Well, we'll only see some negative PR on slashdot because people don't usually read the linked articles. This is old news, it was up on BBC Online over a week ago. The only difference is that instead of the neutral "China Renews Google's License" they went for the more sensationalist "Google Bows to China" headline. Which is, by the way, not only sensationalist, but misleading as well. In other words, they still don't censor content for Chinese users, the only concession Google made was to redirect users to a "landing" site instead of redirecting them automatically to google.hk.
Yes, because perfectly innocuous software needs a legal mandate requiring universal adoption.
People are drawing conclusions from what is known.
Disclaimer: I've been living in Vietnam for over 2 years.
I see your point, but I agree with the GP - Vietnam is far less restrictive in almost everything than China. Yes, there is censorship in the media, specifically you can't demand democracy or change in the form of government and you can't write anything bad about Ho Chi Minh. On the other hand, there is also considerable freedom to criticize government decisions, even in Thanh Nien (The Youth) daily newspaper (the most popular newspaper) in the country. I haven't run into any censored website either, I mean from BBC online to Amnesty International, everything is accessible. Hell, you can watch BBC in your home, it's part of most cable packages (now that's VERY different from China).
Facebook is unofficially banned. Well, it won't resolve through the DNS assigned by my ISP, but the government denies that it has anything to do with it. And the Vietnamese couldn't care less actually, the number of users grow daily. Everyone I know is on facebook around here:) They even write about facebook in the newspapers when comparing to other social networking sites. And some suspect that this ban is not really political, but economical. There is a company the government owns some stakes in that tries to start up its own social networking site, and I believe it is their "lobbying" effort that resulted in the ban, ie they might have payed some huge bribes to some officials... but corruption is an entirely different matter here... But everything else, twitter, google, etc. is free.
So to sum up, Vietnam's government is far less paranoid than China's, and people around here enjoy more freedom than in any other communist country I know about.
I hope that was a joke. Terrible analogy. Let's think for a moment what would happen if we dropped all security measures in place today. I mean all (drop all firewalls, disable all spam filters, anti-virus, encryption, etc.). The Internet would collapse in a matter of seconds. Emails becoming completely unusuble, the remaining PCs infected, servers rooted, websites defaced... Now imagine what would happen if we suddenly dropped all DRM schemes. Nothing.
It's simply a matter of convenience. There are several ways to make online banking completely secure. For instance, the bank could distribute Live CDs/USBs with a bare linux system and a browser. You want online banking? Wait for a minute or two, then login through the browser presented. Problem is, no one would put up with such inconvenience. WE WANT ACCESS RIGHT NOW!!!! Waiting for two minutes is unthinkable... Ultimately, you're right - as long as there are users, there will always be security problems, although the solution is 2 minutes away. We are just so fucking impatient:)
"By making its WebKit technology open, Apple has set the standard for mobile web browsers."
You don't have to go any further than that to find a lie. Apple didn't make WebKit technology open - it was open in the first place. WebKit is based on KHTML, so they had no choice but to keep it open because of the GPL. Even then, they were quite reluctant to release the source code in a usable form. They release huge code-bombs that were almost impossible to merge back into the KHTML codebase until the KDE developers complained about it.
And by now, everyone seems to have accepted that lie - I see quite often posts here on slashdot describing WebKit as an Apple invention, a gift to the community... quite ironic.
It's more likely that those logos are deeply associated in your mind with... well, fast food. Meaning a certain type of lifestyle. Fast food is something you finish in less then 30 minutes. At least that's my definition. A proper meal 1) takes at least one hour 2) is not eaten alone 3) if it's eaten alone, you must have a newspaper or a good book handy for the pauses you take between the starters, main courses and the dessert. This is another type of lifestyle. All those logos remind you of having to finish your meal in 30 minutes, and the impatient lifestyile it implies:)
And what do those have to do with Safari? 2 of them are webkit based browsers, while the third, konqueror, is the origin of webkit (no, webkit is not an Apple invention).
