It's on a very tight beam, closely focused on the UK (so that they can get away with it being unencrypted) so somebody in Italy will probably a dish larger than 1m to get it.
commercial organization's poor products through forced purchases
That exact criticism can be levelled at the entire BBC - if you want to watch TV in the UK, you have to pay for the BBC, whether you want to watch their products or not. I find most of the BBC's output to be poor (and the amount that isn't poor isn't worth the fee), but I have no choice but to buy their product.
If "the citizens required that government truly level the playing field", then the government wouldn't be mandating the BBC not to use Windows DRM, they'd be scrapping the BBC entirely.
The Trust had originally recommended a two year time frame, but the BBC Executive said that setting a time limit would tie their hands in commercial negotiations and that there was so much dependence on 3rd parties that they (the BBC Executive) couldn't take responsibility for, so what was agreed was that there would be no set time scale, but that the BBC Executive has to report on progress towards platform neutrality to the BBC Trust every 6 months.
So, for a reasonable time frame, it looks like it's somewhere between 6 months and never.
If they did, then the licence fee would become even harder to justify (though, I'm already of the opinion that the Licence Fee is unjustifiable anyway). The most visible issue would be how do you justify turning off the commercial channels, none of which receive any part of the TV Tax.
Seeing as the "armed wing of the BBC" (The TV Licensing Authority) has a database with every household in the UK on it, and the name of the Licence holder for that address, it may not be that simple.
In Britian for your tv license you get a ton of free to air digital channels
8 Channels (BBC 1, 2, 3, 4, News 24, Parliament, CBBC, CBeebies), arguably only 6 as the childrens channels use the same bandwidth as 3 and 4. The rest get no licence fee money, and are therefore not a part of the licence fee "package" and shouldn't be considered as part of the "ton" of channels you get for your fee.
Even if you include the commercial channels, Freeview's only around 40 channels max - assuming you can get all the multiplexes. It's hardly a ton.
No high def for free yet
There's the BBC HD channel on satellite (which is just as "free" as the BBC on DTT/Freeview).
I'd much rather download everything, and have the install go really fast, so that my system is down for a minimal amount of time.
You could boot from the Ubuntu Live CD and install from that (while still carrying on with other tasks). Then your system is only down for the amount of time needed to reboot.
It looks unusual to me that a big corporation exec installs the latest Ubuntu distro on one of his laptops even before the news of its release hits the press
Unless he didn't install it and decided to try out one of the new Dell Linux laptops before they hit the streets, so it had Ubuntu on it before it left the factory floor. Which is why there's the speculation that Ubuntu will be the distro used in Dell's consumer Linux machines.
Then again, seeing as the guy got rich from building PCs in his bedroom, I doubt he's a usual corporate exec when it comes to technical matters. Hell, he could be a/. reader for all we know.
It'd be more interesting if he was using something like Fedora, Suse, FreeBSD, or (until a few weeks back) Solaris. The founder of Debian using what is still, fundamentally, Debian isn't that interesting.
because Ubuntu fails to acknowledge that they should ship more than 1 CD
But is there really much point to having more than one CD? The versions of software on CD are going to fall out of date. Other than for users with slow network connections, there isn't that much advantage in having several CDs or a big DVD. If anything, it's a disadvantage, as it means you're downloading a lot of software you're never going to install.
Seeing as Debian has both a minimal install CD and an "everything including the kitchen sink" install CDs, it would be interesting to see which is more popular. If somebody were taking bets, I'd place my bet on the minimal install CD.
I really want to know what it is that makes people think Ubuntu is the best thing since sliced bread.
I think there are several reasons -
* It has more of an community feel than some distros, where the company supporting it isn't as in your face as in some other distros.
* It's based on debian so you get all the goodness of debian, but with timely releases.
* There's a stronger commitment to software freedom than some other distros (even more so in Fiesty with gNewSence inspired super-free version), while at the same time taking a pragmatic approach.
* I think the giving away of CDs helped, especially in the earlier days.
* There isn't open and closed versions (ala Fedora/RedHat, openSuse/Suse, etc), there is just Ubuntu.
It's not one thing, it's the combination of several things that makes Ubuntu compare well against other distros. It's like how in some sports if you can consistently come in second, you can end up first overall.
They're trying to figure out where in the world you are via your IP address. If they get it wrong, their customer service will need to know the IP address so they can unblock it.
There is some strong cultural force at work here that discourages women from becoming programmers.
