In my view we need to revisit the concept of "obscenity." It should either be redefined to include violent material, or abolished altogether. As it stands it's not consistent.
I think most of us agree that there is some violent visual material that children simply should not be exposed to. Given how negligent a huge fraction of the parents in the USA are, I think it's it's not a bad idea for government to provide some degree of protection to minors from such material. You can always argue that motivated minors will access this material anyway... but that does not mean such efforts are pointless. The point is that for a large fraction of minors, it *does* matter when society takes a stand and labels something as obscene. And I think the most graphic violence in these media should indeed be labeled obscene.
It may not be the hardware. Non-LTS Ubuntus are full of regressions. Affects some significant minority of users, but not enough to affect ship date.
The worst regressions are always fixed in the next release. They are rarely backported to non-LTS, a strategy which is designed to keep you constantly upgrading. Except that once one regression is fixed, more creep up. If you're lucky, your won't be affected. But there are ALWAYS regressions.
I basically treat non-LTS Ubuntus as betas for the LTS. I don't expect them to work. I expect many things to be broken. Many of the regressions are insidious---you don't discover them until later in the game. And, dirty secret is that once LTS is long in the tooth, only security updates get backported to LTS. Got a non-functioning file open dialog? Too bad, not going to backport the fix to LTS, you can rot in hell or upgrade. (read the final few comments, where the dev tells me I need to upgrade from LTS to non-LTS to get back a functioning file open dialog box.)
Bitter much? Yes I am, for a fan that's been with them for 7 years now.
"1000 photos on your devices. New photos appear on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch in a rolling collection of your last 1000 photos. Save your best shots. If you take a photo you really love and want to make sure itâ(TM)s saved on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, you can save it from your Photo Stream to one of your photo albums."
What is being implied here is that when you take a photo, it goes into the photo stream and then if you want to make sure it's saved forever on your device, you need to actually take action. If you have a PC/Mac no action is required as it will sync all photos forever; but no PC/Mac means a limit of 1000 photos auto-saved, after that active action is required to keep the photo on the device.
This is a big change from the previous approach of once you've taken a photo, it guaranteed to stay on your device until you do something about it. Without PC/Mac sync, you could easily lose a photo on a vacation if you don't actively do something about it.
She will then lose all her photos > 30 days old if she ever needs to restore or if she ever takes > 1000 photos. Real nice.
The exact deletion policy is not clear yet, but it seems that she will need to actively mark any photos as "keepers" or they will be deleted once > 30 days old. The only way to truly take a photo and forget about is to have a Mac/PC that they get auto-backed up to. But perhaps than can be her grandchild's.
Convert here too, though slightly different story. I'm a one-device kind of person---I don't want to carry around more than my phone. I found all e-readers unusable, unsatisfying to use. Then iBooks came.
Boy, I fell for that iBooks page turn animation like a sucker. Something about it replicated the feeling of having a real book. I don't think any other ebook reader has the same detailed 3D enhanced page-turn animation.
They are not the same. Extensions are the difference. Even if there are IE addons that replicate the functionality of flashblock/adblock/lastpass/xmarks, they don't perform as well.
Kind of feel the same about Chrome. Chrome has evil twins of all those extensions available, but when you install them, they're just not the same.
Plus in Linux, the latest stable build of chromium actually is PAINFULLY slow in GMail! Go figure. I haven't tested bleeding-edge.
How about the other option of not making so many goddam patches? After the Debian OpenSSH debacle, I lost my faith in the Debian "development model" of letting newbs patch core software like OpenSSH for fun. Who try to one-up Theo on security, for crying out loud?
Debian had better rethink the necessity of its myriad patches. So many of the frustrating regressions in Ubuntu are due to some useless patch made to the kernel by downstream.
You do realize that your Prescott Pentium IV is more power hungry than Intel's current faster offerings, right? Perhaps you should buy an AMD if you despise intel and would like to be greener.
