Whenever the article reaches a good stable point, as agreed on by community discussions, then an editor would be invited (if not participating already) to merge a requested version of the normal branch onto the editor branch.
This is exactly what needs to happen at some point. Commentators like to refer to Wikipedia as the "open source encyclopedia", but open source projects don't just let anyone contribute. They evaluate patches, and after contributors have a proven track record, they're allowed to commit patches directly.
With that said, people need to stop comparing Wikipedia to Brittanica as if it's some sort of holy grail of quality to reach. Wikipedia is already better than Brittanica. There are two main uses people have for encyclopedias: as a casual source of information and as a starting point for research. Wikipedia is a better casual source of information because it provides far more information about more topics than Britannica does. The articles are also longer and more in depth. I have never looked up something in Wikipedia and not found an article for it, while that has happened several times with traditional encyclopedias. It's only natural that a digital reference will be able to cover more topics than a printed one due to the lack of space limitations. As a starting point for research, many Wikipedia articles list references, which gives you primary sources to go to if you need to dig deeper than what is in the articles.
So why exactly should Wikipedia be striving to be like Britannica? It can do better.
Ubuntu right now is your classic dotcom strategy -- blow through venture capital to get "eyeballs" and then figure out later how to build revenue out of that. And if Ubuntu can't figure it out, they end up just like Mandrake and Corel and all the other Linux Desktop business failures that have been forgotten about.
Ubuntu has a $10 million foundation behind it to provide for the future development of Ubuntu should Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, keel over. A major difference between Ubuntu and the failed distributions that you mentioned is that although the core Ubuntu team is paid by Canonical, there are also plenty of community developers.
seems like they are all working on the "here try our stuff for free!" approach , closely followed by the "but if you want business/ enterprise support, well you can pay for that"
So you'd rather they provide no support at all? That's a bit silly. You sound like you're allergic to anything related to money. You should probably get that checked out.
Look jacobw, your comment is way behind schedule. If you don't get it out soon, interest in your comment will have waned, and it probably won't be of the quality that people are used to by then. Comment writers have been using more advanced tools to write their posts that make them wittier and more insightful, and your comment was started before these tools were available. Here's the deal: If you get you post your comment within the next two hours, I will give you a +1, Insightful mod. Hurry up. Your fans are waiting.
I just don't believe that there is any way at this point to prove definitively what is causing it, like Al Gore and his fringe cronies are claiming they can do from less than 100 years of data.
It doesn't need to be proven definitively. Once there's a pretty good explanation of what is likely to be causing global warming, why not take steps to try to stop it? Polluting less isn't that hard, and is something we definitely have the capability to do without destroying the economy. Sacrificing short-term profit for the long-term goal of having a planet for the human race to live on for more than a couple hundred years seems like a perfectly good tradeoff to me.
Also, discounting people's conclusions because they're based on "only" 100 years of evidence is a little ridiculous. That assumes that we don't have the ability to change the environment within 100 years. I think we do, and we have. You're placing your bets based on the idea that they could be wrong, but when it comes to doomsday scenarios, I think you need at least a counterargument rather than just doubt.
It's easier than that. If you have a breeezy system that's fully updated, you should be able to run the graphical update manager and click a button to upgrade to dapper. Not only is this easier for non-technical users, but it also takes care of dependency issues and upgrade needs that apt-get alone isn't sophisticated enough to detect. Even if you're a command line guru, use the graphical update manager to upgrade to dapper.
For those of you dreading a long, drawn-out upgrade process, Ubuntu can upgrade using update-manager from many previous Debian builds.
No it can't. The only supported upgrade path is from breezy to dapper. Cross distribution upgrades (Debian to Ubuntu) can be even worse than trying to skip a release. If you don't already have breezy installed, backing up your data and installing from scratch is the best way to go. The developers plan to be able to support upgrades from one LTS (long term support) release to another, but other than that, skipping a release has never been supported. Don't do it.
In addition to what the other posters said, the chromosomes are numbered by their size up chromosome 22, then the 23rd pair is the X and/or Y chromosomes. Since this is chromosome 1 we're talking about, it's the largest one.
Actually, Debian universe and multiverse are in the/etc/apt.d/sources.list by default, they're just commented out by default.
That's not how it works. The universe and multiverse repositories are Ubuntu repositories as well. As with (almost) all other Ubuntu packages, they're taken from Debian with few in-house customizations. The packages won't break your computer like another poster said, they're just unsupported by Ubuntu. This means the packages might not get security updates, and if you happen to call Canonical for support for those packages, you probably won't get very far.
