Frankly, I'd much rather see OpenMicroBlogging being used and promoted rather than the Twitter API. It's used in StatusNet and identi.ca and allows for seamless subscriptions between various OpenMicroBlogging-enabled sites. It's sort of like the XMPP/Jabber of microblogging.
StatusNet also supports the Twitter API, but I don't know of any clients that let me point to identi.ca instead of Twitter. I use Gwibber, though which natively supports both of them and more.
As soon as I get a copy of the actual brief [CC] I will upload it and link to it. Another amicus brief opposing the RIAA's attempt to reverse Judge Gertner was filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other First Amendment proponents and is already available online."
Thus marking the first time Slashdot has posted a breaking news story.;)
The RIAA's actions continue to provide amusement for me. But it's all increasingly irrelevant in my life. Just like when I watch a DVD at someone else's place and I realize there's all kinds of wanings against copying and commercials at the beginning. At home, I just use VLC and immediatelly get the main menus.
The RIAA has to face the court of public opinion eventually. I think the Amazon.com MP3 store and iTunes show what remarkable success DRM-free music can have online. Unfortunately for the RIAA, so do Jamendo and Magnatunes....
Ah! I believe that Ubuntu's (and so Debian's) update is fantastically better, but mainly in that they cover the entire distro (and any third-party repos that you explicitly enable), whereas Windows's updates only cover the OS.
But since it's "Windows Update", that's fitting enough. The article claimed Windows didn't have an automatic update feature, which I found absurd. Ignoring scope, I also felt that they're extremely similar (although I spent two hours last night trying to play a fullscreen game while fighting 15-minute Windows update reboot reminders--that's a feature I don't miss in Ubuntu).
When I said that Windows' update feature "rivaled" Ubuntu's, I meant that it was similar enough to merit a comparison, not that one was better than the other.
You claimed that my assertion that Windows offers automatic updates was wrong. You talked about what Ubuntu and Debian are capable of, but you did not seem to explain why you felt my assertion is wrong.
I am not challenging you to a game of semantics, I am genuinely interested in your opinion.
I am curious. Windows offers automatic updates and the default if you click through is to enable them.
Ubuntu and Debian offer automatic updates but it is not default and you have to either set a crontab or in Ubuntu dig under the Updates tab in System > Administration > Software Sources.
As I said, there is no match in scope, but that is a limitation of proprietary software.
But for OS components--and Microsoft considers IE such--the automatic updates feature is on par with anything offered by the leading Linux distros. And by default it is completely automatic.
I don't believe that Windows' update system is anywhere near as nice as Ubuntu's, but that's not really the point. Microsoft has tried to make it as painless as possible to have critical updates applied to a system. You are free not to trust them (I check every update from Microsoft as well), but that wasn't really the point. The article summary said that Windows didn't have an update feature, and this is simply not true.
Internet Explorer may not have an auto-update system, but Microsoft Windows has an update system rivaling that of Ubuntu and OS X in automaticness, if not scale.
Since Windows encourages users to allow automatic updates installed at 3am every morning and also by default installs any pending critical updates at system power down, it doesn't seem like any supported version of Internet Explorer should remain unpatched for too long.
Frankly, I've dropped my Wii remote a total of once, maybe twice. And I mean I let go of it while standing idle. None of my family was confused about whether they should throw the remote, and the only ones I've had to deal with were my godchildren who liked to swing the remotes while idle, and not let go while playing.
I don't find the remotes particularly difficult to grasp, and while I have replacement straps, I still have the originals on the remotes. As much as I feel bad for anyone who accidentally threw a remote through a window, lamp, or TV, I just have difficulty believing that somehow Nintendo is to blame for this, or that they should be liable.
The trademark policy by Mozilla is restrictive in the sense that you can't take Firefox, make any modification you wish, and still call it "Firefox". This is not necessarily a bad thing, but in the end it was not compatible with the way Debian wished to do things. What was unfortunate is that permission had already been granted and Debian was acting in good faith when Mozilla entirely changed direction.
