Oh well, there probably should be some songs about one's virgin wife being raped by the landlord before marriage as per order of the king (look up origins of the word "fuck" sometime).
Last time I checked, that theory about the origins of the word was probably false.
Anyway, while I don't really care if there's swearing in lyrics one way or the other, I certainly understand that some serious matters that are worth expressing can be difficult to convey as strongly without some strong words, and some matters themselves, expressed in any relatively direct way, are of the kind that would probably warrant a parental advisory or something. Unfortunately the world isn't only daisies and butterflies so neither should music be. That kind of music isn't even some kind of a niche; there's a lot of it.
Do absolutely all drivers/applications work yet? Nope. Do all of mine? Yep.
Great! Let's remember that next time someone complains about some hardware compatibility issue with Linux. After all, all hardware I have works pretty nicely, so obviously there are no issues.
I use flashblock with Firefox. That mostly gives me the advantages of having Flash without the disadvantages (intrusive flash banners etc.) because I get flash but only when I explicitly request it.
Of course browsing sites that make extensive use of flash, particularly in form of several separate flash objects on the same page, are still a pain to use because you may have to click on every one of them in order to get a usable page. Flashblock allows site whitelisting, though, which makes that more bearable.
In my limited experience, stage 4 is more like "Person A doesn't care because he doesn't understand the difference and isn't willing to learn anything new, and thus ignores Geek B". It's not because they think that Geek B doesn't know anything, it's because they don't care. You'd imagine that they do after running into problems, but it doesn't seem to happen.
Other than that, spot on.
Re:Beginning of the end?
on
SCO Loses
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I found it funny even if it's quite normal sarcasm and not one of those really golden pieces that have something really inventive.
GP said:
desktop Lunix can't even manage a user base above the statistical margin of error, so it's quite possible Lunix has less than zero users.
If you still after that wonder whether GP was a joke, you may need to update your sense of humour from the beta version to the latest release. An "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" should suffice.
always != ever, and an anecdote doesn't prove a general point. Of course that doesn't mean that you wouldn't have a point either.
That's all I'm going to say.
Cowardice and I never got along, sounds like you might have better luck.
Not really, but I'm not into the attitude of always fighting just because you've got to fight either.
Of course guerrilla insurgency can be worth it, but I don't really believe it always wins anything truely valuable. It really depends on the situation. The greatest benefit I'd see in guerrilla action would still be the threat of it, potentially eliminating the need for the action itself.
Sure, but whether the society that is left after that is one you want to live in even if the insurgents win is a completely different matter. From a purely patriotic point of view it's clearly better than no opposition but if you don't think about patriotism but about getting the kind of society you want, I'm not so sure anymore.
Lastly, there's the citizens. Many of us are armed, unlike in many other countries. The military may be powerful, but it's nowhere near as large as the citizenry. And Iraq is showing us every day exactly how effective guerrilla insurgents with improvised explosives and small arms can be against the world's most powerful military force.
That didn't prevent the attack in the first place, though. If you have to resort to guerrilla insurgency, in the modern world it's quite questionable how much there is left to gain by the action. If you have to go guerrilla the opposing force is probably controlling all the economical and industrial assets already, as well as most of the significant infrastructure. You may be able to prevent them from using those assets, but that won't bring you the win, because you won't be able to use them either, and the modern western world pretty much runs on economy. If you lose the economy and the infrastructure, you lose the society we want to live in. If you look at Iraq, you'll also see exactly why there's no win in guerrilla warfare: nobody is winning anything, everybody is losing.
What guerrilla insurgency could do is to make the attack (or takeover) so expensive (in whatever terms that are relevant) that the attack isn't a good idea in the first place. Maybe some day somewhere it will actually prevent the attack that way, so yeah. I guess.
Easy. The BSD license is blessed when someone other than $company owns the copyright, because it allows greater freedom to $company. The fact that with the BSD license the copyright owner retains, accordingly, less control of the software is not a concern since it's not $company that is owning the copyright anyway.
If $company owns the copyright, those benefits and disadvantages no longer apply, and there isn't necessarily a reason to favour the BSD license anymore -- although there may not be much reason to prefer the GPL either.
