Well seeing you want to go down the car analogy, the point is would be like Ford asking you if you want to install driving control system A or driving control system B in your car and your order is on hold until you decide. When pressed on what the exact difference is between A and B you are told they more or less do the same thing but A is intuitive but lacking advanced features whereas B covers everything but is quite complex. But you can look through 10 years of flamewars to consider their respective merits. Oh and your servicing is going to cost more money since Ford supports two driving control systems. And the general experience will be flakey because Ford has to split their time making their car work reasonably with two systems.
Android will do the same for tablets what it did for smart phones. There will be tablets in all shapes, sizes, form factors, specifications and budgets.
I think there should be options too to cover the normal spread of things a user might change - mouse speed, desktop background, themes etc. And configuration for things like setting up wifi, screen resolution etc. Beyond that I think most of the stuff in a desktop could be relegated to a generic config editor. KDE has way too many settings, GNOME has too few.
A good rule of thumb I think for any setting is to look at the analog in Windows and OS X and see what happens there. If the setting is absent then it can probably be absent in GNOME / KDE. If it's present then it should be given a similar level of prominence. In other words leech a bit off the usability testing that Apple and Microsoft have done.
Problem for KDE is they're attempting to play the same notes as Windows but without understanding the tune. Arguably GNOME 3 is going to far in the other direction but I think it is far easier for GNOME to add options and new functionality than for KDE to take it away.
My biggest complaint about KDE is it doesn't know when less is more. The UI is packed with too many menus, buttons, configuration settings, dialogs within dialogs. It's just a busy, complex desktop. Arguably GNOME 3 is too cut to the bone and lacking in certain settings but I have no doubt in my mind which desktop is the easiest to use out of the box.
Exactly. It's intimidating and a redundant question since if you don't know the answer then what purpose is there in asking the question in the first place? And if you do know the answer then you should be using a dist which supports your preference. Windows doesn't ask what desktop you want, it just gives it to you one. Same for OS X. I don't see why Linux dists should be any different.
I find it condescending how you suggest offering "no choice" at install time is somehow protecting the new user.
How the hell is a new user supposed to know or care why there are bunch of different desktops, all of which do more or less the same thing but in different ways? How the hell is a new user meant to pick apart the war of words that has been going on for over a decade over which desktop is supposed to be the best.
The sensible thing for any dist is to pick one desktop and be done with it. If someone is in any way informed on the matter they will choose a dist which matches their preference, or will know how to install an alternative post-install.
So yes it is protecting the new user since it relieves them a question that they don't know the answer to, and of downloading a larger iso file. Arguably it also protects the dist since they don't have to waste time & resources supporting multiple desktops with all the overheads in support and bug fixing entailed by that.
It *is* making "good progress". But where these types of projects usually hang up is when they finally get to the stage where they need to put together the infrastructure to source parts, manufacture, and market the *product*. At this point, they generally realize that they just don't have the organization and resources necessary, and the sub-$100 price point is out-the-window unrealistic for the volume they can realistically project to move...
I think Raspberry Pi's price goal is pretty ambitious but at the same time it's not outrageous. It's basically running the same parts you'd find in any cheap ass media player. You can pick up media players for less than $100 and if you cut out the case, packaging, power supply, application software, optional software licences (e.g. AC3, Dolby), reseller margins, and just ship the barebones product you could do it for the price they're proposing. Or if not exactly then not far off it.
Make the picture fairly small so people are not using pronounced movements to draw on it. i.e. don't fill the screen with the picture, use a part of it so the gestures are smaller.
Distort the picture, e.g. scale, rotate, shear and offset by some random percentage each time so even if you observe the gesture or the smears on screen you cannot exactly reproduce them the next time. Apply a transform to turn the gesture back into coords relative to the original picture.
Go one further and break the picture up into 8 or 9 pieces and while maintaining their relative position offset them from each other by some random spacing.
Don't let users pick the picture. Ship some interesting pictures with lots of points of interest to minimize the chances someone could guess them.
Provide a fallback mode that uses a password
All of these would help secure picture passwords and protect against snoopers.
I think the thing Unix got right was to ship a bunch of tiny tools that could be strung together via pipes and redirections to construct something useful. It's a mind bogglingly useful approach, and the tools are powerful especially compared to the half assed tools that plague DOS derivatives to this day.
That said there is no denying how "organic" some tools are. There is no consistent syntax between tools, and some tools are arcane or implement arcane default settings. I also have a love / hate relationship between bash, gawk and perl and constantly have to relearn these bastards when I need to write a script because they're almost write-only languages and virtually unmaintainable once they grow beyond a certain size. I once had to port a 5000 line cgi perl script which could generate 6 disparate web pages into Java. It took six months to unpick and reimplement.
