Personally I like the Debian dpkg-based package management and the KDE desktop
This is how I ended up on Mint KDE, because there were a few versions of Kubuntu that were... lackluster. Olivia KDE should be out in about a month, at which point I will upgrade this machine which is still running Lisa.
I hope sometime in the future that Mint eliminates the Ubuntu middle-man, and just repositions itself as a direct Debian derivative.
They make it worse. And by that I mean less like an email client. They just need to leave it the hell alone. Except for one thing... the Send/Save Now/Discard buttons should be below the message body input, always, all the time, every time. I'm still not sure what conditions cause them to be above the From: line, or both. It's maddening having to hunt for them every time. Oh, second thing... real, legitimate IMAP support, not this half-assed labels bullshit.
The creepiest parts of Minority Report isn't the authoritarian wet dream of "pre-crime", it's the ubiquitous nano-targeting of advertising. Making people buy their consent for this, in the form of wearable hardware, is more revenue friendly (and practical given current technology) than installing eye scanners everywhere.
We are finally realizing that Google knows too much about us, hence the backlash. Google Glass represents the subtle difference between "can" and "should", in a passively invasive way.
Sort of like when the port console games to the PC they make it work, just barely.
This is why, despite my incredible love for The Elder Scrolls series, I may never play Skyrim, which has DLC that's not available on PC.
I played Oblivion and got bored by level 14, having become master of all the guilds and completing all the plots except the main one. I play cRPGs for the story, and it simply ran out. If I merely want to run around and kill shit, I'll bust out the Quake 2 CD.
Those two suffered severely compromised gameplay because of the restrictions imposed by the XBoxes. Morrowind is the pinnacle of the series in almost every way.
Because the media and all their "analyst" guests are ignorant, myopic, ratings-chasing, fear-mongering drama queens. Their reaction to "the potential for 3d-printed guns" is just one more manifestation of this. The Liberator may have been downloaded 100k times, but I bet at least 80% of those people don't even have a 3d printer (and never will), and less than a dozen of them will actually get printed.
...absolute worst people to work with are the [marketing/advertising people] who know just enough about programming that they vastly overestimate their knowledge.
FTFY. And those people invariably think they are omni-gods. I used to work at a place where the marketing director's secret office nickname was "King Dumbshit" (KDS for short), and it was painfully apropos.
I use Mint. I hope this gives them a good reason to at least consider weaning Mint off of Ubuntu packages and repositories. At some point there will be no reason for Mint to maintain the layer between Debian and itself.
I'm still running Lisa (which is now unsupported) and I burned a Nadia disc a few weeks ago, but I'm just going to hold off until Olivia is out at the end of this month.
What OS is installed doesn't change that. Surface users are frustrated that there are no apps for their devices.
Touch UIs suck, and the proof is all over the internet. Every time someone posts something like "I would [something], but I'm on my [phone|tablet|mobile]" it is a damning statement on how limited touch is compared to keyboard+mouse. Even common desktop tasks are a chore in touch.
I realized recently that maybe part of the reason why Apple resisted putting cut and paste into iOS for so long was because they couldn't figure out how to make it not suck. That's something Jobs would have obsessed over.
Adobe hasn't learned anything in the past 15 years. They consistently keep their pricing far above what the market will tolerate, hence the extremely high piracy rate. I might have purchased Photoshop or Illustrator at least once over the years if the cost was 1/3 of what it is. Adobe is shooting themselves in the foot with this move, but they'll just insist in some obtuse way that they have no need to walk.
When GIMP finally has a single-window UI and supports more color spaces and gamuts, it will become a more suitable alternative to Photoshop.
In related graphics standards news, its been rumored today that Adobe is finally killing off Fireworks, which molested PNG as its native format by injecting proprietary data chunks.
HTML5 is riddled with faulty logic, flawed reasoning, and bad semantics. Even reading the spec gives the impression that the writing is of lesser quality than pervious versions. Why this is the case after 9 years completely baffles me.
Selected points:
The b and i elements are presentational, no matter how the authors try to claim otherwise. Let them stay dead.
Sectioning is a mess, and whether related elements are sections is dependent on context. "Strongly Suggesting" that developers use h1 for every headline within sectioned content dilutes its semantic value. Just create a level-less h element, like XHTML2 did, that inherits its level based on depth and context.
There is still no way to clearly associate dd elements with their dt. Wrapping these sets with li would fix this.
Last but not least: enough with the XML hatred. XHTML5, with proper XML syntax, should be the focus instead of an afterthought. XML syntax compliance isn't that hard or time consuming. Markup languages are for machine consumption, not human readability. Not requiring tags to be closed, bare unary attributes (ie, checked instead of checked="checked") and all the other shortcuts are asinine and only foster laziness and sloppiness... which would not be tolerated in any compiled or interpreted language.
