Pretend I'm a used car dealer. I put up a bunch of photos in my local Auto Locator magazine that comes out every Friday. Assuming that I have Ford cars on my lot, would I be infringing on Ford's trademark and copyright since I'm "making money explicitly off the Ford name/products". After all, Ford wouldn't be getting a cut of my sales, since we're talking about used cars. What if I specialize in used Ford cars?
"Copyright Insanity" doesn't quite go far enough, in my opinion. How about batshit insane?
Huh, I had exactly 0 trouble with horizontal scrolling. Even tried it in 2 browsers, (but not ie) The images fit neatly in my browser window even after I resized it to 800x600. My only gripe with scrolling is that you have to scroll down to see each image 100%. Naming the anchors, and putting them in the url would have taken care of that nicely. (of course, that would have skipped the ads)
Yeah, I got confused by the Click for next text also. Enclosing it within the same anchor the image is enclosed in would have fixed it straightaway. A second anchor would have been fine too, but I like to have text colors/decorations change if they're labeling an image anchor that is being hovered over with the mouse.
I'm still surprised that they went with an e17 desktop, given that enlightenment's own website says: "Still in heavy development, several applications that will be part of the DR17 release and examples of what is possible are already available in CVS, such as Entice, Entrance, and Evidence."
I've checked in with e17 development periodically over the last few years, using it for a week or two at a time. Every time, I've said to myself, "this'll be sweet when they get it done" and gone back to using XFCE or KDE. I'm very much looking forward to the final, stable release, but until then, it seems crazy to use it on a daily basis.
For example, I'm a photographer, and I take my laptop with Xubuntu installed along to weddings to download CF cards so I can reuse them on that job. If you plug a CF card into a card reader, a window pops up on the XFCE desktop that shows the folders on the card. From there, it's a simple matter for my freelance assistant du jour to copy the files to the hard drive. Try explaining that process to them if you're using e17 where a whole lotta nothin' happens when you plug in a CF card.
e17 seems like a bad choice for a desktop environment to be used by Joe Sixpack.
a) they're requiring a browser that, while usable, is the worst of the mainstream browsers. b) it only runs on one operating system c) it wouldn't be all that difficult to write cross platform web pages. Yeah, it takes a bit more work to make it run on all browsers, but 99% of the time, if the page works of Firefox, it works on Opera and Webkit. Then you have to see what CSS IE choked on and tweak that. Hell, if they can make Google maps work on all these browsers, they certainly can make a stupid tax site use it. (especially given all the money they waste in government)
Actually, the safety record of airlines overall is incredibly good. Do you know anyone who has been in an airline crash? Compare that number to the number of people you know who have been in an automobile crash.
"The real life" is much more reasonable (with some notable exceptions). Most bosses just care that you get your work done and don't give a rat's ass what program you use to get there.
Yeah, there is a time and place to take up grievances. In this case, shock at a teacher's grievous stupidity is completely understandable. It was situations like this that contributed to me being completely disillusioned with school. School is insulting and irritating enough without this sort of trouble from teachers.
Most schools in my area (I live about 45 minutes drive from this school) are NOT tech savvy in the least. Another nearby school had trouble with kids logging in to the system and causing havoc with the computers. The password in question was the school's street address. (and that one was not a hoax)
Not to mention that downloading Safari on a dial-up connection would take forever. Safari+Quicktime = 38.3Mb Firefox for Windows is 5.7Mb, but even that takes a good bit of time on a dial-up connection. (It also makes me wonder WTF is in Safari that justifies almost 5x the install file size!)
A browser of some sort needs to be installed with the OS - not everyone has or can even get a broadband connection. I can see it now: "Windows Vista: Dial-Up Edition"
Fortunately, I've been hearing quite a bit about DRM from my Joe-Sixpack friends lately. This apathy toward your own rights that people seem to have is slowly going away - at least in this particular place. It's a fairly easy thing to explain, unlike FOSS.
For example:
"Remember how you could copy tapes/CDs without restriction? Wouldn't it be nice to copy your downloaded music the same way? Well, you can, except for the fact that the record companies are using DRM to stop you, and are still charging as if you were buying a copyable CD. Doesn't that suck?"
Eventually, enough people will be annoyed, and start asking for and buying DRM free music. The fact that 2 major record companies are offering DRM free music (for the moment) is a good sign.
The key is to win this battle now before a generation grows up with restricted music. That is the main problem trying to get people outraged with proprietary software. People are used to the idea of buying software and having it locked down. For all intents and purposes, it's always been that way.
Thanksgiving? The Christmas sales/media blitz is in full swing on November 1st here. Once Halloween is over, it's Christmas season.