No... none of my moderations have been metamoderated. When you get metamodded down, your karma suffers. It seems that I've been purged from the moderation lists.
Funny thing is, I used to be able to mod until 2007. The only references I could find to a blacklist (rtbl flag purge) was way back in 2002. So there must be further blacklisting of mods going on. I just wonder what I did to get on the blacklist.
I used to get mod points all the time (once a week or so), then it suddenly stopped. My karma is still excellent, and I still have the option to turn off advertising. Is it waiting for me to turn ads off before it gives me my mod points again? Is it detecting adblock? Anyone have an explanation?
will have trouble with the GIMP. Anyone who can use GIMP productively is also technical enough to install it from the universe repositories.
Yes, I also remove F-Spot because I always remove all mono-based software from my system---I'd prefer my Ubuntu system without any Microsoft-designed software.
I get your point, but the problems are much deeper than that.
The main issue with the Ubuntu development cycle is that unless you're dealing with an LTS, big issues are kicked to the next release. Just downloaded and installed LTS+1? Found a regression that breaks sound/wireless/graphics? Oh, thank you for your bug report. The issue is already fixed in LTS+2 Alpha 1. Yeah, it stinks that it worked in LTS but doesn't work in LTS+1. Sorry, we do not have the resources to fix it in LTS+1 as well.
What? Sorry? You do not want to run the LTS+2 Alpha software? Then downgrade to LTS (yeah, right---it's next-to-impossible without a backup, wipe and reinstall) or wait for LTS+2.
OK, I wait for LTS+2. Put up with whatever inconvenient/crappy workaround they suggest in the bug tracker. LTS+2 comes around. Yay, sound/wireless/graphics bug is fixed. But now there's intermittent freezing. Lots of people report. Cause of problem found and fixed in LTS+3 Alpha 1. Sorry, involves a new kernel, so will not be fixed in LTS+2. So you can either downgrade or wait for LTS+3.
You get the gist of my meaning. There are many regressions in Ubuntu (and I don't know whether other distros have the same problem). You are usually told to wait till the next release, but then new regressions always crop up. I haven't seen an Ubuntu release free of regressions since... well it must be since Feisty.
This is not made up---it has really happened to me. With Jaunty it was a freeze bug, with Karmic it's intel wireless regularly dying.
It still has what one slashdot poster called 'the stench of microsoft' on it. Even if microsoft GPLs the whole stack, there will always be that feeling of disgust in those of us who are old school.
The pluses and the minuses from two weeks' usage
on
Ubuntu 9.04 RC Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I've been running 9.04 on my Dell laptop for a few weeks now. Like every new release, it's a mixed bag.
Pluses:
Really, super, extra fast boot (10 seconds on my newish Dell)
Fixes a lot of bugs (in GNOME mainly) from the previous release, Intrepid, which was their worst ever
Includes the ext4 file system---having upgraded to ext4, I'm really noticing the performance upgrade.
Minuses:
Evolution suckage continues. This version of the mail client crashed on me on startup, plus the "remove duplicate email" plugin no longer works with it. I've had it with Evolution. I've migrated to Thunderbird, and am vastly more happy. I continue to use Evolution's calendaring system, but only as a way to get my google calendar onto the GNOME panel.
Broken NVIDIA binary blob drivers. Yet again. The intrepid drivers were OK, but now there's something toxic about the combination of either 173 or 180 and the Jaunty kernel. On 173 twinview locks up on me, and on 180 I get random hard lockups once a week. I have really had it with this nvidia binary blob garbage---I am anxiously awaiting some kind of dual monitor support in Nouveau, so I can ditch this piece of rubbish---a goblin that keeps on breaking Linux for many more people than just me, and always will, as long as the binary blob keeps on going.
Allright, I decided to bite and put in the PPA repositories into my synaptic in Ubuntu Intrepid. Installed chromium-browser. Neither slashdot nor NY times loaded at all. Proceeded to remove the repository given that it was a daily build.
