It's neither. The reason is because the environments we live in have become less dangerous. There's only so many hours in the day to worry about things, so the more dangerous things take priority. As we've removed more and more dangers through scientific and social progress, it has freed up room in our busy schedules to worry about less significant things.
Think of it as a Maslow-stylehierarchy of risks. You only start worrying about things higher on the hierarchy when you no longer have to worry about the things beneath it. At the bottom are things like "being eaten by bears." Then above that is "plague." Then above that is "being crushed by industrial machinery." And then above that is "peanut allergy."
1) WTF does atheism have to do with cracking down on knockoff handbags?
2) The problem with China's governing "no-bullshit-style atheists" is that if you disagree with them, you disappear off the face of the earth. You may not have a problem with that, since you agree with what they're doing today. But it'll probably seem a lot less appealing if you find yourself disagreeing with them tomorrow.
No, it was because of the crappy hardware. The first generation of WebOS phones (which Palm desperately needed to be a hit, to bring in enough cash to keep them viable) were amazingly shoddy hardware-wise. I bought a Pre on launch week and ended up having it replaced TWICE by Sprint within a month of purchase because of hardware failures. And these weren't weird esoteric issues either, but basic stuff that any QA department worth the name should have caught; one of the Pres I got, for instance, simply couldn't secure its battery in place properly -- the battery compartment was a hair larger than the battery itself -- leading to the phone just shutting down in the middle of a call when the battery slid out of position. Lots of others had the same experience, which killed any chance of early-adopter word-of-mouth generating more sales. Palm eventually got the hardware problems (mostly) sorted, but by that point it was too late; the high defect rates had burned their rep both with customers, who didn't want to buy a phone that was likely to be a brick, and with carriers, who didn't want to be stuck having to service all those returns.
Google opened the source of their Windows package manager (under the Apache license) a while back, so presumably you could use it to roll your own Google Pack if you wanted to. No idea how much work that would require, though.
You're using the term "third-party software" in a difference sense than bigstrat2003 was. You mean it in the sense of "anything other than the kernel". He/she meant it in the sense of "anything that didn't come with your distro". Big difference. And in this case your definition isn't as accurate, since from the user's perspective the question is "can I mount ISOs after installing the operating system without having to acquire any other tools?" And until this announcement the answer for Linux was yes, while for Windows it was no.
I am fond of webOS(application base is tiny; but the interface is actually quite well thought out. The "cards" work quite well. Hell, maybe team Google will pick up their smoldering remains at the firesale and polish up the 'chromebooks' with some of the UI touches...)
She can type in Firefox and VIOLA there it is, no clicking on menus or anything. To further this, she needed to scan something and, according to her, she typed in "scanner" and VIOLA XSane opened up and she could scan whateverthehell it was she needed.
They say "cannot sit on Firefox 4.x" like it's some universal law or something. Are they going to send goons out to my house to forcibly click the upgrade button?
No, they're going to stop requiring a "click of the upgrade button" at all. When you launch Firefox it will silently update to the latest version automatically, no user intervention (or goons) required.
anyone with subs and torpedoes would sink the country, but only States can afford those kind of weapons
Not true -- narcotics syndicates have started building/buying submarines to smuggle drugs in, for instance. They're not typically equipped to survive a stand-up fight with a surface vessel, but adding a torpedo tube to hit a fixed platform wouldn't be a huge leap. Or hell, just use the submarine as a transport (which negates your radar) and have it drop off frogmen who attach demolition charges to the supports of your offshore platform; then you can hold the whole thing to ransom under the threat of blowing the charges if they don't pay up.
Pirates only have AK-47s and RPGs, and anyone can defend against those.
Generally true, but that's because when you're raiding transports and cruise ships anything bigger would be economically inefficient, not because they couldn't get anything bigger. The world is awash in weaponry. If there was enough money (or ransomable people) to be had by raiding your offshore platform, they could easily arm up as needed.
Every Christmas it's the same story, the kids moping dejectedly around the tree because Santa didn't bring them Visual Studio...
Re:Holding off using it for other reasons
on
Hard Truths About HTML5
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· Score: 4, Informative
XML/XHTML was written for the parsers. HTML5 was written for web developers.
I'm a web developer who was also a member of the W3C's HTML Working Group (the group where the HTML5 spec was hammered out) during the development of HTML5, and I can tell you that if you believe that HTML5 was written for web developers, you are wrong. HTML5 was written by and for browser vendors -- Google, Apple, Mozilla, Opera, and (somewhat) Microsoft. The opinions of other Web stakeholders were of minimal concern. Concerns about the spec raised in the WG by anyone who wasn't a browser implementer were routinely shouted down with threats to withdraw from the W3C process completely by those who were. Some who advanced concerns, like accessibility professionals, were actually derided in quite personal terms by representatives of the browser vendors, both in official WG communications and in their own private back channels (like IRC), which invariably leaked. (Here's a good writeup of some of the friction that existed in the WG between browser vendors and everybody else.)