It is NOT a complete hoax. To quote from your own linked article:
Apparently she didn't go around alone on a motorcycle. She went in a car with her husband and a friend. Elena defends herself, admitting that much of her story was 'more poetry' than reality, but noting that most of it was still reality. I'm inclined to side with her. The pictures of Chernobyl, and what it's become, were real. How much does it really matter that she made them more interesting by wrapping them in a tale about a solitary motorcycle ride? (via JohnFord.net)
The same thing happened (happening? I no longer live there) in Hungary. Collective agreement (officially: Microsoft Campus Agreement) with the government, Microsoft gets payed regardless of whether schools use their software. Teachers and students are allowed to use MS Office + Windows as long as they are part of the educational institution. On the bright side, the license is obviously still valid when you finish university - I still have my 7 year old copy of MS Windows that passes all authenticity test;) Not that I use windows, but it comes handy when I install for friends. I know it's illegal, but who cares in SE-Asia? Besides, I only consider it fair, for throughout my studies, I used linux exclusively anyway - and yet, Microsoft still got payed for my non-use of their software.
I wouldn't call Vietnam China's small mirror. The difference is day and night when it comes to human rights. For example, you can freely access bbc, cnn, even amnesty international websites. You can even watch BBC in your home, in fact one of the providers is partly owned by the government (I'd like to see the day when the Chinese government provides cheap access to BBC to the general population).
As to businesses, I regularly follow the news, and the fact of the matter is that the government here goes out of its way trying to avoid any trouble with foreign companies. There is corruption, there are bribes, but there are no arrests simply because the government doesn't like a company. In fact, there aren't arrests when there actually should be. Recently a Taiwanese company was discovered to have been polluting a river for 14 years, building secret pipes and dumping all its wastewater into it untreated. Destroyed the whole ecosystem, including the livelihood of thousands of people. Many people think there should be arrests - but there are not. Unfortunately.
As I said, corruption is rampant (bribing the local authorities is part of doing business here) - but at least the government acknoledges that it's a problem, and discusses it openly. Now the only time I heard about arrests was when a company did something fishy. I never saw a case when there were no grounds for arrests.
Just my opinion. (Been living here for 2 years now).
i played with Wave and think it sucks. it's slow, it's a resource hog and no one is on it. I joined a few public waves and now my Chrome RAM usage goes up to 600MB of RAM.
I played with Chrome OS and think it sucks as well. you can't do anything without an internet connection.
even my iphone can do a lot more without an internet connection in places like the NYC subway
It sucks now, but they have one year to refine the experience, which is hell of a lot time considering that they already have the major components in place. If they have the will, they have the resources necessary to pull this off... Think android a year ago, and see what it can do now for example (T-Mobile G1 vs HTC Hero). Not to mention that this isn't going to be a random install on random hardware - they'll have hardware built for their exact specs!!!
Pretty please? I can transfer all the videos off of my Canon Vixia HG-21 to my linux box with a simple "cp -a ", but I haven't yet seen a Linux video editor that doesn't choke on the AVCHD files.
Kdenlive edits AVCHD files perfectly well, although it can be a little buggy sometimes (though recently it's more stable). I tried it with AVCHD footage copied directly from my fuji camera. It opens the.MTS files from the stream folder correctly...
For me it's either all pages, or I can define ONE range (say from 19-22), but I can't do pages 5, 7, 19 or 3-6, 34-39 - that's what I mean. These options were not available on Mandrake, SuSE, Fedora either (KDE 4.2.x).
Well, I'm not sure it needs all that RAM - most of it can be due to caching to reduce disk access, which makes a lot of sense actually. This is pure speculation, but based on the behaviour I saw, it may read in data from a lot of files at the same time (say when disk access/io is law/nil), then it crawls the data to extract the information it needs... It certainly doesn't seem to be in a hurry;) Took it a day to index everything on my laptop, but as I said, the performance hit during this operation was negligent, except the increased RAM usage (which didn't impact anything, 2Gb is more than enough for linux+KDE4.x).
I saw a preview of the semantic desktop at the Open World Forum in Paris and I think it has the same down-fall as other initiatives: you need to tag most of it yourself.
