The extra effort required to mine coins also increases the likelihood that someone will product another bitcoin-like currency purely to profit the same way as the early bitcoin boosters did - launch a new digital currency from scratch, encourage miners and speculators to buy in, spout a bunch of libertarian nonsense to appeal to potential investors, watch the exchange rate increase, and then cash out before the price slumps. Rinse and repeat.
Gold is inherently more secure and stable than bitcoins for a multitude of reasons. A few simple ones are that bitcoin could be legislated into oblivion, or replaced by bitcoin version 2 and rendered worthless, or selectively cracked or vulnerable to a class break. Bitcoin has no physical properties to exploit. It's not tangible, it's not government backed. It's extremely volatile.
There is no reason to believe bitcoin has a long term future and anyone who favours bitcoin over something tangible such as precious metals really is an idiot.
I have GNOME 3 running quite happily on an old laptop with a Pentium Core Duo and IGP and another running with an AMD x2 64 and an old Radeon card of some sort. Neither has posed me any trouble aside from when a pre-released Ubuntu shipped with a broken AMD driver that turned the screen to mush. Almost any PC with an entry level graphics card or IGP in the last 5 years would be able to run GNOME 3. If you have something older, perhaps you should use another WM, but bear in mind that if compositing is unavailable, that performance suffers in other ways, e.g. dragging a window over another window sends out a flurry of damage events forcing processes to wake up and repaint themselves.
I assume GNOME are dropping the fallback mode in recognition that it's barely necessary any more especially when it has a fallback software based renderer.
I agree that GNOME 3's UI is too dumbed down. For example I wanted to shrink the font down to free up some vertical space on a laptop. The only option to change the font size is in accessibility which makes no sense since I'm shrinking the font and the panel only offers a few presets anyway. But I don't want KDE like settings either. Putting too many options in front of someone, or burying the useful settings amongst the esoteric settings, or splitting behaviours into multiple settings is even worse IMO. I'd just like GNOME 3 to dial back a bit and perhaps adopt some kind of rule - if > 5% of users want a setting then put it in, if 2% want a setting then stuff it into a tweak tool.
In general though I think GNOME 3 is very usable. IMO the design is sound, task centric, clean, simple and very intuitive. An example which I've used in comments a few times is to compare how Windows 8 and GNOME draw attention to their "hot" corner. In Windows 8 there is no clue at all that corners are hot, or how swipes work and so MS were forced to insert a lame ass tutorial when a user first logs in. In GNOME 3, the eye is naturally drawn to the global menu and the Activities button. Even if you didn't know jamming the mouse into the corner did anything you'd still click on Activities for the same effect. That sort of thing speaks of good design.
In general use I also find the UI pretty decent. Our family's communal laptop ran Windows 7 before the hard disk died, so I dug an old 60GB drive out of the cupboard and stuck Fedora 17 on it. My kids had absolutely no trouble adapting to it. It's not without faults and I could list off half a dozen quite easily but none of them are deal breakers and I'd be prepared to give it time to mature. It's also worth remembering that since the shell can be extended (and the poor extension manager is one of the faults), it can be augmented in various ways, far more than GNOME 2 ever could.
While GNOME's extension UI is a mess and I'm sure the mess extends into the API, none of that is relevant here. Any official GNOME extensions are going to work properly. Also MGSE demonstrates that dists can ship their own extensions by the expedient of testing them properly against the version of GNOME in their dist. I further expect that the APIs and the documentation and the user visible management of them will improve over time. It doesn't excuse changing APIs but it's not like this is a unique situation in open source land.
The fallback mode was just an if-all-else-fails mode. It wasn't meant to replace GNOME 2 or even be a place you'd want to work unless your graphics driver was hosed.
Anyway there is no reason for "classic" extensions to be so limited. GNOME Shell is like Firefox in that new functionality can be strapped onto it and appear seamless. Any extension could potentially change the look and feel of the shell in quite radical ways. That's all Mint are doing after all with MGSE.
