...I think you have already answered your question. You are spending a lot of money on something that will bring you very little in return.
My priorities when choosing a candidate to hire in my company are:
1. Experience
2. Limited experience via internship or part-time job, combined with a four-year degree from a respectable university
3. Limited experience via internship or part-time job, combined with a community college degree
4. Four-year degree from a respectable university
5. A community college degree
6. Demonstration of useful skills outside of traditional workplace experience (that is, experience, but not in a job setting or for a commercial project, i.e., an impressive programming project you did on your own; in short, your portfolio)
7. You are related (e.g., nephew, niece) to someone of authority in the company
8. ITT or similar technical college
So, as you can see, you would quickly sink to the bottom of my pre-interview list of candidates. It's highly unlikely you would be called in for an interview. It's not so much that you are getting a bad education at the tech college, but that education is going to be very generic and give you little-to-no idea of what working within an IS/IT group is really like. These schools air commercials during the soap opera and Dr. Phil time of day for a reason: they target unemployed people without any skill sets. These are your peers in a tech college. They cannot be turned into IT wizards in two years. At best, they can get a very simplistic overview of the career field that is about equal to what you can learn on your own, online, for free.
Sorry to be so harsh, but it's my reality, and I imagine the same for many other hiring managers in the field. We value experience over education (and certifications) because the most important consideration before we spend the time and money to recruit and hire someone is "do they have a career path here, long-term?" And the best way to gauge that is experience, plain and simple. That puts you in the age-old conundrum of "how do I get experience without a degree?"
And my answer to that is internships. Work for free. Volunteer your time for a community organization. Have mom or dad or Uncle Joe get you something entry-level in their company. Show me that you not only know your stuff, but have a work ethic, know what you want to do with your life, and can work with the wide range of personality types found in any given company. Talent is everywhere; the ones that get hired are the ones I feel will work hard, get along with their colleagues, and have ambition to work their way up to something other than what they are interviewing for.
I refuse also, but on the grounds that the web advertisers made their products flat-out OBNOXIOUS. If I hadn't been attacked by gyrating, flashing banners proclaiming that I "won" or to "shoot" them, then maybe I wouldn't have minded. Or maybe it wouldn't have been so bad if they'd kept ads out of links on random words in the article text. Or how about the random ads that hijack your slideshow galleries?
I know people have to make money on this web stuff one way or another, but annoying the living fuck out of people should not be the way. Therefore, I do not feel bad for using ABP either.
The show will continue on NPR, drawing from the past 25 years of national syndication. They have actually been inserting a few older calls into "new" shows for quite some time, so little is going to change for the average listener. No, you won't be able to call them anymore, but it wasn't a live call-in show anyway...you called the 1-800 number and got a scheduled time through the week, and then your call aired on Saturday's episode.
So no biggie for me; my Saturdays will still be all about Car Talk, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, and Michael Feldman's Whad'Ya Know on NPR for the foreseeable future. And oh yeah, Weekend Edition, if I happen to get up that early on Saturday.
If profit is the important part of the argument, then don't forget to consider that most books published will never turn a profit. Much like the record and film industries need their few blockbusters to keep everything else afloat, the publishing world needs its Stephen Kings, John Grishams, etc., to generate massive profits to compensate for the majority of books that don't recoup their costs.
Everyone here seems to be arguing that publishing a book is a profitable enterprise, when in most cases, it is not. And *that* is why most will gladly go the route of the traditional book publisher. The financial risk is placed on someone else, while you get a chance to create your art.
Let's be fair, here...ya'know, Ubuntu is probably not going to play my DVDs and Blu-Rays either. That is, until I insert a disc for the first time and it prompts me to download the necessary add-ons. Or, if I have installed VLC myself, I'm good to go.
Now, I know this is not a fair comparison because Ubuntu doesn't actually cost me any money, and since you have to pay for Windows 8--and then pay again for the "Media Center Pack"--it obviously must be MUCH, MUCH better, right?!?
Seriously, I never thought Microsoft would blow their dominance in my lifetime, but it's amazing how quickly they are burning through it.
