I think that there should be no net neutrality (gasp! but that's against the groupthink!). Net neutrality isn't necessary; a free, competitive market is. The problem is, that's not what we have now. The day that I'm able to choose between more than two or three ISPs (and no, four isn't enough:P) is the day we have an ISP that doesn't filter Netflix.
Plus, there are some benefits to net neutrality. Like if a cellphone network discriminated against regular data for the benefit of it's calls or texts. In a truly free market, you could choose between a network that did that (if it benefited you) or a network that had a bias towards regular data (if that benefited you), or one with no bias at all. Wouldn't that kind of choice be a good thing for some people? What about an ISP that was specifically designed to be biased towards Netflix (which, for some people, would be great)? Net neutrality would kill that. I don't want Netflix to die; I just think there should be much more choice.
Of course you do! I'm talking about you ripping your DVD and giving me a copy of your ripped DVD, while you keep your original DVD. I have nothing against lending things, in fact I love it.
Why should you be allowed to, essentially, distribute a copy of a work when you don't have the permission to do so? Lets say I buy a movie. Do I, rather, *should* I, have the right to stream it to my friend, paying or not? Lets say I did have the right to do that. Well, what about illegal downloading like torrents? Those would become legal too, as there's little difference between streaming something you own and sending a copy to someone else.
It sounds like a straw man, but it isn't. The reality is that we have to have some control over the media we create (in the case of movie studios), or else the term "profit" will mean almost nothing. I'm usually a "free culture", "open source" kind of guy, and I love the idea of sharing things... but *only* when I have permission to do so! What this company is doing is obviously infringement: they're creating copies of the work and distributing them without permission. If they did have permission, like Netflix, Crunchyroll, and some things on YouTube, then it would be a totally different matter.
You're joking, right? Just hold down the Alt key or log out first. Shutting down is a really superficial thing to do and rarely needs to be done (relative to other computer functions), so complaining about a couple milliseconds difference is rather pointless.
...What happened to Slashdot? The comments look... tiny! It no longer takes a fortnight just to load the comments, it looks a million times better, and it looks simpler to use as well!
2011: The year of Duke Nukem Forever, GNOME 3, and an actually sensible Slashdot comments system? Am I dreaming? Somebody pinch me!
GNOME Shell, IMO, is much more usable than Unity. Give it a try on Fedora 15 or Arch Linux! It takes a while to get used to, but once you wrap your head around it, it's very nice.
None of the core GNOME apps use Mono besides Tomboy (the others aren't "core apps" and are considered "extra" or even "third-party" apps). You can run GNOME without any of them installed, and they all have reasonable replacements that don't use Mono (Rhythmbox, Gnote, Shotwell, GNOME Shell's search bar, etc.). Rhythmbox is actually quite good; I used to be a Songbird and Banshee fan, but I tried Rhythmbox and, while it doesn't have every single feature under the sun, it's nice to work with and not nearly as buggy as Banshee was to me.
Whoever modded me up as funny must be trolling; I was dead serious! If Firefox really did have serious memory leaks it would have been fixed by now. Sometimes a plugin or add-on or something can cause memory problems and this should be pretty obvious. If you can't reproduce it with a fresh profile, please don't blame FF for it.
I've been using Kdenlive ever since it's port to Qt4, and it works very, very well. It has tons of options and effects, so even the most novice users can make something nice with a little effort. It has a bit of a leaning curve, but any "pro" software usually does. It fits in well with my desktop and Pulseaudio, even though I use GNOME and not KDE. If you've given up on video editing for Linux and haven't tried Kdenlive, you really should try it. It's not the most feature-filled editor, but it's great for casual and semi-pro users. And by great, I mean fantastic!
Please mod this man up. These trolls need to be put to rest; if a bug as severe as that one actually existed, it would have been fixed a long time ago.
I think by "Linux Friendly", he meant that it was developed with Linux mainly in mind, and that it integrates well with it. I love Epiphany for GNOME, honestly, as a second choice. It has tabs on bottom by default (slashdot trolls, take note!), it runs fast and with low memory, it has a built-in ad blocker, and it integrates with GNOME 3 perfectly. It isn't as feature-filled as Chrome, but it works very well.
Oh, and you can't forget Lynx/Links for Linux browsers;)
Can you please not troll and actually talk constructively? YES, I know that the Linux marketshare isn't as large, that's why I'm thanking them for their support! Firefox isn't excessively slow; it's only slow on non-Windows platforms (most notably Linux) because it's more optimized for Windows.
