The allure of the movies (extending to other formats like television and online media) is that they offer the consumer a temporary reprieve from the dullness of their own life. It's about bringing a story to life and convincingly so. The moment the media stops convincing the consumer, it's lost it's lustre.
As many have noted, it's not about the CGI per se. It's about bad CGI breaking the immersion that the consumer is seeking in the media. Even when a practical effect is a little primitive, it's very obviously still real, so there's a little more leniency from the audience (but that too can only go so far).
Age of Ultron is a classic example of bad CGI losing the audience before the story even had a chance to get out of the gate. That intro scene hurt my head.
Stating that LILO and GRUB were "confusing and broken", Lennart Poettering has announced that SystemD will take over MBR management. "It's just a small step towards complete system domination", the great leader was heard to muse, "After all, PulseAudio did so well and everyone is loving how much easier SystemD is than init scripts. What could possibly go wrong?".
I only switched to GRUB because of installed defaults and my laziness. LILO was, imo, always simpler, cleaner, made more sense.
GRUB works, but it feels like it's been engineered to be way more than it needs to be, and, in the process, it starts to suck. As an example, I started looking into GRUB theming (hey, a pretty boot screen would be nice). Turns out I could never convince GRUB to use a TTF font and display the table (and items in the table) correctly. That's a feature that may as well not be in there -- if it doesn't work, turf it. I didn't *need* it, but I spent a bit of time trying to get it to work and failing, which I wouldn't have bothered with if it just weren't there. Or there's the interactive boot -- works if you already know by rote all of the GRUB internals, at the currently installed level; completely useless otherwise. That being said, it does still work, and I still use it to select an OS -- I just miss LILO.
Also, LILO was quite explicit about the "you need to run me to update the MBR" ruling. Which I found kind of comforting: if you didn't make the active choice to update your MBR, you didn't make the active choice to break it with a bad config.
Also, diversity leads to better overall design across the spectrum. Any time a competitor is lost, it's sad for the ecosystem as a whole.
So the KB has a few hiccups and reboots and then fails to install. Not the end of the world -- you're back at being logged in with the system asking you to update.
Sucks you don't get the KB, but you can carry on with life until this is fixed. This is no "reboot loop". For one of those, you really need to install a shitty custom Android ROM. True boot loops have no way out for the user without low-level access.
After installing updates, Windows 10 recommends a reboot and/defaults/ to wanting to reboot at some supposedly quiet time like 03h30. But you can just tell it that you'll reboot manually when you feel like it, from the same dialog you had open to confirm the installation of the updates.
If your win10 machine is rebooting "all the time" and you "can't stop it", you're not reading the text in front of you. It's perfectly reasonable to schedule a reboot by default at a quite time if said reboot is required to install updates -- after all, you clicked the "install" button, so you obviously want those updates?
I've used KDE for a while, from 3 through 5. 4 worked really well and when I got the upgrade to 5, I thought that I finally had the perfect desktop - if it worked like 4 and looked like 5, I'd be ecstatic. Unfortunately, I found it to be overall a little sluggish to start and that deteriorated over time to the often reported states of coming out of screensaver to a black screen with cursor for a minute before anything would show; a programs menu which would take 30 seconds to open the first time, no matter how long ago the machine booted - and 1-5 seconds thereafter; to finally booting to a black desktop with just a mouse cursor. Deleting cache files makes the problem simmer down a little, for a while, but they never truly to away and they creep right back up to full size within a few days. I also had the applet that controls wireless refuse to ever connect to my AP after once inadvertently touching the flight mode toggle. I could connect from the cli, but no amount of pushing and prodding on the applet would get me there. Not to mention that this isn't the first time it's the "gpu driver's fault". The built in dark theme only works on machines with great graphics cards. Older machines get a white-on-white panel.
And let's not forget the xembed debacle. Way to force your philosophical outlook on the people who can't change anything - end users.
I don't know what happened, but the kde guys, imo, lost the plot. I've had to switch to xfce to be able to use my desktop. I've ditched Linux for win10 in my laptop and have a fast boot and os. That ditch was done as a rage-quit of KDE because of the aforementioned wireless issues - I just had enough of trying to work around the beautiful, but ultimately brain-damaged plasma5.