HyperCard was awesome in the days of Motorola 68K-based Macs. I have super-fond memories of "programming" with it on my SE/30 or my IIsi. But the main problem is that Apple really took it as far as it can go before it just no longer became useful, or preferable to other authoring tools out there.
It's clear the Apple did neglect HyperCard to death, but this started well before Steve Jobs returned. But I don't think there was any evil conspiracy behind its demise; I simply think HyperCard ran its course. The neglect is that they hardly made the final version available for sale. If you could find it for sale on their old, "ore-Apple Store" online web store, you could order it. This was the version we had all been waiting for, with full color stack support, and the ability to embed QuickTime media objects (pictures, movies, etc.).
Well, I found it on the site, ordered it...it came on something like 14 floppy disks, which I imaged into the old Disk Copy-style.img files and burned them all to CD-R, so that they could all be mounted at once and the install would go quicker--no floppy shuffle. Turns out this version was slow, bloated, and you know what? By this was point, it was easier to learn a little bit of simple HTML, or use one of the early WYSIWYG HTML editors like Claris HomePage, and build something similar...but faster and compatible with the most of the world that didn't have HyperCard or HyperCard Player installed.
Yes, HyperCard may have helped inspire the web, but the web overtook it. On the Mac, more powerful tools like AppleScript Studio and XCode offered *real* development opportunities, making HyperCard look quaint.
Sure, I get HyperCard nostalgia from time to time, too. So I got me a demo copy of Runtime Revolution, which picks up HyperCard where Apple left off, and adds a whole bunch of modern niceties. Sadly. the whole "stack" concept still seems antiquated and quaint, even with modern tools.
Sorry folks, reviving HyperCard is not the answer. The answer is a new pseudo-development environment and corresponding runtime that is super-easy for non-programmers to pick up. Something we haven't seen yet, not something based on old paradigms.
If this situation came up 100 times with 100 different CIOs, I'd venture to say that 99 times the CIO would make you choose Red Hat. (Actually, they'd probably steer your toward Windows Server, but let's assume we're dealing with Linux-friendly CIOs here.)
Most CIOs won't let a big software project go through without paid support from all the software vendors in question. But your CIO is a smart man. I wouldn't say all software support contracts are worthless, but if you've got strong Linux knowledge in-house, CentOS is a perfectly acceptable alternative to Red Hat.
As the director of IS at my company (we don't have a CIO title, so my position is as close as it gets), I have spent years building up Linux gurus who know their way Red Hat- and Debian-based distros. I trust their knowledge, and their ability to research and solve problems on their own, to go with CentOS when a Red Hat-based distro is needed for a certain project.
Some projects we have done have absolutely required RHEL (to the point where they won't run on Red Hat-based distros, even Fedora), so we went with them because we had to. The only difference we found was that we couldn't get updates without our RHEL license keys. We were able to solve all problems with our own staff; we only contacted RHEL support when there were problems with the update servers.
Maybe you don't feel confident enough with your in-house knowledge. That's too bad. I'd spend money on training and developing gurus rather than forking over cash just to get updates. But mostly I say enjoy your situation here, as it is very unique. 99% of CIOs are going to force you to go down the paid route.
OK, since you asked nicely, I'll draw a line. The last link in the chain of links, that links to the file that allows you to gain access to the material. So, in the case of TPB, I hereby draw the line at the link to the.torrent file.
Are they really "useless" if they lead you to content you are interested in and might want to download?
Don't get me wrong, I like downloading copyrighted stuff for free as much as the next guy, but I find it peculiar that otherwise smart people try to argue that what The Pirate Bay or Newzbin or whoever is doing is just offering up "indexes" or "text files" or what have you. You know damn good and well their intent is to aid you in downloading stuff you would otherwise have to pay for, for free.
Like I said, I like the free stuff too, but let's not play coy here. If you're going to be a pirate, at least admit it.
"You can't shut down my favorite torrent tracker! All they do is offer.torrent files, which are totally useless on their own! (Except for when I load in them up in a torrent client and get free music, movie, TV shows and pr0n, but really, they are useless, I promise!)
