Yes, but you have to admit, the fact that we have to explain the difference between a window manager and a desktop environment is part of the reason Linux will never challenge commercial desktop machines.
Linux is doomed to stay on workstations, and despite all claims to the contrary, will always be difficult and time consuming to use. Meanwhile, Google will probably take over the desktop, and will end up being more evil than MS ever was. Sigh.
Does Haiku still follow the BeOS principle of being exclusively single-user? This is one major reason I couldn't take BeOS seriously and always doubted its security model.
The problem is not indentation or beauty, but termination.
I find if fascinating how many people will curse Javascipt's tendency to automatically (and wrongly) terminate lines when you don't use semicolons, which is why you should always use semicolons even if the language lets you cheat. Yet these same people love using whitespace to both start and terminate a block of logic in Python.
You know, it's okay to admit a mistake was made. It's idiotic to promote it as a major feature.
Especially if manufacturers keep insisting you can turn these features off.
It never ceases to amaze me how even geeks insist there's nothing to worry about because you can disable telemetry. Then they're surprised, after some kind of hack exposé, that the option was never honored by the company. Shocker!
Which is baloney. Some luxury cars are so well insulated you can't hear a damn thing outside -- not even road noise from your own tires. Car stereos with subwoofers are perfectly legal, even when they are loud enough to blow out windows. Hell, the windows on some cars are so small you can't see over the dash, let alone out the read quarter panel.
I used to drive forklifts for a living, and I wore earplugs to work every day. My boss threatened to suspend me if I didn't take them off, since he claimed it was a safety hazard. The irony is that he was talking to me the whole time on a noisy work floor while I was wearing my earplugs, and I clearly heard every word he said, and I told him I could hear machines honking their horns on the other side of the warehouse. In the end I won out and was allowed to do my damn job, but I still couldn't convince him that ear plugs only take the edge off, and they don't silence noise completely. Hurrah for liability paranoia.
People are greedy and those that make more profit can afford more nice things.
People who make more profit and can afford more nice things do not buy nice things. They horde.
The only real solution is to do what no politician wants to do: punish success. The greedy people who make all the money need to pay their damn taxes, so they don't just suck all the money out of circulation.
Even better, UX people are trying to bring the "swipe" paradigm to the desktop. Now, just trying to select and copy a block of text doesn't work, because clicking anywhere in the text treats it like a drag-able layer.
Modern UX is all about breaking everything that made the web work. If browsers even try to stop this BS, designers will hack their way around the fixes.
If any OS has been around for 25+ years and is still struggling to hold on to 1% desktop market share, it's a clear indication that people don't like it. When mainstream users tell Linux fanatics why it sucks, the community refuses to acknowledge that the problems exist, let alone try to fix them. Every day, Linux people tell me there's no reason why it can't dominate the desktop world and you never have to go into a command prompt to do anything... and anyone who says otherwise is citing information that's 10 years out of date. Then you run into a problem, and the only solution is to go to a command prompt and type something.
The first problem Linux needs to solve is "DLL Hell", a problem that Linux people keep jeering about but was solved in the Windows world more than 20 years ago. We have dozens of package managers for the dozens of package managers to install the build environments for the package managers for the scripting languages that create the package managers for the updaters for the installers of the package managers, most of which install directly off the Internet unless you create a local repository, which is easy enough for any normal person to do, of course. Wow. Who knew that copying files from one directory to another was such a complex problem?
The real problem is that Windows writes to drives all the time by default (updating metadata such as "last accessed"). I hate having to mess with the automount settings every time I need to do some data recovery, because otherwise Windows will trash everything in sight once it gains write access to any device, even if the filesystem is known to be unclean. I once plugged a Win10 formatted hard drive into a Win7 machine, and in an instant, every file was invisible because Win7 can't handle Win10 security descriptors correctly, and promptly updated the filesystem to lock out every file. It took me hours on a Win10 machine to fix the mess.
I doubt changing the "safe removal" policy will accomplish anything. Flushing buffers as quickly as possible doesn't help much if your philosophy revolves around constantly writing data all the time when it's unnecessary, thus, there's always something in the damn buffers!
For the last 20 years, I was wondering if any car manufacturers would start using turbine generators to supplant a small battery. Turbines are terribly inefficient under variable load, but are among the best engines at full load. They're also compact enough so they could be optional, given we already live in a culture where cars are designed to accept multiple engine options. With the proliferation of turbos everywhere, I can't imagine that turbine generators would be anywhere near as expensive as they were decades ago.
Back to employees, however; a lot of them don't see the need to increase their skillset. They grudgingly use the technology, but refuse to becoming proficient with it. They adamantly refuse to accept that were they more knowledgeable with the tech they were using they'd do their jobs better.
The core problem is that users don't choose the software -- managers do.
At my ex-employer, management insisted on ramming tech down out throats that we all knew was utter garbage. We complained, and they didn't listen. Long story short, I quit a few years ago, and have seen their profits disappear and their stock price drop from $35/share to $4/share in a couple years. I'm glad I got out when I did.
