UbuntuOne, to strip away all the fancy words, is a 2gb (free version, $10/month for 50gb) of online storage linked to your Launchpad account (used for Ubuntu Forums, bug reports, and other community activities). Similar to ftp, but is secure and allows you to have a friends list such that files and folders can be marked for sharing to specific individuals for either read only, or read/write. In addition to that, any computer with Ubuntu (Jaunty or Karmic+) can have ubuntuone-client installed which will add a directory in your home folder called "UbuntuOne" that will automatically stay synchronised with the files online. You can connect as many computers as you like to that online account. Only one UbuntuOne account can be linked per user.

I for example, have a computer at home, and a computer at work. My current projects are stored in my UbuntuOne directory so at work or home I have access to the same files locally and backed up in three locations automatically in addition to being able to use a web browser to get the files wherever I go. I had used Google Docs, which still works great, but it requires constant Internet access. With UbuntuOne I need only enough Internet access to sync my files when I am done.

As a teacher, in my classroom I have 4 computers with Ubuntu (2 dual boot windows, and 1 dual boots MaxOSX). On the Ubuntu side have a classroom UbuntuOne account all the computers connect to. If a student saves their files on one machine it is automatically backed up online and then to every other computer "in the cloud" Then any computer a student chooses to use will have all their files on it. If a computer is off or not running ubuntu there will be a delay in the sync, but as soon as it is switched back, the files get sync'd and they are good to go. Before I used sshfs and a central machine. It only worked when the computer was on, and though never had any problems, there was no redundant storage. It worked "ok", but UbuntuOne is really the "right" way to be doing it. While it is not necessary, each student could have their own accounts and share files with each other as desired; that is just more than is needed.

Microsoft has said that it beat out Linux on Netbooks. Without getting into all the gory details, HP and Dell have not made the same "observation". Being as neutral as I possibly can it is all a matter of how you define Netbook :)

You got it all wrong. Everyone else is on the long bus. M$ Bus recently became a standard with the support of the EPA, Schwarzenegger, and Al Gore; so I think that makes a scientific consensus.

Because your video card has "integrated" (on the card) memory rather than "shared" video memory. While shared memory subtracts from total memory, integrated memory is not added to available system memory.

In theory your card could have a soft driver rather than use the bios to allocate memory, but I am not sure if such a system exists, but knowing Compaq someone has probably tried (though the idea makes me a little sick)

Hmm... I think it has everything to do with copyright protection.

"securing for limited time" is the operative clause to the subject of the law being to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". The GPL is not only very clear about the when and how of exclusive control, but has in part been critical in maintaining law that has almost been completely lost to an age of fascism and tyranny.

good site:http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080220/020252302.shtml

I think that was exactly what wizardforce was arguing against.

I wouldn't complain to much about getting all the right tools for all the wrong reasons; better than all the wrong tools for the wrong reasons.

This is silly. There is HUGE competition in FlOSS. If your motive is good software, then getting good software is what you are working for. FlOSS isn't any more silly or less competitive for that matter than those that work for fiat money. People work to make better software to make the software better. In the same respect, people don't remodel their homes to ensure that contractors make a good living, they pay the contractor so that they can get a better home. If you lived with a contractor than the contractor could have the same motive as you and currency wouldn't be a rule of the game in that respect. There is still competition because not everyone is a contractor and each individual needs to consider their responsibilities and priorities.

Lets just say that every person and every programmer need a word processor just like every contractor and non-contractor need homes. Rather than starting from scratch, lets say there are several descent FlOSS word processors out there, but none that perfectly meet the needs of a programmer. The programmer now has a motive to consider whether they should take some of their free time and help one of those projects tend towards perfect. It may seem as simple as finding the project that is closest to their idea of perfect, but there are many things to consider. Project age, developer turn over, community cohesion, coding guidelines, and much more. He could even find motive in getting several of his favorite projects to share some of the best features with each other. Maybe he will pick a favorite and then start his own project to address some small issue that just effects him.

He may consider these things or could instead could compare that to the cost of a proprietary solution and compare the difference in needs met between the proprietary solution and existing FlOSS solution. So maybe $250 for a proprietary solution, or putting in five hours of expert programming skill and experience to add a few things to an existing project... which ends up becoming fun and you forget where the time went and you accidental put in 100 hours. There are many ways you could balance it, and some may say great, others may say you are under valuing your time, but cool you contributed to something that will make the world a better place, whatever.

