Hopefully this will mean a complete rewrite of their click-to-play setup, including fixing this incredibly annoying misfeature of Firefox 19:

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=2644157
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=820678

As far as I can tell, this whole aspect of firefox was never designed properly. It grew into an unmaintainable mess, and now they're having a hard time finding their way out.

The youtube link is to a video that someone else made using the Coulton song. They were able to do that because Coulton put the song under a CC license.

The Coulton version is a joke. I think you missed the joke.

FORTAN: 1957

Lisp: 1958

Lisp was such a good idea that people are still reimplementing it 55 years later.

FORTAN was such a piece of crap that ... almost everyone started using it, it became for most people the only possible way to learn to program, it persisted for decades after alternatives were designed, it was sufficiently flexible to evolve into a very nice and usable modern version, it's still often more efficient than C, and it basically defined the whole procedural style of programming.

MS Basic, hell yeah. Amazing what they did in a few k of code. And when your code is in ROM, you don't get to release bug fixes after the fact -- it has to be solid when it ships.

VB ... not so much.

AFAIK, Maxima was the first, dating back to the 1960's. And guess what? It's still open source and works great.

Years ago, I thought Code Monkey was funny and sly, and although I'm not that into pop music, it had a good beat and was fun. It's under a CC license, which makes it possible for other people to do versions of it like this.

The original Sir Mix-a-lot version of Baby Got Back has some interesting things to say about race and body image, and the video was funny in spots, but I thought Coulton's version was a hilariously silly juxtoposition of style with substance. Coulton goes up another notch in my estimation.

Fox rips him off without credit and produces a Glee skit that's funny ... for exactly the same reasons Coulton's song was funny. That's pathetic.

And then Coulton comes back with this very graceful response. Game, set, and match to Coulton.

You're obviously not getting a lot of love from the slashdot crowd for asserting that MS is less hostile to FOSS than it used to be. I think realistically it's a mixed bag.

I would also point out that Bill Gates himself is not completely hostile to free information. For instance, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation helped to fund the creation of this physics textbook, which is under a CC-BY license.

And Coulton's version isn't just a cover either. If you listen to the Sir Mix-a-Lot version and then to the Coulton version, Coulton's puts the lyrics to a melody that wasn't there in the original rap song. Coulton owns the copyright of this melody.

An R^2 value of 0.8 is actually pretty low. And looking at the graph, it's really only three points, even though it looks like a hundred points. They have one big blob for phytoplankton, one for trees, and a third blob in the middle for everything else. This is really not that impressive. If you throw three baseballs in a microwave and observe the resulting random positions, they will often come pretty close to lying on a single line (which is what the R^2 measures).

Within each blob, the correlation looks like it's essentially zero, e.g., it doesn't seem to be true that big trees live longer than small trees.

Here's a list of bugs that I've personally experienced starting with jaunty:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/369822
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/alsa-utils/+bug/449783
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xsplash/+bug/504403
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/504947
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evolution/+bug/501692
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/422536
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-drivers/+bug/561049
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/update-manager/+bug/561040
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/command-not-found/+bug/561046
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/579300
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libdigest-sha1-perl/+bug/993648

Here's a list of hardware I own on which sound input worked in older versions of ubuntu, but is broken in oneiric:

HP Compaq DC5800 Microtower Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 2.33GHz 2GB 160GB DVD-Rom
1.7 GHz AMD Sempron, 512 MB ram, 38 GB hdd
HP XW4400 Workstation Intel Core 2 DUO E6300 1.86GHz 250GB 1GB CD-RW/ DVD
HP Compaq D330 uT Intel Pentium 4 2.66GHZ 80GB HDD 1GB DDR Desktop PC

I'm glad you're having such good luck with the quality of ubuntu. I'm not.

Sorry, I should have said PulseAudio, not ALSA.

I've tried using LTS on some machines, but it hasn't worked out well. The trouble with it is that Ubuntu's quality is crap, and that applies to LTS releases just as much as non-LTS. For instance, they started gratuitously breaking sound with Jaunty, and as of Precise it's still broken on some machines I use. When important stuff is randomly broken in an LTS release, you end up upgrading to a non-LTS to see if they've fixed the bug.

The root problem is that Ubuntu is more interested in random, useless crap like Unity and ALSA than they are in just fixing bugs and making something that works. Rolling releases won't make that any better or worse. You'll get the bug fixes sooner, but you'll also get new bugs sooner.

Here's what worked for me on debian. See https://kb.askmonty.org/en/how-can-i-upgrade-from-mysql-to-mariadb/

mysql --version # I'm running 5.0, am supposed to upgrade to mysql 5.2 or later to run mariadb 5.2
mysql_upgrade -p # upgrades me to 5.1, no 5.2 available; will just try installing mariadb 5.2 and see if it works
mysqldump -u root -p --all-databases > whole_database.sql # shouldn't be needed, but just in case
mysqladmin -u root -p shutdown
apt-get remove mysql-server

Now install MariaDB.

https://kb.askmonty.org/en/installing-mariadb-deb-files/

apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 0xcbcb082a1bb943db
cat /etc/issue # tells me I'm running debian 6.0, which is squeeze, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian#Release_history
# use this web ui to generate text to put in sources.list
# https://downloads.mariadb.org/mariadb/repositories/
cat >/etc/apt/sources.list.d/MariaDB.list
# ...cut and paste into this newly created file
apt-get update
apt-get install mariadb-server
mysql -u root -p # still called mysql for compatibility, but it comes up and identifies itself as mariadb
show databases; # all still there, no need to restore from backup

The mysql binary, etc., are all still named the same thing for compatibility, so, e.g., there's no need to change the cron jobs that back up my database.

The Wikipedia article is much better than the Byte article. (Do people still read Byte? I don't remember seeing it since the 80's.)

One thing that seems a little different from Y2K is that this bug seems to be prevalent in a lot of embedded systems. To me that seems harder to test than a desktop system. On a desktop system, you can just set the time to Dec. 31, 2037, let it roll over, and test as much stuff as possible to see if it broke. You can't do that with a car or an airliner.

The crappy little superficial one-page MIT Technology Review article has a link to another, similarly crappy article on the same site, but if you click through one more layer you actually get to this much more substantial piece in the New Yorker.