BGR is quite positive, but as I recall they're typically quite favorable towards MS. The other two reviews are much less favorable and I think the summary's tone is pretty much in line. I mean heck, the article at Ars is entitled "Microsoft Surface with Windows 8 Pro: Hotter, Thicker, Faster, Louder" - you don't even really need to read it to get the not-so-rosy picture.
The thing is, Google is actually transitioning at least some of their services to use Google+ for all "sharing" purposes under the hood. I know this is true in the case of Picasa at least - Picasa as most people will see it is now simply a part of Google+. (I believe it's still technically possible to not use Google+ for sharing things in Picasa, but G+ is the default, and most people using Picasa at this point are "contributing" to Google+).
Are other Google services doing this? It's hard to really know what counts, since the authors of the survey don't reveal their methodology or describe what specifically they're actually counting. I'd be incredibly surprised if Picasa didn't "count" as "Active Usage" though.
It seems as if this is what a lot of "Google+ users" actually are - people who use other google products which have Google+ integration that they trick people into activating. In addition to youtube they do the same trick for Picasa, instant upload on Android, gmail chat, and probably others that I am not aware of.
I actually like Google+ well enough, but I think their reports of its user base are greatly exaggerated.
Abandoning fallback mode is such a dreadful mistake.
I love GNOME 3, but the reality of current driver support on Linux is that many systems which aren't even very old are incapable of running GNOME 3 properly. Not to mention, remote desktop software such as FreeNX is incapable of 3d acceleration at all, and so a solution that does not require hardware acceleration is vital for that use as well.
I can certainly understand the desire to kill off fallback mode in the long run, but hastening its demise will just hasten the exodus of GNOME users. It's sad to me that the GNOME developers seem to have chosen the most abrasive transition strategy possible, ignoring critical use cases and the users who require them.
All that said, I don't see how a fork of fallback mode really makes a lot of sense at this point. Mate is already out there, and it seems to fill the same niche.
Why, exactly, should the study give the US a pass because it has more poor students? From TFA:
As part of the study, Carnoy and Rothstein calculated how international rankings on the most recent PISA might change if the United States had a social class composition similar to that of top-ranking nations: U.S. rankings would rise to fourth from 14th in reading and to 10th from 25th in math. The gap between U.S. students and those from the highest-achieving countries would be cut in half in reading and by at least a third in math.
That's interesting, sure, but um... the results probably should reflect that we have worse economic disparity here, and the fact that low SES students fare worse, right? If you want to just pick and choose only the best students, and ignore the ones who are being failed by the system, I'm sure you could make any country look better.
From what I can tell, you cannot navigate or search for addresses while in "offline" mode on Google Maps. If you are already navigating or already have search results up, they will remain, but you cannot pre-download a map and start navigation while offline.
This is not a huge issue for me, since I seldom travel where there is no service, but it would be nice to not have to worry about this at all. I do not know whether Nokia Maps is any better - until now that has been rather academic as it had not supported Android:)
Yeah - it sure seems like this was a calculated risk to save what is, essentially, a movie prop and tourist attraction; and the wager was in human lives.
Google could afford one hell of a marketing campaign if they wanted to, but I don't see much evidence of this. Why did they not do a full on media blitz at launch?
I can only assume that + is internally still considered a sort of "soft launch" and they won't start mass marketing until they reach feature parity with Facebook. Maybe they're hoping to "seed" Plus with early adopters now, who will make the service more attractive when it "really" launches, but they run the risk of losing a lot of those early adopters before launch even happens
I actually use Plus (and not Facebook) and it's a fine service, but unless they make some major moves to drive adoption very soon, it's just not going to go anywhere in the long term.
You are certainly right, GNOME's future is tied to Shell, and it's very much unclear whether Shell will ever reach the same userbase that GNOME 2 had at its peak. Luckily, we have choice in this space, and I'm glad to see XFCE and friends enjoy increased exposure as a result.
Of course, some of us do like Shell, so the improved hardware support is very welcome. It may be that GNOME becomes a marginalized, oddball UI in time, but I've enjoyed similarly non-mainstream software for years - I mean, I do run Linux on the desktop, after all:)
I know there's a lot of resistance to GNOME Shell, but it's clearly the future of GNOME (like it or not) and the weird non-3d degraded mode that you get with GNOME 3 + no 3d is something that's not really fit for anybody.
Personally, I really like GNOME Shell and I'm glad to see that it will be supported on older hardware. I always found the decision to completely ignore this hardware to be questionable and damaging to Shell's adoption rate (as if it wasn't going to have a hard enough time to begin with). Surely they could have provided a similar UX without the eye candy for older systems - at least now we have a workaround!