If there is even a debate consider instead a company with 10,000 employees with computers. Lets say for the sake of argument Microsoft will Sell you Word for the generous discount of $50 per user, and $20 every 2 years for upgrades. Compare that to Floss that almost, but does not, meet your long term needs. So we got $500,000 start up cost, plus the need to set aside about $25,000 a quarter towards upgrades.

So the choice is give your money to another company and hope they spend it wisely and that the software grows with your business, or take responsibility for the resources that power your company and hire a team of programmers to develop what you need on top of the existing infrastructure of FlOSS. Of course if you don't know what your software does for you, I expect it would be difficult to manage a team of programmers, but buying or using any software would be a challenge whatever way you go.

I think your calculations are a bit off. For all the people licensed to use linux, you are going to need ~99.9999999833% of them to care about just one bug and have the ability and desire to fix it for the entire user base to benefit.

May not seem very efficient, but it is positive sum.

For the sake of argument, lets just say 100% of Americans care about health care and fiscal responsibility. Hmm... my bet is a couple high school students will do a science fair project that will successfully demonstrate safe clean nano scale cold fusion technology before Social Security and Medicare get a balanced budget that is properly secured for future obligations.

Of course, you say users don't care about open source in a practical way. Well duh; if they cared in a practical way, they wouldn't be called users, they would be called developers. So all you really need to ask yourself is 1) Do developers care about source code? and 2) Should users with a spark of intelligence and ambition have it within their ABILITY to become a developer?

Proprietary Software is akin to the scribe culture of long ago, where certain people read books to most people. Few people could read, and very few could write. Either way, paper was very expensive. When the printing press came along, and books started becoming cheap, books became open source; ordinary people, not just those of an elite class, began to read. Quickly came the age of enlightenment, as more people began to read, so did many people begin to write.

So I ask you, why do you need the source code to your books? Are you going to fix problems in stories and notify the author? Are you going to write a novel? Of the install base of books in homes, how many of those do you think have taken advantage of the open source nature of those books to write a book of their own outside of academic circles? Inexpensive open source books have been around for a few hundred years, though writing and libraries have been around for thousands. Digital computers have been around for about 70 years, but was restricted to a fairly elite class of people such as university students. Open source software in the 90's was much like the way scientists share their information with each other. Servers based on open source software became very popular with the birth of the Internet, and Linux for the non-geek really started to make an appearance about 2004 with OpenSuse followed by Fedora and Ubuntu. Non-geek / non-business people only just starting to get computers... early 90's? Computer literacy (basic usability) becomes mandatory at just about every job by the late 90's. With the Internet, and the human readability of html, everybody was making web pages with about much class and style as a 4 year old writing his first book half way into his kindergarten.

Computer literacy is VERY important. I would like to hope that everybody feels it is within their ability to learn and contribute to an open source project if they desired to. I have known adults that do not have basic reading comprehension. Some are embarrassed, but many just don't think it is important or relevant to their lives, though I think it has been at least 10 years since I have heard that argument from an adult. We can either have a class structure of producers and consumers, programmers and non-programmers with the programmer class picking who will move up to become a creator, and who will not, or we can recognise that good software does exist and improve for its own sake as it serves people.

You can either create a class system (proprietary), Give people the freedom to choose whether or not they want to support the class system (MIT/BSD), or fight the system with hostility and dogmatic ideology (GPL).

Most people don't care how their computer works any more than their care, their house, or even biological functions. But when it comes to using that as an excuse to keep that information away from people, I err on the side of hostile dogmatic ideology.

I guess it can depend on who you mean by purists necessarily, but if by purist you mean those that don't believe in mixing GPL and proprietary software (LGPL aside), you think the FreeBSD is really all that thrilled with the wonderful and great contribution of MacOSX by Apple? Is there, or does it matter, if there is a FreeBSD/Apple development community, or are they totally separate? I think the perception of the development community over just those questions is in part directly responsible for the growth and cohesion of the Ubuntu Development Community. I also believe Ubuntu has done far more to promote and improve Debian and Linux than Apple has done for FreeBSD or BSD.