The point is you can write C++ or Objective C or python bindings on top of GTK with relative ease because GTK is written in C so it represents the lowest common denominator. This is also why Firefox, Eclipse and other projects use GTK in preference to QT because they don't have to wrangle pre-existing C++ objects to make use of the widget primitives.
Actually GNOME served an excellent purpose, one that arguably KDE still doesn't get - usability. GNOME 2 was developed according to a set of Human Interface Guidelines and the project strictly enforced them. As a consequence GNOME 2 was minimalist, consistent, not laden down with heaps of settings, forgiving, and sane out of the box. It can be reasonably thought of as the first Linux desktop usable by mere mortals - people who want their desktop to be compliant, forgiving but otherwise sink into the background while they do other stuff. I believe that usability is why GNOME ended up becoming more popular than KDE.
I really see GNOME 3 as a continuation of that, taking usability further into producing a context sensitive, task centric workflow. Does it get everything right? Of course not and some things are arguably very annoying or immature at present. But I think the foundation is sound and as the iterations pass and extensions appear it will become more refined. Version 3 serves a second purpose which is dragging the experience away from the W2K / MacOS wannabe world of other desktops. I also think that it will facilitate the move to Wayland which I hope and expect will replace X11 for the local desktop experience within a few years.
KDE is still a nice desktop and is making its own advances in compositing and in dumping X (which will be first to Wayland I wonder). But it is still a desktop for which usability really hasn't played a central role. It's very busy with settings, menus, dialogs etc which may be great for people who absolutely have to tune every last setting but confusing and intimidating for people who just want to use the desktop for something else. GNOME may be considered too minimalist by some but arguably KDE is too cluttered.
Which affordable, certified "real Android tablet" in the 7 to 8 inch range do you recommend instead of a Kindle Fire or Nook Tablet? Or are Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet like game consoles, sold at razor-thin margins or even at a loss to get people onto the manufacturer's store, and that's why they're so much cheaper than Google-certified devices?
They're coming. Of course if you're absolutely desperate for a tablet from a brand then $200-250 is probably the best you can hope for right now. But I expect next year the market will be flooded with tablets from $100 up running Ice Cream Sandwich or its successor.
Same could be said of C++ though. It generates machine code and few people would contemplate modifying the machine code. Instead they'd modify the source and recompile. I wonder what fun would await me if I tried to move binaries built for a 10 year old Slackware and tried to make them run on Fedora 17. Chances are I wouldn't even bother - I'd take the pain of porting the code and build it from scratch against the new platform.
I think the biggest issue for JS is there are multiple implementations of it and the DOM and each is a moving target. If you look at GWT (for example), you must specify what user agents your app must run on and it spits out different JS for each of them. So IE, Opera, Chrome and Firefox all run different JS generated from the same input.
I'd have zero confidence that the code GWT spits out now would still function properly 10 years hence. But I'd have zero confidence that even hand written code in JQuery / Dojo etc would work properly either. It might sort-of work but a lot of the details in implementation could change so subtle and not so subtle behavioural and rendering issues could crop up. I think that as long as you write your apps with open source tools that you are relatively safe though. If Google discontinued GWT tomorrow then someone else would pick it up or at least maintain it and I would anticipate that I would run the tool over the source again to produce JS which did work with more recent browsers.
Downloading it and not paying for it is really punishing the publisher, and it isn't their fault.
Well you could say it is their fault for expecting their game to slide past one of the most draconian game censors in the world. Not that I'm trying to defend Australia's level of censorship which I think is ridiculous, but I'm just saying. Can't cry "unfair" when the situation is pretty well understood even if it is a bad situation.
And if the game is banned from the country how much material harm are you actually causing EA by pirating it? The ban meant they weren't going to profit from the game in Australia any way. I suppose some people might import but I really doubt many would unless Syndicate turns out to be an amazing title that people MUST have. If it's a typical 65-80% EA game crapped out from the production line then I doubt many people would be too worried about rushing out to import.
It would slow the bad guys down in proportion to the strength of the password you chose on the archive. Rar, zip, and 7z all support 128-bit+ key encryption. Choose "bob" as your password and the secrets are revealed in a split second. Choose "Feathery bird wins 99 points by fluke in 2011" or some other nonsense phrase as the password for your key and they will be there forever short of torturing you or the recipient.
