Gnome Extension Offers a Shopping Lens We Can Live With

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Gnome Extension Offers a Shopping Lens We Can Live With

Posted by timothy on Sunday December 30, 2012 @07:18PM from the implementation-is-key dept.

sfcrazy writes "The year 2012 has not been very good for Canonical and Ubuntu. The end of the year saw harsh criticism of Ubuntu from bodies like EFF and FSF which accused the operating system of 'data leak,' 'privacy invasion' and adding 'spyware' features. Now, Gnome Shell is also getting online shopping lens. Alan Bell has created a Gnome Shell extension which allows a user to conduct online shopping search right from Gnome's Dash. You can install the extension from this link. Once installed you can start searching for online shopping by hitting 'super' key and then enter your search term. One of the greatest differences between the implementations is who is in control. Gnome's Shopping lens shows how it should have been done in the first place, as it puts the user in control, and not the company whose OS you are using. Bell has explained it very well on his blog."

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Some problems don't need solving by MrEricSir · 2012-12-30 19:34 · Score: 4, Insightful

Putting web content in a UI element I use to start programs is simply frustrating. To make matters worse, the content is very minimal and there's no way to do anything without launching a browser.
So why is this problem being addressed in the first place? Is it just a way to make money from affiliate programs, or is there really a demand for this "feature"?

--
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
1. Re:Some problems don't need solving by innocent_white_lamb · 2012-12-30 19:38 · Score: 2
  
  The article indicates that the extension's author has included his affiliate id in the application as the default, so I guess it's a way for him to make a buck. (You can apparently change the affiliate id to something else after installing the application, but how many people are actually going to do that?)
  
  --
  If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
2. Re:Some problems don't need solving by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-30 19:47 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Is it just a way to make money from affiliate programs, or is there really a demand for this "feature"?
  There's absolutely no demand for this kind of extension. It's just a way for developers to make a buck.
3. Re:Some problems don't need solving by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-30 20:01 · Score: 0
  
  If developers really need to create programs like this, to make a buck, then they are probably doing something wrong or should seek a better job to guarantee income.
  I've been doing programming since mid 80's and figured this. If you are not hired as a programmer, then forget it. You wont make cash with it. Search an alternative job. I switched to Forex trading. During wait times I do programming. The first ensures my income. The latter my private income.
4. Re:Some problems don't need solving by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-30 20:04 · Score: 0
  
  The latter my private interests.
  *pardon*
5. Re:Some problems don't need solving by Sqr(twg) · 2012-12-30 20:12 · Score: 2
  
  The possibility to change the affiliate id is the only reason for installing the lens (that I can think of), so yeah, I think most people who install the lens are going to do that. (If, for example, you want to give money to the Electronic Frontier Foundation every time you shop at amazon, then you enter their affiliate ID, as TFA explains.)
  If you don't care about the affiliate ID, then it's more efficient to have a shortcut to open amazon in a web browser instead of this lens.
6. Re:Some problems don't need solving by Dwedit · 2012-12-30 21:23 · Score: 2
  
  I thought it was really neat when Linux Mint integrated the package manager into the launcher menu, you could either run an application you already have, or easily install a new one.
  But even though it's downloading the application from the internet, it's not exactly "web content", is it?
7. Re:Some problems don't need solving by dominux · 2012-12-30 21:57 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  This isn't my primary source of income, we provide consultancy services around Free Software. This is just a bit of fun and an intellectual exercise in learning to do a gnome shell extension and figuring out how I would have done the Unity shopping lens if I had the opportunity to do it properly. If one day this earns me enough to meet the payout threshold of Amazon then I will be surprised and quite pleased.
8. Re:Some problems don't need solving by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-30 22:01 · Score: 0, Troll
  
  Gnome 3.8 is becoming a security nightmare similar XP before sp1. It looks nice, yet turning my desktop into a browser will not be tolerated. I'll have to find some other window manager that's not based on GTK.
9. Re:Some problems don't need solving by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-30 22:06 · Score: 0
  
  Everyone here hates it when someone makes money. Especially in technology. I recommend you duck and cover.
10. Re:Some problems don't need solving by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-30 22:58 · Score: 0
  
  No! We dont hate money. Reality is that only the most evil pricks (Management) will make the money, ride chicks, command people. The developer is just a source of income for that manager. Its his cash cow.
11. Re:Some problems don't need solving by symbolset · 2012-12-30 23:06 · Score: 2
  
  You should try Windows 8. With that you get integrated advertising without even having to subscribe to it. For some reason they've integrated it into the operating system.
  