If you want to apply that to this particular case, $company = Apple
One reason may also be that it manages to please the newbies and the more traditional Linux geeks at the same time. Having started essentially as a tweaked Debian distro and still sharing most of the benefits of Debian, it's easy to gather support from those more experienced Debian users, and Ubuntu plugs the newbie-friendliness on top of that. Both worlds at the same time.
[1] Or is supposed to anyway -- Network Manager, whose icon you're seeing, has its share of problems, although having the icon shown by default isn't one.
Some of your points are valid, others aren't. The point of your post is complaining about details and has nothing to do with Just Working which means working as expected by default. The details also need to be addressed but they're a completely different matter.
Why is the bottom panel on my desktop missing about 20% of the time? I have to log out and log back in. Usually it comes back, sometimes it takes 2 logins.
...
Why do I just get a black square when playing a movie with Movie Player? If I move the window I see the movie playing, but the black box comes back as soon as I drop the window.
...
Why, when I explicity specify I want 2 workspace, does the second workspace disappear and I'm left with one for half of my logins? Even when I do get 2 the second one has no panels at all 75% of the time.
Do you have desktop effects enabled by any chance? You know, those that have been marked as "experimental" and "not working on all computers" and things like that? I've never seen panels disappear like that or workspaces misbehave except with compiz enabled. If you aren't using compiz, that's a valid complaint; if you are, you're using experimental features which aren't enabled by default, and thus their misbehaviour isn't really against the "Just Works" principle which, essentially, means working by default.
The media player issue might also be related to compiz if you're using that, or it might be something else.
I don't want a network connection icon to show up in the system tray, I'm on a machine that is wired all the time, I know it is on a network, I put it there.
That's your preference. That means you should change the behaviour to match your liking. Showing the icon doesn't prevent the system from "Just Working" -- in fact the icon is there exactly because it enables[1] Just Working. Because it is there by default and allows easy configuration of different kinds of networks, also ones different from yours, it allows things to work out of the box. If it weren't there, your network would still work but some other typical use cases might not be as well catered to, and actual functionality might be lacking for those scenarios. The cost is that there are also things that not everyone may need.
That's pretty much fundamental to Just Working until we get a telepathic installer that makes things exactly the way you want without you consciously doing anything to help it. (If you have to help it, it's not Just Working.)
The article is about computer science, not programming, but even in the latter some idea of mathematics can be useful. In the former it clearly is.
In some other parts of real programming you need to implement things whose idea is very difficult to construe or analyze without some kinds of mathematical methods. In other words, you need to implement nontrivial algorithms.
Of course most code (at least when measured in lines of code) is actually more or less trivial in an algorithmic sense, but nontrivial algorithms, although not as abundant in most code, are still needed. Think about audio or video encoding and decoding, image processing, string processing such as text search (no, that's not really trivial to do efficiently either), or 3D graphics; all of that requires nontrivial algorithms, and someone has to implement the code. Understanding those algorithms and concepts may require some understanding of algorithms and mathematics; coming up with those algorithms in the first place certainly requires that.
You may not have needed to work on things that require understanding mathematics but that doesn't mean nobody needs to do that.
As a Mac user and hobby developer, I'd much rather stick with native UI components for whatever platform I'm targetting. Sure, QT can LOOK like an OS X app, but as far as I know you miss out on a lot of integration with the OS and advanced Cocoa features.
I believe that when GP said "I typically use QT as it works in just about anything" he possibly meant that it works on just about any Linux platform. Besides, if getting things to run on different OS platforms without changing the UI toolkit had been GP's point, Cocoa would be one of the last things to settle on. (But yes, having a separate UI implementation for each platform might be even more preferable -- and this is quite possible with many F/OSS applications if someone bothers to write the specific UI for $platform.)
And yes, Qt does work on just about any Linux platform. Gtk may just be more preferable for developers of proprietary applications because it's licensed under the LGPL and thus allows dynamic linking from software regardless of the license, unlike the GPL that Qt is licensed under (unless you get a commercial license which costs money).
If you had happened to read even a couple of comments posted before yours here (or thought about it for a while or RTFA or something else unthinkable), you might have found out that they aren't coding because someone else is doing the coding and the big names are spending all their time managing those coders.
If we don't start working on a system that eliminates privacy for everyone the only one's who will have privacy are the rich and powerful, you can bet on that.