As a long-time Firefox and GNU/Linux fan, this is excellent news. Whenever I use Firefox on even the most basic windows installs, it's always faster than my desktop running Arch Linux. It lags left and right, sometimes takes forever to switch tabs, but it's not unusable. Thanks Mozilla for remembering that you have a lot of Linux-using fans!:)
For both Unity and Gnome 3, I am unhappy that switching workspaces has gone from a mouse move and a click, to a whole rigmarole of mouse moves and clicks. There's a reason many of these things were the way they were for the last 20 years, or more. I have the command lines and shortcuts to fix some of these things - like shifting left back to right on Unity tool bars - but still.
It's only one mouse movement and one double-click in GNOME 3; even faster if you use both the keyboard and mouse at the same time. Just flick your mouse to the top left corner and double-click a workspace, press the Windows key and double-click, or simply use Ctrl+Alt+Up/Down. It's just about as easy as before, and it even supports "flicking" gestures on the activities menu to switch workspaces on a touchscreen.
...which is Ubuntu with different defaults. I love Mint, I really do, but I think you'd be better off with Fedora, OpenSUSE, or even Arch Linux in the long run;).
"If I would have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said 'a faster horse'." -Henry Ford
I agree that Unity isn't exactly a step forward, more like a side-step, but you can't blame them for trying to innovate. If "The Year of the Linux Desktop" is ever going to come around, it won't come around by imitating the competition, but trying to be better than the competition. It might take a while to get there, but every competing effort helps.
Also, Arch Linux is a distribution full of tweakers and minimalists; the type of people you'd expect to dislike GNOME 3. Well, here's a forum thread on the Arch BBS asking for first impressions of GNOME 3, and the average opinion is very positive. Of course some users have complaints and gripes, but that's to be expected. Quite a few of the people that don't like GNOME 3 are either trolls (as evidenced in the thread) or have very, very precise workflows and can't fit them into GNOME 3. Seriously, try it for a week with an open mind, read the documentation and tip guides, etc. and you might like it! I know I do:)
1) Unity is built on top of GNOME. They didn't develop even half of that.
1.5) Unity, IMHO, is much less usable than GNOME 3's default desktop and quite a few people I've seen online agree with me. This is not absolute though and YMMV.
2) Every other distribution (almost) has an "app store"; it's called a freaking package manager and they've been around for a long, long time. Simply having a simple-to-use UI for one doesn't exactly qualify it as an "app store".
3) The music service is just a re-branded 7Digital (which is a great place to buy music btw; they even sell some things in FLAC).
4) The "personal cloud" is just a Dropbox competitor (with syncing for some apps, which is a nice touch).
I have a feeling that these types of articles are only made for advertisement views and nothing more, as I've rarely seen an article like this that actually makes sense. Plus, Ubuntu is overhyped. I used it from 7.10 to 10.04, and after I tried switching to something else I never looked back. The exact same desktop I got in Ubuntu was actually less buggy in Arch Linux, which doesn't patch things nearly as much as Ubuntu does. Honestly, if you disregard the package manager, there's very, very, very little difference between Ubuntu and any of the other popular distributions like Fedora/OpenSUSE (if you're a desktop user that is). The only reason it's still popular, as far as I can figure out, is because it's hyped so much as being "the easiest" and "the most feature-filled" and whatnot, when every other distribution has caught up with and, dare I say, surpassed Ubuntu in usability.
...We're talking about two different things here. I'm talking about hardware, not software. Nintendo can focus all of it's resources on being innovative hardware-wise, while Sony and Microsoft only focus a portion of their resources on it, while they try to dominate in other fields as well. the 360 and PS3 try to do everything at once, while Nintendo's consoles, as I said, try to be, well, gaming consoles and gaming consoles alone, and it shows.
And if we were talking about software, which we're not, Nintendo would still have a first-party advantage as they have some of the best in-house developers in the gaming industry, with Sony at a close second IMO (Shadow of the Colossus was amazing). Third-party-wise, Nintendo rules the handheld market as well.
A few years ago, the school I went to gave out tablet computers to every student (not portable tablets, but laptop PCs with touch-screens to be used with styluses). Not only did I use one on a daily basis as a student, but I also voluntarily helped out with the "tech director" (or whatever his position was) of the school, doing things like troubleshooting computers and helping to set computers up. As someone who has worked with this kind of program before, let me just say that there's a VERY, VERY, VERY SMALL CHANCE that this could work well. The tablets that we used were expensive, about a thousand dollars per student and teacher. We'd have to ship out pile after pile of busted tablets every week to get replacements, and we used CloneZilla and Deep Freeze to make sure that all of them were the same. Kids fooled around on them in class (I even participated in a school-wide Halo deathmatch during Biology class), and it was very poorly managed. The tech, while the teachers found the technology useful, never added more than the students would get by simply using pencil and paper (they even had digital whiteboards with a projector in every classroom, called "Smart Boards" or something like that).
