Can anyone confirm whether the controversy over Mac-ifying the window buttons applies to the Xubuntu flavor (or Kubuntu for that matter)? I recently made the switch full-time after discovering that XFCE supports everything I care about in Gnome (and then some) while carrying a much lighter footprint. I don't really care what they do to Gnome, I'm just interested in whether those design choices are spilling over into the other flavors as well.

I think we are ultimately applying very different criteria. I use one of the 100+ "nobody" devices that you just linked to, and for me Ogg provides the best balance between audio quality and file size. That's my criteria.

In your criteria, you seem far more focused on avoiding "exclusion". Oh my gosh, what if I'm locked out of the most popular and trendy (and overpriced) devices? What if people don't want to download the pirate torrents that I go through the hassle of creating and publishing? What if I'm in a minority?!? Oh noes!!!

Cool. If anybody reading this is highly concerned about fitting in, then:

• Buy an iPod or iPhone
• Use MP3 for your own rips
• Just leech torrents rather than create them
• Ignore all the 20 paragraphs this guy wrote about FLAC
  (it is a good archival format, but it's silly to carry around on a portable device)

Presto, now you are just like most everyone else!

Anyway... if you want a lossless archival format, FLAC is the best choice. If you have a device with weak format support, or if creating torrents is a big deal to you, then MP3 is the best choice. But if you have a device that supports Ogg, and you don't really give a crap about sharing your own rips, then this format happens to provide the best ratio of quality to file size. Pick your criteria accordingly.

Yes, the default Rockbox skin sucks. Hence the "with a sensible choice of skin" qualifier that you overlooked.

My man, you really need to get over the love affair with the sound of your own voice! This behemoth of a post could have been expressed in a single paragraph, and it would have been more effective. You're basically saying that:

• Using Ogg limits your choice of hardware
• It limits the number of people you can share with.

My response to these two points is:

• The only significant hardware vendor that refuses to support Ogg is Apple. Even that's not necessarily true if you're a fan of the Rockbox firmware. Either way, all the Apple guys probably stopped reading this thread two or three levels back.
• You keep citing to statistics on file-sharing sites, for the formats that leeches would prefer to have provided to them for free. Number one, I frankly don't understand the motivation behind catering to those who would look a gift horse in the mouth. However, if you want to share a CD with the torrent community, or your girlfriend, or whoever, then fine... rip to MP3. I don't see what any of that has to do with the format that you choose to rip for your own personal purposes.

Wow... you are definitely not "someone I could have a beer with"! Rockbox is dramatically superior to native firmware in terms of feature set and intuitiveness, and with a sensible choice of skin it can be more aesthetically pleasing as well.

The rest of your novella of a post is really arguing apples and oranges though. You could have boiled that down to two sentences: "(1) FLAC is a great lossless format for archival purposes, because it's popular and cool, (2) Ogg is poor lossy format for portable device use, because it's unpopular and nerdy." Assuming that #2 is a valid point (which it is not), there's little to no connection between these two threads of discussion.

Because:

• You may not need absolute-100%-CD-quality, but you're still more demanding than the majority of users

• You have a decent (i.e. non-Apple) media player that supports a variety of formats, and Ogg happens to be one of them

• You don't see the point of wasting space with a FLAC that's half the size of a ripped WAV, when you could just use an Ogg file that's less than ten-percent the size of a ripped WAV

[shrug]... That's my reasoning for using Ogg, anyway.

Bingo. After five or ten years of "development" for Wonder Woman with Joss at the helm, I'm a bit surprised to see so many people freak out at any of his comic film announcements. Somebody ping me when actors are actually cast... I'm still waiting to hear whether Charisma Carpenter or Summer Glau will star in the LAST vaporware.

We know that Apple protects their branding to a ridiculous degree... essentially arguing that any name with an "i" in front it threatens their intellectual property. So I wonder if Amazon will have anything to say about this new product? If I saw a news story about the "Kin Two", and the headline didn't qualify it as a Microsoft thing, my first assumption would be that it's a new version of Amazon's ebook reader.

You know, it's a shame that Slashdot doesn't have a designated area just for stuff like this. That could help keep non-stories off the main page, and make the site better overall. Oh well.

No, the article did not say that it was private email account. Presumably, this was his taxpayer-funded public email address. I pulled up his profile page on the District Court's website... and while it doesn't list his email address (at least not anymore!), it does still provide contact information such as the direct telephone line to his chambers.

At a high level, we assume that it's immoral or unjust to lobby a judge, in hopes that pressure will overcome his or her sense of justice and public policy. Meanwhile, we find it (more or less) totally acceptable to lobby a legislator, in hopes that pressure will overcome his or her sense of justice and public policy. Assuming that the channels in both case are public and valid, what's the fundamental difference?

Just to play devil's advocate to some of the comments thus far... I wonder how people would differentiate this from political lobbying. This guy had a court case pending before the judge, and asked his followers to write the judge in hopes that it will sway the judge's impartial decision-making. Large special interest organizations ask their followers to write Congressmen, in hopes that it will sway the legislator's impartial decision-making.

