puller's comments

I don't think you are fair to Ubuntu in this comment. Change in Fedora or Debian Testing usually means breakage. I hear Arch breaks things now and then too. Even Windows breaks things... in all cases, this is avoided by choosing a stable or LTS variant and upgrading less frequently.

There aren't that many top tier distributions to choose from, the main choice is how much time you want packages tested before using them. If you want more testing and older packages, use Debian Stable, Ubuntu LTS, Redhat/CentOS... but don't stack the deck against Ubuntu by comparing its fresh distro to other people's LTS distros, compare apples to apples.

Lubuntu is more lightweight, which will be important for older and lower powered machines (or if speed is a huge deal for you), but certain things might be a bit less polished. You would have to try it to see if it works for you. Xubuntu is a bit more full-featured and can feel somewhat like Gnome 2 did back in the day. But there's no reason you can't install both and try them on any Ubuntu machine, these are really just packages and defaults rather than completely different distros.

I think the point was that it frequently has a simpler install experience, which is true. It doesn't have better driver support for ATI video cards or Broadcom wifi cards.

So what? These aren't criticisms of today's release at all.

Mir isn't even used in 13.10.

I don't think there are any distributions which ship with i3 so you would have to install i3 in any case, that isn't a fault of Ubuntu's and since you are not using it anyway, who cares if it looks like OS X to you?

Ubuntu's work is open source, the code is there under a liberal license, what do you even want?

If you don't like software center, use apt-get or synaptic. Their "App Store" isn't for you but I am glad they have one to encourage a market for Linux software. If you don't like it, don't use it, it's not harming you.

I don't know what developer SDKs have to do with anything. This isn't Android, it's normal Linux. Write a Linux app and it runs on Ubuntu.

Why would I look at OpenSUSE if I do not specifically want an RPM-based distribution oriented toward KDE? If those are your preferences then why are you even complaining about Ubuntu?

The beta of this has been smooth for me. I had no problems doing the upgrade (but I have used Ubuntu for a while). I am enjoying the newer versions of the kernel and some packages that are key for me. If you use Unity, the dash feels faster. I'm more pleased with this release than several past ones.

This list is pretty thin. And here lies much of the problem of who is "unsung" or not. If you began to list even just currently active academics in CS which happen to be women (but are very recognizable names) you would end up with a much longer list.

Of course, listing all the unsung men in the field would be an enormous list. Being male does not automatically mean you are sung, and being female does not automatically mean you are unsung. There is still a demographic imbalance which is reflected in who is sung.

"Leftist" in the sense of Chavismo does not have any analogue in the US. There's just no comparison.

For example, ACA is an originally Republican plan full of handouts to private companies, not Chavismo or "Socialism".

Please don't worry that we will over-correct with another 10 times more Chavez-like, it will never happen.

If no one will pay for those jobs to be done, then how do we know they need to be done?

It really is that much worse. Hardware companies work far harder on their Windows drivers. On Linux we are mostly dependent on third party volunteers to write or fix drivers which support our hardware, because the vendors don't care.

Then Linux takes the blame for worse driver support, impairing adoption. It's a vicious circle.

I don't agree. The graphics performance is far worse than the Windows drivers. I see that a game which runs at full normal speed in Windows tends to run at an unplayable crawl in Linux.

The open source drivers are a terrible power drain on laptops.

Perhaps some of this varies depending on the part? But none of this inspires confidence.

Part of this is confirmation bias. There's no shortage of private web sites which were costly, look like shit, work like shit and are easy to hack. We just don't take any notice. We see a strikingly bad government site, it makes us angry and we compare it to top 10% or top 1% websites in our heads.

The difference between established federal contractors and startups disappears if startups get federal contracts. I know a lot of startups would like a better shot at that cash, but if the problem is in the incentives then it's no help to get different people doing the same things.

If there are already problems with how federal contracts are awarded, it is hard to imagine that wholesale deregulation is going to result in a more selective process. For example, blind removal of lowest-bidder requirements would make larger-scale corruption even easier.

There are legitimate complaints and federal contracting needs work, but what kind of work? Let's not underestimate how much worse we can make it. The money on the table is ample incentive for people to propose innocent-sounding reforms which really just open up the taps or redirect them to different parties rather than increasing efficiency.

and you have Yahoo 'reading your mail'. So?

When you say it is quantifiable - can you actually quantify it for us, or is this just hyperbole?

Because browser support is inconsistent, SVGs are often larger than equivalent than even lightly optimized PNGs, and it's a lot easier to find or create raster images than to obtain high-quality vector art. Also, you actually often want different images at different scales, so that automatically scaling one image is not that big an advantage.

I want to use SVG, particularly in Javascript apps. It seems like a more elegant solution/workflow for things like icons. It would certainly beat abusing fonts to put small images on a page. but it has sort of missed its opportunity.

By all means use hard tabs to your taste, but if it would help anything to use spaces, why not configure the editor to handle that for you and forget about whether you are emitting ASCII 9?

The usual problem with this kind of visualization is that, as you add more data, you get what is basically just a population density map.

What would be interesting is to see where there are more Github users than you would expect by pure density of internet users.

Maybe this is great for PHP, where DBGP is the standard, but...

I tried this for Python and was greatly put off by the need to download an obscure debugger tarball from ActiveState with some weird license on it, then (according to the vdebug documentation) run a very long command line by hand passing the name of the script every time I want to debug something.

If I am going to trouble myself with that, it's hard to understand why I don't just run a standard standalone debugger which works in the expected way, from the command line. I definitely don't see how it reproduces the experience of (say) pressing a debug button in Visual Studio or Xcode.

As a long-time Linux user on many distributions and a sometime BSD user: I find many of BSD's differences not particularly relevant, let alone endearing. It's just another platform. Although there is a street meme about BSD being real Unix or something, I don't see the point making it a badge of honor to use one rather than the other.

That's debatable. Fedora is great, but it is not very stable and skews toward the power users (documentation for solving common problems has a tendency to exercise Linux power user skills, for example).