Almost everyone who has a cell phone has free domestic long distance. This sounds like an amazing offer, but it's giving people nothing they didn't have before. It might get a few more people to actually try Skype, but the practical uses of this offer are almost nonexistent.
When I was growing up, Web 1.0 was all there was and I turned out fine! These darned kids are so spoiled! Get a Geocities account and a few "under construction" animated GIFs, and shut your traps!
Now that I've actually read the article, I should probably reply to my own post. Advertising is not going to cut it, especially if they're the first ones to do it. Users will flock to the other services, and Google has a lot more money to waste on hilarious karaoke videos than YouTube's VCs do. One by one, these video hosting services will start putting up ads, and their users will flock to Google Video. Lots of people embed YouTube videos on their websites, but if they have a choice between a video with ads and one without, which are they going to choose to subject their readers to?
Their plan is to build as large of a user base as possible by luring them in with ad-free videos, then throw ads in their face to make money off of them. It isn't going to work unless they can outspend Google. Unlikely.
One simple question: How does YouTube plan to make any money? Right now they're making $0 and spending tons on bandwidth. The main reason people visit the site in the first place is for content that's infringing on someone's copyright: TV shows, commercials and similar fare. There are a few user-created videos that actually draw traffic, but still, that traffic is pure loss. The only thing of value they have is the brand name. Everyone at my college talks about wasting time on YouTube, but their technology itself is worth next to nothing because it's so easy to build. That's my YouTube has somanycompetitors. If they don't get bought by anyone, they're screwed.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's a good time to be living off of VC money. It's fairly clear that many of them are being advised by underpants gnomes.
This may sound cruel, but I really think some attractively shiny sealed containers with neurotoxins or simple, stable, chemical poisons should be added in another layer under the surface.
"The people who built this put so much effort into deterring people from entering it. There must be something valuable inside."
If you support the USA May Day demonstrations, you can blame the next disease you catch on your own political inclinations.
Oh come on. That's bullshit. There's a difference between supporting illegal immigration and supporting changes in immigration laws to make it easier for foreigners to work here legally. If they were here legally, they wouldn't have to avoid getting medical treatment, such as vaccinations, due to a fear of getting deported.
This is veering a bit off topic, but it's common knowledge that immigrants come here illegally because there is a demand for their labor. Why not allow them to come here legally, and in return, get the tax revenue we need to support their presence?
Netcraft's job is to be the foremost provider of information about what's running the Internet. Anyone who takes the time to actually read what the numbers say will realize that what Netcraft paints as a huge shift is actually a fairly insignificant change. How many servers does it actually take to run all those parked domain names with almost the exact same content? If you look at the data provided on the same page about active sites, you'll see that Apache only dropped 2.32%, while Microsoft gained only 0.92%. Frontloading articles with dubious data while hiding the relevant numbers deep in their charts is extremely misleading and only serves to tarnish Netcraft's reputation. Netcraft's own report states that registrars have a disproportionate influence in market share numbers measured in this way, so what exactly is the value of the data other than to mislead?
Other sibling posts in this thread have mentioned the unofficial Ubuntu Guide, but you should probably look at the official documentation since the unofficial guide has been known to do harmful things to your computer. All of the official documentation, including a sanitized version of the unofficial guide, can be found at help.ubuntu.com.
You're assuming that there are two groups of people: people who are looking for something to hate everyone, and people who are looking for reasons why people hate them. The reality is that there are plenty, if not a majority of people in the gray area in between. Some of the nicest people I know really can't stand interacting with gay people and will treat them with less respect than they would straight people. They don't look for reasons to hate people, they just happen have a trait they dislike in a person. That's called intolerance, and there is no reason why you should tell someone who is offended by that that they shouldn't be. You can try to say that those intolerant people aren't worth interacting with anyway for those gay people, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be angry or offended.
You're blaming people from being offended by perceived intolerance, so does that mean you don't think there are intolerant people out there? Do you think people shouldn't be offended by intolerance? I really can't see what point you're trying to make that could have any justification whatsoever.
Take the word "suck," for example; a person I insultingly call "gay" is no more homosexual than a person I insultingly say "sucks".
All that means is that the intolerant people who started using that as an insult got the term to spread so much that most people don't know how it started. That doesn't mean that the original intolerance should be forgiven, and there are many people out there who use "gay" as an insult because they think being gay is bad. I don't see how anyone can not understand how hurtful it must be for a word that describes you to be used as a general term for "bad".
Nobody cares if you're gay or if you're black if you don't care either.
