And now if I'm watching a full-screen video and Update Manager starts up I lose my full-screen context and need to get up to my keyboard and mouse (because if I'm watching full-screen video I'm probably not sitting at my desk) and reset the fullscreen setting.

So I solved this by turning off Update Manager updates completely. Well done, Shuttleworth.

If you take one step back and look at the effect of the previous generation on the next then life after reproduction can be significant to evolution. A species with a genetic tendency to murder its offspring a year after they are born isn't going to last long, and conversely a species where older creatures tend to care for their grandchildren so that the current adults can go out and "hunt and gather" (or sit in an office playing with computers) is more likely to succeed.

By "minor issues with my Intel video card" I assume you mean "There's no hardware-accelerated video and thus movie playback is unusable unless you futz around with xorg.conf to enable a feature that by all accounts seems to be pre-release quality and write some incomprehensible junk to some file in /proc every time the X server restarts".

The Intel video driver issue in 9.04 should have been a release-blocker. It's ridiculous that Ubuntu shipped with broken support for one of the most popular graphics chipsets in low-end computers. My trust of the Ubuntu brand was seriously tarnished when I upgraded my media center PC from 8.04 to 9.04 and found it completely useless at playing back video; this is not what I've come to expect, and I certainly won't be upgrading so readily in future.

The data connection is similar in concept to a dial-up modem where you establish a point-to-point link and send datagrams over it. On Android (which is based on Linux), the cellular data link is a normal ppp interface as far as userspace is concerned, and it uses the normal Linux IP stack making it completely transparent to app developers. I've no idea how this manifests on the iPhone, though. Apple may well have artificially split the API to make things like this (allowing Skype only over wi-fi) possible.

Off the top of my head, I don't know the answers to any of those questions. Does that matter?

I do understand the questions, and I know how to find the answers to the questions, I've just not committed those facts to memory. I agree with the premise (science education sucks) but not with how they "proved" it (by asking people to recall facts.) What I expect people to have is the ability to think critically and hopefully also an understanding of the scientific method.

I think the real story here is that the people administering this study apparently completely fail at science.

I propose that Microsoft adopt the same migration path that Firefox and other browser vendors offer: allow the new, non-ActiveX browser to be installed at the same time as the legacy ActiveX-supporting browser, and thus allow users to use the legacy browser only for legacy apps.

IE's biggest backward-compatibility problem is that it's designed to only allow one version to be installed at a time. Microsoft's latest workaround is to simply include the legacy rendering engine in the new version, but clearly that's not a sustainable approach as five versions from now the browser would be huge and there'd be hundreds of random corner-cases.

I agree that this isn't something that any user should need to care about, but in case you're interested: Ubuntu doesn't ship with DVD support enabled by default because it is likely to be illegal to ship a DVD player without a licence, and a licence costs money, while of course Ubuntu does not. This is unfortunately not a technical problem but rather a legal one.

For most formats the media player that installs with Ubuntu will automatically find the relevant supporting software and install it as long as it's legal to do so.

I think the author of this article is in the "power user" niche that really has the most trouble with Linux. As someone who uses Ubuntu every day at work and at home, I saw the part about wanting to install OpenOffice 3 and my immediate reaction was "Why would you want to do that? Just use the version that comes with Ubuntu." This is because I've bought the kool-aid of having the distribution package a suite of applications that are tested to work well together, which is of course not the Windows model. Also, most non-technical users wouldn't even know that there was a new version of OpenOffice, and would just take what they have. He's in that unfortunate space where he knows enough to have certain expectations but not enough to translate them into a new environment.

Of course, that's not his fault. Dealing with the Windows culture is the hardest problem Ubuntu has right now, and the solution is not a technical one.

The thing that amused me most when I went into Circuit City in Emeryville, CA a couple months ago was that they had the checkout staff manually calculating the 10%, 20% and 30% discounts with hand-held calulators and amending the prices on the checkout computer one by one. It made the checkout process take ages, and the lines were way back and taking up most of the store. I couldn't help but wonder what crazy computer system they were using where it wasn't a five second job to decrease the prices of a whole category of products.

When we first heard about the death of Circuit City a few months back some friends and I went to our local Circuit City, also to find out if they had any good deals.

What we discovered instead is that the reason they're going out of business is because their stuff is ridiculously overpriced. We were walking around the store using our cellphones to compare prices against Amazon, Best Buy and some other places. There was one product that -- even with 20% off -- was still twice the price of Amazon. My friend actually called over one of the staff and showed him this (which was a bit of a dick move, but whatever) and the guy shrugged and said "I know!".

So I can't really feel sorry for Circuit City. They were killed by being undercut by their competition and failing to adapt, which is how the free market is supposed to work, no?

That little banner is how you're supposed to click through to find out more about the product you were just told about. I'd bet that, despite the fact that barely anyone clicks it, that button is a big part of how Hulu sells advertising as being more valuable than TV advertising.

The other thing they do that Boxee didn't "see" is the full-page branding on certain ads. While the ad's playing, the rest of the Hulu page suddenly becomes rebranded to whatever's being advertised for the duration of the ad, thus making the ad take up more of the screen.

Of course, neither of these things show up if you view the Hulu video full screen, so it's a difficult argumnt to make.

I gather from Google engineers that this issue is caused by the abuse throttling features of GMail. If there's a botnet hitting Google on your subnet, or if your access patterns seem suspicious (which for me seems to include accessing my account from home, work and phone all by IMAP, but as usual the Googler's couldn't be specific about what triggers it) then they'll block you out until you pass a CAPTCHA.

It's pretty annoying since you can't exactly send spam over IMAP. I guess the underlying service is what does the checking, and it can't tell the difference between SMTP, IMAP, and calls from the Web UI.

I think you misunderstood the sentence about it not being a port. It's saying that the phone's architecture is ARM EABI and that Debian has an existing port for ARM EABI; Android itself is not built on Debian, as far as I'm aware.

Unfortunately, due to the way Netscape designed JavaScript it often is necessary to block the parsing of a page on a script even when you're multithreaded since the script can do document.write of fragments that need to be fed into the HTML parser while it's in the same state it was at the opening SCRIPT tag. Modern browsers are starting to work around this by speculatively parsing ahead and resetting if a script writes out anything, but unfortunately writing out stuff is often exactly what these ad and stat-counter scripts are for.

Novell's build of Moonlight ships with licenced Windows Media support in the form of binary blobs, which was intended to allow DRMed video content to be used on Linux via Silverlight. I don't know whether it does in practice because I've never actually encountered a site that uses Silverlight for streaming video other than the handful of demos on the Silverlight site.