Not entirely true...Nepomuk works with three types of metadata. One is simple metadata stored in files (mp3 tags, timestamps, document texts - we can already search for that. The second is metadata created by the user - this is the one you're talking about. Now dolphin makes it extremely easy to tag files... basically you can assign 1-5 stars with a single click - of course this is something new, takes some time to get used to, but once you get into the habit of tagging your important files like that, it can become quite handy... But the most interesting part for nepomuk is metadata that is usually lost, yet can be still extremely useful:
The most interesting type of metadata is, however, the kind that cannot be extracted easily by an indexer and is not generated by the user manually. This includes for example the url of a file that is downloaded from the internet. Once saved on the local harddisk this information is lost. The same goes for the (rather popular) example of email attachments: Once an email attachment is saved to the local harddisk its connection to the email and with it the connection to the sender is lost. These are just two examples relating to the source of files. There are many more. http://nepomuk.kde.org/node/1
It's completely useless to list all those problems without identifying the distribution you use... If it happens to be Kubuntu, well, no surprise there. But on Archlinux, I haven't seen any of the problems you mention, and I haven't seen user reports on the forums either. Most recently some of us had problems with the latest xorg+nvidia+kde4.3.3 ugprade, but it was solved in a few days...
That's the problem with posts like yours - all the evidence is anecdotal. Although I had the occasional (still, quite rare) kwin crashes in 4.2.x, I had none since I updated. No idea what the widget-resize problem is, everything's smooth as silk here. Sound works like a champ, I use xine (with pulse enabled), plays everything smoothly. I only have the gstreamer backend installed because it's needed by a DVD authoring app (devede I believe). I haven't had akonadi installed on my setup until about 10 days ago. Since than, it has been running without any problems..
On a final note, Arch's packages are pretty much vanilla packages, and they rock solid (no pun intended). There was a brief period during the xorg+nvidia+kde4.3.3 update (they all happened at the same time on arch) that caused problems for many users, specifically those who have nvidia cards.... but all problems have been solved in less then a week. Again, if KDE works fine here, works fine on Mandriva (at least that's what I heard), then your distro's implementation is to be blamed, not KDE...
KDE 4.3.3 is brilliant, stable, feature rich... there is one last piece missing: printing options. I've been happy with KDE 4.2.x except for this last piece. I often have to pring select pages from long pdf documents, and for now, I can only do it one-by-one, can't define arbitrary pages or multiple page ranges. That's going to be fixed in KDE 4.4.
Also, the semantic desktop concept is shaping up nicely. I was weary of enabling nepomuksearch with strigi, because in the early 4.x releases they were extremely buggy. Then I went ahead with 4.3.3 (on Arch), and now strigi seem to work fine. It uses minimal resources, indexing is automatically switched off when you switch to powersaving mode (useful on a laptop), otherwise CPU usage is barely noticable. It still uses a shitload of memory, but with KDE 4.x you have plenty to spare. I have 2 Gb in my laptop, and without nepomuk/strigi memory usage after startup is 15%. That includes all the daemons necessary for a modern desktop (including cups), 2 desktops with different wallpapers and widgets, wicd. After running it for days without reboot, memory usage stabilized around 30% including ktorrent running in the background. After I started using nepomuk, that number icreased by around 20% - still pretty lean considering what it does. Which reminds me, nepomuk (on my setting at least) works in dolphin (just start typing in the searchbar), not in the normal Find files option accessible from KMenu.
This is two monumentally stupid articles I've seen from CNET UK in as many days (the other one being the power plugs article from yesterday). If Slashdot continues to post them, I think we should insist on a tag just for that site so we can filter them out.
You forced me to ask google if it's possible to have an allergy to humour...
...considering Mandrivia costs 60 euros and has a MUCH smaller userbase than Ubuntu, which is free and is the de facto desktop distro winner. Shouldn't a linux newcomer just adopt the most supported distro aka Ubuntu?