The problem is, there are plenty of people out there who do care about your race or sexual orientation, and will treat you differently depending on them. To suggest otherwise is rather ridiculous.
For what it's worth, I don't think many people actually agree with the developer's opinion in that case. I hope that one person doesn't sour you to the whole project. Hopefully that'll get fixed for the next release if someone can convince him or other people just implement it themselves.
Then we'd all sit around and wax about how wonderful it is that Gnome is pure C.
Speak for yourself. Gnome is not pure C. Of the top of my head, at least deskbar-applet, sabayon and pessulus are written in python.
and ignore the fact that Mono is associated with it because of cognitive dissonance
None of the official Gnome modules use Mono.
But I suppose it is far too unreasonable to ask for informed discussion these days...
Judging by your comment, I guess you're right. Every other vendor that promotes a specific development environment uses that environment for their own code. Microsoft is the only exception. Whether you like it or not, this is a story.
I hope everyone's watching closely as fair use is lying on its deathbed.
Lots of Slashdotters are hailing this development as a move away from traditional TV-based distribution to online video sales. It sounds nifty on paper, but let's look to the future. If these online video stores end up becoming popular enough to supplant TV distribution, fair use is screwed. These videos are DRM encumbered, and breaking that protection is against the law. TV shows like the Daily Show and Colbert Report depend on their being a large pool of accessible content to discuss and parody. Once it's all online and DRM encumbered, they won't be able to use that content without breaking the law. Want to add background music to your home videos? I hope you didn't buy your music online. Even though this type of use isn't specifically protected under copyright law, it is still felt to be perfectly acceptable by the masses, and courts would probably back it based on the same logic that stopped Hollywood from taking time-shifting away from us.
The future looks bleak for creative works online. These developments call for an overhaul of our copyright laws, but it really doesn't look like that's going to happen. Should a work that is only available in a DRM encumbered form still be protected by copyright? If so, why? Copyright was granted to copyright creators for a limited term, but with DRM, not only do they take away fair use, but they also gain the ability to close up their work forever. Hopefully someone gets elected soon that sees and is willing to fix the many problems with our copyright laws.
Slashdot Mirror
Whenever the article reaches a good stable point, as agreed on by community discussions, then an editor would be invited (if not participating already) to merge a requested version of the normal branch onto the editor branch.
This is exactly what needs to happen at some point. Commentators like to refer to Wikipedia as the "open source encyclopedia", but open source projects don't just let anyone contribute. They evaluate patches, and after contributors have a proven track record, they're allowed to commit patches directly.
With that said, people need to stop comparing Wikipedia to Brittanica as if it's some sort of holy grail of quality to reach. Wikipedia is already better than Brittanica. There are two main uses people have for encyclopedias: as a casual source of information and as a starting point for research. Wikipedia is a better casual source of information because it provides far more information about more topics than Britannica does. The articles are also longer and more in depth. I have never looked up something in Wikipedia and not found an article for it, while that has happened several times with traditional encyclopedias. It's only natural that a digital reference will be able to cover more topics than a printed one due to the lack of space limitations. As a starting point for research, many Wikipedia articles list references, which gives you primary sources to go to if you need to dig deeper than what is in the articles.
So why exactly should Wikipedia be striving to be like Britannica? It can do better.
"Caterina Fake doesn't care about virtual people."
- Kanye West
Ubuntu right now is your classic dotcom strategy -- blow through venture capital to get "eyeballs" and then figure out later how to build revenue out of that. And if Ubuntu can't figure it out, they end up just like Mandrake and Corel and all the other Linux Desktop business failures that have been forgotten about.
Ubuntu has a $10 million foundation behind it to provide for the future development of Ubuntu should Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, keel over. A major difference between Ubuntu and the failed distributions that you mentioned is that although the core Ubuntu team is paid by Canonical, there are also plenty of community developers.
seems like they are all working on the "here try our stuff for free!" approach , closely followed by the "but if you want business/ enterprise support, well you can pay for that"
So you'd rather they provide no support at all? That's a bit silly. You sound like you're allergic to anything related to money. You should probably get that checked out.
Look jacobw, your comment is way behind schedule. If you don't get it out soon, interest in your comment will have waned, and it probably won't be of the quality that people are used to by then. Comment writers have been using more advanced tools to write their posts that make them wittier and more insightful, and your comment was started before these tools were available. Here's the deal: If you get you post your comment within the next two hours, I will give you a +1, Insightful mod. Hurry up. Your fans are waiting.