Having been (rather recently) roped into the interview process, I can tell you that:
1) Recruiters often get it wrong: since they have no actual knowledge of the required skillset, they have to go on the CV alone; which in itself is very open to manipulation and interpretation 2) Someone may be amazing on paper and then just simply not produce when given a technical test (see #1) 3) Someone may have all of the technical skills but just not align with the culture of the company; for example, our company is big on TDD and dedicated time to learn and improve our skillset during what would otherwise be work time -- both of these 'non-negotiables' in our culture have opponents.
Without reading too deeply, I want to just raise a paw to remind everyone that no-one owes you anything and you don't DESERVE a job. You are granted a place to earn your salary at the discretion of the employer. If the Me-Me-Millenials could just stop for a moment to consider that, that would be great. Some of the older generation has seen that mindset working for the younger generation and thinks they can get away with it too.
On a parallel: if a company really doesn't want you to work there, why are you hung up on forcing them to? Personally, I'd hate to work in an environment where I'd forced myself in, especially when there are (guaranteed) places where you'll be just the right cog in the machine. I've actually left companies where I didn't feel 100% valued based solely on that premise. If you're good enough, you'll place somewhere.
In the case of software, another distributed copy costs the coder nothing. The soda, on the other hand, cost the company > 5 cents, so they made a loss that day. Which is to say that your general gist is completely right (for software): a pirated download represents ZERO lost and a potential for gain as some who get the software for free and try it out will feel obliged to pay for it and will do so; however, without the "free full trial", they never would have even gone down that path.
Would anyone switch from a device and platform where you are the commander of the system to one where you are forced into subservience as a consumer of what has been deemed fit for your consumption?
People are sheeple. I'll never grok this thing called the human race.
Plasma4 worked well on my desktop for a long time. Not perfectly, because nothing is. But better than plasma5. At least there was support for legacy notifications. And autostart worked - I've just figured out that it your autostart entry isn't a.desktop, it won't be run:/. The programs menu launched quicker and recents actually worked instead of throwing a kio error. Don't get me wrong - I'm glad that this is the default somewhere so that this shit and ideology (of how being pretty is more important than the user experience with legacy apps - there's not even a fallback widget for legacy notifications: you have to go back a decade with wmsystray and lose the icons to wherever) will be corrected. Plasma5 is well pretty too. But a functional step up from 4 - no. Sideways perhaps.
Expect the disk to be faster. For the privileged few who bothered to RTFA, you'll understand. The high-level languages used tend to degrade on the specific instructions (string concat) as the number of ops increases; I also wager that this problem is more prevalent on Windows where the memory manager is about as good useful as a clown who thinks he has an eye for fashion. So, distilled, this article should read:
"Researchers find an obtuse way to defy a well-established rule-of-thumb".
Or sometimes, we just listen to our paeds because we don't know better. My paed suggested staying away from peanuts because the "wisdom" at the time was that it might provoke an allergy. I'm not a doctor and I'd prefer to listen to a professional, as I'd prefer my clients to not think that they are master coders who have a clue.
And, in addition, they have the gall to do so before you've even downloaded it. It's not like this is a commercial product I'm likely to have come across in a local hardware store (like iOS, some flavour of Android (which you're paying for with the cost of the device) or Windows). This is a specific Linux distribution which may well rock, but I wouldn't know until I've tried it. And I've tried a plethora of Linux distros which basically converted a blank optical medium into a coaster, before VMs were all the rage.
I use Sleep As Android to wake me up optimally. It uses the accelerometer to estimate and track sleep phase - quite effectively to. But it eats my battery like mad - if I let it track sleep all night long, I can expect a 40-60% drain. It basically can't let the phone go into deep sleep so it can keep on getting accelerometer data. I also have a MiFit band, which cost around $20 with shipping and has a 41mah battery which looks like it's easily going to surpass the expected 30 days of usage per charge. It tracks sleep and steps and gets the heavy lifting to be done by the associated phone app. As an added bonus, it can also vibrate for notifications, which I can control thanks to a community-modified version of the app. It can also give me a simple reading of how far I've walked today via leds.
