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An Evening with Jeff Waugh (Linux Journal)
The Linux Journal has a lengthy report from a talk by GNOME and Ubuntu hacker Jeff Waugh. "Apparently Mark [Shuttleworth] originally wanted, given that Ubuntu is Linux for human beings, the first release of Ubuntu to carry a tasteful, artistic picture of a naked woman. This caused everyone in the company and community to offer some version of 'this is a very bad idea'. So, the community got Mark to step away from that in stages. In the end Mark backed down. The upshot of all of this has been that the pictures used for release versions of Ubuntu depict at least one man, at least one woman, at least two races--and everyone is fully clothed."
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Funding opportunity for Ubuntu Posted Dec 29, 2005 0:34 UTC (Thu) by leonbrooks (guest, #1494) [Link] Put up a site somewhere at which contributors pay to name the woman who's asked to do the modelling when Mark finally gets his way?
Funding opportunity for Ubuntu Posted Dec 29, 2005 2:37 UTC (Thu) by busterb (subscriber, #560) [Link] He did, at least for a while; actually, it's what first attracted my attention to the distro. IIRC, you can still get these images via the ubuntu-calendar packages.
Funding opportunity for Ubuntu Posted Dec 29, 2005 12:06 UTC (Thu) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018) [Link] The quoted site mismatches nude and porn. Next thing they'll call pedophile a guy who takes pictures of his baby in bath! Some people's view of the world frightens me, and they seem mostly located in the most powerful country in the world [shiver]!
Funding opportunity for Ubuntu Posted Dec 29, 2005 13:17 UTC (Thu) by pointwood (guest, #2814) [Link] Completely agree. It's a shame they stopped making those beautiful wallpapers :(
Funding opportunity for Ubuntu Posted Dec 30, 2005 11:39 UTC (Fri) by job (guest, #670) [Link] Agreed, in a strict sense of word definitions. But given that the industry has a problem with gender equality (especially true in the Linux world, as noted on Debian-Women or just read LWN or Slashdot any time a woman shows up and lots of comments about her sex), if Mark wants to create a Linux distribution "for everybody", I don't think it was a good idea to use male cultural references (nudie art) as a first impression to the users. The clothed people used instead was a much better idea.
Funding opportunity for Ubuntu Posted Dec 30, 2005 11:47 UTC (Fri) by pointwood (guest, #2814) [Link] Agreed, but choice is good :D
Nudie art Posted Jan 7, 2006 18:55 UTC (Sat) by ilmari (subscriber, #14175) [Link] Well, the January calendar had a male model (albeit wearing boxer shorts), and the October one had all the three models (one male and two female, of which one black), sot it's not all male cultural references.
Also, these backgrounds (and the GDM login screen featuring the same models) were not the default ones, you had to explicitly select them.
That fails their own guidelines Posted Dec 30, 2005 3:08 UTC (Fri) by leonbrooks (guest, #1494) [Link] Needs one more gender and two more races.
Funding opportunity for Ubuntu Posted Jan 5, 2006 21:30 UTC (Thu) by aigarius (subscriber, #7329) [Link] That's my favourite desktop background. Ever.
Mono Posted Dec 29, 2005 3:52 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link] What a shame that they're writing interesting programs in an immediately doomed language. At least the better ideas won't be lost, and will show up again in longer-lived programs.
Mono programs -- not written by Canonical Posted Dec 29, 2005 6:56 UTC (Thu) by scottt (subscriber, #5028) [Link] Note that the Mono programs mentioned: Beagle, Tomboy, F-Spot, Dashboard are all written by developers working at Novell and not Canonical.
Redhat and Novell are still the main Linux companies doing original opensource development.
Mono Posted Dec 29, 2005 20:00 UTC (Thu) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] > What a shame that they're writing interesting programs in an> immediately doomed language
You don't seem to expect bright future for Python, do you? Because this is the language that Canonical seems to push in its developments.
Mono Posted Dec 30, 2005 19:40 UTC (Fri) by piman (subscriber, #8957) [Link] He's referring to C#, which is what most of the programs mentioned in the article are written in.
Geeky Optimism Posted Dec 29, 2005 4:26 UTC (Thu) by thedevil (subscriber, #32913) [Link] I actually attended this talk :)
100 years of technology penetration? We'll be lucky if we're not under
Matthew Garrett Posted Dec 29, 2005 5:54 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link] I didn't know Matthew Garrett was working there now. Matthew is very young, astonishingly brilliant, appallingly energetic, and extremely annoyed with you. (Yes, you. Me too, of course, even moreso now.)
It's gratifying that Canonical has been able to find so many brilliant people, in part because it means Google hasn't snapped them all up yet, and in part because with Canonical pushing from the east and Google from the south, Microsoft might get pushed into the frigid north Pacific Ocean and drown.
Matthew Garrett Posted Dec 29, 2005 13:08 UTC (Thu) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] "Working" - I'm actually finishing off a PhD, the laptop stuff is spare time...
Matthew Garrett Posted Dec 30, 2005 11:22 UTC (Fri) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link] For those not tracking mjg59's career: besides his exemplary contributions to Debian, Matthew is participating in tracking down the genetic basis of Alzheimer's Disease. (I wonder how to tell if a fruit fly suffers dementia.) Why aren't *you* working on something as important?
Matthew Garrett Posted Dec 30, 2005 12:59 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] I'd love to be able to say that's true, but sadly it isn't quite :)
didn't know Posted Dec 29, 2005 19:47 UTC (Thu) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link] ...it was Mark's idea. Then I guess I get what was "weird" with otherwise interesting person and project. (now call me a moron, I've already told what I think on sounder@l.u.c)
Oh well. Good luck to all of us, and merry Christmas :-)
Jeff Waugh rocks! Posted Dec 30, 2005 3:10 UTC (Fri) by leonbrooks (guest, #1494) [Link] Not quite as entertaining as Mark in person, but well on his way there and at least as informative. He and Pia make an excellent double-team, too.
Nautilus again Posted Dec 30, 2005 17:01 UTC (Fri) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link] I actually thought the other thing Mark was voted down on is even funnier than the naked lady:The other time Mark was overruled by the community involved the Nautilus file manager program. When you clicked on a folder in Nautilus, a new window would pop up on the screen. People complained about how the screens would become full of windows. Mark thought it would be a great idea that when one window opened the previous window would close. This feature, at Mark's insistence, was shipped but caused an even greater number of complaints, as users wanted to know why the Nautilus window seemed to dance all over the screen. Nerds are great people, but sometimes I just have to smile a little. The ability to completely loose touch with reality is not a trait exclusively reserved for Gnome hackers, but the Nautilus spatial file manager certainly was a good example. Here's an idea. Let's force users to open lots of windows even if they don't want to. Then when they complain, we'll "fix" this by opening one window and closing another. Then we'll remember to complain every now and then that that other desktop is bloated with unnecessary features. Sorry, I know this is a sore topic, but it's just so funny. As developers it's important to always remind oneself, if the users are happy with something, don't break their program just because you don't have anything important to do. If something wasn't a good idea, just accept the fact and drop it, don't start "fixing" a bad idea. Keep It Simple and all that...
Developers, users, and things that just work without bloat Posted Jan 5, 2006 14:41 UTC (Thu) by utoddl (subscriber, #1232) [Link] The "Amiga User Interface Style Guide" (or some name similar to that; remember the Amiga?) had sage advice along these lines: Don't create user options simply because you couldn't make a design decision. Maybe that's how they achieved great multitasking in <1Mb.
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