Nearly all laptops by quality manufacturers have excellent Linux support these days, especially if you are inclined to use Ubuntu.
Your MacBook is an excellent candidate. I have a couple Dells, one that came with Vista and the other with 7, that I put Ubuntu on, and they run great. I also took an older MacBook that had fell out of use, and it also runs Ubuntu like a champ. I can't say I prefer one or the other; both brands have their strongs points in terms of hardware, but the Linux experience is about as close to perfect as you can get on either Dell or Apple hardware.
If I were you, I'd seriously run Boot Camp Assistant, set up a partition, install the distro of your choice, and continue to enjoy OS X along with Linux on that nice hardware.
I thought most P2P software these days will latch on to port 80 or 443 if everything else is blocked...or 25, 110, 465, 587, 993, or other ports you are likely to have open even if you have "everything" blocked. Traffic on port 80 doesn't have to be HTTP, after all; that's just the "standard" protocol for that port.
That's because that's how the media refer to these criminals. They give their full names so they won't be confused with another John Berkowitz or another Rick Ramirez, both of whom are perfectly normal, non-serial killer citizens. It's not like these folks went by their full names before they became well-known in the media.
I desperately want him to have the memory of going to these movies when they were a big deal, like I remember going to see Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T.
Sorry, it ain't gonna happen. I have a kid that is roughly the same age as yours (turned 6 last month). For kids today, the massive amount of TV/movies/associated tie-ins being slung their way has pretty much guaranteed that no one movie will be a "special experience" seeing it in the theater. They know good and well that if they didn't see it in the theater, it will be on DVD in three months, and forgotten about three months later...unless there is a sequel to hold their interest.
I have told my kid plenty of times about the magic of seeing Star Wars in 1977, or how we all gasped when Darth Vader claimed to be Luke's father in 1980, or how magical ET was. It just doesn't sink in to this generation. I think most of them prefer to watch movies at home. Until more theaters convert to digital projection, I can't really blame them. The setup for watching movies at home is pretty cool, and you don't have to sit and be quiet for two hours.
Well, they could just use a bandwidth stretcher. I think we've got one down in the basement. Haven't had to use it in a while; it's probably rusty and could use some WD40.
I'm not sure using deceptive text would work in this case. It doesn't seem to be automated like a spam filter. It's blacklist of the "worst of the worst" sites, according to TFA.
That makes it sound like somebody at Interpol is viewing the sites, rating them, and adding the "worst of the worst" to the list manually.
Yeah, this is neat, but I already thought a lot of movies premiered on Bit Torrent before the cinema!
In all seriousness, filmmakers have been working around Hollywood since there has been a Hollywood to work around. There have always been independent filmmakers getting their movies made, and then using non-traditional means to exhibit them. In the past, this may have meant selling directly to the home 16mm market, with hopes of getting enough money to strike some 35mm prints and distribute nationally. Or they could have taken it in on the college circuit, or the art-film circuit, first. Later on, public access and more traditional cable TV were outlets to get films noticed. Just a little more than 15 years ago, The Last Seduction premiered on HBO, and later became a cinema box office success.
These developments just represent the latest technology coming in to play. But sorry, this is not going to dethrone the MPAA or any other part of the Hollywood machine in our lifetimes. It's just a way that will potentially mean more people can see the films than before. There may be access to more finances for the filmmakers, but do you seriously think that the Bit Torrent downloading community is going to cough up serious bucks? No, they want their stuff for free (read: they think they are entitled to free entertainment). The only people who are going to cough up tens of thousands of dollars just to see their name as an "Executive Producer" on screen are people who want to be in the film business anyway...just like the guy who funded Manos: The Hands of Fate 40-some years ago.
So yeah, this is neat, but don't read too much into it. It's not a revolution. And if it were, Hollywood soon swallow it up, just like they did with Easy Rider and its progeny in the late '60s/early '70s, or like they did with Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino, and all the other Miramax filmmakers that broke indie filmmaking through to the mainstream in the late '80s/early '90s. The great thing about capitalism is that it eventually swallows up all threats to it.
