at his funeral (in his 70's) my sister and I found out he had three girlfriends at the time he died (no, that wasn't the cause:). At one point one of them took me aside and told me how while taking a break during sex she had ridden him naked around the living room and patio...
For sure that's one of the top ten things you should tell the children of your dead lover at his funeral...:D
Hold on. let me run this by you: Ghostbusters 3 starring Steve Martin and only Steve Martin. Maybe a cameo by Martin Lawrence for the hell of it.
How about we make both Steve Martin and Martin Lawrence members of the new Ghostbusters team - and then round out the cast with Chris Tucker and Rob Schneider?
OTOH: Tail in linux works fantastic and fast. A "Tail" function in Powershell is slower then molasses.
Here was my test:
Tail = less then a second
Powershell = about 5 minutes
Python (for reference) = less then a second.
Does this include the one-time cost to JIT-compile the code the first time you run it?
Of course, personally, I'm not a big fan of running everything within a virtual machine, anyway... It's one of the things I really don't like about.NET and, by extension, Powershell. Using a VM as the basis of everything provides some neat features (security, reflection, etc.) but I hate the idea of everything having to be translated before it's run...
Personally, I'd say so. If you look at a Unix shell as a programming language, it's one in which only the most rudimentary data types are available - and every sub-task is constantly burdened with the need to decode the data that's fed to it. An analogous situation would be if the only type you could pass to or return from functions in C++ were the void pointer. (More accurately, perhaps, a void pointer to a block o data with no other pointers in it...) It can be done, but every step of the way you have to be sure you know what type you're dealing with and that you interpret it correctly.
Now, compare this to Powershell: You can compile classes and instantiate and invoke them in the shell. You can seamlessly integrate any of the.NET-targeted programming languages, including Unix scripting favorites like Python and Ruby. Shared datatypes (via the.NET platform) mean that tools have a very rich "shared vocabulary" - and reflection as part of the.NET standard means programmers don't need to spend as much time "wrapping" things to be operable within the shell. You can write and instantiate a class in one language, return it as a value from a commandlet in the shell (without having to serialize it) and then perform operations on it in the shell or pass it to another commandlet. Powershell can do this because commandlets are run as part of Powershell's process - in Unix terms you could think of this as the shell dynamically loading a library and running functions defined inside it - this can be done safely in Powershell because the.NET virtual machine can protect against out-of-bounds access...
One of the advantages of Linux shell is that it *is* a lot easier and more consistent than the Windows command line.
This is not something I would take for granted. Unix tools were built up over decades by various groups - some of the behavior of these tools has been standardized (via Posix) but some common options or features are proprietary inventions by GNU or others. And due to the diverse backgrounds of these tools, whether they're standardized or not, they tend not to match each other. One program prefixes program options with --, another with -, others may not prefix them at all.
Powershell, on the other hand, is a recent invention, built from the ground up on a consistent set of design rules. And because of the tie to.NET, large volumes of the Windows API can be directly exposed to the shell.
Just having a consistent, easy interface for piping I/O as simple text makes it so much better than the equivalent in Windows.
The "equivalent in Windows" is (and always has been) the same thing - just redirect or pipe a command's output. Powershell is actually no different, except that it also gives you the option to run "commandlets" implemented in.NET.
There is a simple reason Linux junkies will go to the command line for stuff. It's actually feasible.
I'm not a particular Linux Guru, and even I once wrote shell scripts that organized webpages with sed - try doing anything vaguely similar under Windows?
Pug
I think that under cmd.exe on a default install of Windows you'd be hard-pressed to match that. But install some command-line utilities (for instance, MinGW) or go to Powershell and things change drastically. I'm pretty sure Powershell has a much more complete suite of text manipulation tools than the older Microsoft command shells did (by default, I mean) - and with the kind of integration you get through.NET, interfacing code from other languages and binding it all together in a script is much easier than it would be in the Unix shell or in the mainline implementations of Python, etc.