I would think that it's the opposite - in other parts of the world people (regardless of gender) are encouraged to become programmers. So people of both sexes become programmers. In the west, rarely is IT ever encouraged as a career path for anyone, so the only people who get into it are the people who are really interested in it/passionate about it, and there's an inherent gender bias in doing IT out of passion as compared to do getting into IT just for the money.
Women enter IT when IT is seen as a legitimate career choice, and IT being viewed as a legitimate carrier peaked in the 80s.
As far as I know, they're quite free to claim rights they don't actually have,
But isn't the threat of legal action still a threat? If the copyright holder said that they were going to come around and cause you actual, physical or financial harm that would be illegal. Seeing as a court action would cost the defendant money (and cause a lot of stress), isn't that the same thing?
Of course, it would put all the many profitable, tax-paying voodoo diets out of business. Not that I think there's a conspiracy, I don't, but a lot of people would get mad if we were all skinny.
Isn't there a correlation between the increase in voodoo diets with the increase in obesity?
for the first 6 weeks of this semster, my last semester, we were taught what HTML is.
One of the things that annoyed me when I was doing a CS degree was the level of "basic" knowledge that we had to go through. I still remember first year when everybody (including the lecturer) was bored beyond belief by having to go through such things as what a for loop was. I always thought it was like the Arts faculty having to teach people to read. I thought it was bad 16 years ago, but sounds like it's gotten worse.
Computer Science is still very immature with very few true best practices and standards.
I have to take issue with this. IT (which includes, but is not limited to only CS) has at least as many (if not more) "best practices" and standards as any other industry/profession. IT Best Practices is almost an industry itself. And I think our best practices and standards are more likely to be automated, of better quality and better adhered to.
Slashdot Mirror
But with Ubuntu installed, all you need to do is:
sudo apt-get install dell-crapplets
No need for Dell to send you a CD.
The need to move a file between machines during the short grace period is unlikely
Moving files to portable devices is one of the reasons why the Trust went with DRM downloads (as opposed to a streaming solution)
It's on a very tight beam, closely focused on the UK (so that they can get away with it being unencrypted) so somebody in Italy will probably a dish larger than 1m to get it.
commercial organization's poor products through forced purchases
That exact criticism can be levelled at the entire BBC - if you want to watch TV in the UK, you have to pay for the BBC, whether you want to watch their products or not. I find most of the BBC's output to be poor (and the amount that isn't poor isn't worth the fee), but I have no choice but to buy their product.
If "the citizens required that government truly level the playing field", then the government wouldn't be mandating the BBC not to use Windows DRM, they'd be scrapping the BBC entirely.
The Trust had originally recommended a two year time frame, but the BBC Executive said that setting a time limit would tie their hands in commercial negotiations and that there was so much dependence on 3rd parties that they (the BBC Executive) couldn't take responsibility for, so what was agreed was that there would be no set time scale, but that the BBC Executive has to report on progress towards platform neutrality to the BBC Trust every 6 months.
So, for a reasonable time frame, it looks like it's somewhere between 6 months and never.
If they did, then the licence fee would become even harder to justify (though, I'm already of the opinion that the Licence Fee is unjustifiable anyway). The most visible issue would be how do you justify turning off the commercial channels, none of which receive any part of the TV Tax.
requires a valid postal address (easily forged).
Seeing as the "armed wing of the BBC" (The TV Licensing Authority) has a database with every household in the UK on it, and the name of the Licence holder for that address, it may not be that simple.
In Britian for your tv license you get a ton of free to air digital channels
8 Channels (BBC 1, 2, 3, 4, News 24, Parliament, CBBC, CBeebies), arguably only 6 as the childrens channels use the same bandwidth as 3 and 4. The rest get no licence fee money, and are therefore not a part of the licence fee "package" and shouldn't be considered as part of the "ton" of channels you get for your fee.
Even if you include the commercial channels, Freeview's only around 40 channels max - assuming you can get all the multiplexes. It's hardly a ton.
No high def for free yet
There's the BBC HD channel on satellite (which is just as "free" as the BBC on DTT/Freeview).
Personally I'd have expected the BBC Trust to represent the licence payers rather than the competition.
They actually take both sides into account. I think they try to be biased towards the licence fee payer though.
I'd much rather download everything, and have the install go really fast, so that my system is down for a minimal amount of time.
You could boot from the Ubuntu Live CD and install from that (while still carrying on with other tasks). Then your system is only down for the amount of time needed to reboot.