Not that you can blame them. When the browser stars, it tells you that it's pre-alpha and that it's gotten too much exposure, with too many people trying it out and expecting it to work.
The linux-on-windows solutions (cygwin was the first, now the more user-friendly ones) present an interesting dilemma. Most windows users I know hate the windows interface. If given an easy way to try gnome/KDE, they may just like it so much that they'd decide to ditch Windows altogether and move all the way to Linux. These installers allow them to reassure themselves that everything they need to do in Windows can be easily done in Linux as well.
However, my feeling is that these people are outnumbered by the people who will not give up Windows. They will not give up Windows because it runs their games, or because it runs their proprietary applications, or simply because complex Microsoft Office files still look wrong in OpenOffice. These people, I think, are in the majority. Even if they like GNOME/KDE, they will still stick with Windows to get the best of both worlds. This is especially true if they can run GNOME/KDE within Windows without rebooting.
That is both good news and bad news. Many free software applications will get a boost out of this, but the Linux kernel unfortunately will not.
ESR is talking about reliable and bulletproof code. Submitter is talking about code quality and stylistics.
You could have horribly written code that is reliable and bulletproof. OpenSSH comes to mind (unmodded by Debian).
Or you could have beautifully written code that is useless and full of holes. Handed-in college CS homework assignments come to mind.
You haven't been paying attention to many Open Source proponents if you haven't ever seen them claim that Open Source code is of vastly superior quality than proprietary. Hell, ESR's claim to fame is a whole paper he wrote on that exact topic. For example, the OSI itself puts this claim at the very top of their advocacy document on selling OSS to your management:
The foundation of the business case for open-source is high reliability. Open-source software is peer-reviewed software; it is more reliable than closed, proprietary software. Mature open-source code is as bulletproof as software ever gets.
Open Source Case for Business
I think the point here is that we are recording digital images of a star as it was only 140 years after it exploded. As opposed to the crab, for which we have digital images 6500 years after it exploded. Regardless of how old the supernova "actually" is now, what matters is that the data we have shown it at age 140. Whereas for the crab, the data we have show it at age 6500.
NASA is wrong in saying this new supernova is the "youngest" - it is actually just the MOST RECENTLY OBSERVED. The Crab Nebula supernova has it beat as "youngest", exploding occuring only 6500 years ago (and observed less than 300 years ago, in 1731) instead of exploding 28,000 years ago (and observed in 2008).
There's plenty of good reasons to bash microsoft; this isn't one of them.
---Dedicated Ubuntu user
Re:Already has replaced it for the past five years
on
Will the Web Replace TV?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If you watch a lot of TV, you may feel sensitive about others' perception of your intelligence. But don't blame that on me. I never said anything about intelligence, much less books, radio, phones, or magazines. All I said was that the physical television device and accompanying expensive gadgets are irrelevant for me and a growing segment of the population.
Slashdot Mirror
In my view we need to revisit the concept of "obscenity." It should either be redefined to include violent material, or abolished altogether. As it stands it's not consistent.
I think most of us agree that there is some violent visual material that children simply should not be exposed to. Given how negligent a huge fraction of the parents in the USA are, I think it's it's not a bad idea for government to provide some degree of protection to minors from such material. You can always argue that motivated minors will access this material anyway... but that does not mean such efforts are pointless. The point is that for a large fraction of minors, it *does* matter when society takes a stand and labels something as obscene. And I think the most graphic violence in these media should indeed be labeled obscene.
It may not be the hardware. Non-LTS Ubuntus are full of regressions. Affects some significant minority of users, but not enough to affect ship date.
The worst regressions are always fixed in the next release. They are rarely backported to non-LTS, a strategy which is designed to keep you constantly upgrading. Except that once one regression is fixed, more creep up. If you're lucky, your won't be affected. But there are ALWAYS regressions.