  --
  Help stamp out iliturcy.
12. Re:Some problems don't need solving by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-31 00:17 · Score: 0, Troll
  
  Is that you, Linus?
13. Re:Some problems don't need solving by binarylarry · 2012-12-31 00:19 · Score: 0, Troll
  
  Shut the fuck up Mauro
  
  --
  Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
14. Re:Some problems don't need solving by jones_supa · 2012-12-31 00:21 · Score: 2
  
  This. There's quite horrible datamining and advertising system baked in Windows 8.
15. Re:Some problems don't need solving by Andrewkov · 2012-12-31 01:15 · Score: 1
  
  I shudder to think what the world will be like in 10 years.
16. Re:Some problems don't need solving by jellomizer · 2012-12-31 01:33 · Score: 1, Troll
  
  How horrible!
  Imagine working 8-12 hours a day on average, grunting threw the boring parts, having some of what you thought was good ideas just be turned down by end users, working around system limitations. Then you have the audacity to want to make some money for it.
  People tend to have problems separating all their political issues. Open Source isn't Anti-Capitalism, even though some of its biggest voices are, that doesn't make Open Source Anti-Capitalism. However these people have a hard time separating their two beliefs and work to stop every workaround to make money off of GNU with the exception of Consulting/Support Services and Distribution.
  There are a lot of good product ideas however the developers will have a near impossible mission to get the funding to work on it the time they need. Because the product may to so easy to use that Consulting/Support will not get any business, as well Distribution not so much because it is too easy to quickly repackage the product an other way.
  So these people either add some advertising means to bring in some revenue, Offer a Time Sharing service, wait that is two old they host the solution, err um Software as a Service (SaaS), oh wait it is now call Cloud Computing.
  We look at a small handful of Big Projects, and how successful they are in open source however there is a slue of failed projects not due to improper skills or interest, but they just cannot sustain the work that is is needed.
  
  --
  If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
17. Re:Some problems don't need solving by recoiledsnake · 2012-12-31 05:09 · Score: 2
  
  The advertising in Windows 8 just happens to be in a few "Bing" apps like Weather that are bundled in the Metro interface. That is very different from what Ubuntu is doing, which is sending Canonical the search keywords and showing Amazon products for every search you perform in the OS i.e it's more integrated into a core function of the OS, plus it sends personal information to third parties by default. Windows 8 does none of those things.
  
  --
  This space for rent.
18. Re:Some problems don't need solving by recoiledsnake · 2012-12-31 05:11 · Score: 1
  
  Do you have any reference to the datamining part or is it idle speculation to get karma points on Slashdot?
  
  --
  This space for rent.
This doesn't solve *anything* by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-30 19:44 · Score: 1