You mean to tell me this isn't the case in the rest of the Western World? Like, they wait until somewhere in December to do the Christmas thing? How civilized.
As a former Verizon customer who is now a Vonage customer, I can tell you that Vonage is definitely a better deal. POTS service through Verizon cost me about $35-$40 on paper when I first signed up, but the price would always creep up to the $40-$50/month range over the next few years. Then I'd call the bastards up, and we'd be back down to $35-$40. Then the process starts all over again.
Once I switched to Vonage, that problem went away, I've been with them for 3 years, and no price increase. I can call all of USA, Canada, and most of Europe as much as I want for the $27/month I pay, and it never changes. It was really freaking cheap for my wife to call me while I was in Pakistan last year too.
One other thing that POTS doesn't do is send you your phone messages via email.
In the past 100 years, the TOTAL number of Americans who died from terrorist attacks is less than 5000. Given the current mentality, why is the same administration so lax on gun laws? After all, in 2001, there were 7,900 (Dept. of Justice numbers) murders where a handgun was the murder weapon. You'd think that there would be some serious restrictions on those things, given that I can't even take a nail clipper on an airplane. Or, if you're really serious, how about doing something about traffic fatalities involving alcohol - we had 17,448 of those in 2001. It would probably be more effective to make sure that every car in America wouldn't start without the driver passing a breathalyzer test. Sounds draconian, but comparing the tiny number of terrorist attacks that have happened in the past 2 decades compared the the hundreds of thousands of people who have been killed by handguns and alcohol related accidents in the same time perios, it sounds rather reasonable if you are under the "let's lock down society" mentality.
I don't think that this is really the fault of Ubuntu. It's the fault of the software makers themselves. (if fault is to be assigned) Any software maker has the option of making a.deb or.rpm, it's just that many, for various reasons, choose not to. The reason these pieces of software install so easily on Windows is that somebody made the installer. Software doesn't just install itself on windows from source code. It all comes back to the necessity of making these installers. If you want your software to run on Windows, and it has registry keys, etc, you absolutely have to build an installer. Not so in Linux. You can compile from source code, and while it's a pain in the ass, it is certainly doable.
One of the possible reasons is that you have 95% of the market covered by Windows. As a commercial software maker, assuming that your software is Linux compatible in the first place, are you going to bother making a Ubuntu package? Another possibility is that you are a lone programmer making a small app, and don't have time to research package making.
All of my experiences with 3rd party commercial software on Linux has been pretty good. Currently, I have Unreal Tournament 2004 on my machine, and it's installed perfectly on Ubuntu Dapper and Feisty - both 32 and 64 bit versions, Fedora Core, and Gentoo without a hitch - ever. Ditto for Bibble Pro. Quake and Return to Castle Wolfenstein have worked perfectly too, other than the fact that I had to copy a few files from the windows CD.
For the install, I've never been asked what kernel version or boot loader I want. 99% of the time, I don't build from source code. On the rare occasions I do, it's because I can't get the very latest version of some game release because it's in package freeze until the next OS release. (which IS a gripe of mine)
If you choose Gentoo, you already know what you're getting in to. All the mainstream distros I've worked with give you GRUB and 2.6 kernel by default, and you actually have to go out of your way to get something else.
I think "professionalism" is overrated. I think it's a bad thing for a culture if people can only respect something if it's got a stuffy "professional" sounding name. Besides, with all the crappy jobs out there, why not have something that gives a little bit of amusement?
GNOME - yep pretty disappointing. You might as well use XFCE. If you looked at KDE, what's the problem?
For DVDs just read through the Ubuntu forums. There's a little script somewhere on your box already that sets up a decryptor for CSS. Once you run that, you're in business.
I had a script included. The script was exactly 303 lines long, but one of the errors I got was "invalid XML request on line 587" I SSHed into the server, looked at the file, and there were still 303 lines. If I looked at it via my web browser, there were an extra hundred some odd blank lines, and a very weird.
I was recently working on a site with heavy amounts of JavaScript that calculated a price for something as you clicked on the various options. Rsynced it from my development server to the actual host, and these mysterious errors appeared out of nowhere. A bunch of connections to Yahoo. It went away just as mysteriously a few days later. In the mean time, it was breaking my code because of the previous parse errors on these mysterious scripts.
Slashdot Mirror
Pretend I'm a used car dealer. I put up a bunch of photos in my local Auto Locator magazine that comes out every Friday. Assuming that I have Ford cars on my lot, would I be infringing on Ford's trademark and copyright since I'm "making money explicitly off the Ford name/products". After all, Ford wouldn't be getting a cut of my sales, since we're talking about used cars. What if I specialize in used Ford cars?
"Copyright Insanity" doesn't quite go far enough, in my opinion. How about batshit insane?