One long-standing complaint I've had about computers for well over 20 years is that there's no way to quarantine any application to its working folder. It's amazing that it wasn't until fairly recently that VM technology became available, and the best we can do is allow the application to trash the VM image as it sees fit. Not being able write-protect any media (at least not easily) is another major issue that won't be fixed.
Today, we've built our infrastructure to make the web browser the single point of failure in our systems, with constant reminders to update to the latest web browser on a second-by-second basis. Failing this, the only solution is to turn every app into a 200+ MB standalone web browser. Gimme a break.
Even electronic books burn pretty well. Never mind fiction, it's coming to the point where even historical and technical books can be swept away at any time.
What we really need is a new law that declares all digital products with DRM as rentals. No more of this "you can use it until you can't" nonsense. If the company wants to sell something as a lease/rental, they have to guarantee the minimum amount of time you're allowed to use it. How long a rental lasts factors into how much it's worth, and I'm sick of being told to buy stuff that costs $50 but could disappear either 5 years from now or tomorrow. It's clearly obvious that a company doesn't have to go out of business for licenses to expire, and they don't even bother to specify the support period. This needs to stop.
Unsurprisingly, much of the Windows7 documentation and help files have been deleted from Microsoft's site, and replaced with ads for Windows10. The future looks pretty bleak for anyone who needs to support legacy systems, even assuming the software itself can still work without activation.
Based on things like Facebook stomping on our privacy, UX people removing features like crazy to enhance our experiences, support cycles where 6-months is considered "long-term support", and... Trump, I get the impression that reputation doesn't mean much, anymore. It used to be that every company had to release some flaky, PC-laden apology for any minor PR issue, but now you can pretty much say "Fuck you" to the public and go on with business as usual.
Companies are in business to make money, so it's not a question of how much it costs, but how profitable it is to maintain. I can think of tons of technologies that are ultra-cheap to maintain, but are still dropped like hot potatoes when they no longer can be used for good PR.
Fun fact: I literally had to use duct tape to keep the power cord into my PPC Mini. The first Mini models had a proprietary power cable with no clips, tabs, or even friction to keep the cable in place. Only Apple could possibly fuck up a power cable.
I actually had a bunch of problems with that machine, so it was the last and final Apple product I ever bought.
Slashdot Mirror
This will do for consoles what Steam did to PC's.
Render consoles even more irrelevant?
Yes, but you have to admit, the fact that we have to explain the difference between a window manager and a desktop environment is part of the reason Linux will never challenge commercial desktop machines.
Linux is doomed to stay on workstations, and despite all claims to the contrary, will always be difficult and time consuming to use. Meanwhile, Google will probably take over the desktop, and will end up being more evil than MS ever was. Sigh.
Does Haiku still follow the BeOS principle of being exclusively single-user? This is one major reason I couldn't take BeOS seriously and always doubted its security model.
What you're describing is a single function. A language would be an entire garage.
The problem is not indentation or beauty, but termination.
I find if fascinating how many people will curse Javascipt's tendency to automatically (and wrongly) terminate lines when you don't use semicolons, which is why you should always use semicolons even if the language lets you cheat. Yet these same people love using whitespace to both start and terminate a block of logic in Python.
You know, it's okay to admit a mistake was made. It's idiotic to promote it as a major feature.
Especially if manufacturers keep insisting you can turn these features off.
It never ceases to amaze me how even geeks insist there's nothing to worry about because you can disable telemetry. Then they're surprised, after some kind of hack exposé, that the option was never honored by the company. Shocker!
Which is baloney. Some luxury cars are so well insulated you can't hear a damn thing outside -- not even road noise from your own tires. Car stereos with subwoofers are perfectly legal, even when they are loud enough to blow out windows. Hell, the windows on some cars are so small you can't see over the dash, let alone out the read quarter panel.
I used to drive forklifts for a living, and I wore earplugs to work every day. My boss threatened to suspend me if I didn't take them off, since he claimed it was a safety hazard. The irony is that he was talking to me the whole time on a noisy work floor while I was wearing my earplugs, and I clearly heard every word he said, and I told him I could hear machines honking their horns on the other side of the warehouse. In the end I won out and was allowed to do my damn job, but I still couldn't convince him that ear plugs only take the edge off, and they don't silence noise completely. Hurrah for liability paranoia.
I'm pretty sure a city bus will destroy any aircraft in fuel per passenger-mile... and they arguably have more leg room to boot.
Ugh... that page is essentially full-screen video without the video. That is what happens when you get an artist to do the job of a designer.
People are greedy and those that make more profit can afford more nice things.
People who make more profit and can afford more nice things do not buy nice things. They horde.
The only real solution is to do what no politician wants to do: punish success. The greedy people who make all the money need to pay their damn taxes, so they don't just suck all the money out of circulation.
John Oliver recently did a segment about mobile homes and land ownership.
It's worth a view and really shows how far business owners will go when they own all the cards.
Even better, UX people are trying to bring the "swipe" paradigm to the desktop. Now, just trying to select and copy a block of text doesn't work, because clicking anywhere in the text treats it like a drag-able layer.
Modern UX is all about breaking everything that made the web work. If browsers even try to stop this BS, designers will hack their way around the fixes.