Not as long as we have powerful and free media. The rich and the powerful are more interesting than the average citizen for the media, so that balances things out -- and that's only one such factor. Just as a tip, before making noise about a theory like that, compare it with reality to check its feasibility; you may notice that the rich and the powerful (e.g. celebrities or politicians) don't necessarily have even as much privacy as most other people do.
Troll, troll, troll your thread... Parent should be modded as -1 Misinformative (or perhaps +1 Funny, depending on the point of view). I don't know who mods that kind of stuff informative.
It's not that parent has a bias -- that's quite normal and, I think, acceptable (although whether it should be modded informative is a different matter). It's that it can't get its basic facts right, extends the bias so far that it won't even tell how other operating systems really handle the issue, and that it even contradicts itself.
I can't speak much for Windows because I know little about its 64-bit support. However, on Linux we have these things called package managers which generally take care of library dependencies for you. And yes, it can work with third-party (non-distro-provided) software as well, and even pretty easily if the third-party package has been built for your distribution. Since Ubuntu was provided as an example, let's just say that it's not an entirely uncommon target for packagers of third-party software.
The "compatibility layer" mentioned by parent is also a package which other packages can depend on; assuming that a network connection is available, it will be automagically installed when needed. Not to mention that with all this it isn't necessary to compile stuff yourself if someone else has already packaged it for you. Yes, it's possible to package things like that. No, it hasn't been done to every piece of software there is. Are bad third-party packages (or an entire lack of them) a technical deficiency of the operating system platform which, after all, provides all needed tools for third parties to build such packages for their software? Hell, no.
But the really funny part is the Alpha/SPARC/whatever support. So you can't have a mixed environment on them? Might that have something to do with the fact that Alpha has been 64-bit for quite a while by now? Oh, and at least you can run Ubuntu on an UltraSPARC. Not that anyone who doesn't know what he's doing would be doing that anyway, so there's probably not much of a problem anyway.
I'll also be willing to buy a G3 when you provide proof that it'll run the latest 64-bit Mac version of a popular new game. I assume that must be the case -- after all, otherwise there would be no point in saying that a Pentium III can't do that, right?
Oh, and "desktopedness" is a pretty damn funny word.
This is basically the digital equivalent of printing your name on the receipt and putting it in the bag when you buy a CD.
Not exactly -- more like equivalent of printing the name on a piece of paper and then somehow sticking it into a corner in the last page of the cover leaflet. It's attached to the thing itself and if you never happen to take a look at that page, you may never know that your information is passed on if you decide to somehow transfer the CD to someone else, for example selling it.
It may not be a big deal if the information included isn't that private in the first place, but it's still not completely right to compare a receipt that is not attached to the item itself and where it's immediately obvious with a single glance that your information is there (so you can be careful with it if you like) to a file where the information is attached and passes on unless explicitly removed and where you have to actually do a bit of something to find out that the information is there in the first place. They aren't the same thing.
Yeah but not everyone wants to live "efficiently".
"Living efficiently" has an unpleasant tone to it because it suggests that you have to be somehow particularly effective yourself, and that sounds stressful. That's not exactly what is meant when urban life is said to be more efficient than rural life. Urban life is just naturally more efficient in terms of energy and work, and I'd say that at least the former is definitely quite important a factor nowadays. We clearly want to conserve energy while at the same time few people seem willing to have their standard of living improve, or at the very least not decline. Add to that the growing population and you need to increase energy efficiency to have any of that work.
On a large scale you don't have to place energy efficiency and enjoyment against each other. Assume that there are three kinds of people: those who prefer to live in the country rather than in the city, the opposite kind that prefers urban life, and those who consider the two options equal.
Obviously urban life is preferable for those who prefer it. Taking into account the efficiency benefits brought by urban life that affect us all -- even those living in the country -- urban life is probably a better option also for those who otherwise see no great difference. For those who prefer rural life (for reasons other than economy or ecology, because those factors are in favour of urban life, as mentioned earlier) it may be a better option to live in the country, but assuming that they don't form a great majority, it would seem that urban life would indeed be better for most people.
As others have also pointed out, I don't think they ever had such great appreciation.
If anything, though, I think these fields are growing rather than dying. Most terrible UIs I've used have been in relatively old software, or at least not in the very recent stuff. (Or maybe I've just moved away from them, I don't know.)