Long story short, my MiFit beats any step tracker app that someone could come up with, without breaking a sweat.
I have a Galaxy S1 i9000 which has 384mb of RAM, running cm11 (kitkat) better than it ever ran gingerbread. Indeed, it's officially supported by cm11.
Stop gulping down (and propagating) the excuses spewed forth by hardware vendors. Sure, more RAM is better - and the more the merrier - but there is no "can't" in this equation. Hardware vendors are just playing Apple's favorite game: planned obsolescence so you can fork out for another device and toss your current one on the giant ewaste heap to make it the problem of some developing nation so desperate for income they'll take the toxic crap.
I, and others, welcomed the power of the theming engine to overcome the distinct lack of accessibility features in the official client. When your friends and family converse over a common platform, you try to find a way to be a part of that. When a third-party client enables people with suboptimal vision to use the service, that's a good thing. Whatsapp should have rather contacted the plus author to work with them instead of pulling an Apple. One of my friends basically can't use the service any more. All of us are willing to pay when we're finally asked to, so we're not looking to be freeloading brats.
Stop and think for a moment before farting out such a childish response.
That's pretty-much it. Few people are on the Google lifeline, getting updates as they happen. Most are tethered to some vendor who is waiting for all of the minor issues in a major update to be ironed out. Expect the big players (Samsung, HTC, LG) to push updates within the next 6 months. Some of us are on lollipop due to third party roms like Cyanogenmod, but even some super popular third party roms like slim aren't there yet. Even with cm, I have lollipop on my tablet (v500) night but not my handset (i9300).
Low uptake is not due to consumers, but rather due to availability.
Is the collection of garbage-burning super-tankers circling the globe burning the waste's waste to deliver cheap toys and sneakers from China to the developed world. 2.5%? That's nothing in the eye of what these dinosaurs burn. And since they travel in international waters, they don't have to obey any country's emission laws. There are about 20 of them which, together, produce enough emissions to rival all the cars on earth. How about we squash the giants before going after the insects?
It was enough to read a few pages from this book and realise what a pile of crud it is. And how it blatantly discourages girls from being all they can be and actually pursuing careers in comp sci, or indeed, just plain thinking for themselves.
Then I had to read the first few responses which were all like "this is how it is". No! This is how it's been in the past, and that's the LAST FUCKING THING WE WANT TO TEACH GIRLS!.
Fact: girls can code just as well as boys, given the same platforms and understandings. Fact: gender doesn't determine your ability to solve problems and translate those solutions into an intermediatary language which a machine can act upon. Fact: a lot of geek guys don't like these facts because then they have to realise that they aren't inherintly better than all the girls out there.
Girls are taught to be second-class citizens and that needs to stop. If a girl wants to pursue a career in X, then that's great. If she wants to be a stay-at-home mother, that's also great (and a super-noble calling which, as a guy, I would be very hard-pressed to compete with, especially considering existing gender-based pressures). The point is that, after actually reading some of this book, I'm GLAD that it's been pulled and saddened that the rest of the geek community isn't united in solidarity against this kind of trash.
I'm not an super-sensitive person (indeed, I believe a lot of people need to suck it the fuck up), but this book, really, is derogatory. Go read some of it. Barbie is made out to be an airhead who couldn't possibly succeed in life without some male assistance. I call complete bollocks.
Part of the experience there is probably going to be one of mental sharpening.
My suggestion is to take around 10 kata specs with you and three to five languages / environments (I'd recommend python, Ruby, java (or, my preference, a Javascript environment with Karma and so forth) and something eclectic like Haskell or erlang. Use these to hone your discipline and thinking skills. Don't worry about keeping up to date with the latest stuff. But if coding is valuable in your life (and I can understand if it is), an approach like above will help to scratch that itch, keep you sharp and provide a chance to engage in focused practice of discipline.