There are a lot of things in HTML5 that I'm looking forward to being able to use, but if you're a web developer you shouldn't kid yourself into thinking that HTML5 was written for you. It wasn't. Almost every decision made in the development of HTML5 was made to make Google's life easier, not yours.
Because (assuming they're writing it as a desktop app and not a web app), they would have to decide whether to write Quicken for Linux using GTK (the GNOME UI toolkit, which can look sketchy in KDE), Qt (the KDE toolkit, which can look sketchy in GNOME), or some other one entirely (which looks sketchy everywhere).
For the purposes of discussions like this, though, when someone says "desktop" they're talking about a category that includes laptops. "Desktop" in this sense means a general-purpose computing device with a keyboard and a pointer and an operating system that allows the user to install whatever software they wish. From this perspective, your laptop is just a desktop that happens to be pick-up-able.
The distinction isn't between desktops and laptops, it's between "desktops," as described above, and mobile devices such as phones and tablets. "Mobile devices," in this context, are distinct from "desktops" in that they trade away the keyboard and pointer for increased portability and simplicity of use, and the ability to install software from untrusted sources for increased reliability.
Interestingly, Apple before the Second Coming of Jobs had one of the same problems Google does today: too many products, forcing them to spread their resources too thin to support them all. Apple in the 1990s had an incredible profusion of different flavors of Mac; one of Jobs' first big decisions was simplifying it down to four key product lines and throwing the rest out. (Here's video of Jobs himself explaining the situation at the 1998 Macworld keynote.) It angered a lot of people at the time, but that decision was a big part of what started Apple's turnaround.
It's really better to think of many (most?) of Google's "products" as research projects, and remember that in many cases those "failed products" end up as parts or foundations for future products...
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Except that HP doesn't want to be a hardware company anymore.
Native HTML5. Funky, dirty, native HTML5.
It's neither. The reason is because the environments we live in have become less dangerous. There's only so many hours in the day to worry about things, so the more dangerous things take priority. As we've removed more and more dangers through scientific and social progress, it has freed up room in our busy schedules to worry about less significant things.
Think of it as a Maslow-style hierarchy of risks. You only start worrying about things higher on the hierarchy when you no longer have to worry about the things beneath it. At the bottom are things like "being eaten by bears." Then above that is "plague." Then above that is "being crushed by industrial machinery." And then above that is "peanut allergy."
1) WTF does atheism have to do with cracking down on knockoff handbags?
2) The problem with China's governing "no-bullshit-style atheists" is that if you disagree with them, you disappear off the face of the earth. You may not have a problem with that, since you agree with what they're doing today. But it'll probably seem a lot less appealing if you find yourself disagreeing with them tomorrow.
No, it was because of the crappy hardware. The first generation of WebOS phones (which Palm desperately needed to be a hit, to bring in enough cash to keep them viable) were amazingly shoddy hardware-wise. I bought a Pre on launch week and ended up having it replaced TWICE by Sprint within a month of purchase because of hardware failures. And these weren't weird esoteric issues either, but basic stuff that any QA department worth the name should have caught; one of the Pres I got, for instance, simply couldn't secure its battery in place properly -- the battery compartment was a hair larger than the battery itself -- leading to the phone just shutting down in the middle of a call when the battery slid out of position. Lots of others had the same experience, which killed any chance of early-adopter word-of-mouth generating more sales. Palm eventually got the hardware problems (mostly) sorted, but by that point it was too late; the high defect rates had burned their rep both with customers, who didn't want to buy a phone that was likely to be a brick, and with carriers, who didn't want to be stuck having to service all those returns.
Finally, the NSA's secret plan to eliminate Julian Assange is revealed!
Google opened the source of their Windows package manager (under the Apache license) a while back, so presumably you could use it to roll your own Google Pack if you wanted to. No idea how much work that would require, though.
You're using the term "third-party software" in a difference sense than bigstrat2003 was. You mean it in the sense of "anything other than the kernel". He/she meant it in the sense of "anything that didn't come with your distro". Big difference. And in this case your definition isn't as accurate, since from the user's perspective the question is "can I mount ISOs after installing the operating system without having to acquire any other tools?" And until this announcement the answer for Linux was yes, while for Windows it was no.