I just don't believe that there is any way at this point to prove definitively what is causing it, like Al Gore and his fringe cronies are claiming they can do from less than 100 years of data.
It doesn't need to be proven definitively. Once there's a pretty good explanation of what is likely to be causing global warming, why not take steps to try to stop it? Polluting less isn't that hard, and is something we definitely have the capability to do without destroying the economy. Sacrificing short-term profit for the long-term goal of having a planet for the human race to live on for more than a couple hundred years seems like a perfectly good tradeoff to me.
Also, discounting people's conclusions because they're based on "only" 100 years of evidence is a little ridiculous. That assumes that we don't have the ability to change the environment within 100 years. I think we do, and we have. You're placing your bets based on the idea that they could be wrong, but when it comes to doomsday scenarios, I think you need at least a counterargument rather than just doubt.
It's easier than that. If you have a breeezy system that's fully updated, you should be able to run the graphical update manager and click a button to upgrade to dapper. Not only is this easier for non-technical users, but it also takes care of dependency issues and upgrade needs that apt-get alone isn't sophisticated enough to detect. Even if you're a command line guru, use the graphical update manager to upgrade to dapper.
For those of you dreading a long, drawn-out upgrade process, Ubuntu can upgrade using update-manager from many previous Debian builds.
No it can't. The only supported upgrade path is from breezy to dapper. Cross distribution upgrades (Debian to Ubuntu) can be even worse than trying to skip a release. If you don't already have breezy installed, backing up your data and installing from scratch is the best way to go. The developers plan to be able to support upgrades from one LTS (long term support) release to another, but other than that, skipping a release has never been supported. Don't do it.
In addition to what the other posters said, the chromosomes are numbered by their size up chromosome 22, then the 23rd pair is the X and/or Y chromosomes. Since this is chromosome 1 we're talking about, it's the largest one.
Actually, Debian universe and multiverse are in the /etc/apt.d/sources.list by default, they're just commented out by default.
That's not how it works. The universe and multiverse repositories are Ubuntu repositories as well. As with (almost) all other Ubuntu packages, they're taken from Debian with few in-house customizations. The packages won't break your computer like another poster said, they're just unsupported by Ubuntu. This means the packages might not get security updates, and if you happen to call Canonical for support for those packages, you probably won't get very far.
Almost everyone who has a cell phone has free domestic long distance. This sounds like an amazing offer, but it's giving people nothing they didn't have before. It might get a few more people to actually try Skype, but the practical uses of this offer are almost nonexistent.
When I was growing up, Web 1.0 was all there was and I turned out fine! These darned kids are so spoiled! Get a Geocities account and a few "under construction" animated GIFs, and shut your traps!
Now that I've actually read the article, I should probably reply to my own post. Advertising is not going to cut it, especially if they're the first ones to do it. Users will flock to the other services, and Google has a lot more money to waste on hilarious karaoke videos than YouTube's VCs do. One by one, these video hosting services will start putting up ads, and their users will flock to Google Video. Lots of people embed YouTube videos on their websites, but if they have a choice between a video with ads and one without, which are they going to choose to subject their readers to?
Their plan is to build as large of a user base as possible by luring them in with ad-free videos, then throw ads in their face to make money off of them. It isn't going to work unless they can outspend Google. Unlikely.
One simple question: How does YouTube plan to make any money? Right now they're making $0 and spending tons on bandwidth. The main reason people visit the site in the first place is for content that's infringing on someone's copyright: TV shows, commercials and similar fare. There are a few user-created videos that actually draw traffic, but still, that traffic is pure loss. The only thing of value they have is the brand name. Everyone at my college talks about wasting time on YouTube, but their technology itself is worth next to nothing because it's so easy to build. That's my YouTube has so many competitors. If they don't get bought by anyone, they're screwed.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's a good time to be living off of VC money. It's fairly clear that many of them are being advised by underpants gnomes.
This may sound cruel, but I really think some attractively shiny sealed containers with neurotoxins or simple, stable, chemical poisons should be added in another layer under the surface.
"The people who built this put so much effort into deterring people from entering it. There must be something valuable inside."
If you support the USA May Day demonstrations, you can blame the next disease you catch on your own political inclinations.
Oh come on. That's bullshit. There's a difference between supporting illegal immigration and supporting changes in immigration laws to make it easier for foreigners to work here legally. If they were here legally, they wouldn't have to avoid getting medical treatment, such as vaccinations, due to a fear of getting deported.
This is veering a bit off topic, but it's common knowledge that immigrants come here illegally because there is a demand for their labor. Why not allow them to come here legally, and in return, get the tax revenue we need to support their presence?