No, they didn't need the space. It has been Canonical's plan for a while to drop Synaptic and Update Manager (and any other GUI apps that are front ends to the various apt tools) and roll everything into Software Center.
It's been on their roadmap for a while, and I was surprised that Synaptic made it into 11.04. I am also surprised that Update Manager is hanging around.
This is all in the interest of average-Joe users who don't need to know the differences between Synaptic and Software Center, or how they overlap with each other, or with Update Manager. Long-time users or power users can go install Synaptic from the repos if they like, or use apt or dpkg at the command line. Me personally, I always update with 'sudo apt-get update' on the command line because I find it faster than Update Manager. But Grandma doesn't need to do that; software installation and updating should be done all in one place for her.
They are trying to copy or catch up with Chrome on the version numbering thing, but they are missing something important here. With Chrome, it gets auto-updated all the time (at least mine is, on both OS X and Ubuntu), to where I've always got the latest and greatest, and all the inherent security fixes and such. If I had to manually download a new copy of Chrome regularly, even every three months, I would grow tired of it. But the auto-updater does it for me; I installed Chrome once and am now done with that part of it. I couldn't tell you what version of Chrome I am running, except for I know it updated itself earlier this week.
Firefox, on the other hand, won't auto-update to a "major version", like going from 4.x to 5.x. Mozilla should know they had a hard enough time getting people to download a new copy, even when it took 18 months between major versions. People are not going to re-download it on such a quick schedule.
And Mozilla needs to update Firefox's handling of extensions, with its "max version" attribute. Once again, it was bad enough when there was a new FF update every 18 months and it took forever for the extension developers to make the simple integer change. All I have read this week with FF5 is how this extension and that extension disabled itself, when it will probably work just fine.
I was a long-time Firefox supporter and didn't like Chrome at first. Now I am either going with Chrome or Safari all the time, and feeling sad for the days when Firefox was the shiznit.
Slashdot Mirror
...I think you have already answered your question. You are spending a lot of money on something that will bring you very little in return.
My priorities when choosing a candidate to hire in my company are:
So, as you can see, you would quickly sink to the bottom of my pre-interview list of candidates. It's highly unlikely you would be called in for an interview. It's not so much that you are getting a bad education at the tech college, but that education is going to be very generic and give you little-to-no idea of what working within an IS/IT group is really like. These schools air commercials during the soap opera and Dr. Phil time of day for a reason: they target unemployed people without any skill sets. These are your peers in a tech college. They cannot be turned into IT wizards in two years. At best, they can get a very simplistic overview of the career field that is about equal to what you can learn on your own, online, for free.
Sorry to be so harsh, but it's my reality, and I imagine the same for many other hiring managers in the field. We value experience over education (and certifications) because the most important consideration before we spend the time and money to recruit and hire someone is "do they have a career path here, long-term?" And the best way to gauge that is experience, plain and simple. That puts you in the age-old conundrum of "how do I get experience without a degree?"
And my answer to that is internships. Work for free. Volunteer your time for a community organization. Have mom or dad or Uncle Joe get you something entry-level in their company. Show me that you not only know your stuff, but have a work ethic, know what you want to do with your life, and can work with the wide range of personality types found in any given company. Talent is everywhere; the ones that get hired are the ones I feel will work hard, get along with their colleagues, and have ambition to work their way up to something other than what they are interviewing for.
I refuse also, but on the grounds that the web advertisers made their products flat-out OBNOXIOUS. If I hadn't been attacked by gyrating, flashing banners proclaiming that I "won" or to "shoot" them, then maybe I wouldn't have minded. Or maybe it wouldn't have been so bad if they'd kept ads out of links on random words in the article text. Or how about the random ads that hijack your slideshow galleries?
I know people have to make money on this web stuff one way or another, but annoying the living fuck out of people should not be the way. Therefore, I do not feel bad for using ABP either.
The show will continue on NPR, drawing from the past 25 years of national syndication. They have actually been inserting a few older calls into "new" shows for quite some time, so little is going to change for the average listener. No, you won't be able to call them anymore, but it wasn't a live call-in show anyway...you called the 1-800 number and got a scheduled time through the week, and then your call aired on Saturday's episode.