What's the difference between lobbying a government's judicial branch, as opposed to lobbying the legislative branch? I'm not necessarily saying that there ISN'T an enormous difference between these two things... I'm just curious what kind of answers I'd get by posing the question.

The most interesting thing to me about Gnome these days is that it's memory footprint is still ridiculously fatter than Xfce's, even though Xfce has caught up with Gnome's basic features.

My "family computer" has been running default Ubuntu with Gnome, and my non-technical wife has been happy with it. However, it's starting to show its age, and with each major software update it gets a little slower and slower. So for the hell of it last month I thought I'd experiment with Xfce and see if I could postpone the next computer purchase until the holiday season.

I might postpone a lot further out than that! Thanks to Canonical's packaging of Xfce, it looked pretty much the same as Gnome right out of the box. After 5 minutes of tweaking the panel icons and theme settings, it was almost indistinguishable from my machine's previous setup. My wife didn't notice at all until three weeks later when she went to copy some files from a USB drive, and noticed that the file manager was Thunar rather than Nautilus. She turned out to be happier with Thunar though, because it doesn't randomly freeze up during drag-and-drop operations.

For years now, Gnome's "niche" has been with those who want something more feature-rich than Fluxbox, yet simpler and more lightweight than KDE. However, Gnome's basic functionality has been pretty stagnant for a long time, and lighter-weight desktop environments are catching up with the core expected feature set. Right now, I don't know of any compelling reason to run Gnome other than wanting to use a lot of Compiz visual effects, and Xfce is almost caught up with that too.

A dollar per year?

Ding ding ding! We have a winner! The problem I have with most Java-bashing is that it seems so utterly disconnected with the real world and the marketplace.

I read comments in this thread, and they sound like, "Last night I was analyzing differences between Erlang and Smalltalk, and while pondering the merits of Lua vs. Forth I realized that Java doesn't support true closures...". Hey, do you even work as a programmer? I mean, programming professionally... do you get PAID to write code? Enough to support a mortgage and retirement savings and all that livelihood stuff? Have you ever kissed a girl?

I enjoy tinkering with scripting languages and "new" (or at least repackaged from Lisp) programming concepts myself. But when I need drivers to connect to a database (other than MySQL!!!), or to an inventory system on an old IBM midrange box, or just about anything else used in the business world, I need Java. When I need mature toolsets and continuous integration systems, such that I can work in a team of two dozen or more programmers and keep everything straight, I need Java. When I need my credibility with management tied to figures who don't go by names like "Why The Lucky Stiff" and who don't make a childish ass of themselves every time they open their mouths, then I need something like Java. When I need to post my resume on the major job hunting sites, have recruiters call ME, and have my next gig nailed down within two weeks... I need Java.

With Java, I'm even able to "sneak in" some things like Jython or JRuby here and there... so that if indeed the "paradigm shift" occurs during my career, I'll be able to hype those experiences in my resume and have a foot in that door. However, I'm not holding my breath. There are so many factors which come into the picture when doing large-scale enterprise development, and such a different skillset and mindset required. Where a project uses one of these scripting languages, it would wind up LOOKING LIKE Java development anyway. It takes years to get used to that mindset, whereas it took me about an hour and a half to get the hang of closures... so I feel pretty comfortable no matter which way the industry goes.

About once a month or so, somebody comments about a landlord doing something abusive to a tenant, or a school district violating its student's rights, or citizens being wronged by the police or Feds. Somebody else always responds, "Why don't they just get the ACLU to step in?"

True, the ACLU has over a half-million members. Between it's political advocacy and charitable foundation arms, it has over $120 million per year of revenue. Yet STILL, it can only be bothered to get involved with a tiny subset of possible cases. It is ultimately a political and public policy organization, and has to pick and choose the battles that will give it the biggest strategic impact with the smallest possible commitment of resources.

Meanwhile, the entire EFF staff could comfortably hang out at my house and watch a football game. Their annual revenue of $3.4 million is less than the average cost of ONE patent infringement lawsuit... and moreover, they're running a $400k annual deficit over there right now.

There's a reason why the EFF isn't lead counsel on any multi-million dollar pro bono lawsuits, and it's not because they "didn't get the memo". Rather, it's because that's like asking your local Boy Scout troop to fly down and singlehandedly fix Haiti. It bugs me when people assume that lawyers magically grow on trees to fight your political crusades for free. There is a very low ratio of real support for things like the EFF... compared to Slashdot babble about software patents, stealing MP3's, cracking video game DRM, and all of the other things people do to make-believe that they are "heroes of the revolution" or some such laughable bullshit. More people should put at least a few bucks where their mouths are and lend some support.

Sigh... where are mod points when you need them?

Not only is this story preceded by Apple product rumors, it's followed by a "government's coming to getcha!" piece. I'm amazed that even this LOOSELY science-related story was given that space on today's Slashdot... rather than a software patent or copyright issue that would draw more clicks and babble.