I guess there may be too many sides to it, because just like driving a car, many people just want to get to work. Is literacy or should literacy be important? Open Source software is a very new thing in many ways, especially if you compare it to things such as books. But look how important "software" has become in the last 15 years. Phonetic language and mathematic language literacy has been considered very important for some time now as being a necessary part of learning, self improvement., and personal responsibility. I think computer programming literacy is getting up there as things people should really start looking towards as a basic educational tool, and open source is clearly a vial component of that movement.

I am going to have to agree with the people that modded this troll, though personally, I think it is more like flame. You say that MS donated this code out of pure self interest as if it is different from any one else's contribution. Take the Wacom Driver project for example. Wacom only writes drivers for platforms they can "profit" from which they have determined are Windows and MacOSX. The Wacom Project Team has selfishly determined that isn't good enough for them AND that they have the necessary skill to remedy the situation. Why would a person who is greedy and selfish go out of their way to be inefficient and non-pragmatic about their approach? If what they desire is a driver, their greedy selfish desires are better met as an open source community project. The more people like them that want that driver sooner than later will selfishly commit resources towards improving the project. But keep in mind that their purpose is the driver. If they were producing the driver for money to sell to people that want support, it might make sense to keep it closed source and simply hire as many people necessary to slap together something together that looks good enough that will get people to buy it and sell updates as they implement new features to the best of their ability with the hope that nobody trys to compete against them. One thing I think may be different if such a company existed is that you would see drivers for more than just Wacom tablets, doesn't matter to them that people are buying inferior tablets.

To my understanding, one of the reasons why there is no support for any other tablet is that it would run their resources thin. They selfishly believe Wacom makes the best tablets despite the fact that there are likely a lot of people out there that can't afford the most expensive brand. So for now there is just one driver. So what? If it is worth it to someone to develop drivers for other brands, then it will happen, but I expect that for most people the difference in cost of the tablets does not justify the cost of development. (Oooh, those greedy developers!)

Just like any other code contribution, which is nothing more than information, people may or may not choose to review it, may or may not choose to fix it, may or may not choose to implement it, may or may not choose to maintain it, may or may not choose to extend it. That could be 1 person, a hundred people, or nobody. What you are doing is passing judgment on how other people should feels about it and calling for censorship, as if you need to protect people from how they choose to spend their time.

How altruistic of you. :)

Sorry, but I put your comments in the same category as the complainers on brainstorm.ubuntu.com that DEMAND (often in quite colorful language) their ideas that are highly rated by other non-programs be implemented by the development team. There have even been "resolutions" passed giving timelines in which developers must respond to their inquiries. WTF? These people obviously don't have the first clue about how people become "Official Ubuntu Developers", let alone how the dev process works. Personally, I might like to call Project Brainstorm a total flop and just get rid of it. On the other hand, evidently some people like it, sometimes devs respond. I'll just try to convince myself that it is a conspiracy to keep idiots off of launchpad. What I can do about this 'issue' is reserve the right not to go there.

As a side note, I guess, take a look at the number of open bugs with patches over a year old that nobody has bothered to take the few moments necessary to test and confirm so that it can be implemented. It is astounding! But somehow there is still rapid progress.

Which is why it works :)

One of the arguments I make to promote GPL is that it is entirely selfish and meritocratic. It is economically inefficient for a person to produce a product that is not useful to the producer. For example, it is useful for doctors to know medicine whether or not they practice. Same is true of plumbers, carpenters, farmers, etc. It also applies to engineers, software or otherwise. Microsoft "produces" a product for the purpose of selling it. They must make the product something people want, or think they want (Oversimplified I know, but still true). By contrast, people producing GPL work are initially producing something strictly for themselves. With information distribution having reached a cost of effectively zero, and development cost covered (because the intent of the product was the product), all that can happen by releasing the code (assuming it is a tool and not a trade secret) is that other people will selfishly take the code, rather than reinvent the wheel, and change or improve the product for THEIR own purpose. From there, a somewhat natural evolution occurs; the software replicates as people find it useful, and it mutates as people find it worth their time to take what exists and improve it for their own purpose, and hopefully re-releasing it back into the wild.