Windows is pretty much competing with itself at this point, and Win8 isn't offering compelling reasons to upgrade. Metro is a compelling reason not to upgrade. Windows Phone is doomed to be an also-ran, no matter what MS does.
Tablets are a fad in the consumer space which will fizzle out in 2 years. Microsoft won't be able to break into this market, just like their other consumer-oriented efforts (Zune, Kin, Windows Phone... everything except XBox) failed. However E-readers will continue to sell. Tablet equals fancy electronic clipboard... if you don't havea sue for a clipboard, you have little use for a tablet. In certain vertical business markets, tablets can make sense. In the end, tablets are for consumtion, not production, and touch UIs are a step backward. The PC isn't going to die any time soon.
I suspect the OEMs are already looking for ways to hedge on Windows. They'll push back harder when their windows distribution agreements come up for renewal, because Win8 is a failure and MS is encroaching on their turf with the Surface. The big OEMs will start seeking partnerships with major Linux distros soon, preparing to launch hardware with Tux stickers in 2015 or 2016. And all of them will be begging Valve to let them pre-install Steam. Pressure from the OEMs will force AMD, nVidia, and Intel to get their Linux video drivers up to snuff.
The units will be slightly more expensive because the OEMs won't have libraries of crapware at the ready, but most people on/. will agree that's totally worth it. Even now there's little reason for the average person not to drop Windows for a real OS, and by the time all this happens, it'll be even easier.
We've had three decades of subtle propaganda that misrepresents corporate interests as American interests. Corporate america has shifted from treating employees as assets to treating them as liabilities. Our corporate law forces corporations to seek short term profits uber alles, bringing in cheaper foreign labor is just one aspect of that. The entire scheme is short-sighted.
MS doesn't want to fix their UI, the Blue leak proves that. The UI is what people hate about win8, therefore win8 will conintue to drag down PC sales. The OEMs must be screaming at Redmond.
The tablet space is an attractive market for now, but that fad will pass in 2 years when the general public realizes that touch UIs suck.
Corporate IT is about the only friend MS has left, if not now then soon. And it won't be long before corporate IT begins looking elsewhere for future solutions because win8 throws a huge retraining cost in their face: Metro.
All three points are the result of a two intertwined phenomena: Microsoft's hubris and paranoia. I still think OEMs will finally bring about the Year of the Linux Desktop in 2015, all because of win8.
Yep. That's why no one cares about Digg, and no one will care about their also-ran RSS app. Which we have to expect will also be not-so-subtly whored to promote paid content and ignore the inevitable user backlash.
I agree with absolutely everything you said, except for forms being a separate XML dialect (module, OK).
I can't believe TBL has allowed WHATWG, whos agenda and thought process seem substantially built on their hatred of XML, to prevail over XHTML2. Allowing, nay encouraging, sloppy markup in a spec is unfathomable.
Seriously, everyone raves about it, but it's already poisoned candy. Adding DRM to it would just be adding a razor blade.
The HTML5 spec as it stands now is a mess. The semantics are laughable. Sectioning is a mess. The expanded set of characters allowed in identifiers means lots of ugly escape sequences in CSS and Javascript when those new characters are used (seriously, try writing a selector for <div id="foo.bar[baz]"></div>). And there's still no grouping element for dt and dd elements in dictionary lists.
Right now HTML5 is little more than a buzzword that means canvas, just like DHTML was a buzzword that meant DOM manipulation with Javascript. There is a lot of other promising stuff in there (the new form inputs are long overdue), but much of it is defined unbelievably poorly. It's a trainwreck waiting to happen.
A slider form factor with a physical five row QWERTY keyboard. Almost nothing else is a dealbreaker to me.
I've had a Samsung Epic 4G (Galaxy S1) for almost two years. It's one real flaw is that it only has 362MB of ram. However, Sprint doesn't have 4G of any kind in my area but still insist that I pay them $10/month for the vaporous privilege of having a 4G handset (which is always connected to my house's WiFi anyway).
Worse than suffering through the actual daylight/standard time changeovers, are dealing with timezones themselves in code. Most timezones are full hour offsets from UTC, but there are a few that are N:30 or N:45. There are even offsets which are greater than 12.
Then you have to deal with differing dates of when the changeovers actually happen over the years in a given timezone.
If you ever write an iCal-related application and have to deal with recurring events, you'll soon realize that Outlook's iCal support is comparatively even worse than IE's web standards support.