Mozilla expressly disallowed Debian to continue to maintain Firefox 1.5, which they are required to do for Debian stable by their social contract. More explicitly, Mozilla told Debian that they refused to review any patches which Debian might submit for products that Mozilla no longer maintained. Mozilla didn't seem to be interested in being reasonable on this point. Labeling their guidelines as "restrictive" refers to the set of rules that must be followed, not the instance where rules are being broken.
No, unfortunately the problem with Debian is that the restrictive trademarks on the "Mozilla Firefox" name and icon conflict with the Debian Free Software Guidelines.
Mozilla wouldn't allow Debian to put the name and logo on anything that wasn't built from unmodified source from Mozilla's servers. This would have prevented Debian from customizing, integrating, and maintaining older versions of Firefox (Mozilla's response was for Debian to stop using 1.x versions of Firefox even in stable).
Canonical came to some sort of agreement with Mozilla to allow Ubuntu to continue using the name and logo with their modifications. I never heard what exactly it took to come to such an agreement.
That was actually what made me feel that the EULA requirement might have been disingenuous. I don't have any inside knowledge on the matter, of course--it was a Canonical matter. I am glad that things turned out smoothly though.
While this was certainly an issue to be concerned about, it was disappointing to see the invective and bile poured out by some on the Launchpad bug page.
I thought the informative first-run tab was a good way to go about things and I'm glad things finally got settled by sitting down and offering feedback. The best thing about the Free Software and Open Source communities is that they're communities. Coming together to work on solutions is what makes us so much stronger than proprietary software whose owners ignore their own users.
My answer--my honest, sincere answer--is that if you want to be able to use a Linux distro with strong upgradability, then you should install a different distro.
I recommend Ubuntu. 8.04.1 has Firefox 3 and a new version of the disto is released every 6 months. Security and bugfix updates are released constantly for all applications (Firefox 1.5 is still supported in Ubuntu 6.06 for example) and in October when 8.10 is released, you can upgrade directly from 8.04 to 8.10, which will allow you to continue to receive more up-to-date software on a regular basis, without having to bother with manual installs.
There are, of course, other distros that support upgrades from one version to another, but I can vouch for Ubuntu personally.
"Neanderthal" is German, and refers to Neander Valley. The spelling is historic and remains in Latin/scientific words and in English. Neander Valley is now spelled "Neandertal" in modern German and English. There is no/th/ sound in German, so the German pronounciation would be with a hard/t/ sound (and an 'ay' for the first e but that's picking nits).
Neanderthal Man is the pervasive English spelling, it was originally "Neanderthaler" in German but is now similarly spelled "Neandertaler". As noted above, the pronounciation hasn't changed, and "Neandertal" in English isn't strictly wrong either.
It could still be the exchange rate. On the other hand, from everything I hear their technical support is extraordinary.
I've never used it myself, opting for community support (which is frankly what drew me to Ubuntu in the first place--tightknit, friendly and polite community).
Yes, but you could hardly argue that the automobile was anti-business. Instead, the business opportunities changed. New opportunites opened up that were far more lucrative and--ultimately--successful.
Free Software is powerful because it allows others to build up services and products. In many cases, you can start off much further ahead than if you started from nothing. My router is a MIPS processor running Linux and a bunch of commodity daemons, and I know it was not significant work for Linksys to design the firmware. It was all some configuration and Web-based configuration interface glue. The source code is available, others have improved it, and Linksys sold these routers quite successfully.
Meanwhile, I knew the router wasn't doing anything too strange and I know I can continue to use my router and manage updates on my own or with others, no matter what Linksys now does. It was peace of mind for me and well worth the $70 I spent at the time.
In what purported to be a rational theory, the rant about GPL-advocates being too lazy to rewrite poorly-written routines and instead simply wrappping APIs around them in the effort to dogmatically reuse code seemed out of place and detracted from what had been up to then a rather promising start.
I'm sorry that Chemisor seems to misunderstand the purpose of the GPL and the culture it grew out of.
