The Amazon advertising fiasco? The commercial "Ubuntu Software Center"? The lack of upstream patches for many years? Debian maintainers and Red Hat wouldn't even thinking of pulling off that kind of junk. It's not about deeply analysing every possible motivation for every single thing involving them -- Canonical simply shows an attitude of taking from the open source community and not giving back.
The Amazon lens that everyone knew about and could be removed with one command? The whole thing was massively blown out of proportion, often by people who'd never even used Ubuntu.
What's wrong with selling commercial software? I could understand it if you were all about Open Source, but you're clearly not. Redhat certainly sell proprietary software solutions. Debian don't, but then that's their raison d'être.
They've given back a whole OS to people. They've released plenty of their own software under the GPL. Fine if you think that's not enough, but it's far more than many companies have done and accusing them of not giving back at all is flat out wrong.
Fundamentally, Canonical is a business that's developing an open source operating system to compete with the likes of Windows and OS X, and they're making decent headway. They have bills and salaries to pay and affiliate marketing is one experiment they're trying in order to increase their revenues, albeit one I don't necessarily like or agree with. I have no issue with them running an app store, again, because they have employees and offices and stuff.
Regarding upstream patches, whatever your feelings about it, this is the nature of the FOSS beast. They're not obligated to do such a thing, but upstream contributions are only one way they can contribute to the open source movement. I'd argue that their other contributions (marketing, usable n00b friendly desktop Linux) far outweigh their lack of upstream contributions. I would, however, love it if they'd make this a priority also.
I hope Canonical becomes increasingly financially successful. I don't know how profitable they are but it's hard to give your product away for free and make a healthy profit in the process. As of 2009, they had at most $60k of revenue per employee, which almost certainly indicates a loss.
> Canonical simply shows an attitude of taking from the open source community and not giving back.
Speaking of which, I should probably go donate something after using Ubuntu for years.
I don't think being a social enterprise should mean that they shouldn't make profits at all. Given that they their major income is from support and services, I am quite sure measures like amazon ads were quite inevitable. Not to mention how long they had survived without making any profit to get some presence in a dominant space ( Ubuntu ShipIt! Remember? ). Even if they make smart profits, doesn't change the idea of the company and why they exist.
> Bose doesn't have nearly as good range of sound as professional equipment
It's not about "range of sound", it's about producing sound accurately. A more accurate frequency response won't sound exciting, but you'll hear slightly more of your music because nothing is hyped. It's a matter of personal taste and suitability to the task. I wouldn't mix a song on any Bose equipment, but I wouldn't be frothing at the mouth if I went to a friend's and they had a Bose system. I'd still prefer a £300 pair of studio monitors over an equivalent Bose setup, but that's my opinion.
That isn't what "peer to peer" means, though. Peer to peer means that peers (the aforementioned browser, smartphone and tablet) communicate directly with each other.
Also, how does CouchDB keep things secure if clients can sync apparently any data? I'm assuming there's something there, but nobody else has explained this.
Second, for CouchDB replication is just another client connecting to a DB; it's handled the same way anything else is.
As a result, we have the notion of filtered replication. The server-side CouchDB won't tell anyone secrets they don't need to know - be they clients or client-side DBs. At at the other end, the client-side CouchDB has some validation to stop "bad" data going into the database by accident, and then the server-side CouchDB has the same validation again. People can compromise their client DB all they want, but eventually it all ends up on the wire as plain old HTTP requests interacting with a plain old REST API.
In many ways - as far as security goes - the client DB is a red herring. The server ONLY speaks a well-defined REST API, and has validation and security to deal with malformed or malicious API requests. The fact that those requests are generated by a client-side DB based on data entered into it via JS commands is neither here nor there; a Backbone app would generate the exact same requests based on more-or-less the same JS commands. If you can secure any REST API, you can secure CouchDB.
Implies that Opera never innovates or has anything interesting to offer, and implies that instead they follow the market leader like-for-like. They were one of the first browsers to have tabs and supported many CSS3 properties without prefixes first. Just because they didn't support WebSuperFlySpeedySocketRockets the day the draft standard was out doesn't mean they don't innovate.
>copying Chrome
They're standards compliant, Chrome is standards compliant. Not "copying" Chrome.
No, they're literally copying Chromium. They're forking the source tree and including it as the rendering engine in their browser. That is a verbatim copy. There's nothing wrong with that, and I think it's a smart move and does not speak anything less of Opera (in fact it speaks probably a lot more), but it is a copy.
Before, Opera "copied" Trident by implementing the same quirks so pages behaved the same way. They were not standards compliant, and Trident was not standards compliant. Trident failed at certain implementations, and Opera deliberately failed at those same implementations to achieve the desired effect.
> No, they're literally copying Chromium. They're forking the source tree and including it as the rendering engine in their browser. That is a verbatim copy.