Personally I do not feel like the "everything is text" philosophy of the U
Or, if you have to use WINE, make the use of it completely seamless.
Err, like how? Build it into the kernel?
I suppose someone could implement a change to the kernel which would allow it, when someone attempts to run a binary format other than a.out or ELF, to try to identify the file type and run the proper program to execute the file... Make the feature configurable at runtime (i.e. have a startup script or config file inform the running kernel about how different file types should be handled) and then there's no need for actual integration of Wine or whatever into the kernel itself at all...
Nah, forget it. They'd never accept a stupid feature like that into the kernel. XD
And if you don't trust the people you get your OS from then... well that would be special.
If you don't trust the people who put together your OS distribution then it doesn't matter what you install or don't install. There are a million places a malicious package maintainer could put something nasty. Kernel images, drivers, critical libraries or package management tools... Anywhere.
Realistically speaking, I think someone who maintained just one package and wanted to put something nasty inside it could probably get away with it, at least for a while. I don't believe code for every single package is scrutinized that closely on a regular basis...
Malware scanners generally can't detect malware that hasn't been seen before. If someone implemented a brand-new piece of malware, an existing scanner wouldn't find it. That being the case, with malware not presently a huge problem on Linux, trying to implement a malware scanner would be mostly fruitless - there's nothing to scan for, and once something nasty does come along the scanner will have no way of finding it until the scanner's been updated to recognize it.
Emulating the look and feel of Windows isn't going to change the fact that their needs aren't satisfied by Linux.
I don't switch primarily because of look and feel issues. I know how to do everything on a Windows system, anything that works differently feels "broken", even if it's a valid alternative choice.
That's how I feel about Linux, at this point - I tried Mac OS X for a few years, and ultimately found I wasn't happy with the experience, basically because it wasn't Linux.
I don't want that to come across as any kind of counterpoint - it simply reflects my experiences, and my belief that no one OS is really for everybody. Likewise, I have no interest in Linux becoming a "Windows alternative" - I'm more interested in it being a better system for those who are drawn to it in the first place.
I find it very hard to try out different operating systems and give them "a fair shake" - it seems to me that you have to have a lot invested in an OS before you can come to understand whether it's really right for you. There are operating systems I do want to learn about, but I don't want to put a huge time investment into giving them a serious try...
As the astronauts had their first drink of recycled urine, the guys on the ground asked them how they felt about the new toilet's ability to reclaim pure, fresh water from crewmembers' urine:
"Wait, is that what you guys just sent up here? We haven't installed it yet..."
As JMS described this, he had pre-planned means of switching up characters like that just in case actors needed to drop out for something. For instance, the Talia thing wasn't completely the result of a last-minute scramble.
Really? It sure as hell seemed like it was...
I mean, OK, they had the Lyta character who was in the pilot episode available for use. That was the one and only element of that thing that showed any possibility of forethought.
The rest, everything with Talia - I mean she'd been granted powers by Ironheart, she was beginning to question her allegiance to Psi-Corps, and there were no indications that she was any kind of sleeper agent. (Which there wouldn't be, if she were any kind of good sleeper agent, right? But still, there's the need for some kind of narrative continuity...)
Then, in one episode, Lyta comes back, says there's a sleeper agent, and by the end of the episode it turns out to be Talia. Before you know it she's thumbing her nose at all the main characters and everything they stand for, and she's unceremoniously shuffled off.
The explanation for why she suddenly is removed from the story makes logical sense if you accept the premise - but from a narrative point of view it just looks like a giant last-minute hack. Not even a single suggestion prior that this was coming, and Talia suddenly and completely transforms into an enemy, and is conveniently replaced, all in a single episode. In the process, the whole Ironheart story is completely thrown out the window. (Well, the Ironheart thing probably explains her dissection - but as with, for instance, Sinclair's transformation into Valen, it represents a story element that was more or less cast off entirely by the casting change...) That's what makes it reek of "last-minute scramble"...