So no biggie for me; my Saturdays will still be all about Car Talk, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, and Michael Feldman's Whad'Ya Know on NPR for the foreseeable future. And oh yeah, Weekend Edition, if I happen to get up that early on Saturday.
If profit is the important part of the argument, then don't forget to consider that most books published will never turn a profit. Much like the record and film industries need their few blockbusters to keep everything else afloat, the publishing world needs its Stephen Kings, John Grishams, etc., to generate massive profits to compensate for the majority of books that don't recoup their costs.
Everyone here seems to be arguing that publishing a book is a profitable enterprise, when in most cases, it is not. And *that* is why most will gladly go the route of the traditional book publisher. The financial risk is placed on someone else, while you get a chance to create your art.
Let's be fair, here...ya'know, Ubuntu is probably not going to play my DVDs and Blu-Rays either. That is, until I insert a disc for the first time and it prompts me to download the necessary add-ons. Or, if I have installed VLC myself, I'm good to go.
Now, I know this is not a fair comparison because Ubuntu doesn't actually cost me any money, and since you have to pay for Windows 8--and then pay again for the "Media Center Pack"--it obviously must be MUCH, MUCH better, right?!?
Seriously, I never thought Microsoft would blow their dominance in my lifetime, but it's amazing how quickly they are burning through it.
Well at least you admit it by signing your posts that way.
Damn, that was the best chuckle I have gotten on /. in quite some time. Good one, Mr. Coward!
HyperCard was awesome in the days of Motorola 68K-based Macs. I have super-fond memories of "programming" with it on my SE/30 or my IIsi. But the main problem is that Apple really took it as far as it can go before it just no longer became useful, or preferable to other authoring tools out there.
It's clear the Apple did neglect HyperCard to death, but this started well before Steve Jobs returned. But I don't think there was any evil conspiracy behind its demise; I simply think HyperCard ran its course. The neglect is that they hardly made the final version available for sale. If you could find it for sale on their old, "ore-Apple Store" online web store, you could order it. This was the version we had all been waiting for, with full color stack support, and the ability to embed QuickTime media objects (pictures, movies, etc.).
Well, I found it on the site, ordered it...it came on something like 14 floppy disks, which I imaged into the old Disk Copy-style .img files and burned them all to CD-R, so that they could all be mounted at once and the install would go quicker--no floppy shuffle. Turns out this version was slow, bloated, and you know what? By this was point, it was easier to learn a little bit of simple HTML, or use one of the early WYSIWYG HTML editors like Claris HomePage, and build something similar...but faster and compatible with the most of the world that didn't have HyperCard or HyperCard Player installed.
Yes, HyperCard may have helped inspire the web, but the web overtook it. On the Mac, more powerful tools like AppleScript Studio and XCode offered *real* development opportunities, making HyperCard look quaint.
Sure, I get HyperCard nostalgia from time to time, too. So I got me a demo copy of Runtime Revolution, which picks up HyperCard where Apple left off, and adds a whole bunch of modern niceties. Sadly. the whole "stack" concept still seems antiquated and quaint, even with modern tools.
Sorry folks, reviving HyperCard is not the answer. The answer is a new pseudo-development environment and corresponding runtime that is super-easy for non-programmers to pick up. Something we haven't seen yet, not something based on old paradigms.
If this situation came up 100 times with 100 different CIOs, I'd venture to say that 99 times the CIO would make you choose Red Hat. (Actually, they'd probably steer your toward Windows Server, but let's assume we're dealing with Linux-friendly CIOs here.)
Most CIOs won't let a big software project go through without paid support from all the software vendors in question. But your CIO is a smart man. I wouldn't say all software support contracts are worthless, but if you've got strong Linux knowledge in-house, CentOS is a perfectly acceptable alternative to Red Hat.