6. use of testing, version control, refactoring, and other best practices
8. general communications skills
I really haven't been around in the field long enough to know, but are these really going down?
Some of the items on the list were spot on but others made me wonder as they don't seem obvious to me.
Just because he isn't a foam-mouthed zealot doesn't mean he's an idiot (or an MS fan for that matter). Some people need to and wisely choose to be diplomatic rather than overly sharp-tongued.
It's quite common in the real world to soften things a little.
Just to clear up some misunderstandings...
even Ubuntu still requires you to connect to dubious quasi-legal repositories in order to get mp3 working.
It's not really "dubious" as you claim (universe and multiverse are hosted at archive.ubuntu.com and its mirrors, and the packages are digitally signed and all). Moreover, depending on how you define "working", it's not really quasi-legal; it's completely fine to use at least a decoder for private, non-commercial use. Fraunhofer & Thomson don't ask for royalties for that.
Encoding is a problem, but the only problem with decoding is probably that it can't be done for commercial purposes without a license, and of course Canonical tries to make money by providing commercial support for officially supported packages in Ubuntu. Thus, mp3 decoders can't be officially supported, so they don't appear in the default install either. There's currently no legal problem with private end-users installing and using the decoder, however.
That also applies to many, but not all, patent-encumbered codecs. Encoding may be a problem, decoding is only so for commercial purposes.
Quake 3. Um.
... and Quake 4 and Doom 3 and so on, just to continue along your lines, but with information that isn't five years old.
Please... Everyone knows that not many games have been ported to Linux and nobody suggests Linux as a gamer's primary platform. I understand what you're saying, and so does everyone else without you having to overdo it. It only gives the impression that you haven't paid any attention to Linux in the last three years or so.
Personally I dislike the Ubuntu version numbering scheme because it isn't very practical from the end user's point of view unless you happen to be in the habit of tracking the releases closely and always know when they're done. Nobody else will remember that it's Ubuntu 6.06 or 7.04, it's just 6.x (which is ambiguous at best) or 7.x or something else even more misleading. That's why I actually use the code names more than the version numbers.
One argument for tying the version numbers to release dates could be that the latter are actually a lot more important in Ubuntu (and some other Linux distros) than in a lot of other software because the releases are a lot more frequent than for, say, Windows, and because you probably want to keep up with the latest one unless you're running an older LTS release. I don't think it outweights the difficulty of using the awkward version numbers, though, so I'd probably prefer a traditional numbering scheme where.0 is always a first stable release of something new and everything with some other minor version is a less major update to that.
The complexity of the version numbering may be one significant reason why the code names tend to stick.
Slashdot Mirror
Last time I checked, that theory about the origins of the word was probably false.
Anyway, while I don't really care if there's swearing in lyrics one way or the other, I certainly understand that some serious matters that are worth expressing can be difficult to convey as strongly without some strong words, and some matters themselves, expressed in any relatively direct way, are of the kind that would probably warrant a parental advisory or something. Unfortunately the world isn't only daisies and butterflies so neither should music be. That kind of music isn't even some kind of a niche; there's a lot of it.
Great! Let's remember that next time someone complains about some hardware compatibility issue with Linux. After all, all hardware I have works pretty nicely, so obviously there are no issues.
I use flashblock with Firefox. That mostly gives me the advantages of having Flash without the disadvantages (intrusive flash banners etc.) because I get flash but only when I explicitly request it.
Of course browsing sites that make extensive use of flash, particularly in form of several separate flash objects on the same page, are still a pain to use because you may have to click on every one of them in order to get a usable page. Flashblock allows site whitelisting, though, which makes that more bearable.
In my limited experience, stage 4 is more like "Person A doesn't care because he doesn't understand the difference and isn't willing to learn anything new, and thus ignores Geek B". It's not because they think that Geek B doesn't know anything, it's because they don't care. You'd imagine that they do after running into problems, but it doesn't seem to happen.
Other than that, spot on.
I found it funny even if it's quite normal sarcasm and not one of those really golden pieces that have something really inventive.
GP said:
desktop Lunix can't even manage a user base above the statistical margin of error, so it's quite possible Lunix has less than zero users.If you still after that wonder whether GP was a joke, you may need to update your sense of humour from the beta version to the latest release. An "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" should suffice.
always != ever, and an anecdote doesn't prove a general point. Of course that doesn't mean that you wouldn't have a point either. That's all I'm going to say.