I never said, nor even suggested that you were ignorant. Your opinion just seemed to be based on outdated experiences. So some feedback, for what it's worth:
1) I have Kubuntu running reliably on 3 very different setups. If win8 is working well for you on your setup and Kubuntu isn't, then it's time to start blaming the hardware manufacturer for not giving a flying fsck about the users and only putting effort into windows drivers. You do remember, after all, that linux drivers are (mostly) done by unpaid people who do so just because they can and care to? Not to say that I don't care about your plight -- PLEASE do email your hardware manufacturers and implore them to solve the situation. It's them that are depriving you of the freedom to use your device as you see fit. In that vein though, I've learned (the hard way) not to buy hardware which isn't mainstream and already well-supported by the FOSS community simply because I don't want to be in that situation. Not to say that I get it right all the time:/ 2) I've installed Kubuntu (and other debian derivatives) with zero issue under VirtualBox. Multiple times. Again, if your virtual machine provider doesn't provide for an environment as supported by the FOSS community, please DO complain loudly to them. You'll be doing everyone a favour. Still, you need to know that VM+*buntu == win, so if that's not your experience, swap out your VM. 3) Every experience I've had under OSX has been one of frustration. To the point that, in addition to my existing base rage against the cost of crapple products for what you get, hardware-wise, I'll go so far as to do whatever I can to discourage someone from getting a Mac simply because the user experience that I've had has been one of terrible frustration. "Close" window titlebar buttons which don't actually close the application. "Maximise" buttons which make the window arbitrarily bigger, but not to the size of the screen. A "POSIX" system which has the terminal buried under layers of tricky-to-traverse menus (layered menus are one of the greatest UX failures ever, imo), and a system which has the intelligence to use the 'file' function to figure out that a.xlsx file is a zipped collection of XML and dump that out to the desktop when a user without MSO double-clicks it, but which provides no feedback about that eventuality. This is UI failure. When the ideal target audience for a Mac (inexperienced user, given laptop for birthday, not a power-user on any platform whatsoever) can't figure out why her mail attachment "won't open" (when it's silenty unzipping to the desktop with every double-click), it's time to give the whole deal another thought. Windows could have done better. A decent Linux distro could have done better, though I'm sure a shitty one wouldn't have.
I really try to be objective and I'm a big proponent of "a tool for a task". But, at no point in the time that I've used OSX, have I ever thought "I could carry on using this", or "Other vendors could learn from this". Multiple times, the phrase "HULK SMASH" has been predominant. YMMV, of course, but the Linux desktop is way less frustrating and way more stable and responsive, as my pre-schooler would attest to -- if he even cared. And he doesn't. And that's the point. It gets out of the way so he can do the stuff he wants to.
Re:Unity is rubbish. Systemd is rubbish
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Ubuntu Turns 10
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· Score: 1
The problem was never that Ubuntu became popular. Geeks everywhere rejoiced!
The problem was simply the Gnome3/Unity fallout which left a lot of users with no easily accessible default desktop. Each has interesting ideas and strengths but neither are the stalwart that Gnome2 was. Anyone who was already on the KDE track with Kubuntu wasn't bothered though... until Canonical dropped official support for Kubuntu.
Personally, I still run Kubuntu. KDE plasma has evolved from a bloated pig into something pretty and acceptably fast. There are still quirks, but they're less than what I have to deal with on any other platform. Kubuntu is my "daily driver", as it were, with a dual-boot to win8 for games (those not found under Linux; a number which is diminishing) and when I really want to use Visual Studio (usually work reasons). I used Mint for a while, but learned the hard way that a distro which recommends a re-installation over an upgrade is a bad choice for a desktop which is expected to be alive no-matter-what.
You obviously haven't visited Penguin land in some time. I suggest you go find a friendly KDE-based distro (like Kubuntu, but there are others) and test your hypothesis again. You may find that you get a better experience at zero cost.
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The allure of the movies (extending to other formats like television and online media) is that they offer the consumer a temporary reprieve from the dullness of their own life. It's about bringing a story to life and convincingly so. The moment the media stops convincing the consumer, it's lost it's lustre.