Well, if said newcomer desires KDE, the answer is ABSOLUTELY NOT. Kubuntu, for the past 4 releases (basically, since Feisty) have been alpha quality. They ship with broken packages, zero customization, and bugs that would be considered by any other responsible vendor as showstopper (for instance, wireless that broke most people's Internet connection after updating to Jaunty). Besides, as other pointed out, Mandiva has free editions.
"Quality free distributions" - are you trolling? Mandriva is free. Yes, they have a commercial edition (powerpack) that comes with some proprietary software, but they offeer completely free editions (Mandriva One, Mandriva Free) that are just like any other free editions. And about quality - Mandriva 2009 spring received glowing review, and having used it for a few months, I can confirm - it's probably one of the finest distribution, especially if you look at their KDE implementation. Which reminds me - since when can you mention quality and ubuntu together when it comes to KDE?
I can't speak for Ubuntu, but when it comes to Kubuntu, it has been this way for ages. Releasing software with known bugs that any other responsible vendor would consider a showstopper. The last known acceptable release of Kubuntu was Feisty Fawn. Since then, everything went downhill. I always did a clean install because the "upgrade" never worked as advertised. And then, I had regressions after regressions. My hotkeys stopped working with Gutsy, and though I'm pretty good at troubleshooting problems, I couldn't solve it. Hardy brought on a broken OSD plus a couple of other problems, mostly incomplete/OBVIOUSLY buggy packages shipped with the distro and a terrible KDE implementation. Ibex was a nice upgrade though, news about its quality led me to upgrade to OpenSuse, which was OK. In fact, it was a fantastic KDE experience, but I started distro-hopping: Mandriva, Fedora, and finally Arch. All the "big three" had been way way better in every respect than Kubuntu. Neither was perfect, but at least I learned that there is such a thing as quality assurance. Was laughing when I heard Jaunty shipped with a known bug that disabled wireless for half of its users. I never thought it could get worst than that, but apparently it can. Not that I care anymore - Arch it is, and Arch it will be for the foreseeable future. Finally something that simply works.
Parent's comment must be one of the most insightful ones I saw regarding copyrights. When we look at the scope and significance of change a particular technology can bring about, the significance of Gutenberg's invention's the only one that matches that of the Internet... I know, I know... the Internet has many "dependencies" (electricity, cables, whatnot), but I'm referring to the impact on culture.
It can be argued that printing made culture possible. Before the invention of printing, the production of cultural artifacts was mostly embedded in rituals: they served 'magical' and religious (sometimes even legal) purposes, and what we now call art or culture were inseparable aspects of other social practices.
I believe the Internet has the potential to affect a change similar in scope. However, it is yet to be seen if it can reach its potential. They are key areas that are under constant attack (net neutrality, freedom of speech, etc.) - parent sounds optimistic when assumes that these will be fruitless. I hope he's right.
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, this is a dupe.
Yes, because perfectly innocuous software needs a legal mandate requiring universal adoption.
People are drawing conclusions from what is known.
Disclaimer: I've been living in Vietnam for over 2 years. I see your point, but I agree with the GP - Vietnam is far less restrictive in almost everything than China. Yes, there is censorship in the media, specifically you can't demand democracy or change in the form of government and you can't write anything bad about Ho Chi Minh. On the other hand, there is also considerable freedom to criticize government decisions, even in Thanh Nien (The Youth) daily newspaper (the most popular newspaper) in the country. I haven't run into any censored website either, I mean from BBC online to Amnesty International, everything is accessible. Hell, you can watch BBC in your home, it's part of most cable packages (now that's VERY different from China).
Facebook is unofficially banned. Well, it won't resolve through the DNS assigned by my ISP, but the government denies that it has anything to do with it. And the Vietnamese couldn't care less actually, the number of users grow daily. Everyone I know is on facebook around here :) They even write about facebook in the newspapers when comparing to other social networking sites. And some suspect that this ban is not really political, but economical. There is a company the government owns some stakes in that tries to start up its own social networking site, and I believe it is their "lobbying" effort that resulted in the ban, ie they might have payed some huge bribes to some officials... but corruption is an entirely different matter here... But everything else, twitter, google, etc. is free.