Not really, but I'm not into the attitude of always fighting just because you've got to fight either.
Of course guerrilla insurgency can be worth it, but I don't really believe it always wins anything truely valuable. It really depends on the situation. The greatest benefit I'd see in guerrilla action would still be the threat of it, potentially eliminating the need for the action itself.
Sure, but whether the society that is left after that is one you want to live in even if the insurgents win is a completely different matter. From a purely patriotic point of view it's clearly better than no opposition but if you don't think about patriotism but about getting the kind of society you want, I'm not so sure anymore.
That didn't prevent the attack in the first place, though. If you have to resort to guerrilla insurgency, in the modern world it's quite questionable how much there is left to gain by the action. If you have to go guerrilla the opposing force is probably controlling all the economical and industrial assets already, as well as most of the significant infrastructure. You may be able to prevent them from using those assets, but that won't bring you the win, because you won't be able to use them either, and the modern western world pretty much runs on economy. If you lose the economy and the infrastructure, you lose the society we want to live in. If you look at Iraq, you'll also see exactly why there's no win in guerrilla warfare: nobody is winning anything, everybody is losing.
What guerrilla insurgency could do is to make the attack (or takeover) so expensive (in whatever terms that are relevant) that the attack isn't a good idea in the first place. Maybe some day somewhere it will actually prevent the attack that way, so yeah. I guess.
Easy. The BSD license is blessed when someone other than $company owns the copyright, because it allows greater freedom to $company. The fact that with the BSD license the copyright owner retains, accordingly, less control of the software is not a concern since it's not $company that is owning the copyright anyway.
If $company owns the copyright, those benefits and disadvantages no longer apply, and there isn't necessarily a reason to favour the BSD license anymore -- although there may not be much reason to prefer the GPL either.
If you want to apply that to this particular case, $company = Apple
One reason may also be that it manages to please the newbies and the more traditional Linux geeks at the same time. Having started essentially as a tweaked Debian distro and still sharing most of the benefits of Debian, it's easy to gather support from those more experienced Debian users, and Ubuntu plugs the newbie-friendliness on top of that. Both worlds at the same time.
Forgot one thing...
[1] Or is supposed to anyway -- Network Manager, whose icon you're seeing, has its share of problems, although having the icon shown by default isn't one.
Some of your points are valid, others aren't. The point of your post is complaining about details and has nothing to do with Just Working which means working as expected by default. The details also need to be addressed but they're a completely different matter.
Why is the bottom panel on my desktop missing about 20% of the time? I have to log out and log back in. Usually it comes back, sometimes it takes 2 logins.
Why do I just get a black square when playing a movie with Movie Player? If I move the window I see the movie playing, but the black box comes back as soon as I drop the window.
Why, when I explicity specify I want 2 workspace, does the second workspace disappear and I'm left with one for half of my logins? Even when I do get 2 the second one has no panels at all 75% of the time.
Do you have desktop effects enabled by any chance? You know, those that have been marked as "experimental" and "not working on all computers" and things like that? I've never seen panels disappear like that or workspaces misbehave except with compiz enabled. If you aren't using compiz, that's a valid complaint; if you are, you're using experimental features which aren't enabled by default, and thus their misbehaviour isn't really against the "Just Works" principle which, essentially, means working by default.
The media player issue might also be related to compiz if you're using that, or it might be something else.
I don't want a network connection icon to show up in the system tray, I'm on a machine that is wired all the time, I know it is on a network, I put it there.That's your preference. That means you should change the behaviour to match your liking. Showing the icon doesn't prevent the system from "Just Working" -- in fact the icon is there exactly because it enables[1] Just Working. Because it is there by default and allows easy configuration of different kinds of networks, also ones different from yours, it allows things to work out of the box. If it weren't there, your network would still work but some other typical use cases might not be as well catered to, and actual functionality might be lacking for those scenarios. The cost is that there are also things that not everyone may need.
That's pretty much fundamental to Just Working until we get a telepathic installer that makes things exactly the way you want without you consciously doing anything to help it. (If you have to help it, it's not Just Working.)
The article is about computer science, not programming, but even in the latter some idea of mathematics can be useful. In the former it clearly is.