For iPads to work in a school environment, they would have to be very locked down and very well-managed. What can you possibly do with an iPad, besides use the internet or a specialized research application, that you can't do with pencil and paper? It's a huge cost to support, it doesn't add much, it's more complicated than simple pencil-and-paper, and, unless it can be well-integrated into the curriculum, would be totally useless. Take it from me, as someone who has dealt with this before. Schools just seem to think that, by adding random technology, grades and learning will somehow improve. It doesn't work like that; not one bit. I know this from real-life experience.
PS: Yes, I know that Deep Freeze isn't exactly a very good solution for computers that students keep with them all the time. If I was them, I'd use Linux with limited user permissions, and the "tech director" there agreed with me. Management wanted Windows and that's what we got. Sigh...
Slashdot Mirror
I think that there should be no net neutrality (gasp! but that's against the groupthink!). Net neutrality isn't necessary; a free, competitive market is. The problem is, that's not what we have now. The day that I'm able to choose between more than two or three ISPs (and no, four isn't enough :P) is the day we have an ISP that doesn't filter Netflix.
Plus, there are some benefits to net neutrality. Like if a cellphone network discriminated against regular data for the benefit of it's calls or texts. In a truly free market, you could choose between a network that did that (if it benefited you) or a network that had a bias towards regular data (if that benefited you), or one with no bias at all. Wouldn't that kind of choice be a good thing for some people? What about an ISP that was specifically designed to be biased towards Netflix (which, for some people, would be great)? Net neutrality would kill that. I don't want Netflix to die; I just think there should be much more choice.
Of course you do! I'm talking about you ripping your DVD and giving me a copy of your ripped DVD, while you keep your original DVD. I have nothing against lending things, in fact I love it.
No it's not.
Why should you be allowed to, essentially, distribute a copy of a work when you don't have the permission to do so? Lets say I buy a movie. Do I, rather, *should* I, have the right to stream it to my friend, paying or not? Lets say I did have the right to do that. Well, what about illegal downloading like torrents? Those would become legal too, as there's little difference between streaming something you own and sending a copy to someone else.
It sounds like a straw man, but it isn't. The reality is that we have to have some control over the media we create (in the case of movie studios), or else the term "profit" will mean almost nothing. I'm usually a "free culture", "open source" kind of guy, and I love the idea of sharing things... but *only* when I have permission to do so! What this company is doing is obviously infringement: they're creating copies of the work and distributing them without permission. If they did have permission, like Netflix, Crunchyroll, and some things on YouTube, then it would be a totally different matter.
You're joking, right? Just hold down the Alt key or log out first. Shutting down is a really superficial thing to do and rarely needs to be done (relative to other computer functions), so complaining about a couple milliseconds difference is rather pointless.
...What happened to Slashdot? The comments look... tiny! It no longer takes a fortnight just to load the comments, it looks a million times better, and it looks simpler to use as well!
2011: The year of Duke Nukem Forever, GNOME 3, and an actually sensible Slashdot comments system? Am I dreaming? Somebody pinch me!
LoDR also applies here,
...Lord of Da Rings? Joking aside, what does this mean? Google isn't giving me any straight answers.
GNOME Shell, IMO, is much more usable than Unity. Give it a try on Fedora 15 or Arch Linux! It takes a while to get used to, but once you wrap your head around it, it's very nice.
WHAT 9000!? -Nappa
None of the core GNOME apps use Mono besides Tomboy (the others aren't "core apps" and are considered "extra" or even "third-party" apps). You can run GNOME without any of them installed, and they all have reasonable replacements that don't use Mono (Rhythmbox, Gnote, Shotwell, GNOME Shell's search bar, etc.). Rhythmbox is actually quite good; I used to be a Songbird and Banshee fan, but I tried Rhythmbox and, while it doesn't have every single feature under the sun, it's nice to work with and not nearly as buggy as Banshee was to me.
Can you imagine what's on Osama bin Laden's hard drive?
Obligatory XKCD
Use /etc/inittab, not daemons for gdm; it auto-restarts when you kill it, which is nice for some issues ;)
Whoever modded me up as funny must be trolling; I was dead serious! If Firefox really did have serious memory leaks it would have been fixed by now. Sometimes a plugin or add-on or something can cause memory problems and this should be pretty obvious. If you can't reproduce it with a fresh profile, please don't blame FF for it.
I've been using Kdenlive ever since it's port to Qt4, and it works very, very well. It has tons of options and effects, so even the most novice users can make something nice with a little effort. It has a bit of a leaning curve, but any "pro" software usually does. It fits in well with my desktop and Pulseaudio, even though I use GNOME and not KDE. If you've given up on video editing for Linux and haven't tried Kdenlive, you really should try it. It's not the most feature-filled editor, but it's great for casual and semi-pro users. And by great, I mean fantastic!
Please mod this man up. These trolls need to be put to rest; if a bug as severe as that one actually existed, it would have been fixed a long time ago.