So to sum up, Vietnam's government is far less paranoid than China's, and people around here enjoy more freedom than in any other communist country I know about.
I hope that was a joke. Terrible analogy. Let's think for a moment what would happen if we dropped all security measures in place today. I mean all (drop all firewalls, disable all spam filters, anti-virus, encryption, etc.). The Internet would collapse in a matter of seconds. Emails becoming completely unusuble, the remaining PCs infected, servers rooted, websites defaced... Now imagine what would happen if we suddenly dropped all DRM schemes. Nothing.
It's simply a matter of convenience. There are several ways to make online banking completely secure. For instance, the bank could distribute Live CDs/USBs with a bare linux system and a browser. You want online banking? Wait for a minute or two, then login through the browser presented. Problem is, no one would put up with such inconvenience. WE WANT ACCESS RIGHT NOW!!!! Waiting for two minutes is unthinkable... Ultimately, you're right - as long as there are users, there will always be security problems, although the solution is 2 minutes away. We are just so fucking impatient :)
You don't have to go any further than that to find a lie. Apple didn't make WebKit technology open - it was open in the first place. WebKit is based on KHTML, so they had no choice but to keep it open because of the GPL. Even then, they were quite reluctant to release the source code in a usable form. They release huge code-bombs that were almost impossible to merge back into the KHTML codebase until the KDE developers complained about it.
And by now, everyone seems to have accepted that lie - I see quite often posts here on slashdot describing WebKit as an Apple invention, a gift to the community... quite ironic.
It's more likely that those logos are deeply associated in your mind with ... well, fast food. Meaning a certain type of lifestyle. Fast food is something you finish in less then 30 minutes. At least that's my definition. A proper meal 1) takes at least one hour 2) is not eaten alone 3) if it's eaten alone, you must have a newspaper or a good book handy for the pauses you take between the starters, main courses and the dessert. This is another type of lifestyle. All those logos remind you of having to finish your meal in 30 minutes, and the impatient lifestyile it implies :)
And what do those have to do with Safari? 2 of them are webkit based browsers, while the third, konqueror, is the origin of webkit (no, webkit is not an Apple invention).
The same thing happened (happening? I no longer live there) in Hungary. Collective agreement (officially: Microsoft Campus Agreement) with the government, Microsoft gets payed regardless of whether schools use their software. Teachers and students are allowed to use MS Office + Windows as long as they are part of the educational institution. On the bright side, the license is obviously still valid when you finish university - I still have my 7 year old copy of MS Windows that passes all authenticity test ;) Not that I use windows, but it comes handy when I install for friends. I know it's illegal, but who cares in SE-Asia? Besides, I only consider it fair, for throughout my studies, I used linux exclusively anyway - and yet, Microsoft still got payed for my non-use of their software.
Similar thing happens in Vietnam (a small China's mirror) btw http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126311541085623535.html
I wouldn't call Vietnam China's small mirror. The difference is day and night when it comes to human rights. For example, you can freely access bbc, cnn, even amnesty international websites. You can even watch BBC in your home, in fact one of the providers is partly owned by the government (I'd like to see the day when the Chinese government provides cheap access to BBC to the general population).
As to businesses, I regularly follow the news, and the fact of the matter is that the government here goes out of its way trying to avoid any trouble with foreign companies. There is corruption, there are bribes, but there are no arrests simply because the government doesn't like a company. In fact, there aren't arrests when there actually should be. Recently a Taiwanese company was discovered to have been polluting a river for 14 years, building secret pipes and dumping all its wastewater into it untreated. Destroyed the whole ecosystem, including the livelihood of thousands of people. Many people think there should be arrests - but there are not. Unfortunately.
As I said, corruption is rampant (bribing the local authorities is part of doing business here) - but at least the government acknoledges that it's a problem, and discusses it openly. Now the only time I heard about arrests was when a company did something fishy. I never saw a case when there were no grounds for arrests.
Just my opinion. (Been living here for 2 years now).
i played with Wave and think it sucks. it's slow, it's a resource hog and no one is on it. I joined a few public waves and now my Chrome RAM usage goes up to 600MB of RAM.
