CrunchBang - Code, Design & GNU/Linux

Launchpad Got It Wrong?!

Some interesting thoughts about Launchpad by Martin F. Krafft. Martin is basically saying that Canonical got it wrong with Launchpad, not because of its closed source nature, but because they missed an opportunity to create a decentralised system:

What we need is something as slick as Launchpad, and thousands of instances thereof, which all peer with each other, automatically. The information would automatically be mirrored wherever it’s referenced, so the entire cloud would be highly-available and failure-proof.

I agree that this would be great, in theory, and I look forward to testing the system soon, not :) Seriously though, being a member of the Launchpad Beta Testers team and having used many of Launchpad's features, I am not sure that Martin's proposal is even remotely possible — is it possible to maintain a complex project such as Ubuntu without a centralised project management system?

Pop-up Dictionary.com

Dictionary.com is the only site I use on a regular basis that still employs pop-up advertising. I think it's a real shame that such an important reference site should use this method of advertising.

The thing is, I think it's more than simply an annoyance, it's discriminatory against users that are unaware that pop-ups can be blocked. Most modern browsers come with anti pop-up software by default, but users that are forced to use older browsers and/or systems don't benefit from such tools.

If it wasn't for Firefox I think I would have looked for an alternative long ago. One alternative that comes to mind is dict.org. It's fast, free and sans advertising. A worthy non-commercial alternative to Dictionary.com's pop-up hell.