As the director of IS at my company (we don't have a CIO title, so my position is as close as it gets), I have spent years building up Linux gurus who know their way Red Hat- and Debian-based distros. I trust their knowledge, and their ability to research and solve problems on their own, to go with CentOS when a Red Hat-based distro is needed for a certain project.
Some projects we have done have absolutely required RHEL (to the point where they won't run on Red Hat-based distros, even Fedora), so we went with them because we had to. The only difference we found was that we couldn't get updates without our RHEL license keys. We were able to solve all problems with our own staff; we only contacted RHEL support when there were problems with the update servers.
Maybe you don't feel confident enough with your in-house knowledge. That's too bad. I'd spend money on training and developing gurus rather than forking over cash just to get updates. But mostly I say enjoy your situation here, as it is very unique. 99% of CIOs are going to force you to go down the paid route.
OK, since you asked nicely, I'll draw a line. The last link in the chain of links, that links to the file that allows you to gain access to the material. So, in the case of TPB, I hereby draw the line at the link to the .torrent file.
You are correct, good sir. Pirate certainly doesn't fit everyone's situation.
Are they really "useless" if they lead you to content you are interested in and might want to download?
Don't get me wrong, I like downloading copyrighted stuff for free as much as the next guy, but I find it peculiar that otherwise smart people try to argue that what The Pirate Bay or Newzbin or whoever is doing is just offering up "indexes" or "text files" or what have you. You know damn good and well their intent is to aid you in downloading stuff you would otherwise have to pay for, for free.
Like I said, I like the free stuff too, but let's not play coy here. If you're going to be a pirate, at least admit it.
"You can't shut down my favorite torrent tracker! All they do is offer .torrent files, which are totally useless on their own! (Except for when I load in them up in a torrent client and get free music, movie, TV shows and pr0n, but really, they are useless, I promise!)
Nearly all laptops by quality manufacturers have excellent Linux support these days, especially if you are inclined to use Ubuntu.
Your MacBook is an excellent candidate. I have a couple Dells, one that came with Vista and the other with 7, that I put Ubuntu on, and they run great. I also took an older MacBook that had fell out of use, and it also runs Ubuntu like a champ. I can't say I prefer one or the other; both brands have their strongs points in terms of hardware, but the Linux experience is about as close to perfect as you can get on either Dell or Apple hardware.
If I were you, I'd seriously run Boot Camp Assistant, set up a partition, install the distro of your choice, and continue to enjoy OS X along with Linux on that nice hardware.
I recommend that if Ubuntu does not rid their distro of Unity, then I suggest that it be boycotted.
You recommend that you suggest? Way to take a stance there.
It is possible to run other window managers on Ubuntu, you know. You might even give Kubuntu a try if you are so inclined to customization.
Brian, is that you?
I thought most P2P software these days will latch on to port 80 or 443 if everything else is blocked...or 25, 110, 465, 587, 993, or other ports you are likely to have open even if you have "everything" blocked. Traffic on port 80 doesn't have to be HTTP, after all; that's just the "standard" protocol for that port.
Hell, I remember seeing it on NBC in the late '80s!
That's because that's how the media refer to these criminals. They give their full names so they won't be confused with another John Berkowitz or another Rick Ramirez, both of whom are perfectly normal, non-serial killer citizens. It's not like these folks went by their full names before they became well-known in the media.
And G.W. Bush's middle name is Walker.
What "freedom of association"? There is only "guilt by association".
Correct answer. 100 internets to you, my friend.
I desperately want him to have the memory of going to these movies when they were a big deal, like I remember going to see Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T.
Sorry, it ain't gonna happen. I have a kid that is roughly the same age as yours (turned 6 last month). For kids today, the massive amount of TV/movies/associated tie-ins being slung their way has pretty much guaranteed that no one movie will be a "special experience" seeing it in the theater. They know good and well that if they didn't see it in the theater, it will be on DVD in three months, and forgotten about three months later...unless there is a sequel to hold their interest.
I have told my kid plenty of times about the magic of seeing Star Wars in 1977, or how we all gasped when Darth Vader claimed to be Luke's father in 1980, or how magical ET was. It just doesn't sink in to this generation. I think most of them prefer to watch movies at home. Until more theaters convert to digital projection, I can't really blame them. The setup for watching movies at home is pretty cool, and you don't have to sit and be quiet for two hours.