I'm missing the context here; could somebody explain what this disaster was and how it threatened the existence of the GPU division? A quick google returns nothing.
I hear they make videogames, and they have this crazy new console with a 2012. Called a "Wii U" or something. You know, I think they even had another console on the market before this.
I know, I know, the Wii U has less space than a Nomad, so you'd be forgiven for writing it off as "lame," but maybe these spunky upstarts at Nintendo will be worth paying attention to some day. I'm sure they'll never compete with Microsoft or Sony, but hey, you never know.
I suppose I'm something of an oddity, but I really enjoy reviewing products (ranked somewhere in the 4.5k range now). I've always been curious about Vine - there's very little documentation on it - and was really hoping to get in at some point.
I found the 1000 number thrown out in the OP impossible, and I'm glad to hear that it's incorrect. From what I've observed their ranking algorithm is pretty clever, and after an initially rapid increase in ranking I've leveled off, and now my rank oh-so-slowly increases over time.
I've often wondered the most effective way to gain rank in this system; it seems to help if you can make it onto the "top 3" reviews for items which are displayed along with the item on its front page, but after a certain point there seem to be diminishing returns to more votes on individual posts. I've basically just decided to write reviews for everything I buy at Amazon, and hope that I keep moving up.
But Windows' main (and practically lone) selling point is that it works with all your old software. If they rewrite it for ARM, it may say "Windows" on it but it won't run your apps or play your games.
And I'm sure users will enjoy discovering that after they buy "Windows" tablets and netbooks.
I would be very, very surprised if they would port Windows to ARM and *not* include something like Apple's Rosetta. Sure, you take a performance hit when running legacy, crusty apps, but considering that those were probably designed for much slower computers originally it hardly matters if you're running them with a hefty performance penalty now. I know I was quite pleased with the PPC -> Intel transition process on my Macbook Pro.
Snapshotting is probably the most compelling feature of either FS for workstation use. Both BTRFS and ZFS are copy-on-write, and they both feature very low overhead, very straightforward snapshotting. That's a feature that almost anybody can utilize.
Aside from that, ZFS features a lot of datacenter-centric goodies that might have some utility on a workstation as well. Realtime (low overhead) compression, realtime (high overhead) deduplication, realtime encryption, easy and fast creation/destruction of filesystems and virtual block devices, and a ton of other odds and ends.
The long take is an old technique with countless excellent examples, but I really love Kubrick's use of them in The Shining. Particularly in two instances: Danny's traversal of the halls on his trike, and meandering through the garden maze towards the end of the film.
These scenes to me are especially captivating because of the motion of the camera through these corridors. It's one thing to have a fixed point camera for a long scene, but it's quite another to have a moving camera for such a long time; the potential missteps are countless. The maze scene in the Shining is notorious for how long it took to complete. The sense of motion and space that this sort of cinematography can provide is really quite spectacular though, and I think it often justifies the effort.
You're right, and the Linux community as a whole has certainly embraced btrfs. If Oracle were to just pull the plug on it, the project would continue in some form (which is more than one could say for opensolaris and ZFS).
The problem as I see it is that Oracle has already shown a willingness to submarine competitors with patents they hold on GPL'd projects. A worst case scenario isn't that btrfs dies; a worst case scenario is that it gets used by Oracle's competitors, and then Oracle decides to go and sue them for patent infringement.
Oracle: Hey, Red Hat... nice filesystem you got there. Shame if something were to... happen to it...
Of course, Oracle controls btrfs as well, and its future doesn't exactly look so great at this point, either
Why exactly does Oracle need btrfs now, anyway? ZFS is more mature, and the CDDL is more restrictive than the GPL, so it seems like that would be Oracle's product of choice. I guess Oracle can still sue btrfs users for patent infringement, even though the code itself is under the GPL, but why bother at all? Making Linux a more attractive competitor to their own Solaris doesn't seem like it makes much sense.
Indeed. This program is solely responsible for me ever using ebay.
They say it's discontinued due to poor adoption, or some such thing; I think adoption was quite rapid amongst people looking to save money and get the absolute best prices possible. The problem is, as an advertiser, those are the people you're least interested in.
MythTV has its weaknesses (mostly UI related), but I'm not sure what you mean by this:
Does it record to two files if the shows overlap (due to begin/end padding)? Or does it still decide the two shows conflict, and records only one, or records both but only one partial?