So I think this whole argument is totally obnoxious. Whatever Microsoft's motivation for the release of their code may be, all you have is more information available for which anybody may do with as they please. I may be inclined to assume that Microsoft has put in the minimal effort to tease the community with information that could be useful in producing a useful product, and whether or not it is controversial to put in the effort to make the information useful to them doesn't take away from the fact that Microsoft has done NOTHING (this time) to harm the community. An ability or inability to rationalize a decision must be the sole responsibility of the person making that decision.

If Microsoft is trying to bait the community into doing work for them, who cares. It is either worth it, or isn't. Microsoft's hope is that they can get SOMEONE do do the rest of the work. It is a calculated risk. As far as the community goes, I see no hostility in informing Microsoft that their half-ass contribution isn't worth the effort of implementing, if that be the case, and Microsoft can recalculate their move.

The code isn't going to be deleted, it will either be commented out, or stored elsewhere and a line item added to a TO-DO list somewhere. This happens all the time. Last Ubuntu release (9.04) I put the majority of my time into two projects. Upon review for implementation, one was accepted and merged. The other, despite the fact I had managed to close out almost a dozen bug reports, was implemented incorrectly (for the sake of argument), and rejected. The days of work were not recoverable and basically wasted. Nobody picked up where I had left off, including myself. Those bugs are still open. It is just how things work. I wasn't offended, nor do I think the maintainer was rude for not accepting the work as is. I learned a lot from the experience and I still use my own version of the package.

The only thing notable this time is that the 'contribution' was made by Microsoft. If some sloppy hacker pieced this together by way of reverse engineering, threw it out there and walked away, who knows what would happen to the code. It might rouse some discussion on the mailing list with comments like "wow cool, but wtf? Anyone want to tackle this s***?" for awhile, but it certainly wouldn't make headline news, because in my observation, that is just another day in the life.

Judging from what people have posted (here and elsewhere), I think there are enough great schools out there that actually care about technology and education to serve a diverse community with quality cross-platform software that the rest can simply be disregarded. I think judging a school on its staff is perfectly reasonable. "Linux support" isn't something that exists in a bubble, but one of many things that should be warning signs about the environment.

Why didn't you just skip to the next article? I think the question was important to the person that posted it, and I think there are enough people here to help him, and maybe get an interesting discussion from the few people that still come here for that reason. Or do you believe he may hae been just as well served by using Yahoo Answers?

I think you over qualified your statement. Fixed it for ya.

Education is something that you get for your life, not something that you get for your job. If you are getting an education for your job, then blind obedience is the most pragmatic way to approach a class so long as you make the grade and it enables you to perform a particular task. Sometimes going to school can be a requirement of parole. Often times just being in a school and being in the environment is better than sitting around at home playing video games. I even have friends that go to school because their parents require it if they are going to continue to pay their rent.

On the other hand, if you are getting an education for your life, not only can it help you in a career, but it helps you in every part of life you want to apply your education. That is a bit more of a challenge because there is more to consider. When you are looking for an education for your life, a school that matches your principles and values become important. Class size, diversity of staff, which federal programs they accept money from, non-discrimination policy, How good the Chinese food is, and the range of technology they embrace. Schools are ranked all the time by other peoples standards, and they are generally good guidelines. However, imho, one should check the data that is used to determine their ranking, but why not take it a step further and feel whether or not this is the type of environment you want to immerse yourself in that you hope will guide you for the rest of your life.

From what I have seen, a person that takes responsibility for their own education for themselves and on their own terms will be more successful in life and in their career, and likely to get better grades on top of that, than anyone that has gone to Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, MIT cause their parents told them they had to.

And if you are a wack-nut Linux fanboy RMS worshiping FOSS junkie, or just someone that has grown up Linux and take pleasure in being a part of the community on some small level, I believe one is going to be much happier and successful in an environment as important as college where your culture is going to be embraced.

This is really about any belief or ideal. If you can' stand up for what you believe in, just little selfish things that YOU want (keeping in mind this is you going to college, not anyone else when it comes down to your choices), how are you ever supposed to stand up for what you know once you are there, let alone later in life?

Of course if all this just sounds silly, then it probably doesn't matter which school you end up going to. (obligatory straw-man)