Huh, I had exactly 0 trouble with horizontal scrolling. Even tried it in 2 browsers, (but not ie) The images fit neatly in my browser window even after I resized it to 800x600. My only gripe with scrolling is that you have to scroll down to see each image 100%. Naming the anchors, and putting them in the url would have taken care of that nicely. (of course, that would have skipped the ads)
Yeah, I got confused by the Click for next text also. Enclosing it within the same anchor the image is enclosed in would have fixed it straightaway. A second anchor would have been fine too, but I like to have text colors/decorations change if they're labeling an image anchor that is being hovered over with the mouse.
Joe Sixpack calls a computer with Windoze installed a PC, and he calles a computer with OSX installed a Mac. Dumb, but this is how it is.
I'm still surprised that they went with an e17 desktop, given that enlightenment's own website says: "Still in heavy development, several applications that will be part of the DR17 release and examples of what is possible are already available in CVS, such as Entice, Entrance, and Evidence."
I've checked in with e17 development periodically over the last few years, using it for a week or two at a time. Every time, I've said to myself, "this'll be sweet when they get it done" and gone back to using XFCE or KDE. I'm very much looking forward to the final, stable release, but until then, it seems crazy to use it on a daily basis.
For example, I'm a photographer, and I take my laptop with Xubuntu installed along to weddings to download CF cards so I can reuse them on that job. If you plug a CF card into a card reader, a window pops up on the XFCE desktop that shows the folders on the card. From there, it's a simple matter for my freelance assistant du jour to copy the files to the hard drive. Try explaining that process to them if you're using e17 where a whole lotta nothin' happens when you plug in a CF card.
e17 seems like a bad choice for a desktop environment to be used by Joe Sixpack.
Gee, I thought that Slashdot readers were savvy, not passive consumers of tech news.
Yeah, but it's especially rankling, when
a) they're requiring a browser that, while usable, is the worst of the mainstream browsers.
b) it only runs on one operating system
c) it wouldn't be all that difficult to write cross platform web pages. Yeah, it takes a bit more work to make it run on all browsers, but 99% of the time, if the page works of Firefox, it works on Opera and Webkit. Then you have to see what CSS IE choked on and tweak that. Hell, if they can make Google maps work on all these browsers, they certainly can make a stupid tax site use it. (especially given all the money they waste in government)
Actually, the safety record of airlines overall is incredibly good. Do you know anyone who has been in an airline crash? Compare that number to the number of people you know who have been in an automobile crash.
The school system is not the military. Thank God.
"The real life" is much more reasonable (with some notable exceptions). Most bosses just care that you get your work done and don't give a rat's ass what program you use to get there.
Yeah, there is a time and place to take up grievances. In this case, shock at a teacher's grievous stupidity is completely understandable. It was situations like this that contributed to me being completely disillusioned with school. School is insulting and irritating enough without this sort of trouble from teachers.
Most schools in my area (I live about 45 minutes drive from this school) are NOT tech savvy in the least. Another nearby school had trouble with kids logging in to the system and causing havoc with the computers. The password in question was the school's street address. (and that one was not a hoax)
... not only ban these things out of existence, but get rid of billboards too. They've been ruining perfectly good landscapes for years now.
Not to mention that downloading Safari on a dial-up connection would take forever. Safari+Quicktime = 38.3Mb Firefox for Windows is 5.7Mb, but even that takes a good bit of time on a dial-up connection. (It also makes me wonder WTF is in Safari that justifies almost 5x the install file size!)
A browser of some sort needs to be installed with the OS - not everyone has or can even get a broadband connection. I can see it now: "Windows Vista: Dial-Up Edition"
Of course, this would be written by our congresscritters that have such a good track record of legislating for the long term.
Life isn't always a simple binary choice.
Fortunately, I've been hearing quite a bit about DRM from my Joe-Sixpack friends lately. This apathy toward your own rights that people seem to have is slowly going away - at least in this particular place. It's a fairly easy thing to explain, unlike FOSS.
For example:
"Remember how you could copy tapes/CDs without restriction? Wouldn't it be nice to copy your downloaded music the same way? Well, you can, except for the fact that the record companies are using DRM to stop you, and are still charging as if you were buying a copyable CD. Doesn't that suck?"
Eventually, enough people will be annoyed, and start asking for and buying DRM free music. The fact that 2 major record companies are offering DRM free music (for the moment) is a good sign.
The key is to win this battle now before a generation grows up with restricted music. That is the main problem trying to get people outraged with proprietary software. People are used to the idea of buying software and having it locked down. For all intents and purposes, it's always been that way.