As many have noted, it's not about the CGI per se. It's about bad CGI breaking the immersion that the consumer is seeking in the media. Even when a practical effect is a little primitive, it's very obviously still real, so there's a little more leniency from the audience (but that too can only go so far).
Age of Ultron is a classic example of bad CGI losing the audience before the story even had a chance to get out of the gate. That intro scene hurt my head.
Stating that LILO and GRUB were "confusing and broken", Lennart Poettering has announced that SystemD will take over MBR management. "It's just a small step towards complete system domination", the great leader was heard to muse, "After all, PulseAudio did so well and everyone is loving how much easier SystemD is than init scripts. What could possibly go wrong?".
I only switched to GRUB because of installed defaults and my laziness. LILO was, imo, always simpler, cleaner, made more sense.
GRUB works, but it feels like it's been engineered to be way more than it needs to be, and, in the process, it starts to suck. As an example, I started looking into GRUB theming (hey, a pretty boot screen would be nice). Turns out I could never convince GRUB to use a TTF font and display the table (and items in the table) correctly. That's a feature that may as well not be in there -- if it doesn't work, turf it. I didn't *need* it, but I spent a bit of time trying to get it to work and failing, which I wouldn't have bothered with if it just weren't there. Or there's the interactive boot -- works if you already know by rote all of the GRUB internals, at the currently installed level; completely useless otherwise. That being said, it does still work, and I still use it to select an OS -- I just miss LILO.
Also, LILO was quite explicit about the "you need to run me to update the MBR" ruling. Which I found kind of comforting: if you didn't make the active choice to update your MBR, you didn't make the active choice to break it with a bad config.
Also, diversity leads to better overall design across the spectrum. Any time a competitor is lost, it's sad for the ecosystem as a whole.
So the KB has a few hiccups and reboots and then fails to install. Not the end of the world -- you're back at being logged in with the system asking you to update.
Sucks you don't get the KB, but you can carry on with life until this is fixed. This is no "reboot loop". For one of those, you really need to install a shitty custom Android ROM. True boot loops have no way out for the user without low-level access.
Rubbish.
After installing updates, Windows 10 recommends a reboot and /defaults/ to wanting to reboot at some supposedly quiet time like 03h30. But you can just tell it that you'll reboot manually when you feel like it, from the same dialog you had open to confirm the installation of the updates.
If your win10 machine is rebooting "all the time" and you "can't stop it", you're not reading the text in front of you. It's perfectly reasonable to schedule a reboot by default at a quite time if said reboot is required to install updates -- after all, you clicked the "install" button, so you obviously want those updates?
I've used KDE for a while, from 3 through 5. 4 worked really well and when I got the upgrade to 5, I thought that I finally had the perfect desktop - if it worked like 4 and looked like 5, I'd be ecstatic.
Unfortunately, I found it to be overall a little sluggish to start and that deteriorated over time to the often reported states of coming out of screensaver to a black screen with cursor for a minute before anything would show; a programs menu which would take 30 seconds to open the first time, no matter how long ago the machine booted - and 1-5 seconds thereafter; to finally booting to a black desktop with just a mouse cursor. Deleting cache files makes the problem simmer down a little, for a while, but they never truly to away and they creep right back up to full size within a few days.
I also had the applet that controls wireless refuse to ever connect to my AP after once inadvertently touching the flight mode toggle. I could connect from the cli, but no amount of pushing and prodding on the applet would get me there.
Not to mention that this isn't the first time it's the "gpu driver's fault". The built in dark theme only works on machines with great graphics cards. Older machines get a white-on-white panel.
And let's not forget the xembed debacle. Way to force your philosophical outlook on the people who can't change anything - end users.
I don't know what happened, but the kde guys, imo, lost the plot. I've had to switch to xfce to be able to use my desktop. I've ditched Linux for win10 in my laptop and have a fast boot and os. That ditch was done as a rage-quit of KDE because of the aforementioned wireless issues - I just had enough of trying to work around the beautiful, but ultimately brain-damaged plasma5.