Fuck, another shitty parser that tells you what the error is next to, but not where it is? It's like perl all over again.
This is what happens when you make your language syntax flexible and comfortable without regard for the difficulty it causes for automated tools trying to interpret it.:D
Re:Heroin? What Kinda Book Reading Do You Do, JR?
on
Space Vulture
·
· Score: 2, Funny
There seems to be s serial pattern of homophone substitutions in the review.
Yeah, what's the author got against gays, anyway?
I can't read the rest of this review...
on
Space Vulture
·
· Score: 1
"There are many more similarities between the books than their are differences."
Parser error, line 9: near "than". Compilation aborted.
. . . I would put in an easter egg that on random occasions causes the onboard speaker to broadcast stuff like "DIE CARBON UNITS!", "EXTERMINATE!" and "RESISTANCE IS USELESS."
Also:
"You have thirty seconds to comply!" "By your command." "We seek peaceful coexistence..." "Skynet connection established. Awaiting instructions." "HarCOURT! Harcourt Fenton Mudd, what have you been up to? Have you been drinking again? Every night it's the same thing...thing....thing..."
It stops when people are so fed up with this nonsense that they won't fly on airlines any more. When that happens, the airlines, desperate to be able to do business again, will push for the security theater to be ramped down a few notches - and since something that matters would then be on the line (i.e. money, as opposed to abstract "human rights") then those with the ability to make this crap stop would finally be motivated to do so.
I'm taking not one, but two trips halfway across the US or more this year, I won't be flying on either trip. I'm sick of all this TSA crap.
How about a summary that describes the new Moblin release (what the post is ostensibly about), rather than focusing on the competition against Win7? How about being FOR something (Moblin in this case), rather than always being against Microsoft?
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but seriously, the one-note, constant Microsoft bashing on this site is getting old.
OK, what "Microsoft bashing"?
These products (Moblin, Windows 7, etc.) are in competition with one another in the netbook market. If Moblin achieves some level of success in the netbook market, that reduces the number of netbooks sold with Windows 7. So, the summary states (quite correctly) that this system is a threat to Windows in the netbook market. Any well-packaged system optimized for the platform would be. It's just a fact.
It just didn't live up to the older Star Treks, where the focus was on the sheer joy of discovery and the strength of the human spirit. There was a bit of the latter, but it was mostly just standard action-movie fare.
Indeed. It seems like what JJ Abrams thought was wrong with Star Trek is that it's not Star Wars.
I don't think this approach is at all new, unfortunately. Remember "Wrath of Khan"? Granted, it did have the nice sub-plot of Kirk coming to terms with his mid-life crisis, but mostly the movie was just the set-up for a great big fight. (That said, it was at least a distinctly "Star Trek" kind of fight... With giant ships that moved like giant ships)
"Undiscovered Country" was maybe a bit more balanced with its political intrigue angle... "First Contact" was like two completely different movies stuck together (one of which was strictly action-adventure/thriller in the vein of "Aliens") I seem to have blocked out "Insurrection" and "Generations", and "Nemesis" was just a weak attempt to repeat "Wrath of Khan"...
Really, I think the only Star Trek films that really represent what Trek is all about are "The Slow Motion Picture" and "The Final Frontier". And maybe "The Voyage Home"... Of course, each of those films had their weak points as well, to be sure. XD
I watched the Star Trek movie and for the most part I was just kind of bored. There's nitpicking to be done but in the end I'm not sure if it's those nitpicky details that ruined my enjoyment of the film, or if my lack of enjoyment of the film gave me more time to ponder the nitpicky details. I think the cheap location shots, plot holes, convenient coincidences, demonstrated fundamental lack of understanding of the scale of space travel, atrociously bad starship design, etc. certainly didn't help in my enjoyment of the film... But I don't know if it was the deal breaker, either.