This is misleading nonsense. You led people to believe that they would just make a copy of Chrome, but they will obviously not just compile Chromium and give it a new name. They will most likely bring the entire Quick framework and their existing UI to the Chromium framework.
No one's saying Opera hasn't innovated. Only that it's not very popular and that, in addition to their innovations, they follow trends. That's not a passive aggressive statement.
> They're standards compliant, Chrome is standards compliant. Not "copying" Chrome.
The commenter was suggesting that Opera is now choosing to be "standards compliant" because the current most popular browsers are, as opposed to Opera's choice in the past to be non-standards compliant to copy the top browser of that time, IE. If the top browser is standards compliant, and you want to copy it, what would your browser end up being?
I think finding a kernel exploit in the server's OS that let you run the firmware-bricking code would probably be more viable than installing a new operating system.
This is my problem with self-help books... you must try to replace years of your own learning, rationalizing and understanding with someone else's ideas, absorbed only through a few hours of reading. Naturally, it falls apart quickly.
My experience with self help books is quite similar to my experience with people who read "Learn how to program" books. Some people go into the book with a head full of steam, but they give up as soon as things get hard. Other people start with the same enthusiasm, but they push through the difficult parts and (eventually) become great programmers.
The best educational materials I've ever read always start from the perspective that what you're about to learn is freakishly hard and it will take hard work to gain even a modicum of skill. Tragically, writing that on the cover of a book would likely kill sales.
As a reader though, I like to remind myself that I'm embarking on a voyage of learning, not one of already knowing. I remind myself that this is going to take a whole lot of work and that I will be frustrated many times. As long as I'm willing to do the homework, I can learn how to do almost anything.
As for your third question, you'll find tremendous variance as people have a number of different learning styles. I'd argue that any kind of personal change would work similarly to expert performance, so I suspect that the best medium is whatever medium does the best job of encouraging deliberate practice.
VAK(T): Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic, (Tactile). It's been argued that tactile and kinesthetic learners can be lumped into the same group, hence the parentheses. It's also hard to define exactly what the differences between the two are.
Ah. The VAK model. I looked briefly for scientific support for this "theory" on the Internet, but I couldn't really find any. Wikipedia suggested it's a theory with little to no support, and other locations didn't show ANYTHING that would convince me such a thing as "visual" or "auditory" learners exist. Below is a bit of my thinking on the subject.
I am inclined to think that these "learning styles" are bogus, that every person can and will learn in many different "styles" depending on the situation, specifically it's been shown that every normal (and even very young) human can learn just by observing other people's behavior. (One of the classics - Bandura: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observational_learning)
I met many people (mostly in the soft skills training circles, same people who tend to work in psychodynamic therapy systems but went to business training for the money) who claim that "there are people of different learning styles and you should take that into account when instructing them/teaching them", but when I ask about details, nobody can explain what's the difference between these learning styles, and what is the belief that they even exist based on (e.g. a "source" :).
I could go on, but I think you get the point :)
While I do understand people may consciously prefer certain learning _settings_ (much more than a "style"), I doubt it's the categorization of a learner that makes or breakes such a complicated topic as "changing a habit" or "making a change in life" [based on a book / other 'intervention'].
[edit: read up the Criticism section on this Wikipedia page if you are interested in the validity of auditory/visual/kinesthetic model - VAK: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_styles]
I can definitely confirm the existence of visual/kinesthetic learners (in the limited realm of dancing). I've worked as a dance coach, and there's a distinct grouping into people who need to see steps demonstrated, and people who need to be guided through steps.
I can also confirm that people communicate in a way that describes the world in visual/auditory/kinesthetic terms, and people often have a preferred mode of communication. As a result, it is often helpful to choose a similar mode of communication. (My personal speculation: Not because that's their learning style, but because it is a more familiar kind of speech. What you say becomes more relatable)
But I certainly do agree with you that the "learning style" model is oversimplified, and can't be applied as such in many settings. (How on earth do you teach computer science in a kinesthetic way? ;)
Very interesting information about dancing, thanks for sharing that!
I can see how people have _preferences_. If something is new & hard (a possible definition for learning), I would imagine we instinctively look for ways to make progress with minimum amount of effort. So in that sense we may have learning styles, but that wouldn't mean permantent or exclusive style. Other ways could work for us, too, but over the years we practiced certain style more than others and so we choose whenever we can (it's efficient/pleasant).
So perhaps simple familiarity of a way to learn might be the source of the whole idea and its appeal.
I can see how poorly designed scientific research would even validate learning styles in that sense without uncovering that everyone can actually learn in every way, they just choose not to for local efficiency.
I think it's more on the part of the reader. A lot of willpower is needed to fundamentally change yourself, especially based on just one person's ideas. It's up to the reader to put the ideas into action, and I think that for a lot of people that's difficult without a motivating environment.
For example, hanging out with people that are into fitness does a lot more for you than going it alone. Working a service job and having to speak to people to make money does more for your confidence than any motivating words. It's different for different people, of course.