My laws say "no stabby".
Heart, back, dick, I don't care. NO. STABBY.
Having been (rather recently) roped into the interview process, I can tell you that:
1) Recruiters often get it wrong: since they have no actual knowledge of the required skillset, they have to go on the CV alone; which in itself is very open to manipulation and interpretation
2) Someone may be amazing on paper and then just simply not produce when given a technical test (see #1)
3) Someone may have all of the technical skills but just not align with the culture of the company; for example, our company is big on TDD and dedicated time to learn and improve our skillset during what would otherwise be work time -- both of these 'non-negotiables' in our culture have opponents.
Without reading too deeply, I want to just raise a paw to remind everyone that no-one owes you anything and you don't DESERVE a job. You are granted a place to earn your salary at the discretion of the employer. If the Me-Me-Millenials could just stop for a moment to consider that, that would be great. Some of the older generation has seen that mindset working for the younger generation and thinks they can get away with it too.
On a parallel: if a company really doesn't want you to work there, why are you hung up on forcing them to? Personally, I'd hate to work in an environment where I'd forced myself in, especially when there are (guaranteed) places where you'll be just the right cog in the machine. I've actually left companies where I didn't feel 100% valued based solely on that premise. If you're good enough, you'll place somewhere.
Just one little problem with your analogy:
In the case of software, another distributed copy costs the coder nothing. The soda, on the other hand, cost the company > 5 cents, so they made a loss that day. Which is to say that your general gist is completely right (for software): a pirated download represents ZERO lost and a potential for gain as some who get the software for free and try it out will feel obliged to pay for it and will do so; however, without the "free full trial", they never would have even gone down that path.
Would anyone switch from a device and platform where you are the commander of the system to one where you are forced into subservience as a consumer of what has been deemed fit for your consumption?
People are sheeple. I'll never grok this thing called the human race.
Plasma4 worked well on my desktop for a long time. Not perfectly, because nothing is. But better than plasma5. At least there was support for legacy notifications. And autostart worked - I've just figured out that it your autostart entry isn't a .desktop, it won't be run: /. The programs menu launched quicker and recents actually worked instead of throwing a kio error.
Don't get me wrong - I'm glad that this is the default somewhere so that this shit and ideology (of how being pretty is more important than the user experience with legacy apps - there's not even a fallback widget for legacy notifications: you have to go back a decade with wmsystray and lose the icons to wherever) will be corrected. Plasma5 is well pretty too. But a functional step up from 4 - no. Sideways perhaps.
So if the plan sounds insanely stupid... perhaps it's not the plan?
Perhaps it's time to stop hating on BillG just because he's not *nix-ey enough? Perhaps it's time to stop feeding the conspiracy theorists? Perhaps?
Naw, what am I thinking. This is /., home of the terminally insane.
Expect the disk to be faster. For the privileged few who bothered to RTFA, you'll understand. The high-level languages used tend to degrade on the specific instructions (string concat) as the number of ops increases; I also wager that this problem is more prevalent on Windows where the memory manager is about as good useful as a clown who thinks he has an eye for fashion. So, distilled, this article should read:
"Researchers find an obtuse way to defy a well-established rule-of-thumb".
Bravo. Or not.
Or sometimes, we just listen to our paeds because we don't know better. My paed suggested staying away from peanuts because the "wisdom" at the time was that it might provoke an allergy. I'm not a doctor and I'd prefer to listen to a professional, as I'd prefer my clients to not think that they are master coders who have a clue.
And, in addition, they have the gall to do so before you've even downloaded it. It's not like this is a commercial product I'm likely to have come across in a local hardware store (like iOS, some flavour of Android (which you're paying for with the cost of the device) or Windows). This is a specific Linux distribution which may well rock, but I wouldn't know until I've tried it. And I've tried a plethora of Linux distros which basically converted a blank optical medium into a coaster, before VMs were all the rage.
I use Sleep As Android to wake me up optimally. It uses the accelerometer to estimate and track sleep phase - quite effectively to. But it eats my battery like mad - if I let it track sleep all night long, I can expect a 40-60% drain. It basically can't let the phone go into deep sleep so it can keep on getting accelerometer data.