Now, on the more positive side: I was perfectly happy with Chekov, Scotty, all the major players, really. The characters worked. I have no complaints there - even Scotty's scabby little Ewok friend didn't bother me in the slightest. Just somehow, the film didn't generate enough enthusiasm in me to hold my interest.
And Kirk isn't very subtle. At least not in the Star Trek I have watched. He's a tactician, he takes risks, and at times he is very brazen. But subtle? No. Not Kirk.
Oh, I don't know. When he wanted to be deceptive, he could be. For instance, pretending his ship was disabled to draw an enemy in, or using a compromised message code to deliver a false message to the enemy... And when he brought down Reliant's shields in "Wrath of Khan" he wasn't giggling the whole time, or acting cocky, because he knew that would tip his enemy off. But that's exactly what we see in the Kobayashi Maru test in the new film - he went through the test acting as though there wasn't a chance in hell he would fail. It doesn't make a lot of sense.
In fact, ditching Gnome for KDE will likely fix your printer problems too.
Battery life and suspend/resume are a bit more esoteric. You'll never improve those on your own unless you're willing to hack and compile a kernel. It's certainly possible, but hardware support lags for obvious reasons.
And it's answers like yours that explain why Linux still isn't ready for the desktop. None of what you say is within the realms of the average user
If you want to be pedantic about it you could say this is something the distribution maintainer should do - thus, it becomes a solution a useless, technologically illiterate feeb - er, I mean, an ordinary user, can deal with.*
(* And for the record, I actually don't care about having Linux "ready for the desktop". What interests me is having it be a system I enjoy.)
that's why they are calling those things you mention "netbooks"... because they aren't really a laptop or a desktop, no more than a horse and buggy is a car.
I have a EEE 901. Rest assured, it is truly a laptop computer.
Slashdot Mirror
And the Ghostbusters' new car (to replace the old Ecto-1) looks like some kind of horribly disfigured parody of the original...
at his funeral (in his 70's) my sister and I found out he had three girlfriends at the time he died (no, that wasn't the cause :). At one point one of them took me aside and told me how while taking a break during sex she had ridden him naked around the living room and patio...
For sure that's one of the top ten things you should tell the children of your dead lover at his funeral... :D
Hold on. let me run this by you: Ghostbusters 3 starring Steve Martin and only Steve Martin. Maybe a cameo by Martin Lawrence for the hell of it.
How about we make both Steve Martin and Martin Lawrence members of the new Ghostbusters team - and then round out the cast with Chris Tucker and Rob Schneider?
OTOH: Tail in linux works fantastic and fast. A "Tail" function in Powershell is slower then molasses.
Here was my test:
Tail = less then a second
Powershell = about 5 minutes
Python (for reference) = less then a second.
Does this include the one-time cost to JIT-compile the code the first time you run it?
Of course, personally, I'm not a big fan of running everything within a virtual machine, anyway... It's one of the things I really don't like about .NET and, by extension, Powershell. Using a VM as the basis of everything provides some neat features (security, reflection, etc.) but I hate the idea of everything having to be translated before it's run...
Ah, but is it smartly designed compared to Bash?
Personally, I'd say so. If you look at a Unix shell as a programming language, it's one in which only the most rudimentary data types are available - and every sub-task is constantly burdened with the need to decode the data that's fed to it. An analogous situation would be if the only type you could pass to or return from functions in C++ were the void pointer. (More accurately, perhaps, a void pointer to a block o data with no other pointers in it...) It can be done, but every step of the way you have to be sure you know what type you're dealing with and that you interpret it correctly.
Now, compare this to Powershell: You can compile classes and instantiate and invoke them in the shell. You can seamlessly integrate any of the .NET-targeted programming languages, including Unix scripting favorites like Python and Ruby. Shared datatypes (via the .NET platform) mean that tools have a very rich "shared vocabulary" - and reflection as part of the .NET standard means programmers don't need to spend as much time "wrapping" things to be operable within the shell. You can write and instantiate a class in one language, return it as a value from a commandlet in the shell (without having to serialize it) and then perform operations on it in the shell or pass it to another commandlet. Powershell can do this because commandlets are run as part of Powershell's process - in Unix terms you could think of this as the shell dynamically loading a library and running functions defined inside it - this can be done safely in Powershell because the .NET virtual machine can protect against out-of-bounds access...