Slashdot Mirror
This is how I ended up on Mint KDE, because there were a few versions of Kubuntu that were... lackluster. Olivia KDE should be out in about a month, at which point I will upgrade this machine which is still running Lisa.
I hope sometime in the future that Mint eliminates the Ubuntu middle-man, and just repositions itself as a direct Debian derivative.
They make it worse. And by that I mean less like an email client. They just need to leave it the hell alone. Except for one thing... the Send/Save Now/Discard buttons should be below the message body input, always, all the time, every time. I'm still not sure what conditions cause them to be above the From: line, or both. It's maddening having to hunt for them every time. Oh, second thing... real, legitimate IMAP support, not this half-assed labels bullshit.
The creepiest parts of Minority Report isn't the authoritarian wet dream of "pre-crime", it's the ubiquitous nano-targeting of advertising. Making people buy their consent for this, in the form of wearable hardware, is more revenue friendly (and practical given current technology) than installing eye scanners everywhere.
We are finally realizing that Google knows too much about us, hence the backlash. Google Glass represents the subtle difference between "can" and "should", in a passively invasive way.
This is why, despite my incredible love for The Elder Scrolls series, I may never play Skyrim, which has DLC that's not available on PC.
I played Oblivion and got bored by level 14, having become master of all the guilds and completing all the plots except the main one. I play cRPGs for the story, and it simply ran out. If I merely want to run around and kill shit, I'll bust out the Quake 2 CD.
Those two suffered severely compromised gameplay because of the restrictions imposed by the XBoxes. Morrowind is the pinnacle of the series in almost every way.
Because the media and all their "analyst" guests are ignorant, myopic, ratings-chasing, fear-mongering drama queens. Their reaction to "the potential for 3d-printed guns" is just one more manifestation of this. The Liberator may have been downloaded 100k times, but I bet at least 80% of those people don't even have a 3d printer (and never will), and less than a dozen of them will actually get printed.
FTFY. And those people invariably think they are omni-gods. I used to work at a place where the marketing director's secret office nickname was "King Dumbshit" (KDS for short), and it was painfully apropos.
Wrong. Ad code is required to use the evil document.write() wherever possible.
I use Mint. I hope this gives them a good reason to at least consider weaning Mint off of Ubuntu packages and repositories. At some point there will be no reason for Mint to maintain the layer between Debian and itself.
I'm still running Lisa (which is now unsupported) and I burned a Nadia disc a few weeks ago, but I'm just going to hold off until Olivia is out at the end of this month.
What OS is installed doesn't change that. Surface users are frustrated that there are no apps for their devices.
Touch UIs suck, and the proof is all over the internet. Every time someone posts something like "I would [something], but I'm on my [phone|tablet|mobile]" it is a damning statement on how limited touch is compared to keyboard+mouse. Even common desktop tasks are a chore in touch.
I realized recently that maybe part of the reason why Apple resisted putting cut and paste into iOS for so long was because they couldn't figure out how to make it not suck. That's something Jobs would have obsessed over.
Adobe hasn't learned anything in the past 15 years. They consistently keep their pricing far above what the market will tolerate, hence the extremely high piracy rate. I might have purchased Photoshop or Illustrator at least once over the years if the cost was 1/3 of what it is. Adobe is shooting themselves in the foot with this move, but they'll just insist in some obtuse way that they have no need to walk.
When GIMP finally has a single-window UI and supports more color spaces and gamuts, it will become a more suitable alternative to Photoshop.
In related graphics standards news, its been rumored today that Adobe is finally killing off Fireworks, which molested PNG as its native format by injecting proprietary data chunks.
Google now has a handset maker in house, which gives them certain advantages in the mobile market beyond the patent portfolio.
Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility is certainly more honest than Microsoft's ongoing stealth assimilation of Nokia.
HTML5 is riddled with faulty logic, flawed reasoning, and bad semantics. Even reading the spec gives the impression that the writing is of lesser quality than pervious versions. Why this is the case after 9 years completely baffles me.
Selected points:
Last but not least: enough with the XML hatred. XHTML5, with proper XML syntax, should be the focus instead of an afterthought. XML syntax compliance isn't that hard or time consuming. Markup languages are for machine consumption, not human readability. Not requiring tags to be closed, bare unary attributes (ie, checked instead of checked="checked") and all the other shortcuts are asinine and only foster laziness and sloppiness... which would not be tolerated in any compiled or interpreted language.
Windows is pretty much competing with itself at this point, and Win8 isn't offering compelling reasons to upgrade. Metro is a compelling reason not to upgrade. Windows Phone is doomed to be an also-ran, no matter what MS does.