The GPL is not communist. It is not anti-business. The GPL simply prevents someone from taking shared code and no longer sharing. If you use GPL-licensed code in your product, you have an obligation to give others the same freedoms you received when you redistribute the work.
This is an up-front permission, however. Nothing prevents someone from looking at a GPL'ed application or library and then doing the work themselves to implement the same functionality, nor contacting the copyright holders of the code and negotiating a custom licensing agreement.
BSD is also a very valuable license, but with different goals in mind. There is no reason for the antagonism between proponents of both licenses.
No, Tolkien grew up a devout Catholic. So that's definitely not it.:)
I hate to appeal to Wikipedia, but the article there does mention Lewis's falling away from Christianity as a teenager and then returning to theism and then Christianity when he in his early 30's.
C.S. Lewis was definitely one of the great Christian apologists of the 20th century, and it's no wonder that you remember him as such.
Actually, C.S. Lewis had been converted to Christianity by J.R.R. Tolkien and in fact wrote the Chronicles of Narnia as a sort of Christian allegory. The "overtones" (to put it mildly: I agree with others now that they are overwhelming and a bit cloying) are not really meant to be subtle.
All in all I far prefer the quiet, assumed Christianity of Middle-earth to the blatent allegory of Narnia. That said, I found the series delightful as a child.
Slashdot Mirror
Frankly, I'd much rather see OpenMicroBlogging being used and promoted rather than the Twitter API. It's used in StatusNet and identi.ca and allows for seamless subscriptions between various OpenMicroBlogging-enabled sites. It's sort of like the XMPP/Jabber of microblogging.
StatusNet also supports the Twitter API, but I don't know of any clients that let me point to identi.ca instead of Twitter. I use Gwibber, though which natively supports both of them and more.
As soon as I get a copy of the actual brief [CC] I will upload it and link to it. Another amicus brief opposing the RIAA's attempt to reverse Judge Gertner was filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other First Amendment proponents and is already available online."
Thus marking the first time Slashdot has posted a breaking news story. ;)
The RIAA's actions continue to provide amusement for me. But it's all increasingly irrelevant in my life. Just like when I watch a DVD at someone else's place and I realize there's all kinds of wanings against copying and commercials at the beginning. At home, I just use VLC and immediatelly get the main menus.
The RIAA has to face the court of public opinion eventually. I think the Amazon.com MP3 store and iTunes show what remarkable success DRM-free music can have online. Unfortunately for the RIAA, so do Jamendo and Magnatunes....
No, SFTP is the SSH File Transfer Protocol and has nothing to do with FTP. If you like scp, you'll love SFTP.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSH_file_transfer_protocol
Frankly, the ease of transferring files back and forth is really one of the things I miss most when using other operating systems.
Not really, since if you can log in via SSH, there's an SSH server on the other side. :)
fish:// is great because you don't need SSH, it'll work over rlogin sessions, too, which is excellent. I didn't remember about this one. Thanks!
That's one of my favorite features, too. In Nautilus, just type 'sftp://SOMEADDRESS' and you're all set.
Ah! I believe that Ubuntu's (and so Debian's) update is fantastically better, but mainly in that they cover the entire distro (and any third-party repos that you explicitly enable), whereas Windows's updates only cover the OS.
But since it's "Windows Update", that's fitting enough. The article claimed Windows didn't have an automatic update feature, which I found absurd. Ignoring scope, I also felt that they're extremely similar (although I spent two hours last night trying to play a fullscreen game while fighting 15-minute Windows update reboot reminders--that's a feature I don't miss in Ubuntu).
When I said that Windows' update feature "rivaled" Ubuntu's, I meant that it was similar enough to merit a comparison, not that one was better than the other.
You claimed that my assertion that Windows offers automatic updates was wrong. You talked about what Ubuntu and Debian are capable of, but you did not seem to explain why you felt my assertion is wrong.
I am not challenging you to a game of semantics, I am genuinely interested in your opinion.
I am curious. Windows offers automatic updates and the default if you click through is to enable them.