There were two main problems with the original implemntation of Amazon search in Ubuntu:
1) By making the search seamless, your intended-for-internal-search-only search terms would get sent to Amazon and other places.
This doesn't solve this problem at all, or at least not any better than removing the default extension and installing an Amazon-specific search extension. Installing this extension just requires you to add an 'a' search term to indicate that you *want* to search Amazon. Yes, that's "opt-in," but it means that Amazon search is no longer seamless.
2) Your Amazon search terms, though passed through an intermediary so that Amazon can't associate them with you, are still stored *at that intermediary* for an unknown amount of time and for unknown later uses.
This extension just adds a new intermediary, and TFA completely glosses over that intermediary, so I don't learn anything about it at all. Is it run by the NSA? An organization owned by Amazon? An individual who likes to read my search terms and cackle over them? An organization or person with proper security? Who knows?! The intermediary is configurable, yes, but the fact that the string 'libertus' only shows up in TFA in the screenshot as the Backend, as the URL to download the extension, and as a reference to a "Beer Fund" makes me question its transparency and privacy/security. Visit that URL and there's no Privacy Policy, no statement of ownership, and no contact address (electronic nor physical).
So, what... this was a Slashvertisement for Privacy Invasion?
1. Re:This doesn't solve *anything* by greg1104 · 2012-12-30 20:18 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  If you want Amazon search to be "seemless" (a word which I wouldn't think even belongs for a tack on UI element like this), you just remove the "a" prefix. There could be a better UI to this concept; the important advance is that there's a UI to limit it at all, while still being useful.
  If you don't like the intermediary, it's stated to be "about 5 lines of code" to build your own. The only interesting part is that it needs an Amazon services ID to unlock the search API of their site. If you have your own Amazon services capable account instead, you can host it. If you don't, this guy is offering the connector to make things easier for you, specifically disclaimed with how he'll benefit from that.
  A bit evil out of the box, accurately described as being so, and with easy workarounds to the biggest concerns. That solves this problem as well as I'd like to be. As for what we know about the service hosting so far, it's the personal site of someone who works at a Canonical partner. It looks to me like he's trying to get someone else to pick up the intermediary role by providing an example.
2. Re:This doesn't solve *anything* by dominux · 2012-12-30 21:48 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Hi, I am Alan and I wrote it. I am not trying to get anyone else to pick up the intermediary role, I kind of like the idea of the floods of money pouring into my Amazon account, however I wanted to point out that other people have got the software freedom to fork the front end and run their own back end and do that. For the record, the back end uses the Amazon API PHP library and has boilerplate code to set it up, including the super sekrit API keys that I can't include in an open source client then after the boilerplate there are basically two lines of active code:
  $response = $amazonEcs->category($type)->responseGroup('Medium')->search($searchquery);
  echo json_encode($response->Items);
  so it just spits out the "Items" array from the JSON it gets from Amazon as JSON.
  It isn't a personal site as such, it is one of our company servers running at Hetzner in Germany. I am a joint owner of the company so you could say it is mine :)
3. Re:This doesn't solve *anything* by dominux · 2012-12-30 23:41 · Score: 2
  
  ah, fair point. I guess I was expecting people to be able to connect the dots a bit better. I will add the relevant info to the root page of the web service. It was an afterthought putting anything there other than a 404 error to be honest. Libertus Solutions is my company and if you take the products bit off the front of the URL you get to the contact details and so on. I just flung up the web service to make the client work. The back end is trivial, it reads the query string, uses boilerplate code to set up the amazon web services connection, gets a datastructure from Amazon and spits the results part of that structure straight out again. The only reason it isn't published is that it includes the non-shareable API keys, I might split those out into a separate file so I can publish it. If I could have done without the intermediary and got the client to hit Amazon directly I would have done, but that would require everyone who wanted to use it to register as an Amazon API developer (giving up *lots* of privacy).
  At the moment it is doing the default logging of requests to /var/log/apache2/access.log because I haven't bothered to turn that off yet. I fully intend to do so because I don't want the log data because someone might legally demand it if I have it and I don't want to have to pay to defend my refusal to hand it over. I would rather not have it. I might get the back end to update some counters so I have some kind of daily load indicator but I certainly don't want to know what people are searching for.
  I will get a report from Amazon about what products I have earned commission on if people purchase through my affiliate ID. If you change the affiliate ID to some other value then someone else will get those reports so do bear that in mind. If you remove the affiliate ID then I will insert mine on the server side, (or Amazon get the commission and they are more evil than me so it is for your own good) but if you really want to give nobody the commission (or give it to Amazon) then put garbage in the affiliate ID and the only evil organisation that will know what you are up to is Amazon itself.
4. Re:This doesn't solve *anything* by dominux · 2012-12-30 23:49 · Score: 1
  
  better now? I don't know what else you would like to see in a privacy statement but suggestions are welcome.
5. Re:This doesn't solve *anything* by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-31 02:32 · Score: 0
  
  PHP? Come on, use JavaScript like the rest of the GNOME shell extension developers.
6. Re:This doesn't solve *anything* by gbjbaanb · 2012-12-31 03:30 · Score: 1
  
  For the record, the back end uses the Amazon API PHP library and has boilerplate code to set it up, including the super sekrit API keys that I can't include in an open source client
  hmm, but would it have been better to include a placeholder config where the user puts their own super secret Amazon keys in the front end and runs it entirely for themselves?
7. Re:This doesn't solve *anything* by dominux · 2012-12-31 03:47 · Score: 1
  
  That would mean everyone who wants to use it would have to register as an Amazon API developer themselves - and the registration process is a bit more involved than setting up an Amazon shopping account or even an affiliate account. You have to declare what you are developing and give them a URL to your site and other things. I could have a preference setting where people put their API codes which would then get passed to the web service and then on to Amazon, however that doesn't actually deliver any benefit whatsoever and it means it exposes their secret API codes to me (or to my server or whatever backend server they are using). You could run a local back end server and point the search client at localhost. I might write some instructions on doing that.
8. Re:This doesn't solve *anything* by greg1104 · 2012-12-31 03:57 · Score: 1
  