Obviously using symmetric crypto has its own drawbacks but it's a perfectly acceptable way to pass data around assuming you gave the other guy the decryption key in a way that prevented eavesdropping, e.g. you wrote the key on a piece of paper and physically handed it to the person. Failing all that you could encrypt a.zip or.rar with GPG or similar and benefit from public key crypto but the disadvantage is it becomes a two step process.
No JS is not that bad, it's just that sites are making more and more demands from it. Where once upon a time a site might have some simple functions and a few onclick handlers, now it's executing humoungous blocks of JS often tied to DOM calls. Look at apps like Emscripten for example or GWT which spew out a mass of JS code. The JS engine suddenly finds that the time it takes to parse, compile, garbage collect, execute and interact with the DOM suddenly makes a big deal of difference in performance when previously it might not have mattered so much.
The situation is bound to get even worse when tools appear which convert flash into HTML and HTML based animations with bloated JS runtimes of their own become increasingly common features on websites.
Very little of what I write is important enough for anybody to care about
Very few of the people I interact with use encryption and I'm certainly not going to advocate encryption unless I consider it necessary to what I wish to send/receive
Encrypted email is orthogonal to searchable email. i.e. if I encrypt my emails to somebody then I can't search that email unless the plugin slowly, painfully decrypts every email to search through it.
Email encryption was DOA the moment S/MIME + PKCS was chosen as the default standard. What the fuck were Netscape & Microsoft they thinking to back this 3 legged horse? It's hideously complex, slow, bloats emails, makes it difficult to obtain / renew keys and email clients had such botched or complex interfaces that it virtually guaranteed no one used the tech.
I have used raw PGP/GPG and Enigmail with good results but usually only when exchanging emails with customers who want certain data to be encrypted, e.g. the keys used to port knock a device for example.
I can't help but think how prevalent encryption would be now if every email client's setup wizard auto generated a keypair (or allow you to import them) and just enabled it without some big song and dance. Forcing people to root around in broken CAs and obtain certs from a CA for $$$ and repeat the process every 6-12 months was a recipe for disaster.
The thing is, if some people do inadvertently believe that tagging something private makes it private, then how hard is it for facebook to ask "you added the word private to this photo, do you want to make it private? Yes / No".
Sure it's undertaken various abortive token projects but nothing that remotely approaches the concept of free trade. Usually it's a "partnership" with some firm or country to build a resort, hotel, infrastructure which promptly flops, has its assets seized, or attracts appalling publicity and then flops and has its assets seized. A proper move to free trade would see trade brought to the masses, property de-collectivized, the rights for people to open businesses for profit, the import and export of goods on a large scale, the opening of stock exchanges, of banks, lenders, free travel etc. A few prominent and ultimately failed experiments don't cut it.
I doubt it's that easy to go from totalitarian state to democracy short of a revolution. But what Kim Jong Il could have done is allowed a modicum of free trade to attract investment into the country, gone on a diplomatic charm offensive to thaw relations with neighbours, loosened up some of the more suppressive state policies and generally start acting like a sane country again. Russia and China both managed that much even while under communism. It may be that even after his rule were over the country would not be free but it would have certainly been happier, well fed and potentially ready to take a few more steps.
North Korea's poverty was entirely self inflicted. It's surrounded by moderately to very prosperous neighbours and could have achieved prosperity if took the tinfoil hat off.
It makes no sense to everyone including Amazon. There is a perfectly functional EPUB format which they could use and still DRM in whichever way they pleased.
Then you pick a dist and disable or redirect the sources so it stays still until you decide to change. Ubuntu also has a long term support (LTS) version so you could coast off that, picking up the patches for a few years before deciding whether to continuing to support the dist by yourself or upgrading something more recent. Red Hat is probably a safer bet if you want long term support though.
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I'll be able to surf the web when I buy my sex cup and schoolgirl panties.
Well seeing you want to go down the car analogy, the point is would be like Ford asking you if you want to install driving control system A or driving control system B in your car and your order is on hold until you decide. When pressed on what the exact difference is between A and B you are told they more or less do the same thing but A is intuitive but lacking advanced features whereas B covers everything but is quite complex. But you can look through 10 years of flamewars to consider their respective merits. Oh and your servicing is going to cost more money since Ford supports two driving control systems. And the general experience will be flakey because Ford has to split their time making their car work reasonably with two systems.
That analogy isn't a remotely comparable. And no choice is not good if the consumer has no idea what the answer is to the question.
Android will do the same for tablets what it did for smart phones. There will be tablets in all shapes, sizes, form factors, specifications and budgets.