Ubuntu and Debian offer automatic updates but it is not default and you have to either set a crontab or in Ubuntu dig under the Updates tab in System > Administration > Software Sources.
In what manner is this substantially different?
As I said, there is no match in scope, but that is a limitation of proprietary software.
But for OS components--and Microsoft considers IE such--the automatic updates feature is on par with anything offered by the leading Linux distros. And by default it is completely automatic.
I don't believe that Windows' update system is anywhere near as nice as Ubuntu's, but that's not really the point. Microsoft has tried to make it as painless as possible to have critical updates applied to a system. You are free not to trust them (I check every update from Microsoft as well), but that wasn't really the point. The article summary said that Windows didn't have an update feature, and this is simply not true.
Internet Explorer may not have an auto-update system, but Microsoft Windows has an update system rivaling that of Ubuntu and OS X in automaticness, if not scale.
Since Windows encourages users to allow automatic updates installed at 3am every morning and also by default installs any pending critical updates at system power down, it doesn't seem like any supported version of Internet Explorer should remain unpatched for too long.
Frankly, I've dropped my Wii remote a total of once, maybe twice. And I mean I let go of it while standing idle. None of my family was confused about whether they should throw the remote, and the only ones I've had to deal with were my godchildren who liked to swing the remotes while idle, and not let go while playing.
I don't find the remotes particularly difficult to grasp, and while I have replacement straps, I still have the originals on the remotes. As much as I feel bad for anyone who accidentally threw a remote through a window, lamp, or TV, I just have difficulty believing that somehow Nintendo is to blame for this, or that they should be liable.
"And still call it Firefox" would be the topic at hand. It was not a malicious omission.
The trademark policy by Mozilla is restrictive in the sense that you can't take Firefox, make any modification you wish, and still call it "Firefox". This is not necessarily a bad thing, but in the end it was not compatible with the way Debian wished to do things. What was unfortunate is that permission had already been granted and Debian was acting in good faith when Mozilla entirely changed direction.
Mozilla expressly disallowed Debian to continue to maintain Firefox 1.5, which they are required to do for Debian stable by their social contract. More explicitly, Mozilla told Debian that they refused to review any patches which Debian might submit for products that Mozilla no longer maintained. Mozilla didn't seem to be interested in being reasonable on this point. Labeling their guidelines as "restrictive" refers to the set of rules that must be followed, not the instance where rules are being broken.
No, unfortunately the problem with Debian is that the restrictive trademarks on the "Mozilla Firefox" name and icon conflict with the Debian Free Software Guidelines.
Mozilla wouldn't allow Debian to put the name and logo on anything that wasn't built from unmodified source from Mozilla's servers. This would have prevented Debian from customizing, integrating, and maintaining older versions of Firefox (Mozilla's response was for Debian to stop using 1.x versions of Firefox even in stable).
Canonical came to some sort of agreement with Mozilla to allow Ubuntu to continue using the name and logo with their modifications. I never heard what exactly it took to come to such an agreement.
That was actually what made me feel that the EULA requirement might have been disingenuous. I don't have any inside knowledge on the matter, of course--it was a Canonical matter. I am glad that things turned out smoothly though.
While this was certainly an issue to be concerned about, it was disappointing to see the invective and bile poured out by some on the Launchpad bug page.
I thought the informative first-run tab was a good way to go about things and I'm glad things finally got settled by sitting down and offering feedback. The best thing about the Free Software and Open Source communities is that they're communities. Coming together to work on solutions is what makes us so much stronger than proprietary software whose owners ignore their own users.
My answer--my honest, sincere answer--is that if you want to be able to use a Linux distro with strong upgradability, then you should install a different distro.
I recommend Ubuntu. 8.04.1 has Firefox 3 and a new version of the disto is released every 6 months. Security and bugfix updates are released constantly for all applications (Firefox 1.5 is still supported in Ubuntu 6.06 for example) and in October when 8.10 is released, you can upgrade directly from 8.04 to 8.10, which will allow you to continue to receive more up-to-date software on a regular basis, without having to bother with manual installs.