The answer: it depends. MythTV will do the following: if possible, it will record each show in its entirety, with the padding requested by the user (this is configurable on a global and per-recording level). Say you have show A and show B, where show A ends at the same time that show B begins: MythTV it will do its best to preserve both shows, but it's limited by how many tuners you have. With two tuners of equal priority, MythTV will record show A on tuner 1 (including any pre/post padding) and show B on tuner 2 (also including any pre/post padding).
If you only have one tuner, then MythTV obviously can't do that (indeed, no DVR really could). What happens in this case is that MythTV "throws away" the padding in its calculations; so it records show A (but no post-padding) and immediately switches to show B (with no pre-padding). In an ideal world with good schedule data from the TV stations, that would be good enough, but shows often run over/under (which is why you have the "padding" option), so in this case you might lose a few seconds of each show (assuming A runs long and B starts early). MythTV figures that the padding is "nice to have" but, if it can't guarantee that padding, it also figures you'd rather have the show as scheduled than no show at all.
By the way, if you dig deep, most of these things can be modified. MythTV's defaults in this case do what I believe most people would want to do, but they can be extensively modified to taste.
Does mythweb has a record button on the shedule overview? or do I still need to go to the show page, change the state to record, save, and then go back to the shedule?
I don't think it has this as of.22 - it would be handy.
Does it play DVDs out of the box?
.
This is distribution specific, and it's not a MythTV problem. In the United States it's illegal to play DVDs in Linux without paying for a decoder license. Many distributions give you easy ways to bypass this restriction at your own peril, and in gentoo with the appropriate use flags everything does indeed work "out of the box."
Basicly, MythTV is great for a power user, but is really sucks for the basic user.
I do agree with that sentiment. It does/can do most of what you desire, but it's not obvious due to a murky UI and rather cumbersome setup process. If you aren't interested in tinkering, it's a poor choice.
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BGR is quite positive, but as I recall they're typically quite favorable towards MS. The other two reviews are much less favorable and I think the summary's tone is pretty much in line. I mean heck, the article at Ars is entitled "Microsoft Surface with Windows 8 Pro: Hotter, Thicker, Faster, Louder" - you don't even really need to read it to get the not-so-rosy picture.
The thing is, Google is actually transitioning at least some of their services to use Google+ for all "sharing" purposes under the hood. I know this is true in the case of Picasa at least - Picasa as most people will see it is now simply a part of Google+. (I believe it's still technically possible to not use Google+ for sharing things in Picasa, but G+ is the default, and most people using Picasa at this point are "contributing" to Google+).
Are other Google services doing this? It's hard to really know what counts, since the authors of the survey don't reveal their methodology or describe what specifically they're actually counting. I'd be incredibly surprised if Picasa didn't "count" as "Active Usage" though.
It seems as if this is what a lot of "Google+ users" actually are - people who use other google products which have Google+ integration that they trick people into activating. In addition to youtube they do the same trick for Picasa, instant upload on Android, gmail chat, and probably others that I am not aware of.
I actually like Google+ well enough, but I think their reports of its user base are greatly exaggerated.
Abandoning fallback mode is such a dreadful mistake.
I love GNOME 3, but the reality of current driver support on Linux is that many systems which aren't even very old are incapable of running GNOME 3 properly. Not to mention, remote desktop software such as FreeNX is incapable of 3d acceleration at all, and so a solution that does not require hardware acceleration is vital for that use as well.
I can certainly understand the desire to kill off fallback mode in the long run, but hastening its demise will just hasten the exodus of GNOME users. It's sad to me that the GNOME developers seem to have chosen the most abrasive transition strategy possible, ignoring critical use cases and the users who require them.
All that said, I don't see how a fork of fallback mode really makes a lot of sense at this point. Mate is already out there, and it seems to fill the same niche.
Why, exactly, should the study give the US a pass because it has more poor students? From TFA:
As part of the study, Carnoy and Rothstein calculated how international rankings on the most recent PISA might change if the United States had a social class composition similar to that of top-ranking nations: U.S. rankings would rise to fourth from 14th in reading and to 10th from 25th in math. The gap between U.S. students and those from the highest-achieving countries would be cut in half in reading and by at least a third in math.
That's interesting, sure, but um... the results probably should reflect that we have worse economic disparity here, and the fact that low SES students fare worse, right? If you want to just pick and choose only the best students, and ignore the ones who are being failed by the system, I'm sure you could make any country look better.