A simple problem. A flight is arriving from Yemen at 530am with 100 passengers, and another flight from Amsterdam with 80 passengers, and another from Glasgow with 40 passengers. None of the Glasgow passengers are from connecting flights but 6 are foreign nationals. 8 of the passengers from the Amsterdam flight came from Saudi Arabia. 1 name comes up in a watchlist as a partial match. All planes land at different gates in different terminals. You have 4 checkpoints around the terminals but only 9 available police resources. Meanwhile 4 of the Yemen passengers are on connecting flights (but not the same flights either), and are going through the connection lounge, while 3 of the Glasgow passengers appears to be travelling to a nearby airport and checking in there. Now multiply the permutations by the hundreds of flights taking off and landing and passengers coming and going and police, customs and security staff who work shifts, and vacation / sickness and the time to physically travel from one location to another and every other permutation. How do you deploy your resources?
Perhaps some software wouldn't be a bad idea at all.
The first question the software would have to answer is how does it demonstrate it's working. How do you quantify "success"? How do you establish a baseline to even measure success? And how does the software justify its decisions? And is the software inflexible or can it be made to inject a bit of randomness into the situation, or for security to override an answer for a good reason?
Lots of things which could mean the difference between an effective tool and snakeoil. So I wouldn't say it's a good idea but it's not necessarily a bad idea either.
I suppose if it starts and ends with procuring a phone then it doesn't matter what they choose providing it meets their needs. If they start developing actual native apps to run on the phone then there is serious cause for concern.
I'm not surprised if a chunk of malware still happens to work on the latest OS, especially through a normal BIOS which has no secure boot. Not all malware roots the system or replaces critical files and even if they did a legacy system has no way of knowing.
Even under UEFI, the secure boot would be responsible for ensuring the OS loader and firmware drivers were correctly signed before executing them. Assuming they were then it's not responsible for exploits which happen down the chain. I assume Windows 8 does attempt to validate its kernel and critical files but who knows what exploits are possible even under that model.
This box doesn't look exactly cheap either. It's unclear to me if the anticipated $300-320 retail price includes the memory, storage or wifi module. They say they added that stuff in their boxto make the price $450. When you consider that netbooks cost less but included wifi, memory, harddisk, battery, screen, keyboard / trackpad it makes you wonder why this thing costs so much. The CPU is better than an Atom processor but not *that* much better.
There is no denying these would be fabulously useful boxes, though I think it would actually benefit the device if it were larger - if there were an empty bay to the side of the main unit where people could plug in USB sticks (TV tuners etc.) or extra drives without an obvious mess of stuff sticking out.
The difference would be that Canadians haven't been herded into ever decreasing areas, surrounded by barbed wire, walls, checkpoints and sniper towers. They haven't been denied the means and materials through blockade to have a decent standard of living. I would say that extremism is a virtually inevitable part of living life under siege.
I think metro is very appealing and is at least superficially a very inviting way to start a session.
The issue comes IMO not from metro being there but because it's frustratingly limited on the desktop. There's no way to zoom out the tiles to make better use of the screen. Some actions which should work on multi selection don't (e.g. pin apps to start), there is zero integration between metro and the desktop, the search charm makes an extremely poor substitute for the start menu, all the things that the start menu used to do are scattered to the four winds or not implemented at all, there is no way to group tiles in folders, desktop apps don't appear in the left hand edge app list, the amount of mouse travel is unreal, wheeling to scroll sideways is counter intuitive and often defeated by focus issues. There is also advertising, some of it very intrusive coming into the periphery of the OS - games like Mahong, some other apps.
I think it is abundantly clear that some time in the development process Microsoft said screw desktop users in this release. They paid lip service, to get something which sort of works but they didn't go to town on the desktop functionality aside from some relatively minor things (e.g. new task manager, file copy etc.). It's a shame because Windows 8 does generally feel a lot slicker and responsive and the idea of a hybrid tablet / desktop in a single device is extremely attractive. It's just that half baked front end which is the problem.
What I would like to see for Windows 8.5 / 9. Is a proper focus on the desktop. I don't care if Start doesn't come back but whatever replaces it has to work sensibly on the desktop.
I have a Lumia 800 as one of my phones and I have a mixed opinion of it. The screen is excellent and touch is highly responsive. The phone itself feels solid in the hand.
On the flip side there is a little hatch covering the USB which is incredibly annoying since smart phones need to be charged once a day so this hatch is just a nuisance. Fortunately / unfortunately for me, the hatch snapped off. But it's next to the SIM slot which is incredibly fiddly and easy to damage. You also can't remove the battery and there are no expansion slots. The worst sin by far is some Lumia 800s suffered from fault batteries which discharged in about 6 hours. It took about 4 months for Nokia to semi-fix the issue in firmware but if the battery came out, they could have just sent out replacements.