Well, they could just use a bandwidth stretcher. I think we've got one down in the basement. Haven't had to use it in a while; it's probably rusty and could use some WD40.
I'm not sure using deceptive text would work in this case. It doesn't seem to be automated like a spam filter. It's blacklist of the "worst of the worst" sites, according to TFA.
That makes it sound like somebody at Interpol is viewing the sites, rating them, and adding the "worst of the worst" to the list manually.
Yeah, this is neat, but I already thought a lot of movies premiered on Bit Torrent before the cinema!
In all seriousness, filmmakers have been working around Hollywood since there has been a Hollywood to work around. There have always been independent filmmakers getting their movies made, and then using non-traditional means to exhibit them. In the past, this may have meant selling directly to the home 16mm market, with hopes of getting enough money to strike some 35mm prints and distribute nationally. Or they could have taken it in on the college circuit, or the art-film circuit, first. Later on, public access and more traditional cable TV were outlets to get films noticed. Just a little more than 15 years ago, The Last Seduction premiered on HBO, and later became a cinema box office success.
These developments just represent the latest technology coming in to play. But sorry, this is not going to dethrone the MPAA or any other part of the Hollywood machine in our lifetimes. It's just a way that will potentially mean more people can see the films than before. There may be access to more finances for the filmmakers, but do you seriously think that the Bit Torrent downloading community is going to cough up serious bucks? No, they want their stuff for free (read: they think they are entitled to free entertainment). The only people who are going to cough up tens of thousands of dollars just to see their name as an "Executive Producer" on screen are people who want to be in the film business anyway...just like the guy who funded Manos: The Hands of Fate 40-some years ago.
So yeah, this is neat, but don't read too much into it. It's not a revolution. And if it were, Hollywood soon swallow it up, just like they did with Easy Rider and its progeny in the late '60s/early '70s, or like they did with Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino, and all the other Miramax filmmakers that broke indie filmmaking through to the mainstream in the late '80s/early '90s. The great thing about capitalism is that it eventually swallows up all threats to it.
No, they didn't need the space. It has been Canonical's plan for a while to drop Synaptic and Update Manager (and any other GUI apps that are front ends to the various apt tools) and roll everything into Software Center.
It's been on their roadmap for a while, and I was surprised that Synaptic made it into 11.04. I am also surprised that Update Manager is hanging around.
This is all in the interest of average-Joe users who don't need to know the differences between Synaptic and Software Center, or how they overlap with each other, or with Update Manager. Long-time users or power users can go install Synaptic from the repos if they like, or use apt or dpkg at the command line. Me personally, I always update with 'sudo apt-get update' on the command line because I find it faster than Update Manager. But Grandma doesn't need to do that; software installation and updating should be done all in one place for her.
They are trying to copy or catch up with Chrome on the version numbering thing, but they are missing something important here. With Chrome, it gets auto-updated all the time (at least mine is, on both OS X and Ubuntu), to where I've always got the latest and greatest, and all the inherent security fixes and such. If I had to manually download a new copy of Chrome regularly, even every three months, I would grow tired of it. But the auto-updater does it for me; I installed Chrome once and am now done with that part of it. I couldn't tell you what version of Chrome I am running, except for I know it updated itself earlier this week.
Firefox, on the other hand, won't auto-update to a "major version", like going from 4.x to 5.x. Mozilla should know they had a hard enough time getting people to download a new copy, even when it took 18 months between major versions. People are not going to re-download it on such a quick schedule.
And Mozilla needs to update Firefox's handling of extensions, with its "max version" attribute. Once again, it was bad enough when there was a new FF update every 18 months and it took forever for the extension developers to make the simple integer change. All I have read this week with FF5 is how this extension and that extension disabled itself, when it will probably work just fine.
I was a long-time Firefox supporter and didn't like Chrome at first. Now I am either going with Chrome or Safari all the time, and feeling sad for the days when Firefox was the shiznit.