A good rule of thumb I think for any setting is to look at the analog in Windows and OS X and see what happens there. If the setting is absent then it can probably be absent in GNOME / KDE. If it's present then it should be given a similar level of prominence. In other words leech a bit off the usability testing that Apple and Microsoft have done.
Problem for KDE is they're attempting to play the same notes as Windows but without understanding the tune. Arguably GNOME 3 is going to far in the other direction but I think it is far easier for GNOME to add options and new functionality than for KDE to take it away.
My biggest complaint about KDE is it doesn't know when less is more. The UI is packed with too many menus, buttons, configuration settings, dialogs within dialogs. It's just a busy, complex desktop. Arguably GNOME 3 is too cut to the bone and lacking in certain settings but I have no doubt in my mind which desktop is the easiest to use out of the box.
Exactly. It's intimidating and a redundant question since if you don't know the answer then what purpose is there in asking the question in the first place? And if you do know the answer then you should be using a dist which supports your preference. Windows doesn't ask what desktop you want, it just gives it to you one. Same for OS X. I don't see why Linux dists should be any different.
I find it condescending how you suggest offering "no choice" at install time is somehow protecting the new user.
How the hell is a new user supposed to know or care why there are bunch of different desktops, all of which do more or less the same thing but in different ways? How the hell is a new user meant to pick apart the war of words that has been going on for over a decade over which desktop is supposed to be the best.
The sensible thing for any dist is to pick one desktop and be done with it. If someone is in any way informed on the matter they will choose a dist which matches their preference, or will know how to install an alternative post-install.
So yes it is protecting the new user since it relieves them a question that they don't know the answer to, and of downloading a larger iso file. Arguably it also protects the dist since they don't have to waste time & resources supporting multiple desktops with all the overheads in support and bug fixing entailed by that.
It *is* making "good progress". But where these types of projects usually hang up is when they finally get to the stage where they need to put together the infrastructure to source parts, manufacture, and market the *product*. At this point, they generally realize that they just don't have the organization and resources necessary, and the sub-$100 price point is out-the-window unrealistic for the volume they can realistically project to move...
I think Raspberry Pi's price goal is pretty ambitious but at the same time it's not outrageous. It's basically running the same parts you'd find in any cheap ass media player. You can pick up media players for less than $100 and if you cut out the case, packaging, power supply, application software, optional software licences (e.g. AC3, Dolby), reseller margins, and just ship the barebones product you could do it for the price they're proposing. Or if not exactly then not far off it.
All of these would help secure picture passwords and protect against snoopers.
That said there is no denying how "organic" some tools are. There is no consistent syntax between tools, and some tools are arcane or implement arcane default settings. I also have a love / hate relationship between bash, gawk and perl and constantly have to relearn these bastards when I need to write a script because they're almost write-only languages and virtually unmaintainable once they grow beyond a certain size. I once had to port a 5000 line cgi perl script which could generate 6 disparate web pages into Java. It took six months to unpick and reimplement.
The point is you can write C++ or Objective C or python bindings on top of GTK with relative ease because GTK is written in C so it represents the lowest common denominator. This is also why Firefox, Eclipse and other projects use GTK in preference to QT because they don't have to wrangle pre-existing C++ objects to make use of the widget primitives.
I really see GNOME 3 as a continuation of that, taking usability further into producing a context sensitive, task centric workflow. Does it get everything right? Of course not and some things are arguably very annoying or immature at present. But I think the foundation is sound and as the iterations pass and extensions appear it will become more refined. Version 3 serves a second purpose which is dragging the experience away from the W2K / MacOS wannabe world of other desktops. I also think that it will facilitate the move to Wayland which I hope and expect will replace X11 for the local desktop experience within a few years.
KDE is still a nice desktop and is making its own advances in compositing and in dumping X (which will be first to Wayland I wonder). But it is still a desktop for which usability really hasn't played a central role. It's very busy with settings, menus, dialogs etc which may be great for people who absolutely have to tune every last setting but confusing and intimidating for people who just want to use the desktop for something else. GNOME may be considered too minimalist by some but arguably KDE is too cluttered.
Which affordable, certified "real Android tablet" in the 7 to 8 inch range do you recommend instead of a Kindle Fire or Nook Tablet? Or are Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet like game consoles, sold at razor-thin margins or even at a loss to get people onto the manufacturer's store, and that's why they're so much cheaper than Google-certified devices?
They're coming. Of course if you're absolutely desperate for a tablet from a brand then $200-250 is probably the best you can hope for right now. But I expect next year the market will be flooded with tablets from $100 up running Ice Cream Sandwich or its successor.