From looking at the 920 I think it's a better phone all around, at least from a hardware standpoint. After the battery debacle I don't trust Nokia's quality control though and I think the hard launch deadline for WP8 is bound to have introduced bugs which might require a firmware update or two to fix. I also don't think much of WP7.5 and most descriptions of WP8 suggest the changes aren't that significant from a user perspective.
So Nokia make nice phones, but I don't see any reason to favour them over other brands. Especially given which phone OS runs on it.
LinkedIn has gone from being a semi useful way to keep track of colleagues to being a meat market. If you accept invites from agents you WILL be spammed without remorse from now until forever. At least that's my experience. It's best not to accept invites from agents at all and be careful about what groups you join too since I've had explicit spams identifying as a member of some group to justify the spiele that follows. I expect agents just see LinkedIn as cheaper than Monster.com andsimilar and LinkedIn has obliged them with tools which mine the data. That might be great for agents and LinkedIn but it makes me quite averse from using the service at all.
You can buy small gumstick type PCs running Allwinner A10 chips that come with 4-8GB flash, 512MB-1GB RAM, a 1.5Ghz CPU, a plastic housing and wifi built-in. Android or Google TV preloaded. Alibaba is full of such devices and they cost about the same price as the Raspberry Pi.
The data is my own experience with an Asus Transformer TF301. There are numerous issues with the experience compared to a desktop OS - horrifically inconsistent handling of keyboard accelerators and features like ctrl+shift+cursor, and a mouse which has no contextual feedback (e.g. showing as a caret over an edit field), and selection behaviour which is designed for fingers. It's replete with issues that deserve a full release to polish the experience and produce guidelines for developers to follow.
Devices like the Asus Transformer and some others have keyboards and can use plug in mice. Google TV must also see a lot of use from people with bluetooth keyboards and trackpads. Admittedly support for keyboards and mice is quite poor in Android but it could be improved upon and perhaps it would be if Google stopped flogging a dead horse called ChromeOS and concentrated on their successful OS.
They don't have to prove you watch the TV, just that you own a TV capable of receiving broadcasts. I expect in most cases its as easy as looking through the window in the evening and seeing the TV on or walking past an apartment and hearing it on. They probably also have some powers to enter a property or call the police and enter.
Chrome needs to be dumped on its ass and the best bits folded into Android. These two operating systems have so much overlap that it makes no sense to keep them both going.
PNaCl *is* bitcode - LLVM bitcode with some APIs that it can see for audio, display and minimal interaction with the browser surrounding it. So instead of translating bitcode to JS and compiling / interpreting that again through the constraints of the browser, JS and the DOM, the browser could execute it directly or hand over execution to a plugin, even one running with reduced privileges in its own process space, and only interacting with the browser for repaints. That's the point. Performance would be a LOT better. Proper threading, proper code execution, no time slicing except through the standard kernel scheduler. Aside from any instrumentation / security checks it could potentially execute at full native speed.
Keyboard and mice have been the defacto standard for text entry on Windows since forever. Windows 8 and RT support these inputs extremely well and apps get a lot of default behaviour for free, including some gestures and have a sufficient user base to explicitly test with these inputs.
As I said this stuff is not adequate in Android and it is obvious by simple comparison. I don't see why you need to defend it when I provided so many examples of its failings. I like Android but I see no need to sweep its bad points under the rug. I want Android to get stronger by addressing them.
I also didn't mention that the time slicing above would also have to simulate threading for C/C++ apps which need it - a bit like the way Java used to do pseudo threading circa 1.0.2. Everything would be running on the one thread though.
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The extra effort required to mine coins also increases the likelihood that someone will product another bitcoin-like currency purely to profit the same way as the early bitcoin boosters did - launch a new digital currency from scratch, encourage miners and speculators to buy in, spout a bunch of libertarian nonsense to appeal to potential investors, watch the exchange rate increase, and then cash out before the price slumps. Rinse and repeat.
There is no reason to believe bitcoin has a long term future and anyone who favours bitcoin over something tangible such as precious metals really is an idiot.