I basically treat non-LTS Ubuntus as betas for the LTS. I don't expect them to work. I expect many things to be broken. Many of the regressions are insidious---you don't discover them until later in the game. And, dirty secret is that once LTS is long in the tooth, only security updates get backported to LTS. Got a non-functioning file open dialog? Too bad, not going to backport the fix to LTS, you can rot in hell or upgrade. (read the final few comments, where the dev tells me I need to upgrade from LTS to non-LTS to get back a functioning file open dialog box.)
Bitter much? Yes I am, for a fan that's been with them for 7 years now.
It has a roughly uniform chance of supernova within the next million years. So one in a million chance that it will go off this year.
Not if she takes > 1000 photos. Quoting from http://www.apple.com/icloud/features/photo-stream.html
"1000 photos on your devices. New photos appear on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch in a rolling collection of your last 1000 photos. Save your best shots. If you take a photo you really love and want to make sure itâ(TM)s saved on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, you can save it from your Photo Stream to one of your photo albums."
What is being implied here is that when you take a photo, it goes into the photo stream and then if you want to make sure it's saved forever on your device, you need to actually take action. If you have a PC/Mac no action is required as it will sync all photos forever; but no PC/Mac means a limit of 1000 photos auto-saved, after that active action is required to keep the photo on the device.
This is a big change from the previous approach of once you've taken a photo, it guaranteed to stay on your device until you do something about it. Without PC/Mac sync, you could easily lose a photo on a vacation if you don't actively do something about it.
She will then lose all her photos > 30 days old if she ever needs to restore or if she ever takes > 1000 photos. Real nice.
The exact deletion policy is not clear yet, but it seems that she will need to actively mark any photos as "keepers" or they will be deleted once > 30 days old. The only way to truly take a photo and forget about is to have a Mac/PC that they get auto-backed up to. But perhaps than can be her grandchild's.
Convert here too, though slightly different story. I'm a one-device kind of person---I don't want to carry around more than my phone. I found all e-readers unusable, unsatisfying to use. Then iBooks came.
Boy, I fell for that iBooks page turn animation like a sucker. Something about it replicated the feeling of having a real book. I don't think any other ebook reader has the same detailed 3D enhanced page-turn animation.
"There's an app for that" if you jailbreak, but not without, LOL.
As long as you do not upgrade iPhone up to 3.0.0, it appears that the paywall is basically failing to materialize on the iPhone. Yipee!
LOL, they somehow failed to mention "implements paywall" in the latest iPhone app changelog alongside all the other features.
You are kidding right? This was actually a takeover of Nokia by Microsoft. There is no "outside vendor."
They are not the same. Extensions are the difference. Even if there are IE addons that replicate the functionality of flashblock/adblock/lastpass/xmarks, they don't perform as well.
Kind of feel the same about Chrome. Chrome has evil twins of all those extensions available, but when you install them, they're just not the same.
Plus in Linux, the latest stable build of chromium actually is PAINFULLY slow in GMail! Go figure. I haven't tested bleeding-edge.
How about the other option of not making so many goddam patches? After the Debian OpenSSH debacle, I lost my faith in the Debian "development model" of letting newbs patch core software like OpenSSH for fun. Who try to one-up Theo on security, for crying out loud?
Debian had better rethink the necessity of its myriad patches. So many of the frustrating regressions in Ubuntu are due to some useless patch made to the kernel by downstream.
You do realize that your Prescott Pentium IV is more power hungry than Intel's current faster offerings, right? Perhaps you should buy an AMD if you despise intel and would like to be greener.
No... none of my moderations have been metamoderated. When you get metamodded down, your karma suffers. It seems that I've been purged from the moderation lists.
Funny thing is, I used to be able to mod until 2007. The only references I could find to a blacklist (rtbl flag purge) was way back in 2002. So there must be further blacklisting of mods going on. I just wonder what I did to get on the blacklist.
