Donating to software projects - or, more accurately, open source projects. It's hardly new, it's hardly rare, and I'm sure most of us have donated at some point. That's probably why Canonical has opened Ubuntu up for donations - but with a twist.
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Member since:2011-01-28
UltraZelda64,
"By the way... does anyone know if Mark ever officially explained is extremely snobbish 'we have root' comment that he posted on a blog post of his a while back?"
It's about implied trust in one's distro.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Canonical-We-Have-Root-Trust-Us-2945...
"Your anonymity is preserved because we handle the query on your behalf. Don’t trust us? Erm, we have root. You do trust us with your data already. You trust us not to screw up on your machine with every update. You trust Debian, and you trust a large swathe of the open source community. And most importantly, you trust us to address it when, being human, we err"
When Mark said this, he alluded to the fact that every Ubuntu user already trusts Ubuntu with their system updates, and then he suggests that because of this implicit trust, we should not regard Canonical's data collection of local queries to be an extension of trust. While I understand what he is saying, I don't agree with him. It is unfortunate that Canonical is collecting this private data regardless of whether they're trustworthy enough to do what they say they're going to do.
The article linked above made a very good point:
"We do trust Canonical with all our data, but this type of controlling view emanating from Canonical's founder is rather worrisome because it looks like an 'Apple' standpoint: the company knows what's best for the users and they will decide what the users need, not the other way around."
"So in summary... Google has pulled the plug on support on a protocol they've helped popularize, after years of promising interoperability, for reasons that are dubious at best, and in a way that leaves people who don't jump to the new Hangouts app unable to talk to their contacts without any feedback that their IMs aren't getting through... And they've done that with no warning to anyone. I imagine there's a bunch of people out there wondering where some of their buddies have gone, or why their messages aren't getting responses, because this isn't documented anywhere." Google really messed this up. Such a dick move.
The Tizen Greek Community has some screenshots of a very recent build of Tizen running on a Samsung GT-i8800. It looks wholly unremarkable.Joint statement to The Next Web from Microsoft and Google: "Microsoft and YouTube are working together to update the new YouTube for Windows Phone app to enable compliance with YouTube's API terms of service, including enabling ads, in the coming weeks. Microsoft will replace the existing YouTube app in Windows Phone Store with the previous version during this time." Good to know these children stopped acting like little pricks. Can we have full Google support in Windows 8 now, please?
Yahoo is acquiring Tumblr, the microblogging and social networking website, for $1.1 billion USD. Tumblr offers little revenue but lots of eyeballs if Yahoo can monetarize them. Now Yahoo is bidding for Hulu, the streaming video service. After years of ineffective responses while Google, Facebook, and others took large chunks of the online advertising market, Yahoo is fighting back. Can Yahoo reignite the momentum it had at the turn of the century? What do you think?
"Sources have described iOS 7 as 'black, white, and flat all over'. This refers to the dropping of heavy textures and the addition of several new black and white user interface elements." I couldn't be happier.
"Ilja van Sprundel, a security researcher with IOActive, has discovered a large number of issues in the way various X client libraries handle the responses they receive from servers, and has worked with X.Org's security team to analyze, confirm, and fix these issues."
"Google is facing a new antitrust probe by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission into whether the company is using its leadership in the online display-advertising market to illegally curb competition, people familiar with the matter said." Sucks to be Google today, apparently."In the midst of the major press blitz surrounding its annual I/O Conference, Google dropped some unfortunate news about its instant messaging plans. In several places around the web, the company is replacing the existing 'Talk' platform with a new one called 'Hangouts' that sharply diminishes support for the open messaging protocol known as XMPP (or sometimes informally Jabber), and also removes the option to disable the archiving of all chat communications. These changes represent a switch from open protocols to proprietary ones, and a clear step backward for many users." That's why I always say: only suckers trust companies."The wave of departures is a sign of internal struggle, but amidst all the bad news, there is a glimmer of hope. According to an anonymous HTC executive cited by WSJ, the crucial HTC One is selling 'pretty good so far'. The executive revealed that HTC sold about five million One units since launch, a performance that is deemed encouraging. However, sales have been limited by the persisting supply issues that still plague the production of the HTC One." Finally some good news for HTC. Five million units amidst supply constraints is very impressive.
"Sony gave the PS4 50% more raw shader performance, plain and simple (768 SPs @ 800MHz vs. 1152 SPs & 800MHz). Unlike last generation, you don't need to be some sort of Jedi to extract the PS4's potential here. The Xbox One and PS4 architectures are quite similar, Sony just has more hardware under the hood. Weâll have to wait and see how this hardware delta gets exposed in games over time, but the gap is definitely there. The funny thing about game consoles is that itâs usually the lowest common denominator that determines the bulk of the experience across all platforms. On the plus side, the Xbox One should enjoy better power/thermal characteristics compared to the PlayStation 4. Even compared to the Xbox 360 we should see improvement in many use cases thanks to modern power management techniques." AnandTech does its usual in-depth thing.
Member since:
2006-12-05
Yep. You guessed my response. Nailed it. Those are the two I could even consider picking from. The main reason being, well, those Ubuntu variants actually have sane desktop environments and better coordination with the parent distro is always a good thing.
As for "make the desktop more amazing" (what? Are you kidding? Unity? Amazing?) and "phone and tablet versions of Ubuntu" (is that not what Unity is at least partially meant to be designed for? Netbooks and other portable devices with small screens?), I really couldn't care less. Unity is... just not worthy of donating for, IMO.
Also, as for donating just as a tip for Canonical, no thanks. Donating to improve drivers/hardware support would not be too bad, as long as they trickle into other distros.
I think the timing of this is kind of funny. Just after Mark announces that all searches of the "home" machine will also be sent to Amazon for advertisement purposes. Though they claimed it was not really meant to be advertising and just there to "help" users, it was obvious what its intent really was. This seems to just further reflect that: Canonical wants more money. No problem there; I just don't see why they didn't do this first instead of implementing a half-assed Amazon product search with some serious privacy problems in Unity. It would've been better to just ask for donations in the first place.
By the way... does anyone know if Mark ever officially explained is extremely snobbish "we have root" comment that he posted on a blog post of his a while back? It seemed that every time anyone asked him to explain, they were ignored and received no reply. And I would say that the way it was worded certainly calls for an official explanation.
Edited 2012-10-11 03:44 UTC