In some other parts of real programming you need to implement things whose idea is very difficult to construe or analyze without some kinds of mathematical methods. In other words, you need to implement nontrivial algorithms.
Of course most code (at least when measured in lines of code) is actually more or less trivial in an algorithmic sense, but nontrivial algorithms, although not as abundant in most code, are still needed. Think about audio or video encoding and decoding, image processing, string processing such as text search (no, that's not really trivial to do efficiently either), or 3D graphics; all of that requires nontrivial algorithms, and someone has to implement the code. Understanding those algorithms and concepts may require some understanding of algorithms and mathematics; coming up with those algorithms in the first place certainly requires that.
You may not have needed to work on things that require understanding mathematics but that doesn't mean nobody needs to do that.
I believe that when GP said "I typically use QT as it works in just about anything" he possibly meant that it works on just about any Linux platform. Besides, if getting things to run on different OS platforms without changing the UI toolkit had been GP's point, Cocoa would be one of the last things to settle on. (But yes, having a separate UI implementation for each platform might be even more preferable -- and this is quite possible with many F/OSS applications if someone bothers to write the specific UI for $platform.)
And yes, Qt does work on just about any Linux platform. Gtk may just be more preferable for developers of proprietary applications because it's licensed under the LGPL and thus allows dynamic linking from software regardless of the license, unlike the GPL that Qt is licensed under (unless you get a commercial license which costs money).
If you had happened to read even a couple of comments posted before yours here (or thought about it for a while or RTFA or something else unthinkable), you might have found out that they aren't coding because someone else is doing the coding and the big names are spending all their time managing those coders.
Your evidence seems to have lost its compass.
If we don't start working on a system that eliminates privacy for everyone the only one's who will have privacy are the rich and powerful, you can bet on that.
Not as long as we have powerful and free media. The rich and the powerful are more interesting than the average citizen for the media, so that balances things out -- and that's only one such factor. Just as a tip, before making noise about a theory like that, compare it with reality to check its feasibility; you may notice that the rich and the powerful (e.g. celebrities or politicians) don't necessarily have even as much privacy as most other people do.
Troll, troll, troll your thread... Parent should be modded as -1 Misinformative (or perhaps +1 Funny, depending on the point of view). I don't know who mods that kind of stuff informative.
It's not that parent has a bias -- that's quite normal and, I think, acceptable (although whether it should be modded informative is a different matter). It's that it can't get its basic facts right, extends the bias so far that it won't even tell how other operating systems really handle the issue, and that it even contradicts itself.
I can't speak much for Windows because I know little about its 64-bit support. However, on Linux we have these things called package managers which generally take care of library dependencies for you. And yes, it can work with third-party (non-distro-provided) software as well, and even pretty easily if the third-party package has been built for your distribution. Since Ubuntu was provided as an example, let's just say that it's not an entirely uncommon target for packagers of third-party software.
The "compatibility layer" mentioned by parent is also a package which other packages can depend on; assuming that a network connection is available, it will be automagically installed when needed. Not to mention that with all this it isn't necessary to compile stuff yourself if someone else has already packaged it for you. Yes, it's possible to package things like that. No, it hasn't been done to every piece of software there is. Are bad third-party packages (or an entire lack of them) a technical deficiency of the operating system platform which, after all, provides all needed tools for third parties to build such packages for their software? Hell, no.
But the really funny part is the Alpha/SPARC/whatever support. So you can't have a mixed environment on them? Might that have something to do with the fact that Alpha has been 64-bit for quite a while by now? Oh, and at least you can run Ubuntu on an UltraSPARC. Not that anyone who doesn't know what he's doing would be doing that anyway, so there's probably not much of a problem anyway.
I'll also be willing to buy a G3 when you provide proof that it'll run the latest 64-bit Mac version of a popular new game. I assume that must be the case -- after all, otherwise there would be no point in saying that a Pentium III can't do that, right?
Oh, and "desktopedness" is a pretty damn funny word.
Not exactly -- more like equivalent of printing the name on a piece of paper and then somehow sticking it into a corner in the last page of the cover leaflet. It's attached to the thing itself and if you never happen to take a look at that page, you may never know that your information is passed on if you decide to somehow transfer the CD to someone else, for example selling it.