I assume GNOME are dropping the fallback mode in recognition that it's barely necessary any more especially when it has a fallback software based renderer.
In general though I think GNOME 3 is very usable. IMO the design is sound, task centric, clean, simple and very intuitive. An example which I've used in comments a few times is to compare how Windows 8 and GNOME draw attention to their "hot" corner. In Windows 8 there is no clue at all that corners are hot, or how swipes work and so MS were forced to insert a lame ass tutorial when a user first logs in. In GNOME 3, the eye is naturally drawn to the global menu and the Activities button. Even if you didn't know jamming the mouse into the corner did anything you'd still click on Activities for the same effect. That sort of thing speaks of good design.
In general use I also find the UI pretty decent. Our family's communal laptop ran Windows 7 before the hard disk died, so I dug an old 60GB drive out of the cupboard and stuck Fedora 17 on it. My kids had absolutely no trouble adapting to it. It's not without faults and I could list off half a dozen quite easily but none of them are deal breakers and I'd be prepared to give it time to mature. It's also worth remembering that since the shell can be extended (and the poor extension manager is one of the faults), it can be augmented in various ways, far more than GNOME 2 ever could.
While GNOME's extension UI is a mess and I'm sure the mess extends into the API, none of that is relevant here. Any official GNOME extensions are going to work properly. Also MGSE demonstrates that dists can ship their own extensions by the expedient of testing them properly against the version of GNOME in their dist. I further expect that the APIs and the documentation and the user visible management of them will improve over time. It doesn't excuse changing APIs but it's not like this is a unique situation in open source land.
Don't worry, Apple Maps had to make up its island quota in other ways.
Anyway there is no reason for "classic" extensions to be so limited. GNOME Shell is like Firefox in that new functionality can be strapped onto it and appear seamless. Any extension could potentially change the look and feel of the shell in quite radical ways. That's all Mint are doing after all with MGSE.
Perhaps some software wouldn't be a bad idea at all.
The first question the software would have to answer is how does it demonstrate it's working. How do you quantify "success"? How do you establish a baseline to even measure success? And how does the software justify its decisions? And is the software inflexible or can it be made to inject a bit of randomness into the situation, or for security to override an answer for a good reason?
Lots of things which could mean the difference between an effective tool and snakeoil. So I wouldn't say it's a good idea but it's not necessarily a bad idea either.
I suppose if it starts and ends with procuring a phone then it doesn't matter what they choose providing it meets their needs. If they start developing actual native apps to run on the phone then there is serious cause for concern.
Even under UEFI, the secure boot would be responsible for ensuring the OS loader and firmware drivers were correctly signed before executing them. Assuming they were then it's not responsible for exploits which happen down the chain. I assume Windows 8 does attempt to validate its kernel and critical files but who knows what exploits are possible even under that model.
There is no denying these would be fabulously useful boxes, though I think it would actually benefit the device if it were larger - if there were an empty bay to the side of the main unit where people could plug in USB sticks (TV tuners etc.) or extra drives without an obvious mess of stuff sticking out.
Is who are these morons who suddenly find a product desirable just because a daytime TV host has been paid very large sums of money to say they are.
The difference would be that Canadians haven't been herded into ever decreasing areas, surrounded by barbed wire, walls, checkpoints and sniper towers. They haven't been denied the means and materials through blockade to have a decent standard of living. I would say that extremism is a virtually inevitable part of living life under siege.
The issue comes IMO not from metro being there but because it's frustratingly limited on the desktop. There's no way to zoom out the tiles to make better use of the screen. Some actions which should work on multi selection don't (e.g. pin apps to start), there is zero integration between metro and the desktop, the search charm makes an extremely poor substitute for the start menu, all the things that the start menu used to do are scattered to the four winds or not implemented at all, there is no way to group tiles in folders, desktop apps don't appear in the left hand edge app list, the amount of mouse travel is unreal, wheeling to scroll sideways is counter intuitive and often defeated by focus issues. There is also advertising, some of it very intrusive coming into the periphery of the OS - games like Mahong, some other apps.
I think it is abundantly clear that some time in the development process Microsoft said screw desktop users in this release. They paid lip service, to get something which sort of works but they didn't go to town on the desktop functionality aside from some relatively minor things (e.g. new task manager, file copy etc.). It's a shame because Windows 8 does generally feel a lot slicker and responsive and the idea of a hybrid tablet / desktop in a single device is extremely attractive. It's just that half baked front end which is the problem.