Honestly, I might get one of these things - assuming it can run Linux. GNOME 3 would have a touchscreen-based device on which it could really shine :)
From what I can tell, you cannot navigate or search for addresses while in "offline" mode on Google Maps. If you are already navigating or already have search results up, they will remain, but you cannot pre-download a map and start navigation while offline.
This is not a huge issue for me, since I seldom travel where there is no service, but it would be nice to not have to worry about this at all. I do not know whether Nokia Maps is any better - until now that has been rather academic as it had not supported Android :)
The issue is remote desktop with no 3d acceleration. I hate fallback mode, but it's better than nothing for (e.g.) x2go or freenx.
Now I'll need to install something like xfce just for the remote desktop use case. It's hardly the end of the world, but it will definitely be missed.
Safer for the ship, of course, not the crew.
Yeah - it sure seems like this was a calculated risk to save what is, essentially, a movie prop and tourist attraction; and the wager was in human lives.
Google could afford one hell of a marketing campaign if they wanted to, but I don't see much evidence of this. Why did they not do a full on media blitz at launch?
I can only assume that + is internally still considered a sort of "soft launch" and they won't start mass marketing until they reach feature parity with Facebook. Maybe they're hoping to "seed" Plus with early adopters now, who will make the service more attractive when it "really" launches, but they run the risk of losing a lot of those early adopters before launch even happens
I actually use Plus (and not Facebook) and it's a fine service, but unless they make some major moves to drive adoption very soon, it's just not going to go anywhere in the long term.
You are certainly right, GNOME's future is tied to Shell, and it's very much unclear whether Shell will ever reach the same userbase that GNOME 2 had at its peak. Luckily, we have choice in this space, and I'm glad to see XFCE and friends enjoy increased exposure as a result.
Of course, some of us do like Shell, so the improved hardware support is very welcome. It may be that GNOME becomes a marginalized, oddball UI in time, but I've enjoyed similarly non-mainstream software for years - I mean, I do run Linux on the desktop, after all :)
I'm curious, because I guess I don't understand Slashdot's moderation system, why did I get moderated -1 troll? I was not intending to troll anybody.
I know there's a lot of resistance to GNOME Shell, but it's clearly the future of GNOME (like it or not) and the weird non-3d degraded mode that you get with GNOME 3 + no 3d is something that's not really fit for anybody.
Personally, I really like GNOME Shell and I'm glad to see that it will be supported on older hardware. I always found the decision to completely ignore this hardware to be questionable and damaging to Shell's adoption rate (as if it wasn't going to have a hard enough time to begin with). Surely they could have provided a similar UX without the eye candy for older systems - at least now we have a workaround!
I'm missing the context here; could somebody explain what this disaster was and how it threatened the existence of the GPU division? A quick google returns nothing.
I hear they make videogames, and they have this crazy new console with a 2012. Called a "Wii U" or something. You know, I think they even had another console on the market before this.
I know, I know, the Wii U has less space than a Nomad, so you'd be forgiven for writing it off as "lame," but maybe these spunky upstarts at Nintendo will be worth paying attention to some day. I'm sure they'll never compete with Microsoft or Sony, but hey, you never know.
I suppose I'm something of an oddity, but I really enjoy reviewing products (ranked somewhere in the 4.5k range now). I've always been curious about Vine - there's very little documentation on it - and was really hoping to get in at some point.
I found the 1000 number thrown out in the OP impossible, and I'm glad to hear that it's incorrect. From what I've observed their ranking algorithm is pretty clever, and after an initially rapid increase in ranking I've leveled off, and now my rank oh-so-slowly increases over time.
I've often wondered the most effective way to gain rank in this system; it seems to help if you can make it onto the "top 3" reviews for items which are displayed along with the item on its front page, but after a certain point there seem to be diminishing returns to more votes on individual posts. I've basically just decided to write reviews for everything I buy at Amazon, and hope that I keep moving up.
I guess we all need something to aspire to :)
But Windows' main (and practically lone) selling point is that it works with all your old software. If they rewrite it for ARM, it may say "Windows" on it but it won't run your apps or play your games.
And I'm sure users will enjoy discovering that after they buy "Windows" tablets and netbooks.
I would be very, very surprised if they would port Windows to ARM and *not* include something like Apple's Rosetta. Sure, you take a performance hit when running legacy, crusty apps, but considering that those were probably designed for much slower computers originally it hardly matters if you're running them with a hefty performance penalty now. I know I was quite pleased with the PPC -> Intel transition process on my Macbook Pro.
Snapshotting is probably the most compelling feature of either FS for workstation use. Both BTRFS and ZFS are copy-on-write, and they both feature very low overhead, very straightforward snapshotting. That's a feature that almost anybody can utilize.