Netcraft's job is to be the foremost provider of information about what's running the Internet. Anyone who takes the time to actually read what the numbers say will realize that what Netcraft paints as a huge shift is actually a fairly insignificant change. How many servers does it actually take to run all those parked domain names with almost the exact same content? If you look at the data provided on the same page about active sites, you'll see that Apache only dropped 2.32%, while Microsoft gained only 0.92%. Frontloading articles with dubious data while hiding the relevant numbers deep in their charts is extremely misleading and only serves to tarnish Netcraft's reputation. Netcraft's own report states that registrars have a disproportionate influence in market share numbers measured in this way, so what exactly is the value of the data other than to mislead?
Is BSD really dying?
Other sibling posts in this thread have mentioned the unofficial Ubuntu Guide, but you should probably look at the official documentation since the unofficial guide has been known to do harmful things to your computer. All of the official documentation, including a sanitized version of the unofficial guide, can be found at help.ubuntu.com.
Shit, they closed with a quote from Grover Fucking Norquist. That's just lame.
That's an unfortunate middle name.
You're assuming that there are two groups of people: people who are looking for something to hate everyone, and people who are looking for reasons why people hate them. The reality is that there are plenty, if not a majority of people in the gray area in between. Some of the nicest people I know really can't stand interacting with gay people and will treat them with less respect than they would straight people. They don't look for reasons to hate people, they just happen have a trait they dislike in a person. That's called intolerance, and there is no reason why you should tell someone who is offended by that that they shouldn't be. You can try to say that those intolerant people aren't worth interacting with anyway for those gay people, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be angry or offended. You're blaming people from being offended by perceived intolerance, so does that mean you don't think there are intolerant people out there? Do you think people shouldn't be offended by intolerance? I really can't see what point you're trying to make that could have any justification whatsoever.
Take the word "suck," for example; a person I insultingly call "gay" is no more homosexual than a person I insultingly say "sucks".
All that means is that the intolerant people who started using that as an insult got the term to spread so much that most people don't know how it started. That doesn't mean that the original intolerance should be forgiven, and there are many people out there who use "gay" as an insult because they think being gay is bad. I don't see how anyone can not understand how hurtful it must be for a word that describes you to be used as a general term for "bad".
Nobody cares if you're gay or if you're black if you don't care either.
The problem is, there are plenty of people out there who do care about your race or sexual orientation, and will treat you differently depending on them. To suggest otherwise is rather ridiculous.
For what it's worth, I don't think many people actually agree with the developer's opinion in that case. I hope that one person doesn't sour you to the whole project. Hopefully that'll get fixed for the next release if someone can convince him or other people just implement it themselves.
For some perspective on how far the software is from done, read this blog about some of the issues the OLPC team is facing.
Then we'd all sit around and wax about how wonderful it is that Gnome is pure C.
Speak for yourself. Gnome is not pure C. Of the top of my head, at least deskbar-applet, sabayon and pessulus are written in python.
and ignore the fact that Mono is associated with it because of cognitive dissonance
None of the official Gnome modules use Mono.
But I suppose it is far too unreasonable to ask for informed discussion these days...
Judging by your comment, I guess you're right. Every other vendor that promotes a specific development environment uses that environment for their own code. Microsoft is the only exception. Whether you like it or not, this is a story.
I hope everyone's watching closely as fair use is lying on its deathbed.
Lots of Slashdotters are hailing this development as a move away from traditional TV-based distribution to online video sales. It sounds nifty on paper, but let's look to the future. If these online video stores end up becoming popular enough to supplant TV distribution, fair use is screwed. These videos are DRM encumbered, and breaking that protection is against the law. TV shows like the Daily Show and Colbert Report depend on their being a large pool of accessible content to discuss and parody. Once it's all online and DRM encumbered, they won't be able to use that content without breaking the law. Want to add background music to your home videos? I hope you didn't buy your music online. Even though this type of use isn't specifically protected under copyright law, it is still felt to be perfectly acceptable by the masses, and courts would probably back it based on the same logic that stopped Hollywood from taking time-shifting away from us.
The future looks bleak for creative works online. These developments call for an overhaul of our copyright laws, but it really doesn't look like that's going to happen. Should a work that is only available in a DRM encumbered form still be protected by copyright? If so, why? Copyright was granted to copyright creators for a limited term, but with DRM, not only do they take away fair use, but they also gain the ability to close up their work forever. Hopefully someone gets elected soon that sees and is willing to fix the many problems with our copyright laws.