I think the biggest issue for JS is there are multiple implementations of it and the DOM and each is a moving target. If you look at GWT (for example), you must specify what user agents your app must run on and it spits out different JS for each of them. So IE, Opera, Chrome and Firefox all run different JS generated from the same input.
I'd have zero confidence that the code GWT spits out now would still function properly 10 years hence. But I'd have zero confidence that even hand written code in JQuery / Dojo etc would work properly either. It might sort-of work but a lot of the details in implementation could change so subtle and not so subtle behavioural and rendering issues could crop up. I think that as long as you write your apps with open source tools that you are relatively safe though. If Google discontinued GWT tomorrow then someone else would pick it up or at least maintain it and I would anticipate that I would run the tool over the source again to produce JS which did work with more recent browsers.
Downloading it and not paying for it is really punishing the publisher, and it isn't their fault.
Well you could say it is their fault for expecting their game to slide past one of the most draconian game censors in the world. Not that I'm trying to defend Australia's level of censorship which I think is ridiculous, but I'm just saying. Can't cry "unfair" when the situation is pretty well understood even if it is a bad situation.
And if the game is banned from the country how much material harm are you actually causing EA by pirating it? The ban meant they weren't going to profit from the game in Australia any way. I suppose some people might import but I really doubt many would unless Syndicate turns out to be an amazing title that people MUST have. If it's a typical 65-80% EA game crapped out from the production line then I doubt many people would be too worried about rushing out to import.
Obviously using symmetric crypto has its own drawbacks but it's a perfectly acceptable way to pass data around assuming you gave the other guy the decryption key in a way that prevented eavesdropping, e.g. you wrote the key on a piece of paper and physically handed it to the person. Failing all that you could encrypt a .zip or .rar with GPG or similar and benefit from public key crypto but the disadvantage is it becomes a two step process.
Is JS really that bad?
No JS is not that bad, it's just that sites are making more and more demands from it. Where once upon a time a site might have some simple functions and a few onclick handlers, now it's executing humoungous blocks of JS often tied to DOM calls. Look at apps like Emscripten for example or GWT which spew out a mass of JS code. The JS engine suddenly finds that the time it takes to parse, compile, garbage collect, execute and interact with the DOM suddenly makes a big deal of difference in performance when previously it might not have mattered so much.
The situation is bound to get even worse when tools appear which convert flash into HTML and HTML based animations with bloated JS runtimes of their own become increasingly common features on websites.
I have used raw PGP/GPG and Enigmail with good results but usually only when exchanging emails with customers who want certain data to be encrypted, e.g. the keys used to port knock a device for example.
I can't help but think how prevalent encryption would be now if every email client's setup wizard auto generated a keypair (or allow you to import them) and just enabled it without some big song and dance. Forcing people to root around in broken CAs and obtain certs from a CA for $$$ and repeat the process every 6-12 months was a recipe for disaster.
The thing is, if some people do inadvertently believe that tagging something private makes it private, then how hard is it for facebook to ask "you added the word private to this photo, do you want to make it private? Yes / No".
Sure it's undertaken various abortive token projects but nothing that remotely approaches the concept of free trade. Usually it's a "partnership" with some firm or country to build a resort, hotel, infrastructure which promptly flops, has its assets seized, or attracts appalling publicity and then flops and has its assets seized. A proper move to free trade would see trade brought to the masses, property de-collectivized, the rights for people to open businesses for profit, the import and export of goods on a large scale, the opening of stock exchanges, of banks, lenders, free travel etc. A few prominent and ultimately failed experiments don't cut it.
I doubt it's that easy to go from totalitarian state to democracy short of a revolution. But what Kim Jong Il could have done is allowed a modicum of free trade to attract investment into the country, gone on a diplomatic charm offensive to thaw relations with neighbours, loosened up some of the more suppressive state policies and generally start acting like a sane country again. Russia and China both managed that much even while under communism. It may be that even after his rule were over the country would not be free but it would have certainly been happier, well fed and potentially ready to take a few more steps.
North Korea's poverty was entirely self inflicted. It's surrounded by moderately to very prosperous neighbours and could have achieved prosperity if took the tinfoil hat off.
It makes no sense to everyone including Amazon. There is a perfectly functional EPUB format which they could use and still DRM in whichever way they pleased.
Then you pick a dist and disable or redirect the sources so it stays still until you decide to change. Ubuntu also has a long term support (LTS) version so you could coast off that, picking up the patches for a few years before deciding whether to continuing to support the dist by yourself or upgrading something more recent. Red Hat is probably a safer bet if you want long term support though.