Google's one step ahead of you :-D When Palm sold to HP, Google moved in and lured away the guy who designed the webOS user interface, Mathias Duarte. His current job title there is "Director, Android User Experience", so it's safe to assume that we'll see some of the same ideas that animated webOS making their way into the Android UI, if not their specific implementations.
Yup, SuperPoke is on its way out. And the Pokers are piiiiiiiiiiissed.
If only there had been some reliable, full-featured way to do this already...
Which is what everyone already says about GIMP anyway.
There's an effort underway to make a Paint.NET-alike for Linux, but it's currently extremely rough. Which is too bad, because Paint.NET on Linux would be nice.
No, they're going to stop requiring a "click of the upgrade button" at all. When you launch Firefox it will silently update to the latest version automatically, no user intervention (or goons) required.
If you want to get more recent versions into your LTS system, Mozilla operates a PPA that you can add to your software sources that will bring the most recent stable version of Firefox and Thunderbird into your next system update.
Not true -- narcotics syndicates have started building/buying submarines to smuggle drugs in, for instance. They're not typically equipped to survive a stand-up fight with a surface vessel, but adding a torpedo tube to hit a fixed platform wouldn't be a huge leap. Or hell, just use the submarine as a transport (which negates your radar) and have it drop off frogmen who attach demolition charges to the supports of your offshore platform; then you can hold the whole thing to ransom under the threat of blowing the charges if they don't pay up.
Generally true, but that's because when you're raiding transports and cruise ships anything bigger would be economically inefficient, not because they couldn't get anything bigger. The world is awash in weaponry. If there was enough money (or ransomable people) to be had by raiding your offshore platform, they could easily arm up as needed.
Because kids love IDEs!
Every Christmas it's the same story, the kids moping dejectedly around the tree because Santa didn't bring them Visual Studio...
I'm a web developer who was also a member of the W3C's HTML Working Group (the group where the HTML5 spec was hammered out) during the development of HTML5, and I can tell you that if you believe that HTML5 was written for web developers, you are wrong. HTML5 was written by and for browser vendors -- Google, Apple, Mozilla, Opera, and (somewhat) Microsoft. The opinions of other Web stakeholders were of minimal concern. Concerns about the spec raised in the WG by anyone who wasn't a browser implementer were routinely shouted down with threats to withdraw from the W3C process completely by those who were. Some who advanced concerns, like accessibility professionals, were actually derided in quite personal terms by representatives of the browser vendors, both in official WG communications and in their own private back channels (like IRC), which invariably leaked. (Here's a good writeup of some of the friction that existed in the WG between browser vendors and everybody else.)
There are a lot of things in HTML5 that I'm looking forward to being able to use, but if you're a web developer you shouldn't kid yourself into thinking that HTML5 was written for you. It wasn't. Almost every decision made in the development of HTML5 was made to make Google's life easier, not yours.
DOS won that fight, you know...
Because (assuming they're writing it as a desktop app and not a web app), they would have to decide whether to write Quicken for Linux using GTK (the GNOME UI toolkit, which can look sketchy in KDE), Qt (the KDE toolkit, which can look sketchy in GNOME), or some other one entirely (which looks sketchy everywhere).
For the purposes of discussions like this, though, when someone says "desktop" they're talking about a category that includes laptops. "Desktop" in this sense means a general-purpose computing device with a keyboard and a pointer and an operating system that allows the user to install whatever software they wish. From this perspective, your laptop is just a desktop that happens to be pick-up-able.
The distinction isn't between desktops and laptops, it's between "desktops," as described above, and mobile devices such as phones and tablets. "Mobile devices," in this context, are distinct from "desktops" in that they trade away the keyboard and pointer for increased portability and simplicity of use, and the ability to install software from untrusted sources for increased reliability.
Interestingly, Apple before the Second Coming of Jobs had one of the same problems Google does today: too many products, forcing them to spread their resources too thin to support them all. Apple in the 1990s had an incredible profusion of different flavors of Mac; one of Jobs' first big decisions was simplifying it down to four key product lines and throwing the rest out. (Here's video of Jobs himself explaining the situation at the 1998 Macworld keynote.) It angered a lot of people at the time, but that decision was a big part of what started Apple's turnaround.
Google appears to disagree: under Larry Page's leadership, they have begun pulling back on the "throw lots of things against the wall and see which ones stick" strategy.
No it doesn't. Java is distributed for free. Oracle doesn't do free. Oracle doesn't do anything that doesn't make them money.
This may seem wrongheaded, but it's worth remembering that Oracle is still in business and Sun is not.
Linus used to be a KDE user, but the KDE 4 debacle drove him to switch to GNOME.