  Getting an Amazon AWS key requires providing a credit card and accepting some unknown future charges for what your programs do. It's not a risk I would advise anyone to do just to make shopping easier. The key I use is owned by a LLC for example, and I was uncomfortable personally signing that agreement. Accordingly, there is some value to a software developer taking on the risk there, which you get to eat along with the expectation of profit. If the code was distributed without the matching server-side, and you had to substitute your own key to make it work, that wouldn't have been nearly as useful.
GNOME Shell by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-30 19:46 · Score: 5, Funny

Gnome Shell's shopping lens can be intuitively accessed by anyone! Just press your windows key three times quickly and then Ctrl-S, then shuffle through the windows until you find the lens interface! Click it and a whizzy animation will move the input box to a random monitor. Enter your first letter! A whizzy animation will confirm your letter's input and close the window. Repeat the process for the second letter of your search term until it is complete! Congratulations, you just netted yourself a bargain!
1. Re:GNOME Shell by aliquis · 2012-12-31 00:33 · Score: 1
  
  Video?
  (With keystrikes.)
Are we really this lazy? by Osgeld · 2012-12-30 20:12 · Score: 4, Funny

where opening a browser to shop the entire world from our toilet is just too much?
Slahvertisment? by udippel · 2012-12-30 20:47 · Score: 4, Insightful

The world (and dog) seem to agree that Mark Shuttleworth screwed it up with his money-spinning exercise of searching Amazon instead of your own machine, when making an innocuous search.
Many of us started to hate Unity for that 'feature'.
And now someone comes along and offers an extension to the likewise hated Gnome3 that compounds its ugliness.
How is that newsworthy?
1. Re:Slahvertisment? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-30 21:09 · Score: 1
  
  How is that newsworthy?
  Err,
  because it shows that this 'dickish' money-spinning behaviour on the part of Linux/Unix programmers which some of us thought only to be a local infection in one OS distribution, now has the potential to spread to many OS distributions (depending on sheeple & greed factors) via a desktop 'trojan'?
2. Re:Slahvertisment? by dominux · 2012-12-30 22:02 · Score: 1
  
  dunno if I should be feeding this comment, but here goes.
  Unity is based on Gnome 3. Gnome Shell is based on Gnome 3. They are both shells for Gnome 3, but Unity is not Gnome Shell.
  Gnome Shell was pretty grim once, (as was Unity) it is now really really good, and Unity is OK. Try it. I am guessing you haven't used Unity much either.
  You can email Mark if you want to, or catch him on IRC he is quite responsive.
3. Re:Slahvertisment? by udippel · 2012-12-30 22:25 · Score: 1
  
  Assumptions ... assumptions ... ... wrong assumptions. I am using Unity on a daily basis. First.
  I have tried Gnome3, again, for an hour or so, yesterday. Second.
  What was your line of reasoning again?
4. Re:Slahvertisment? by dominux · 2012-12-30 23:50 · Score: 0
  
  wow, thanks!
5. Re:Slahvertisment? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-31 01:02 · Score: 0
  
  I believe his line of reasoning is that people who use Unity are ignorant shits, and you proved that beautifully by opening your dumbass mouth.
  Excellent work, ubuttfuck.
6. Re:Slahvertisment? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-31 01:42 · Score: 0
  
  Unity is based on Compiz.
7. Re:Slahvertisment? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-31 08:31 · Score: 0
  
  How is that newsworthy?
  It might be newsworthy to Shuttleworth. As a business plan, his search/data_leakage plan is not unlike the infamous $999.99 "I Am Rich" app:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich
  Which is to say, he is pissed away a lot of rep for an easily reproducible and soon-to-be worthless application.
  When anybody can add referral apps, then soon everyone will and the value of the idea continues to fractionate. More so, if it becomes sufficiently successful, the ultimate fractionation can come directly from Amazon.
  Shuttleworth isn't really generating leads for Amazon in a meaningful sense. He's not like Oprah. His following may be of similar magnitude but I doubt he can push many techies to buy something in particular. Nobody will court him (the online retailers might, but that just proves who is the product and who is the customer).
I sense.. by TechyImmigrant · 2012-12-30 20:59 · Score: 4, Insightful

I sense a problem that didn't need solving.
Any screen space taken up by this feature is an affront to every coder who's ever had to maximize their window to fit more code in the editor's view.