One of the advantages of Linux shell is that it *is* a lot easier and more consistent than the Windows command line.
This is not something I would take for granted. Unix tools were built up over decades by various groups - some of the behavior of these tools has been standardized (via Posix) but some common options or features are proprietary inventions by GNU or others. And due to the diverse backgrounds of these tools, whether they're standardized or not, they tend not to match each other. One program prefixes program options with --, another with -, others may not prefix them at all.
Powershell, on the other hand, is a recent invention, built from the ground up on a consistent set of design rules. And because of the tie to .NET, large volumes of the Windows API can be directly exposed to the shell.
Just having a consistent, easy interface for piping I/O as simple text makes it so much better than the equivalent in Windows.
The "equivalent in Windows" is (and always has been) the same thing - just redirect or pipe a command's output. Powershell is actually no different, except that it also gives you the option to run "commandlets" implemented in .NET.
There is a simple reason Linux junkies will go to the command line for stuff. It's actually feasible.
I'm not a particular Linux Guru, and even I once wrote shell scripts that organized webpages with sed - try doing anything vaguely similar under Windows?
Pug
I think that under cmd.exe on a default install of Windows you'd be hard-pressed to match that. But install some command-line utilities (for instance, MinGW) or go to Powershell and things change drastically. I'm pretty sure Powershell has a much more complete suite of text manipulation tools than the older Microsoft command shells did (by default, I mean) - and with the kind of integration you get through .NET, interfacing code from other languages and binding it all together in a script is much easier than it would be in the Unix shell or in the mainline implementations of Python, etc.
Personally I do not feel like the "everything is text" philosophy of the U
Or, if you have to use WINE, make the use of it completely seamless.
Err, like how? Build it into the kernel?
I suppose someone could implement a change to the kernel which would allow it, when someone attempts to run a binary format other than a.out or ELF, to try to identify the file type and run the proper program to execute the file... Make the feature configurable at runtime (i.e. have a startup script or config file inform the running kernel about how different file types should be handled) and then there's no need for actual integration of Wine or whatever into the kernel itself at all...
Nah, forget it. They'd never accept a stupid feature like that into the kernel. XD
And if you don't trust the people you get your OS from then... well that would be special.
If you don't trust the people who put together your OS distribution then it doesn't matter what you install or don't install. There are a million places a malicious package maintainer could put something nasty. Kernel images, drivers, critical libraries or package management tools... Anywhere.
Realistically speaking, I think someone who maintained just one package and wanted to put something nasty inside it could probably get away with it, at least for a while. I don't believe code for every single package is scrutinized that closely on a regular basis...
Malware scanners generally can't detect malware that hasn't been seen before. If someone implemented a brand-new piece of malware, an existing scanner wouldn't find it. That being the case, with malware not presently a huge problem on Linux, trying to implement a malware scanner would be mostly fruitless - there's nothing to scan for, and once something nasty does come along the scanner will have no way of finding it until the scanner's been updated to recognize it.
I don't switch primarily because of look and feel issues. I know how to do everything on a Windows system, anything that works differently feels "broken", even if it's a valid alternative choice.
That's how I feel about Linux, at this point - I tried Mac OS X for a few years, and ultimately found I wasn't happy with the experience, basically because it wasn't Linux.
I don't want that to come across as any kind of counterpoint - it simply reflects my experiences, and my belief that no one OS is really for everybody. Likewise, I have no interest in Linux becoming a "Windows alternative" - I'm more interested in it being a better system for those who are drawn to it in the first place.