Denial.
If any OS has been around for 25+ years and is still struggling to hold on to 1% desktop market share, it's a clear indication that people don't like it. When mainstream users tell Linux fanatics why it sucks, the community refuses to acknowledge that the problems exist, let alone try to fix them. Every day, Linux people tell me there's no reason why it can't dominate the desktop world and you never have to go into a command prompt to do anything... and anyone who says otherwise is citing information that's 10 years out of date. Then you run into a problem, and the only solution is to go to a command prompt and type something.
The first problem Linux needs to solve is "DLL Hell", a problem that Linux people keep jeering about but was solved in the Windows world more than 20 years ago. We have dozens of package managers for the dozens of package managers to install the build environments for the package managers for the scripting languages that create the package managers for the updaters for the installers of the package managers, most of which install directly off the Internet unless you create a local repository, which is easy enough for any normal person to do, of course. Wow. Who knew that copying files from one directory to another was such a complex problem?
The real problem is that Windows writes to drives all the time by default (updating metadata such as "last accessed"). I hate having to mess with the automount settings every time I need to do some data recovery, because otherwise Windows will trash everything in sight once it gains write access to any device, even if the filesystem is known to be unclean. I once plugged a Win10 formatted hard drive into a Win7 machine, and in an instant, every file was invisible because Win7 can't handle Win10 security descriptors correctly, and promptly updated the filesystem to lock out every file. It took me hours on a Win10 machine to fix the mess.
I doubt changing the "safe removal" policy will accomplish anything. Flushing buffers as quickly as possible doesn't help much if your philosophy revolves around constantly writing data all the time when it's unnecessary, thus, there's always something in the damn buffers!
Write protect tabs as standard would have been nice, too. Floppy drives had that feature even before viruses and malware even existed.
For the last 20 years, I was wondering if any car manufacturers would start using turbine generators to supplant a small battery. Turbines are terribly inefficient under variable load, but are among the best engines at full load. They're also compact enough so they could be optional, given we already live in a culture where cars are designed to accept multiple engine options. With the proliferation of turbos everywhere, I can't imagine that turbine generators would be anywhere near as expensive as they were decades ago.
At least this story actually links to iFixit.
Back to employees, however; a lot of them don't see the need to increase their skillset. They grudgingly use the technology, but refuse to becoming proficient with it. They adamantly refuse to accept that were they more knowledgeable with the tech they were using they'd do their jobs better.
The core problem is that users don't choose the software -- managers do.
At my ex-employer, management insisted on ramming tech down out throats that we all knew was utter garbage. We complained, and they didn't listen. Long story short, I quit a few years ago, and have seen their profits disappear and their stock price drop from $35/share to $4/share in a couple years. I'm glad I got out when I did.
One long-standing complaint I've had about computers for well over 20 years is that there's no way to quarantine any application to its working folder. It's amazing that it wasn't until fairly recently that VM technology became available, and the best we can do is allow the application to trash the VM image as it sees fit. Not being able write-protect any media (at least not easily) is another major issue that won't be fixed.
Today, we've built our infrastructure to make the web browser the single point of failure in our systems, with constant reminders to update to the latest web browser on a second-by-second basis. Failing this, the only solution is to turn every app into a 200+ MB standalone web browser. Gimme a break.
Even electronic books burn pretty well. Never mind fiction, it's coming to the point where even historical and technical books can be swept away at any time.
What we really need is a new law that declares all digital products with DRM as rentals. No more of this "you can use it until you can't" nonsense. If the company wants to sell something as a lease/rental, they have to guarantee the minimum amount of time you're allowed to use it. How long a rental lasts factors into how much it's worth, and I'm sick of being told to buy stuff that costs $50 but could disappear either 5 years from now or tomorrow. It's clearly obvious that a company doesn't have to go out of business for licenses to expire, and they don't even bother to specify the support period. This needs to stop.
Unsurprisingly, much of the Windows7 documentation and help files have been deleted from Microsoft's site, and replaced with ads for Windows10. The future looks pretty bleak for anyone who needs to support legacy systems, even assuming the software itself can still work without activation.
Based on things like Facebook stomping on our privacy, UX people removing features like crazy to enhance our experiences, support cycles where 6-months is considered "long-term support", and... Trump, I get the impression that reputation doesn't mean much, anymore. It used to be that every company had to release some flaky, PC-laden apology for any minor PR issue, but now you can pretty much say "Fuck you" to the public and go on with business as usual.
Companies are in business to make money, so it's not a question of how much it costs, but how profitable it is to maintain. I can think of tons of technologies that are ultra-cheap to maintain, but are still dropped like hot potatoes when they no longer can be used for good PR.
You know something is overpriced when people try to justify a purchase in the form of a monthly payment.
Fun fact: I literally had to use duct tape to keep the power cord into my PPC Mini. The first Mini models had a proprietary power cable with no clips, tabs, or even friction to keep the cable in place. Only Apple could possibly fuck up a power cable.
I actually had a bunch of problems with that machine, so it was the last and final Apple product I ever bought.
Stilton!