--
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
1. Re:I sense.. by dominux · 2012-12-30 21:49 · Score: 0
  
  This is a reasonable point of view, I just figured that someone was going to do it so it might as well be me - and if it was going to be done I might as well do it as inoffensively as possible!
2. Re:I sense.. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-30 21:53 · Score: 0
  
  "[...] maximize their window to fit more code in the editor's view."
  You're doing it wrong.
3. Re:I sense.. by symbolset · 2012-12-30 23:12 · Score: 1
  
  Meh. I'm less concerned about what this is than where it leads: "Ow my balls!"
  
  --
  Help stamp out iliturcy.
4. Re:I sense.. by arth1 · 2012-12-30 23:32 · Score: 1
  
  This is a reasonable point of view, I just figured that someone was going to do it so it might as well be me - and if it was going to be done I might as well do it as inoffensively as possible!
  What's offending to me is vendor tie-ins in general, and Amaxzon in particular. Some of us still boycott Amazon because of the 1-click patent and other actions limiting the freedom of programmers and admins.
  Any time you tie to a particular vendor, you're doing it wrong. Whether it's making a desktop Facebook, Twitter or Skype app, or a search that goes through Amazon (or any other particular vendor).
  Be open. Be generic. Don't allow for a single line of code to be specific to a specific vendor.
  It will cost you users in the short term, but will benefit us all in the long term.
5. Re:I sense.. by dominux · 2012-12-30 23:57 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  If there was an open vendor neutral API to plug into I would do that. I don't have the resources that google shopping have got to screen scrape loads of stores. I am certainly up for adding more stores, but they have to expose a search API and preferably an affiliate scheme (they don't have to do that, but realistically I am going to prioritise those that do). The code is all GPL v2 so feel free to enhance it to work with multiple APIs and search back ends. I don't *want* to limit it to one vendor.
6. Re:I sense.. by TechyImmigrant · 2012-12-31 04:40 · Score: 1
  
  No I'm not. Whenever I need to see a bit more text, I rush out and buy a bigger monitor.
  
  --
  I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
7. Re:I sense.. by arth1 · 2012-12-31 06:55 · Score: 1
  
  If there was an open vendor neutral API to plug into I would do that.
  Um, there are several. They work against a multitude of shopping systems. They won't give you Amazon searches, because Amazon does not support them - and (and this is the important point) Amazon doesn't have an incentive to adhere to any open API as long as devs are willing to dance to their pipe.
  In other words, well-meaning as your effort is, you make it worse for all of us, supporting vendor tie-ins instead of open standards.
8. Re:I sense.. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-31 08:09 · Score: 0
  
  Um, there are several. They work against a multitude of shopping systems. They won't give you Amazon searches, because Amazon does not support them - and (and this is the important point) Amazon doesn't have an incentive to adhere to any open API as long as devs are willing to dance to their pipe.
  In other words, well-meaning as your effort is, you make it worse for all of us, supporting vendor tie-ins instead of open standards.
  What are the vendor neutral shopping APIs to which you are referring?
9. Re:I sense.. by dominux · 2012-12-31 08:27 · Score: 1
  
  oh, interesting. I wasn't aware of any, but I didn't look massively hard (all those stores with an API that I am aware of were different to each other). Having now looked I am no closer to finding such an animal. Got a link?
putting user in control? can't believe it by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-30 21:24 · Score: 4, Insightful

Configurable? Gnome putting user in control? That's not their spirit. Well, probably they will improve it removing that feature in subsequent releases
1. Re:putting user in control? can't believe it by dominux · 2012-12-30 22:17 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  This is a third party extension that they are hosting on their site for third party extensions. Extensions are how you extend and configure Gnome Shell.
Pathetic. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-30 21:38 · Score: 0

I can't believe this "story" made it onto the front page. This is outright pathetic; the "story" is clearly just advertising.
1. Re:Pathetic. by symbolset · 2012-12-30 23:13 · Score: 1
  
  Wow. Your first day here? Stick around. Some of the natives are friendly - sometimes.
  