There are, of course, other distros that support upgrades from one version to another, but I can vouch for Ubuntu personally.
"Neanderthal" is German, and refers to Neander Valley. The spelling is historic and remains in Latin/scientific words and in English. Neander Valley is now spelled "Neandertal" in modern German and English. There is no /th/ sound in German, so the German pronounciation would be with a hard /t/ sound (and an 'ay' for the first e but that's picking nits).
Neanderthal Man is the pervasive English spelling, it was originally "Neanderthaler" in German but is now similarly spelled "Neandertaler". As noted above, the pronounciation hasn't changed, and "Neandertal" in English isn't strictly wrong either.
It could still be the exchange rate. On the other hand, from everything I hear their technical support is extraordinary.
I've never used it myself, opting for community support (which is frankly what drew me to Ubuntu in the first place--tightknit, friendly and polite community).
Actually, Canonical is registered in the Isle of Man and headquartered in London.
Canonical's phone support is based in Canada I believe.
Get the rope.
Yes, but you could hardly argue that the automobile was anti-business. Instead, the business opportunities changed. New opportunites opened up that were far more lucrative and--ultimately--successful.
Free Software is powerful because it allows others to build up services and products. In many cases, you can start off much further ahead than if you started from nothing. My router is a MIPS processor running Linux and a bunch of commodity daemons, and I know it was not significant work for Linksys to design the firmware. It was all some configuration and Web-based configuration interface glue. The source code is available, others have improved it, and Linksys sold these routers quite successfully.
Meanwhile, I knew the router wasn't doing anything too strange and I know I can continue to use my router and manage updates on my own or with others, no matter what Linksys now does. It was peace of mind for me and well worth the $70 I spent at the time.
In what purported to be a rational theory, the rant about GPL-advocates being too lazy to rewrite poorly-written routines and instead simply wrappping APIs around them in the effort to dogmatically reuse code seemed out of place and detracted from what had been up to then a rather promising start.
I'm sorry that Chemisor seems to misunderstand the purpose of the GPL and the culture it grew out of.
The GPL is not communist. It is not anti-business. The GPL simply prevents someone from taking shared code and no longer sharing. If you use GPL-licensed code in your product, you have an obligation to give others the same freedoms you received when you redistribute the work.
This is an up-front permission, however. Nothing prevents someone from looking at a GPL'ed application or library and then doing the work themselves to implement the same functionality, nor contacting the copyright holders of the code and negotiating a custom licensing agreement.
BSD is also a very valuable license, but with different goals in mind. There is no reason for the antagonism between proponents of both licenses.
No, Tolkien grew up a devout Catholic. So that's definitely not it. :)
I hate to appeal to Wikipedia, but the article there does mention Lewis's falling away from Christianity as a teenager and then returning to theism and then Christianity when he in his early 30's.
C.S. Lewis was definitely one of the great Christian apologists of the 20th century, and it's no wonder that you remember him as such.
Actually, C.S. Lewis had been converted to Christianity by J.R.R. Tolkien and in fact wrote the Chronicles of Narnia as a sort of Christian allegory. The "overtones" (to put it mildly: I agree with others now that they are overwhelming and a bit cloying) are not really meant to be subtle.
This is in contrast with The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings which does have a very Catholic foundation in its setting. The entire nature of the origins of the Elves--firstborn of the Children of Ilvatar--and their undying nature, the idea of the Halls of Mandos and the Gift of IllÃvatar (Elves were immortal only as long as Arda existed, but the spirits of Men lingered in the Halls of Mandos and then passed beyond the circles of the World), plus the hand of God guiding the heros (Frodo actually failed his Quest--it was impossible for him to overcome the lure of the One Ring, but because he showed Sméagol mercy and did everything that he had the strength to do, by divine fate the Ring was destroyed.
All in all I far prefer the quiet, assumed Christianity of Middle-earth to the blatent allegory of Narnia. That said, I found the series delightful as a child.