I also have a MiFit band, which cost around $20 with shipping and has a 41mah battery which looks like it's easily going to surpass the expected 30 days of usage per charge. It tracks sleep and steps and gets the heavy lifting to be done by the associated phone app. As an added bonus, it can also vibrate for notifications, which I can control thanks to a community-modified version of the app. It can also give me a simple reading of how far I've walked today via leds.
Long story short, my MiFit beats any step tracker app that someone could come up with, without breaking a sweat.
I have a Galaxy S1 i9000 which has 384mb of RAM, running cm11 (kitkat) better than it ever ran gingerbread. Indeed, it's officially supported by cm11.
Stop gulping down (and propagating) the excuses spewed forth by hardware vendors. Sure, more RAM is better - and the more the merrier - but there is no "can't" in this equation. Hardware vendors are just playing Apple's favorite game: planned obsolescence so you can fork out for another device and toss your current one on the giant ewaste heap to make it the problem of some developing nation so desperate for income they'll take the toxic crap.
I, and others, welcomed the power of the theming engine to overcome the distinct lack of accessibility features in the official client. When your friends and family converse over a common platform, you try to find a way to be a part of that. When a third-party client enables people with suboptimal vision to use the service, that's a good thing. Whatsapp should have rather contacted the plus author to work with them instead of pulling an Apple. One of my friends basically can't use the service any more. All of us are willing to pay when we're finally asked to, so we're not looking to be freeloading brats.
Stop and think for a moment before farting out such a childish response.
That's pretty-much it. Few people are on the Google lifeline, getting updates as they happen. Most are tethered to some vendor who is waiting for all of the minor issues in a major update to be ironed out. Expect the big players (Samsung, HTC, LG) to push updates within the next 6 months. Some of us are on lollipop due to third party roms like Cyanogenmod, but even some super popular third party roms like slim aren't there yet. Even with cm, I have lollipop on my tablet (v500) night but not my handset (i9300).
Low uptake is not due to consumers, but rather due to availability.
Is the collection of garbage-burning super-tankers circling the globe burning the waste's waste to deliver cheap toys and sneakers from China to the developed world. 2.5%? That's nothing in the eye of what these dinosaurs burn. And since they travel in international waters, they don't have to obey any country's emission laws. There are about 20 of them which, together, produce enough emissions to rival all the cars on earth. How about we squash the giants before going after the insects?
It was enough to read a few pages from this book and realise what a pile of crud it is. And how it blatantly discourages girls from being all they can be and actually pursuing careers in comp sci, or indeed, just plain thinking for themselves.
Then I had to read the first few responses which were all like "this is how it is". No! This is how it's been in the past, and that's the LAST FUCKING THING WE WANT TO TEACH GIRLS!.
Fact: girls can code just as well as boys, given the same platforms and understandings. Fact: gender doesn't determine your ability to solve problems and translate those solutions into an intermediatary language which a machine can act upon. Fact: a lot of geek guys don't like these facts because then they have to realise that they aren't inherintly better than all the girls out there.
Girls are taught to be second-class citizens and that needs to stop. If a girl wants to pursue a career in X, then that's great. If she wants to be a stay-at-home mother, that's also great (and a super-noble calling which, as a guy, I would be very hard-pressed to compete with, especially considering existing gender-based pressures). The point is that, after actually reading some of this book, I'm GLAD that it's been pulled and saddened that the rest of the geek community isn't united in solidarity against this kind of trash.
I'm not an super-sensitive person (indeed, I believe a lot of people need to suck it the fuck up), but this book, really, is derogatory. Go read some of it. Barbie is made out to be an airhead who couldn't possibly succeed in life without some male assistance. I call complete bollocks.
Part of the experience there is probably going to be one of mental sharpening.