  --
  Help stamp out iliturcy.
This should not be hard to do by DrXym · 2012-12-30 22:02 · Score: 1

What Ubuntu did was obviously going to annoy people and there was no need for it either.
Browsers have supported mycroft plugins for years - those things that power the search box in Firefox / Opera etc. It should not be hard to implement them behind a search lens (using an HTML scraper for sites which don't return XML if necessary) and present the results in a uniform way. Or introduce a plugin format v2 which returns richer results and metadata and encourage prominent sites like Wikipedia to support it. Then stick a simple UI in the control panel where plugins can be added, removed or disabled from the lens.
It wouldn't stop Ubuntu offering sponsored search plugins (I expect some default browser plugins to Amazon, ebay etc are affiliate links) but it would mean they reside in a framework where they could be removed easily or disabled.
Lens? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-30 22:49 · Score: 2, Insightful

From what I can see in the screenshots this is just a search function for a specific search domain. Just a search box and search results, looks pretty standard to me. Why do we need a new (or actually reuse an existing) term for this? A 'shopping search engine' is actually clearer than 'shopping lens'. Are we going to call Google, Bing etc. 'web lenses' now? Or does it have to be integrated in the desktop background to be called a 'lens'? Why would that matter?
I'm not opposed to jargon if it actually makes things clearer. But very often it doesn't: many new words or new meanings for existing words seem to be made up for marketing reasons, not because they are better at expressing a meaning. Using such terms adds confusion rather than value as far as I'm concerned.
1. Re:Lens? by dominux · 2012-12-30 23:18 · Score: 1
  
  The Gnome Shell terminology is that this is a search provider. I use the lens terminology because that is the Ubuntu Unity name for the same thing and was the inspiration for it. Also I am quite narcissistic and figured it would get me some attention.
Re:Gnome.. by udippel · 2012-12-30 22:50 · Score: 1

Can someone with mod points minus 1 this shameless advertisement for some Youtube clip showing African Christmas music?
I would guess that our AC poster is none other than Aulnay Cap, the owner of that Youtube channel. A veritable AC!
We do things other than shop by Alain+Williams · 2012-12-30 23:07 · Score: 4, Insightful

Very little of what I do with my PC is about shopping. If I want to do shopping I take some definite action, I don't want the default assumption that I am using my machine because I may want to buy something. I know that we are supposed to live in a consumer society, but this is stupid.
1. Re:We do things other than shop by dominux · 2012-12-30 23:20 · Score: 2
  
  yes, me too. There are quite a lot of more imaginative (and probably better written) extensions on https://extensions.gnome.org/ I would encourage you to have a browse and see what else you can do with your computer. Then buy stuff. This volcano won't hollow itself out you know - I need the commissions.
2. Re:We do things other than shop by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-30 23:24 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  are you some kind of commie?
3. Re:We do things other than shop by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-31 02:42 · Score: 0
  
  I agree. I will use a browser if I want to go shopping online. Do not want it or need it build into my desktop.
4. Re:We do things other than shop by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-31 09:33 · Score: 0
  
  Communism in Ohio. People sharing. Nobody buying stuff. That kind of bullshit.
NOT a shop-a-holic by anonieuweling · 2012-12-30 23:41 · Score: 1

When I want to shop I fire up my browser if it isn't already running.
No need for integration into the desktop without a clear explanation of the added features.
I am NOT a shop-a-holic and I do understand we need to shop less to make the future sustainable.
Super key? huh? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-31 00:41 · Score: 0

What is a super key? Is that part of why people are abandoning Gnome 3?
1. Re:Super key? huh? by dominux · 2012-12-31 01:28 · Score: 2
  
  it is the key that wears it's underpants on the outside.
  Those underpants have got a Windows logo on them for reasons of unspeakable evil.
2. Re:Super key? huh? by VortexCortex · 2012-12-31 02:53 · Score: 1
  
  What is a super key? Is that part of why people are abandoning Gnome 3?
  No, the Super Key is the one with the Towel on it. Towels are Super, and not even a keyboard should be without one.
Re:Gnome.. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-12-31 02:07 · Score: 0

Administrative Contact:
KUBACKI, Arnaud capade.nord@gmail.com
37 Avenue de Savigny
Aulnay-sous-Bois, 93600
France
0621777826
So basically... by blind+biker · 2012-12-31 03:06 · Score: 1

Gnome doesn't want to be left behind Unity in suckiness.

--
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Or we all can continue to use by Stan92057 · 2012-12-31 04:17 · Score: 0

Or we all can continue to use whatever search provider we have been using for the last + years or the trusty phone book.

--
Jack of all trades,master of none