a new Zelda. How about the Portal gun? Would make a great fit for a Zelda game that could be used in a ton of puzzles. How about finally providing a real open world and not just a collection of small rooms with forest-decoration? The world of Shadow of the Colossus feels far bigger, far more impressive and far more realistic then anything modern 3D Zeldas have ever come up with. Wind Waker kind of had an open world, but it was a boring one, why was water in there just a plain blue area of boredom? Why not WaveRace style water physics?
Basically Zelda used to be at the forefront of game development and offered exciting worlds to explore, today it just feels really old school and I would have a really hard time naming anything original the series has done in the last ten years, which is sad, given that there are so many things the series could do instead of just giving you yet another boomerang.
Everything from start to finish feels polished and you just want to explore.
Polish doesn't make we want to explore, it is the mystery and the unknown that makes me want to explore things and Zelda games spend far to much time in very familiar "been there, done that" territory, devoid of any mystery or surprise. For example there is no doubt that Zelda:TP was an masterfully crafted game, but playing it where also the most boring 35h I ever spend with a brilliantly designed game.
The biggest problem with the Zelda series is that it hasn't really advanced, it still uses at its core the same game mechanics and story elements that it did 25 years ago and while that wasn't a problem for say the first 15 years of Zelda (tech improved, 3D, etc. made it still feel fresh enough), the series really shows its age by now, not so much because its bad, but because we have seen the same old stuff for the last two decades. Fighting Ganon again and rescuing Zelda again, just is kind of a snore by now and the Zelda games haven't been all that great when it comes to story telling to begin with (Links Awakening being the exception, loved the ending).
Anyway, I can certainly see why those games have been popular in the good old days, I used to love them myself and Link to the Past is worth a play, but these days I just don't care for the newer ones, to much of the same old stuff and I doubt that a little watercolor effect and being able to swing the sword horizontally in the next one will change that.
I'd say it was "killed", if one wants to call it that, simply by not being very useful in the first place. The article itself gives the answer already: "Send a message to X, copy and paste it, and send it to Y.", that serves the same as BCC, allows you to add additional information and is far easier to understand for both the sender and receiver, thus people use that instead of BCC. Also I don't think the original design purpose for BCC was to allow easy sending of nasty messages while letting a third party know about it in the first place, so if that abuse of that feature dies out, so be it.
The only valid reason I see for using BCC is the case of mail announcements, where you don't want to go the trouble of setting up a mailing list, but still want to get mail to a few hundred people without giving the recipients away to everybody. Thus you use BCC instead of CC. No confusion on the recipient side and everything works as intended.
What's not to like?
They don't allow used games. They don't allow to decouple games from an account. They don't allow lending games. They disallow you to import your games by blocking the CD keys. All their regular non-special sales prices are quite expensive and almost always above what you pay at Amazon (the German one, things might differ elsewhere).
Steam makes a lot of things right from a usability perspective, but it takes your freedom away just like any other Internet activated DRM scheme.
They're all equally time sinks with the onley upside being people get some enjoyment from them.
I can't answer the question for Mafia Wars, as I haven't played that, but the problem with FarmVille is that it works on real time. You can't switch it off, do something else and come back in three days as you can with regular games, as by then all your plants in the game will have died. Leaving the game doesn't stop the clock, it just keeps ticking. The game requires constant attention to keep your plants alive and harvest them in time. In that sense FarmVille is a hell of a lot closer to a Tamagotchi then it is to your average round of Call of Duty.
The total time required to play FarmVille isn't event very long, as a single session might only take something like 15min. After that you have done everything you can and are forced to wait for your plants to grow (or pay them real money for virtual one). It is the dependency it creates that is the real issue.
No, it wasnt. other than (you need to get from point A, to point B) and so the endpoints are fixed.
Not really, it pretty much was a "one true path" game by design and while you could here and there add in a bit variation, that variation never was very large. What you do in time trial is very different, as there you have the time to do the exploration and try dozens of times, also you don't have enemies to worry about, on a single playthrough of the game you are never ever going to find many of those paths or even any add all. Adding a few hidden path just doesn't make it a non-linear game, more the opposite, it just goes to show that those hidden paths are something special to be discovered, not but of the main gameplay.
That said, I never had an issue with that fact, its an environment puzzle game, very much like Prince of Persia, Another World, etc. and finding the one true path is pretty much what you do in those games.
Indeed. And it ensures that proper dependencies graphs can be built. IMO, this is the better solution than a mix with unintended consequences.
You wouldn't have any issues with dependency graph if you wouldn't lump everything into a single namespace.
Ignoring the fact that I have six different sources in my sources.list at this time and mix from them without problems,
Thats because you have been lucky, not because there is anything stopping one of those repositories from totally fucking up your system. What I am hinting at is a system where you could mix and match everything, enter Ubuntu in your sources.list, do "apt-get install ubuntu/gnome" and have that work fine without breaking your current Debian Gnome installation or the rest of the system.
I am intrigued. Define this "should" you are speaking of. What's the rationale? What's the incentive?
The incentive? Cleanup up the distribution mess that Linux is and providing the best system possible?
What mess?
And then at one future day you might want to install a new piece of hardware or install a new piece of software not supported by the by now year old stable release. What are your options then? Either wait till the new stable is out, which could be month or years, or completly bypass everything Debian provides and manually hack stuff into the system. Thats what I call a mess. A proper system should allow you to install new stuff when you need it without dist-upgrading the whole system.
Name any other desktop OS that has seen half as much stability testing as
You are thinking to much in competitive terms. Just because other are worse doesn't mean Debian couldn't be a whole lot better.
Simply create package1 and package2 for versions 1 & 2
Thats not two versions of the same package but two different packages. Small, but very important difference.
Every distribution has a graph of dependencies.
Yes, that flaw isn't a Debian issue, it affects basically every Linux distribution out there.
To provide an analogy: Debian is basically the SVN of distributions, nice, solid, does 95% of what you want. I want the Git of distributions, that gives me all of that plus a lot of more freedom and less dependency on some single central repository.
Implying that Debian should limit itself so that others can more easily mooch is... strange?
First of all, just because Debian should be able to provide a proper base system doesn't stop it from providing a full distribution. Secondly, the whole "base system" thing wouldn't just benefit Ubuntu, but also Debian, as it could clean up the whole base stable vs unstable issues, like say you want to install a unstable Gnome on a stable system, currently that would be quite a mess, if there would be proper decoupling between components on the other side, such a thing might very well be possible. And while at it, how about allowing to install two packages with different versions at the time? This is really not just about making things easier for Ubuntu, but getting rid of the whole monolithic dependency tree in general.
That is how it should be, but that is not how it is. Debian is not some generic distribution-construction-kit, but instead Debian is a complete normal independent Linux distribution and that is exactly where I see the problems. Ubuntu, just as the other distributions based on Debian, isn't a real Debian with a few extra packages installed, but a completely different thing, having its own complete package dependency tree that is incompatible to that of Debian. You might have luck installing Ubuntu packages on Debian or visa versa, but you might as well have not. There is no Debian base system to which developers can develop their packages that will then automatically be compatible with all Debian based distribution, you still have to build every package for every distribution.And thats really the crux, instead of having a unified base with which you can reach a large part of Linux users, you have heavy fragmentation. See for example the whole Launchpad auto builder infrastructure, great for building stuff for Ubuntu, but wanna build something for another Debian based distro or even Debian itself? Tough luck, that stuff is Ubuntu only.
At this point I would really welcome it when Debian would work towards becoming a proper base system for other distributions to build on in a proper way, not the kind of hacky one that is practiced today.