It may not be a big deal if the information included isn't that private in the first place, but it's still not completely right to compare a receipt that is not attached to the item itself and where it's immediately obvious with a single glance that your information is there (so you can be careful with it if you like) to a file where the information is attached and passes on unless explicitly removed and where you have to actually do a bit of something to find out that the information is there in the first place. They aren't the same thing.
Simultaneous use of the mouse and the keyboard is not trivial. Or at least not as trivial as using a two-button mouse.
"Living efficiently" has an unpleasant tone to it because it suggests that you have to be somehow particularly effective yourself, and that sounds stressful. That's not exactly what is meant when urban life is said to be more efficient than rural life. Urban life is just naturally more efficient in terms of energy and work, and I'd say that at least the former is definitely quite important a factor nowadays. We clearly want to conserve energy while at the same time few people seem willing to have their standard of living improve, or at the very least not decline. Add to that the growing population and you need to increase energy efficiency to have any of that work.
On a large scale you don't have to place energy efficiency and enjoyment against each other. Assume that there are three kinds of people: those who prefer to live in the country rather than in the city, the opposite kind that prefers urban life, and those who consider the two options equal.
Obviously urban life is preferable for those who prefer it. Taking into account the efficiency benefits brought by urban life that affect us all -- even those living in the country -- urban life is probably a better option also for those who otherwise see no great difference. For those who prefer rural life (for reasons other than economy or ecology, because those factors are in favour of urban life, as mentioned earlier) it may be a better option to live in the country, but assuming that they don't form a great majority, it would seem that urban life would indeed be better for most people.
4. usability
5. interface design
As others have also pointed out, I don't think they ever had such great appreciation.
If anything, though, I think these fields are growing rather than dying. Most terrible UIs I've used have been in relatively old software, or at least not in the very recent stuff. (Or maybe I've just moved away from them, I don't know.)
6. use of testing, version control, refactoring, and other best practices
8. general communications skills
I really haven't been around in the field long enough to know, but are these really going down?
Some of the items on the list were spot on but others made me wonder as they don't seem obvious to me.
Just because he isn't a foam-mouthed zealot doesn't mean he's an idiot (or an MS fan for that matter). Some people need to and wisely choose to be diplomatic rather than overly sharp-tongued.
It's quite common in the real world to soften things a little.
It's not really "dubious" as you claim (universe and multiverse are hosted at archive.ubuntu.com and its mirrors, and the packages are digitally signed and all). Moreover, depending on how you define "working", it's not really quasi-legal; it's completely fine to use at least a decoder for private, non-commercial use. Fraunhofer & Thomson don't ask for royalties for that.
Encoding is a problem, but the only problem with decoding is probably that it can't be done for commercial purposes without a license, and of course Canonical tries to make money by providing commercial support for officially supported packages in Ubuntu. Thus, mp3 decoders can't be officially supported, so they don't appear in the default install either. There's currently no legal problem with private end-users installing and using the decoder, however.
That also applies to many, but not all, patent-encumbered codecs. Encoding may be a problem, decoding is only so for commercial purposes.
Quake 3. Um.... and Quake 4 and Doom 3 and so on, just to continue along your lines, but with information that isn't five years old.
Please... Everyone knows that not many games have been ported to Linux and nobody suggests Linux as a gamer's primary platform. I understand what you're saying, and so does everyone else without you having to overdo it. It only gives the impression that you haven't paid any attention to Linux in the last three years or so.
Personally I dislike the Ubuntu version numbering scheme because it isn't very practical from the end user's point of view unless you happen to be in the habit of tracking the releases closely and always know when they're done. Nobody else will remember that it's Ubuntu 6.06 or 7.04, it's just 6.x (which is ambiguous at best) or 7.x or something else even more misleading. That's why I actually use the code names more than the version numbers.
One argument for tying the version numbers to release dates could be that the latter are actually a lot more important in Ubuntu (and some other Linux distros) than in a lot of other software because the releases are a lot more frequent than for, say, Windows, and because you probably want to keep up with the latest one unless you're running an older LTS release. I don't think it outweights the difficulty of using the awkward version numbers, though, so I'd probably prefer a traditional numbering scheme where .0 is always a first stable release of something new and everything with some other minor version is a less major update to that.
The complexity of the version numbering may be one significant reason why the code names tend to stick.