I find it very hard to try out different operating systems and give them "a fair shake" - it seems to me that you have to have a lot invested in an OS before you can come to understand whether it's really right for you. There are operating systems I do want to learn about, but I don't want to put a huge time investment into giving them a serious try...
...have you seen the Windows command line?
cmd.exe deserves nothing less than open hostility.
There's always Powershell... Pretty smartly designed, IMO.
As the astronauts had their first drink of recycled urine, the guys on the ground asked them how they felt about the new toilet's ability to reclaim pure, fresh water from crewmembers' urine:
"Wait, is that what you guys just sent up here? We haven't installed it yet..."
She's that woman your PC searches for with its free cycles.
Oh, is that what that "Folding@Home" thing is all about?
As JMS described this, he had pre-planned means of switching up characters like that just in case actors needed to drop out for something. For instance, the Talia thing wasn't completely the result of a last-minute scramble.
Really? It sure as hell seemed like it was...
I mean, OK, they had the Lyta character who was in the pilot episode available for use. That was the one and only element of that thing that showed any possibility of forethought.
The rest, everything with Talia - I mean she'd been granted powers by Ironheart, she was beginning to question her allegiance to Psi-Corps, and there were no indications that she was any kind of sleeper agent. (Which there wouldn't be, if she were any kind of good sleeper agent, right? But still, there's the need for some kind of narrative continuity...)
Then, in one episode, Lyta comes back, says there's a sleeper agent, and by the end of the episode it turns out to be Talia. Before you know it she's thumbing her nose at all the main characters and everything they stand for, and she's unceremoniously shuffled off.
The explanation for why she suddenly is removed from the story makes logical sense if you accept the premise - but from a narrative point of view it just looks like a giant last-minute hack. Not even a single suggestion prior that this was coming, and Talia suddenly and completely transforms into an enemy, and is conveniently replaced, all in a single episode. In the process, the whole Ironheart story is completely thrown out the window. (Well, the Ironheart thing probably explains her dissection - but as with, for instance, Sinclair's transformation into Valen, it represents a story element that was more or less cast off entirely by the casting change...) That's what makes it reek of "last-minute scramble"...
Fuck, another shitty parser that tells you what the error is next to, but not where it is? It's like perl all over again.
This is what happens when you make your language syntax flexible and comfortable without regard for the difficulty it causes for automated tools trying to interpret it. :D
There seems to be s serial pattern of homophone substitutions in the review.
Yeah, what's the author got against gays, anyway?
"There are many more similarities between the books than their are differences."
Parser error, line 9: near "than".
Compilation aborted.
. . . I would put in an easter egg that on random occasions causes the onboard speaker to broadcast stuff like "DIE CARBON UNITS!", "EXTERMINATE!" and "RESISTANCE IS USELESS."
Also:
"You have thirty seconds to comply!"
"By your command."
"We seek peaceful coexistence..."
"Skynet connection established. Awaiting instructions."
"HarCOURT! Harcourt Fenton Mudd, what have you been up to? Have you been drinking again? Every night it's the same thing...thing....thing..."
Is it possible to get a metallic tattoo? Like, without causing skin cancer or something?
It stops when people are so fed up with this nonsense that they won't fly on airlines any more. When that happens, the airlines, desperate to be able to do business again, will push for the security theater to be ramped down a few notches - and since something that matters would then be on the line (i.e. money, as opposed to abstract "human rights") then those with the ability to make this crap stop would finally be motivated to do so.
I'm taking not one, but two trips halfway across the US or more this year, I won't be flying on either trip. I'm sick of all this TSA crap.
How about a summary that describes the new Moblin release (what the post is ostensibly about), rather than focusing on the competition against Win7? How about being FOR something (Moblin in this case), rather than always being against Microsoft?
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but seriously, the one-note, constant Microsoft bashing on this site is getting old.
OK, what "Microsoft bashing"?