My suggestion is to take around 10 kata specs with you and three to five languages / environments (I'd recommend python, Ruby, java (or, my preference, a Javascript environment with Karma and so forth) and something eclectic like Haskell or erlang. Use these to hone your discipline and thinking skills. Don't worry about keeping up to date with the latest stuff. But if coding is valuable in your life (and I can understand if it is), an approach like above will help to scratch that itch, keep you sharp and provide a chance to engage in focused practice of discipline.
I never said, nor even suggested that you were ignorant. Your opinion just seemed to be based on outdated experiences. So some feedback, for what it's worth:
1) I have Kubuntu running reliably on 3 very different setups. If win8 is working well for you on your setup and Kubuntu isn't, then it's time to start blaming the hardware manufacturer for not giving a flying fsck about the users and only putting effort into windows drivers. You do remember, after all, that linux drivers are (mostly) done by unpaid people who do so just because they can and care to? Not to say that I don't care about your plight -- PLEASE do email your hardware manufacturers and implore them to solve the situation. It's them that are depriving you of the freedom to use your device as you see fit. In that vein though, I've learned (the hard way) not to buy hardware which isn't mainstream and already well-supported by the FOSS community simply because I don't want to be in that situation. Not to say that I get it right all the time :/ .xlsx file is a zipped collection of XML and dump that out to the desktop when a user without MSO double-clicks it, but which provides no feedback about that eventuality. This is UI failure. When the ideal target audience for a Mac (inexperienced user, given laptop for birthday, not a power-user on any platform whatsoever) can't figure out why her mail attachment "won't open" (when it's silenty unzipping to the desktop with every double-click), it's time to give the whole deal another thought. Windows could have done better. A decent Linux distro could have done better, though I'm sure a shitty one wouldn't have.
2) I've installed Kubuntu (and other debian derivatives) with zero issue under VirtualBox. Multiple times. Again, if your virtual machine provider doesn't provide for an environment as supported by the FOSS community, please DO complain loudly to them. You'll be doing everyone a favour. Still, you need to know that VM+*buntu == win, so if that's not your experience, swap out your VM.
3) Every experience I've had under OSX has been one of frustration. To the point that, in addition to my existing base rage against the cost of crapple products for what you get, hardware-wise, I'll go so far as to do whatever I can to discourage someone from getting a Mac simply because the user experience that I've had has been one of terrible frustration. "Close" window titlebar buttons which don't actually close the application. "Maximise" buttons which make the window arbitrarily bigger, but not to the size of the screen. A "POSIX" system which has the terminal buried under layers of tricky-to-traverse menus (layered menus are one of the greatest UX failures ever, imo), and a system which has the intelligence to use the 'file' function to figure out that a
I really try to be objective and I'm a big proponent of "a tool for a task". But, at no point in the time that I've used OSX, have I ever thought "I could carry on using this", or "Other vendors could learn from this". Multiple times, the phrase "HULK SMASH" has been predominant. YMMV, of course, but the Linux desktop is way less frustrating and way more stable and responsive, as my pre-schooler would attest to -- if he even cared. And he doesn't. And that's the point. It gets out of the way so he can do the stuff he wants to.
The problem was never that Ubuntu became popular. Geeks everywhere rejoiced!
The problem was simply the Gnome3/Unity fallout which left a lot of users with no easily accessible default desktop. Each has interesting ideas and strengths but neither are the stalwart that Gnome2 was. Anyone who was already on the KDE track with Kubuntu wasn't bothered though... until Canonical dropped official support for Kubuntu.
Personally, I still run Kubuntu. KDE plasma has evolved from a bloated pig into something pretty and acceptably fast. There are still quirks, but they're less than what I have to deal with on any other platform. Kubuntu is my "daily driver", as it were, with a dual-boot to win8 for games (those not found under Linux; a number which is diminishing) and when I really want to use Visual Studio (usually work reasons). I used Mint for a while, but learned the hard way that a distro which recommends a re-installation over an upgrade is a bad choice for a desktop which is expected to be alive no-matter-what.
You obviously haven't visited Penguin land in some time. I suggest you go find a friendly KDE-based distro (like Kubuntu, but there are others) and test your hypothesis again. You may find that you get a better experience at zero cost.