What I would like to see for Windows 8.5 / 9. Is a proper focus on the desktop. I don't care if Start doesn't come back but whatever replaces it has to work sensibly on the desktop.
On the flip side there is a little hatch covering the USB which is incredibly annoying since smart phones need to be charged once a day so this hatch is just a nuisance. Fortunately / unfortunately for me, the hatch snapped off. But it's next to the SIM slot which is incredibly fiddly and easy to damage. You also can't remove the battery and there are no expansion slots. The worst sin by far is some Lumia 800s suffered from fault batteries which discharged in about 6 hours. It took about 4 months for Nokia to semi-fix the issue in firmware but if the battery came out, they could have just sent out replacements.
From looking at the 920 I think it's a better phone all around, at least from a hardware standpoint. After the battery debacle I don't trust Nokia's quality control though and I think the hard launch deadline for WP8 is bound to have introduced bugs which might require a firmware update or two to fix. I also don't think much of WP7.5 and most descriptions of WP8 suggest the changes aren't that significant from a user perspective.
So Nokia make nice phones, but I don't see any reason to favour them over other brands. Especially given which phone OS runs on it.
LinkedIn has gone from being a semi useful way to keep track of colleagues to being a meat market. If you accept invites from agents you WILL be spammed without remorse from now until forever. At least that's my experience. It's best not to accept invites from agents at all and be careful about what groups you join too since I've had explicit spams identifying as a member of some group to justify the spiele that follows. I expect agents just see LinkedIn as cheaper than Monster.com andsimilar and LinkedIn has obliged them with tools which mine the data. That might be great for agents and LinkedIn but it makes me quite averse from using the service at all.
You can buy small gumstick type PCs running Allwinner A10 chips that come with 4-8GB flash, 512MB-1GB RAM, a 1.5Ghz CPU, a plastic housing and wifi built-in. Android or Google TV preloaded. Alibaba is full of such devices and they cost about the same price as the Raspberry Pi.
The data is my own experience with an Asus Transformer TF301. There are numerous issues with the experience compared to a desktop OS - horrifically inconsistent handling of keyboard accelerators and features like ctrl+shift+cursor, and a mouse which has no contextual feedback (e.g. showing as a caret over an edit field), and selection behaviour which is designed for fingers. It's replete with issues that deserve a full release to polish the experience and produce guidelines for developers to follow.
I'm too busy trying to find the point of this stupid story.
Devices like the Asus Transformer and some others have keyboards and can use plug in mice. Google TV must also see a lot of use from people with bluetooth keyboards and trackpads. Admittedly support for keyboards and mice is quite poor in Android but it could be improved upon and perhaps it would be if Google stopped flogging a dead horse called ChromeOS and concentrated on their successful OS.
They don't have to prove you watch the TV, just that you own a TV capable of receiving broadcasts. I expect in most cases its as easy as looking through the window in the evening and seeing the TV on or walking past an apartment and hearing it on. They probably also have some powers to enter a property or call the police and enter.
Chrome needs to be dumped on its ass and the best bits folded into Android. These two operating systems have so much overlap that it makes no sense to keep them both going.
PNaCl *is* bitcode - LLVM bitcode with some APIs that it can see for audio, display and minimal interaction with the browser surrounding it. So instead of translating bitcode to JS and compiling / interpreting that again through the constraints of the browser, JS and the DOM, the browser could execute it directly or hand over execution to a plugin, even one running with reduced privileges in its own process space, and only interacting with the browser for repaints. That's the point. Performance would be a LOT better. Proper threading, proper code execution, no time slicing except through the standard kernel scheduler. Aside from any instrumentation / security checks it could potentially execute at full native speed.
As I said this stuff is not adequate in Android and it is obvious by simple comparison. I don't see why you need to defend it when I provided so many examples of its failings. I like Android but I see no need to sweep its bad points under the rug. I want Android to get stronger by addressing them.
I also didn't mention that the time slicing above would also have to simulate threading for C/C++ apps which need it - a bit like the way Java used to do pseudo threading circa 1.0.2. Everything would be running on the one thread though.