Aside from that, ZFS features a lot of datacenter-centric goodies that might have some utility on a workstation as well. Realtime (low overhead) compression, realtime (high overhead) deduplication, realtime encryption, easy and fast creation/destruction of filesystems and virtual block devices, and a ton of other odds and ends.
The long take is an old technique with countless excellent examples, but I really love Kubrick's use of them in The Shining. Particularly in two instances: Danny's traversal of the halls on his trike, and meandering through the garden maze towards the end of the film.
These scenes to me are especially captivating because of the motion of the camera through these corridors. It's one thing to have a fixed point camera for a long scene, but it's quite another to have a moving camera for such a long time; the potential missteps are countless. The maze scene in the Shining is notorious for how long it took to complete. The sense of motion and space that this sort of cinematography can provide is really quite spectacular though, and I think it often justifies the effort.
You're right, and the Linux community as a whole has certainly embraced btrfs. If Oracle were to just pull the plug on it, the project would continue in some form (which is more than one could say for opensolaris and ZFS).
The problem as I see it is that Oracle has already shown a willingness to submarine competitors with patents they hold on GPL'd projects. A worst case scenario isn't that btrfs dies; a worst case scenario is that it gets used by Oracle's competitors, and then Oracle decides to go and sue them for patent infringement.
Oracle: Hey, Red Hat... nice filesystem you got there. Shame if something were to... happen to it...
Of course, Oracle controls btrfs as well, and its future doesn't exactly look so great at this point, either
Why exactly does Oracle need btrfs now, anyway? ZFS is more mature, and the CDDL is more restrictive than the GPL, so it seems like that would be Oracle's product of choice. I guess Oracle can still sue btrfs users for patent infringement, even though the code itself is under the GPL, but why bother at all? Making Linux a more attractive competitor to their own Solaris doesn't seem like it makes much sense.
Indeed. This program is solely responsible for me ever using ebay. They say it's discontinued due to poor adoption, or some such thing; I think adoption was quite rapid amongst people looking to save money and get the absolute best prices possible. The problem is, as an advertiser, those are the people you're least interested in.
So how much is a ring?
One?
Does it record to two files if the shows overlap (due to begin/end padding)? Or does it still decide the two shows conflict, and records only one, or records both but only one partial?
The answer: it depends. MythTV will do the following: if possible, it will record each show in its entirety, with the padding requested by the user (this is configurable on a global and per-recording level). Say you have show A and show B, where show A ends at the same time that show B begins: MythTV it will do its best to preserve both shows, but it's limited by how many tuners you have. With two tuners of equal priority, MythTV will record show A on tuner 1 (including any pre/post padding) and show B on tuner 2 (also including any pre/post padding).
If you only have one tuner, then MythTV obviously can't do that (indeed, no DVR really could). What happens in this case is that MythTV "throws away" the padding in its calculations; so it records show A (but no post-padding) and immediately switches to show B (with no pre-padding). In an ideal world with good schedule data from the TV stations, that would be good enough, but shows often run over/under (which is why you have the "padding" option), so in this case you might lose a few seconds of each show (assuming A runs long and B starts early). MythTV figures that the padding is "nice to have" but, if it can't guarantee that padding, it also figures you'd rather have the show as scheduled than no show at all.
By the way, if you dig deep, most of these things can be modified. MythTV's defaults in this case do what I believe most people would want to do, but they can be extensively modified to taste.
Does mythweb has a record button on the shedule overview? or do I still need to go to the show page, change the state to record, save, and then go back to the shedule?
I don't think it has this as of .22 - it would be handy.
Does it play DVDs out of the box?
. This is distribution specific, and it's not a MythTV problem. In the United States it's illegal to play DVDs in Linux without paying for a decoder license. Many distributions give you easy ways to bypass this restriction at your own peril, and in gentoo with the appropriate use flags everything does indeed work "out of the box."
Does it allow me find© the recorded files to another machine so I can watch them on the road? (searching trough the hashed filenames is no fun)
Mythweb allows direct download of files.
Basicly, MythTV is great for a power user, but is really sucks for the basic user.
I do agree with that sentiment. It does/can do most of what you desire, but it's not obvious due to a murky UI and rather cumbersome setup process. If you aren't interested in tinkering, it's a poor choice.
Sales tax!? Bah, if you give up schools and paved roads, you can do without it entirely.
We do!
NC's government is so corrupt, we're currently giving up schools and paved roads even *with* the sales tax.