I played with Chrome OS and think it sucks as well. you can't do anything without an internet connection.
even my iphone can do a lot more without an internet connection in places like the NYC subway
It sucks now, but they have one year to refine the experience, which is hell of a lot time considering that they already have the major components in place. If they have the will, they have the resources necessary to pull this off... Think android a year ago, and see what it can do now for example (T-Mobile G1 vs HTC Hero). Not to mention that this isn't going to be a random install on random hardware - they'll have hardware built for their exact specs!!!
Pretty please? I can transfer all the videos off of my Canon Vixia HG-21 to my linux box with a simple "cp -a ", but I haven't yet seen a Linux video editor that doesn't choke on the AVCHD files.
Kdenlive edits AVCHD files perfectly well, although it can be a little buggy sometimes (though recently it's more stable). I tried it with AVCHD footage copied directly from my fuji camera. It opens the .MTS files from the stream folder correctly...
Now China's blocking the porn? How do they plan on dealing with the ah, excess males? Send them off to war?
hmmm... Not a bad idea. Hu Jintao
For me it's either all pages, or I can define ONE range (say from 19-22), but I can't do pages 5, 7, 19 or 3-6, 34-39 - that's what I mean. These options were not available on Mandrake, SuSE, Fedora either (KDE 4.2.x).
Well, I'm not sure it needs all that RAM - most of it can be due to caching to reduce disk access, which makes a lot of sense actually. This is pure speculation, but based on the behaviour I saw, it may read in data from a lot of files at the same time (say when disk access/io is law/nil), then it crawls the data to extract the information it needs... It certainly doesn't seem to be in a hurry ;) Took it a day to index everything on my laptop, but as I said, the performance hit during this operation was negligent, except the increased RAM usage (which didn't impact anything, 2Gb is more than enough for linux+KDE4.x).
I saw a preview of the semantic desktop at the Open World Forum in Paris and I think it has the same down-fall as other initiatives: you need to tag most of it yourself.
Not entirely true...Nepomuk works with three types of metadata. One is simple metadata stored in files (mp3 tags, timestamps, document texts - we can already search for that. The second is metadata created by the user - this is the one you're talking about. Now dolphin makes it extremely easy to tag files... basically you can assign 1-5 stars with a single click - of course this is something new, takes some time to get used to, but once you get into the habit of tagging your important files like that, it can become quite handy... But the most interesting part for nepomuk is metadata that is usually lost, yet can be still extremely useful:
The most interesting type of metadata is, however, the kind that cannot be extracted easily by an indexer and is not generated by the user manually. This includes for example the url of a file that is downloaded from the internet. Once saved on the local harddisk this information is lost. The same goes for the (rather popular) example of email attachments: Once an email attachment is saved to the local harddisk its connection to the email and with it the connection to the sender is lost. These are just two examples relating to the source of files. There are many more. http://nepomuk.kde.org/node/1
That's the problem with posts like yours - all the evidence is anecdotal. Although I had the occasional (still, quite rare) kwin crashes in 4.2.x, I had none since I updated. No idea what the widget-resize problem is, everything's smooth as silk here. Sound works like a champ, I use xine (with pulse enabled), plays everything smoothly. I only have the gstreamer backend installed because it's needed by a DVD authoring app (devede I believe). I haven't had akonadi installed on my setup until about 10 days ago. Since than, it has been running without any problems..
On a final note, Arch's packages are pretty much vanilla packages, and they rock solid (no pun intended). There was a brief period during the xorg+nvidia+kde4.3.3 update (they all happened at the same time on arch) that caused problems for many users, specifically those who have nvidia cards.... but all problems have been solved in less then a week. Again, if KDE works fine here, works fine on Mandriva (at least that's what I heard), then your distro's implementation is to be blamed, not KDE...