It looks unusual to me that a big corporation exec installs the latest Ubuntu distro on one of his laptops even before the news of its release hits the press
/. reader for all we know.
Unless he didn't install it and decided to try out one of the new Dell Linux laptops before they hit the streets, so it had Ubuntu on it before it left the factory floor. Which is why there's the speculation that Ubuntu will be the distro used in Dell's consumer Linux machines.
Then again, seeing as the guy got rich from building PCs in his bedroom, I doubt he's a usual corporate exec when it comes to technical matters. Hell, he could be a
It'd be more interesting if he was using something like Fedora, Suse, FreeBSD, or (until a few weeks back) Solaris. The founder of Debian using what is still, fundamentally, Debian isn't that interesting.
because Ubuntu fails to acknowledge that they should ship more than 1 CD
But is there really much point to having more than one CD? The versions of software on CD are going to fall out of date. Other than for users with slow network connections, there isn't that much advantage in having several CDs or a big DVD. If anything, it's a disadvantage, as it means you're downloading a lot of software you're never going to install.
Seeing as Debian has both a minimal install CD and an "everything including the kitchen sink" install CDs, it would be interesting to see which is more popular. If somebody were taking bets, I'd place my bet on the minimal install CD.
I really want to know what it is that makes people think Ubuntu is the best thing since sliced bread.
I think there are several reasons -
* It has more of an community feel than some distros, where the company supporting it isn't as in your face as in some other distros.
* It's based on debian so you get all the goodness of debian, but with timely releases.
* There's a stronger commitment to software freedom than some other distros (even more so in Fiesty with gNewSence inspired super-free version), while at the same time taking a pragmatic approach.
* I think the giving away of CDs helped, especially in the earlier days.
* There isn't open and closed versions (ala Fedora/RedHat, openSuse/Suse, etc), there is just Ubuntu.
It's not one thing, it's the combination of several things that makes Ubuntu compare well against other distros. It's like how in some sports if you can consistently come in second, you can end up first overall.
Every other Linux distribution isn't aimed at all at any variation of a home/average user.
Linspire????
And what's with the "Your IP address is"?
They're trying to figure out where in the world you are via your IP address. If they get it wrong, their customer service will need to know the IP address so they can unblock it.
how happy do you think Adobe would be with us engineering a tool to work with their precious format?
Well, there's gnash
There is some strong cultural force at work here that discourages women from becoming programmers.
I would think that it's the opposite - in other parts of the world people (regardless of gender) are encouraged to become programmers. So people of both sexes become programmers. In the west, rarely is IT ever encouraged as a career path for anyone, so the only people who get into it are the people who are really interested in it/passionate about it, and there's an inherent gender bias in doing IT out of passion as compared to do getting into IT just for the money.
Women enter IT when IT is seen as a legitimate career choice, and IT being viewed as a legitimate carrier peaked in the 80s.
As far as I know, they're quite free to claim rights they don't actually have,
But isn't the threat of legal action still a threat? If the copyright holder said that they were going to come around and cause you actual, physical or financial harm that would be illegal. Seeing as a court action would cost the defendant money (and cause a lot of stress), isn't that the same thing?
So, you're basically making it all up as you go along?
Giving thought to the above question necessarily requires one to engage in religion.
Not much thought though:
Believer: I assert <entity> exists.
Atheist: Your evidence is?
Believer: I have none
Atheist: Then I don't believe you
That's about all the thought needed. That's not engaging in religion, it's engaging in critical thought.
Of course, it would put all the many profitable, tax-paying voodoo diets out of business. Not that I think there's a conspiracy, I don't, but a lot of people would get mad if we were all skinny.
Isn't there a correlation between the increase in voodoo diets with the increase in obesity?
for the first 6 weeks of this semster, my last semester, we were taught what HTML is.
One of the things that annoyed me when I was doing a CS degree was the level of "basic" knowledge that we had to go through. I still remember first year when everybody (including the lecturer) was bored beyond belief by having to go through such things as what a for loop was. I always thought it was like the Arts faculty having to teach people to read. I thought it was bad 16 years ago, but sounds like it's gotten worse.
Computer Science is still very immature with very few true best practices and standards.
I have to take issue with this. IT (which includes, but is not limited to only CS) has at least as many (if not more) "best practices" and standards as any other industry/profession. IT Best Practices is almost an industry itself. And I think our best practices and standards are more likely to be automated, of better quality and better adhered to.
There's an article at the BBC about how the Conservative party is advocating the use of FOSS in government.