These products (Moblin, Windows 7, etc.) are in competition with one another in the netbook market. If Moblin achieves some level of success in the netbook market, that reduces the number of netbooks sold with Windows 7. So, the summary states (quite correctly) that this system is a threat to Windows in the netbook market. Any well-packaged system optimized for the platform would be. It's just a fact.
does OpenOffice.org do this?
Ask this question first. :)
It just didn't live up to the older Star Treks, where the focus was on the sheer joy of discovery and the strength of the human spirit. There was a bit of the latter, but it was mostly just standard action-movie fare.
Indeed. It seems like what JJ Abrams thought was wrong with Star Trek is that it's not Star Wars.
I don't think this approach is at all new, unfortunately. Remember "Wrath of Khan"? Granted, it did have the nice sub-plot of Kirk coming to terms with his mid-life crisis, but mostly the movie was just the set-up for a great big fight. (That said, it was at least a distinctly "Star Trek" kind of fight... With giant ships that moved like giant ships)
"Undiscovered Country" was maybe a bit more balanced with its political intrigue angle... "First Contact" was like two completely different movies stuck together (one of which was strictly action-adventure/thriller in the vein of "Aliens") I seem to have blocked out "Insurrection" and "Generations", and "Nemesis" was just a weak attempt to repeat "Wrath of Khan"...
Really, I think the only Star Trek films that really represent what Trek is all about are "The Slow Motion Picture" and "The Final Frontier". And maybe "The Voyage Home"... Of course, each of those films had their weak points as well, to be sure. XD
I watched the Star Trek movie and for the most part I was just kind of bored. There's nitpicking to be done but in the end I'm not sure if it's those nitpicky details that ruined my enjoyment of the film, or if my lack of enjoyment of the film gave me more time to ponder the nitpicky details. I think the cheap location shots, plot holes, convenient coincidences, demonstrated fundamental lack of understanding of the scale of space travel, atrociously bad starship design, etc. certainly didn't help in my enjoyment of the film... But I don't know if it was the deal breaker, either.
Now, on the more positive side: I was perfectly happy with Chekov, Scotty, all the major players, really. The characters worked. I have no complaints there - even Scotty's scabby little Ewok friend didn't bother me in the slightest. Just somehow, the film didn't generate enough enthusiasm in me to hold my interest.
And Kirk isn't very subtle. At least not in the Star Trek I have watched. He's a tactician, he takes risks, and at times he is very brazen. But subtle? No. Not Kirk.
Oh, I don't know. When he wanted to be deceptive, he could be. For instance, pretending his ship was disabled to draw an enemy in, or using a compromised message code to deliver a false message to the enemy... And when he brought down Reliant's shields in "Wrath of Khan" he wasn't giggling the whole time, or acting cocky, because he knew that would tip his enemy off. But that's exactly what we see in the Kobayashi Maru test in the new film - he went through the test acting as though there wasn't a chance in hell he would fail. It doesn't make a lot of sense.
And that scene with the huge predators on the ice planet reminded me of Star Wars Episode 1 ("There is always a bigger fish").
I cast "summon bigger fish!"
Wifi connectivity -- Disable that stupid fucking Gnome network manager applet. It's braindead.
In fact, ditching Gnome for KDE will likely fix your printer problems too.
Battery life and suspend/resume are a bit more esoteric. You'll never improve those on your own unless you're willing to hack and compile a kernel. It's certainly possible, but hardware support lags for obvious reasons.
And it's answers like yours that explain why Linux still isn't ready for the desktop. None of what you say is within the realms of the average user
If you want to be pedantic about it you could say this is something the distribution maintainer should do - thus, it becomes a solution a useless, technologically illiterate feeb - er, I mean, an ordinary user, can deal with.*
(* And for the record, I actually don't care about having Linux "ready for the desktop". What interests me is having it be a system I enjoy.)
that's why they are calling those things you mention "netbooks"... because they aren't really a laptop or a desktop, no more than a horse and buggy is a car.
I have a EEE 901. Rest assured, it is truly a laptop computer.