Also, the semantic desktop concept is shaping up nicely. I was weary of enabling nepomuksearch with strigi, because in the early 4.x releases they were extremely buggy. Then I went ahead with 4.3.3 (on Arch), and now strigi seem to work fine. It uses minimal resources, indexing is automatically switched off when you switch to powersaving mode (useful on a laptop), otherwise CPU usage is barely noticable. It still uses a shitload of memory, but with KDE 4.x you have plenty to spare. I have 2 Gb in my laptop, and without nepomuk/strigi memory usage after startup is 15%. That includes all the daemons necessary for a modern desktop (including cups), 2 desktops with different wallpapers and widgets, wicd. After running it for days without reboot, memory usage stabilized around 30% including ktorrent running in the background. After I started using nepomuk, that number icreased by around 20% - still pretty lean considering what it does. Which reminds me, nepomuk (on my setting at least) works in dolphin (just start typing in the searchbar), not in the normal Find files option accessible from KMenu.
This is two monumentally stupid articles I've seen from CNET UK in as many days (the other one being the power plugs article from yesterday). If Slashdot continues to post them, I think we should insist on a tag just for that site so we can filter them out.
You forced me to ask google if it's possible to have an allergy to humour...
...considering Mandrivia costs 60 euros and has a MUCH smaller userbase than Ubuntu, which is free and is the de facto desktop distro winner. Shouldn't a linux newcomer just adopt the most supported distro aka Ubuntu?
Well, if said newcomer desires KDE, the answer is ABSOLUTELY NOT. Kubuntu, for the past 4 releases (basically, since Feisty) have been alpha quality. They ship with broken packages, zero customization, and bugs that would be considered by any other responsible vendor as showstopper (for instance, wireless that broke most people's Internet connection after updating to Jaunty). Besides, as other pointed out, Mandiva has free editions.
"Quality free distributions" - are you trolling? Mandriva is free. Yes, they have a commercial edition (powerpack) that comes with some proprietary software, but they offeer completely free editions (Mandriva One, Mandriva Free) that are just like any other free editions. And about quality - Mandriva 2009 spring received glowing review, and having used it for a few months, I can confirm - it's probably one of the finest distribution, especially if you look at their KDE implementation. Which reminds me - since when can you mention quality and ubuntu together when it comes to KDE?
I can't speak for Ubuntu, but when it comes to Kubuntu, it has been this way for ages. Releasing software with known bugs that any other responsible vendor would consider a showstopper. The last known acceptable release of Kubuntu was Feisty Fawn. Since then, everything went downhill. I always did a clean install because the "upgrade" never worked as advertised. And then, I had regressions after regressions. My hotkeys stopped working with Gutsy, and though I'm pretty good at troubleshooting problems, I couldn't solve it. Hardy brought on a broken OSD plus a couple of other problems, mostly incomplete/OBVIOUSLY buggy packages shipped with the distro and a terrible KDE implementation. Ibex was a nice upgrade though, news about its quality led me to upgrade to OpenSuse, which was OK. In fact, it was a fantastic KDE experience, but I started distro-hopping: Mandriva, Fedora, and finally Arch. All the "big three" had been way way better in every respect than Kubuntu. Neither was perfect, but at least I learned that there is such a thing as quality assurance. Was laughing when I heard Jaunty shipped with a known bug that disabled wireless for half of its users. I never thought it could get worst than that, but apparently it can. Not that I care anymore - Arch it is, and Arch it will be for the foreseeable future. Finally something that simply works.
You presume that it is impossible to break out of a virtualised environment.
A quick google will turn up papers which may diminish your naivety.
Also IMHO the way to go is VirtualBox (FOSS and made by Soracle).
Small correction - VirtualBox, made by Innotek bought by Sun bought by Oracle.
It can be argued that printing made culture possible. Before the invention of printing, the production of cultural artifacts was mostly embedded in rituals: they served 'magical' and religious (sometimes even legal) purposes, and what we now call art or culture were inseparable aspects of other social practices.
I believe the Internet has the potential to affect a change similar in scope. However, it is yet to be seen if it can reach its potential. They are key areas that are under constant attack (net neutrality, freedom of speech, etc.) - parent sounds optimistic when assumes that these will be fruitless. I hope he's right.
I really like the design of his website. Even IE renders it correctly... That's what I call a clean design, UI experts and gnome devs take note!!