Tablets are a fad in the consumer space which will fizzle out in 2 years. Microsoft won't be able to break into this market, just like their other consumer-oriented efforts (Zune, Kin, Windows Phone... everything except XBox) failed. However E-readers will continue to sell. Tablet equals fancy electronic clipboard... if you don't havea sue for a clipboard, you have little use for a tablet. In certain vertical business markets, tablets can make sense. In the end, tablets are for consumtion, not production, and touch UIs are a step backward. The PC isn't going to die any time soon.
I suspect the OEMs are already looking for ways to hedge on Windows. They'll push back harder when their windows distribution agreements come up for renewal, because Win8 is a failure and MS is encroaching on their turf with the Surface. The big OEMs will start seeking partnerships with major Linux distros soon, preparing to launch hardware with Tux stickers in 2015 or 2016. And all of them will be begging Valve to let them pre-install Steam. Pressure from the OEMs will force AMD, nVidia, and Intel to get their Linux video drivers up to snuff.
The units will be slightly more expensive because the OEMs won't have libraries of crapware at the ready, but most people on /. will agree that's totally worth it. Even now there's little reason for the average person not to drop Windows for a real OS, and by the time all this happens, it'll be even easier.
The scam is that H1-B jobs can be easily mislabeled as "American".
We've had three decades of subtle propaganda that misrepresents corporate interests as American interests. Corporate america has shifted from treating employees as assets to treating them as liabilities. Our corporate law forces corporations to seek short term profits uber alles, bringing in cheaper foreign labor is just one aspect of that. The entire scheme is short-sighted.
MS doesn't want to fix their UI, the Blue leak proves that. The UI is what people hate about win8, therefore win8 will conintue to drag down PC sales. The OEMs must be screaming at Redmond.
The tablet space is an attractive market for now, but that fad will pass in 2 years when the general public realizes that touch UIs suck.
Corporate IT is about the only friend MS has left, if not now then soon. And it won't be long before corporate IT begins looking elsewhere for future solutions because win8 throws a huge retraining cost in their face: Metro.
All three points are the result of a two intertwined phenomena: Microsoft's hubris and paranoia. I still think OEMs will finally bring about the Year of the Linux Desktop in 2015, all because of win8.
Lack of proportion and perspective. The "worst company in America" dishonor belongs to Monsanto, there shouldn't even be a contest.
Say it ain't so. I wonder when they'll squeeze this into the schedule between all the wrestling and other ratings-chasing dreck.
But we won't know if it's a true SciFi series until it gets unceremoniously cancelled for no good reason.
Come on, most of Microsoft's software products have merely descriptive names: Windows, Word, Internet Explorer...
Yep. That's why no one cares about Digg, and no one will care about their also-ran RSS app. Which we have to expect will also be not-so-subtly whored to promote paid content and ignore the inevitable user backlash.
More specifically, Mint KDE.
I agree with absolutely everything you said, except for forms being a separate XML dialect (module, OK).
I can't believe TBL has allowed WHATWG, whos agenda and thought process seem substantially built on their hatred of XML, to prevail over XHTML2. Allowing, nay encouraging, sloppy markup in a spec is unfathomable.
Seriously, everyone raves about it, but it's already poisoned candy. Adding DRM to it would just be adding a razor blade.
The HTML5 spec as it stands now is a mess. The semantics are laughable. Sectioning is a mess. The expanded set of characters allowed in identifiers means lots of ugly escape sequences in CSS and Javascript when those new characters are used (seriously, try writing a selector for <div id="foo.bar[baz]"></div>). And there's still no grouping element for dt and dd elements in dictionary lists.
Right now HTML5 is little more than a buzzword that means canvas, just like DHTML was a buzzword that meant DOM manipulation with Javascript. There is a lot of other promising stuff in there (the new form inputs are long overdue), but much of it is defined unbelievably poorly. It's a trainwreck waiting to happen.
A slider form factor with a physical five row QWERTY keyboard. Almost nothing else is a dealbreaker to me.
I've had a Samsung Epic 4G (Galaxy S1) for almost two years. It's one real flaw is that it only has 362MB of ram. However, Sprint doesn't have 4G of any kind in my area but still insist that I pay them $10/month for the vaporous privilege of having a 4G handset (which is always connected to my house's WiFi anyway).
Worse than suffering through the actual daylight/standard time changeovers, are dealing with timezones themselves in code. Most timezones are full hour offsets from UTC, but there are a few that are N:30 or N:45. There are even offsets which are greater than 12.
Then you have to deal with differing dates of when the changeovers actually happen over the years in a given timezone.
If you ever write an iCal-related application and have to deal with recurring events, you'll soon realize that Outlook's iCal support is comparatively even worse than IE's web standards support.
Also, relevant xkcd.