Thanksgiving? The Christmas sales/media blitz is in full swing on November 1st here. Once Halloween is over, it's Christmas season.
You mean to tell me this isn't the case in the rest of the Western World? Like, they wait until somewhere in December to do the Christmas thing? How civilized.
As a former Verizon customer who is now a Vonage customer, I can tell you that Vonage is definitely a better deal. POTS service through Verizon cost me about $35-$40 on paper when I first signed up, but the price would always creep up to the $40-$50/month range over the next few years. Then I'd call the bastards up, and we'd be back down to $35-$40. Then the process starts all over again.
Once I switched to Vonage, that problem went away, I've been with them for 3 years, and no price increase. I can call all of USA, Canada, and most of Europe as much as I want for the $27/month I pay, and it never changes. It was really freaking cheap for my wife to call me while I was in Pakistan last year too.
One other thing that POTS doesn't do is send you your phone messages via email.
In the past 100 years, the TOTAL number of Americans who died from terrorist attacks is less than 5000. Given the current mentality, why is the same administration so lax on gun laws? After all, in 2001, there were 7,900 (Dept. of Justice numbers) murders where a handgun was the murder weapon. You'd think that there would be some serious restrictions on those things, given that I can't even take a nail clipper on an airplane. Or, if you're really serious, how about doing something about traffic fatalities involving alcohol - we had 17,448 of those in 2001. It would probably be more effective to make sure that every car in America wouldn't start without the driver passing a breathalyzer test. Sounds draconian, but comparing the tiny number of terrorist attacks that have happened in the past 2 decades compared the the hundreds of thousands of people who have been killed by handguns and alcohol related accidents in the same time perios, it sounds rather reasonable if you are under the "let's lock down society" mentality.
In Xubuntu:
Applications->System->Upgrade Manager
Click on upgrade distribution.
Done.
I don't think that this is really the fault of Ubuntu. It's the fault of the software makers themselves. (if fault is to be assigned) Any software maker has the option of making a .deb or .rpm, it's just that many, for various reasons, choose not to. The reason these pieces of software install so easily on Windows is that somebody made the installer. Software doesn't just install itself on windows from source code. It all comes back to the necessity of making these installers. If you want your software to run on Windows, and it has registry keys, etc, you absolutely have to build an installer. Not so in Linux. You can compile from source code, and while it's a pain in the ass, it is certainly doable.
One of the possible reasons is that you have 95% of the market covered by Windows. As a commercial software maker, assuming that your software is Linux compatible in the first place, are you going to bother making a Ubuntu package? Another possibility is that you are a lone programmer making a small app, and don't have time to research package making.
All of my experiences with 3rd party commercial software on Linux has been pretty good. Currently, I have Unreal Tournament 2004 on my machine, and it's installed perfectly on Ubuntu Dapper and Feisty - both 32 and 64 bit versions, Fedora Core, and Gentoo without a hitch - ever. Ditto for Bibble Pro. Quake and Return to Castle Wolfenstein have worked perfectly too, other than the fact that I had to copy a few files from the windows CD.
Not to mention Quaker groups. A real dangerous bunch...we can't have that pacifism disease spreading.
For the install, I've never been asked what kernel version or boot loader I want. 99% of the time, I don't build from source code. On the rare occasions I do, it's because I can't get the very latest version of some game release because it's in package freeze until the next OS release. (which IS a gripe of mine)
If you choose Gentoo, you already know what you're getting in to. All the mainstream distros I've worked with give you GRUB and 2.6 kernel by default, and you actually have to go out of your way to get something else.
I think "professionalism" is overrated. I think it's a bad thing for a culture if people can only respect something if it's got a stuffy "professional" sounding name. Besides, with all the crappy jobs out there, why not have something that gives a little bit of amusement?
This of course, is assuming that there is any money left in this beast after Novell and IBM are done with it. I bet the nazgul pick the carcass clean.
GNOME - yep pretty disappointing. You might as well use XFCE. If you looked at KDE, what's the problem?
For DVDs just read through the Ubuntu forums. There's a little script somewhere on your box already that sets up a decryptor for CSS. Once you run that, you're in business.
Yep, similar problem here.
I had a script included. The script was exactly 303 lines long, but one of the errors I got was "invalid XML request on line 587" I SSHed into the server, looked at the file, and there were still 303 lines. If I looked at it via my web browser, there were an extra hundred some odd blank lines, and a very weird.
I was recently working on a site with heavy amounts of JavaScript that calculated a price for something as you clicked on the various options. Rsynced it from my development server to the actual host, and these mysterious errors appeared out of nowhere. A bunch of connections to Yahoo. It went away just as mysteriously a few days later. In the mean time, it was breaking my code because of the previous parse errors on these mysterious scripts.