I used to get mod points all the time (once a week or so), then it suddenly stopped. My karma is still excellent, and I still have the option to turn off advertising. Is it waiting for me to turn ads off before it gives me my mod points again? Is it detecting adblock? Anyone have an explanation?
will have trouble with the GIMP. Anyone who can use GIMP productively is also technical enough to install it from the universe repositories.
Yes, I also remove F-Spot because I always remove all mono-based software from my system---I'd prefer my Ubuntu system without any Microsoft-designed software.
I get your point, but the problems are much deeper than that.
The main issue with the Ubuntu development cycle is that unless you're dealing with an LTS, big issues are kicked to the next release. Just downloaded and installed LTS+1? Found a regression that breaks sound/wireless/graphics? Oh, thank you for your bug report. The issue is already fixed in LTS+2 Alpha 1. Yeah, it stinks that it worked in LTS but doesn't work in LTS+1. Sorry, we do not have the resources to fix it in LTS+1 as well.
What? Sorry? You do not want to run the LTS+2 Alpha software? Then downgrade to LTS (yeah, right---it's next-to-impossible without a backup, wipe and reinstall) or wait for LTS+2.
OK, I wait for LTS+2. Put up with whatever inconvenient/crappy workaround they suggest in the bug tracker. LTS+2 comes around. Yay, sound/wireless/graphics bug is fixed. But now there's intermittent freezing. Lots of people report. Cause of problem found and fixed in LTS+3 Alpha 1. Sorry, involves a new kernel, so will not be fixed in LTS+2. So you can either downgrade or wait for LTS+3.
You get the gist of my meaning. There are many regressions in Ubuntu (and I don't know whether other distros have the same problem). You are usually told to wait till the next release, but then new regressions always crop up. I haven't seen an Ubuntu release free of regressions since... well it must be since Feisty.
This is not made up---it has really happened to me. With Jaunty it was a freeze bug, with Karmic it's intel wireless regularly dying.
Makes me want to go back to Mac OS X.
It still has what one slashdot poster called 'the stench of microsoft' on it. Even if microsoft GPLs the whole stack, there will always be that feeling of disgust in those of us who are old school.
Pluses:
Minuses:
Allright, I decided to bite and put in the PPA repositories into my synaptic in Ubuntu Intrepid. Installed chromium-browser. Neither slashdot nor NY times loaded at all. Proceeded to remove the repository given that it was a daily build. Not that you can blame them. When the browser stars, it tells you that it's pre-alpha and that it's gotten too much exposure, with too many people trying it out and expecting it to work.
The linux-on-windows solutions (cygwin was the first, now the more user-friendly ones) present an interesting dilemma. Most windows users I know hate the windows interface. If given an easy way to try gnome/KDE, they may just like it so much that they'd decide to ditch Windows altogether and move all the way to Linux. These installers allow them to reassure themselves that everything they need to do in Windows can be easily done in Linux as well.
However, my feeling is that these people are outnumbered by the people who will not give up Windows. They will not give up Windows because it runs their games, or because it runs their proprietary applications, or simply because complex Microsoft Office files still look wrong in OpenOffice. These people, I think, are in the majority. Even if they like GNOME/KDE, they will still stick with Windows to get the best of both worlds. This is especially true if they can run GNOME/KDE within Windows without rebooting.
That is both good news and bad news. Many free software applications will get a boost out of this, but the Linux kernel unfortunately will not.
You could have horribly written code that is reliable and bulletproof. OpenSSH comes to mind (unmodded by Debian).
Or you could have beautifully written code that is useless and full of holes. Handed-in college CS homework assignments come to mind.
s/6500/1000/g
There's plenty of good reasons to bash microsoft; this isn't one of them.
---Dedicated Ubuntu user
If you watch a lot of TV, you may feel sensitive about others' perception of your intelligence. But don't blame that on me. I never said anything about intelligence, much less books, radio, phones, or magazines. All I said was that the physical television device and accompanying expensive gadgets are irrelevant for me and a growing segment of the population.