I think by "Linux Friendly", he meant that it was developed with Linux mainly in mind, and that it integrates well with it. I love Epiphany for GNOME, honestly, as a second choice. It has tabs on bottom by default (slashdot trolls, take note!), it runs fast and with low memory, it has a built-in ad blocker, and it integrates with GNOME 3 perfectly. It isn't as feature-filled as Chrome, but it works very well.
Oh, and you can't forget Lynx/Links for Linux browsers ;)
Can you please not troll and actually talk constructively? YES, I know that the Linux marketshare isn't as large, that's why I'm thanking them for their support! Firefox isn't excessively slow; it's only slow on non-Windows platforms (most notably Linux) because it's more optimized for Windows.
As a long-time Firefox and GNU/Linux fan, this is excellent news. Whenever I use Firefox on even the most basic windows installs, it's always faster than my desktop running Arch Linux. It lags left and right, sometimes takes forever to switch tabs, but it's not unusable. Thanks Mozilla for remembering that you have a lot of Linux-using fans! :)
For both Unity and Gnome 3, I am unhappy that switching workspaces has gone from a mouse move and a click, to a whole rigmarole of mouse moves and clicks. There's a reason many of these things were the way they were for the last 20 years, or more. I have the command lines and shortcuts to fix some of these things - like shifting left back to right on Unity tool bars - but still.
It's only one mouse movement and one double-click in GNOME 3; even faster if you use both the keyboard and mouse at the same time. Just flick your mouse to the top left corner and double-click a workspace, press the Windows key and double-click, or simply use Ctrl+Alt+Up/Down. It's just about as easy as before, and it even supports "flicking" gestures on the activities menu to switch workspaces on a touchscreen.
You've never seen the Arch Wiki, have you? I swear, it's the most helpful documentation I've ever read, and some of it's tips can be used for other distros as well.
...which is Ubuntu with different defaults. I love Mint, I really do, but I think you'd be better off with Fedora, OpenSUSE, or even Arch Linux in the long run ;).
"If I would have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said 'a faster horse'." -Henry Ford
I agree that Unity isn't exactly a step forward, more like a side-step, but you can't blame them for trying to innovate. If "The Year of the Linux Desktop" is ever going to come around, it won't come around by imitating the competition, but trying to be better than the competition. It might take a while to get there, but every competing effort helps.
Also, Arch Linux is a distribution full of tweakers and minimalists; the type of people you'd expect to dislike GNOME 3. Well, here's a forum thread on the Arch BBS asking for first impressions of GNOME 3, and the average opinion is very positive. Of course some users have complaints and gripes, but that's to be expected. Quite a few of the people that don't like GNOME 3 are either trolls (as evidenced in the thread) or have very, very precise workflows and can't fit them into GNOME 3. Seriously, try it for a week with an open mind, read the documentation and tip guides, etc. and you might like it! I know I do :)
1) Unity is built on top of GNOME. They didn't develop even half of that.
1.5) Unity, IMHO, is much less usable than GNOME 3's default desktop and quite a few people I've seen online agree with me. This is not absolute though and YMMV.
2) Every other distribution (almost) has an "app store"; it's called a freaking package manager and they've been around for a long, long time. Simply having a simple-to-use UI for one doesn't exactly qualify it as an "app store".
3) The music service is just a re-branded 7Digital (which is a great place to buy music btw; they even sell some things in FLAC).
4) The "personal cloud" is just a Dropbox competitor (with syncing for some apps, which is a nice touch).
I have a feeling that these types of articles are only made for advertisement views and nothing more, as I've rarely seen an article like this that actually makes sense. Plus, Ubuntu is overhyped. I used it from 7.10 to 10.04, and after I tried switching to something else I never looked back. The exact same desktop I got in Ubuntu was actually less buggy in Arch Linux, which doesn't patch things nearly as much as Ubuntu does. Honestly, if you disregard the package manager, there's very, very, very little difference between Ubuntu and any of the other popular distributions like Fedora/OpenSUSE (if you're a desktop user that is). The only reason it's still popular, as far as I can figure out, is because it's hyped so much as being "the easiest" and "the most feature-filled" and whatnot, when every other distribution has caught up with and, dare I say, surpassed Ubuntu in usability.
That sounds much better than I hoped. Thanks for the insight!
...We're talking about two different things here. I'm talking about hardware, not software. Nintendo can focus all of it's resources on being innovative hardware-wise, while Sony and Microsoft only focus a portion of their resources on it, while they try to dominate in other fields as well. the 360 and PS3 try to do everything at once, while Nintendo's consoles, as I said, try to be, well, gaming consoles and gaming consoles alone, and it shows.
And if we were talking about software, which we're not, Nintendo would still have a first-party advantage as they have some of the best in-house developers in the gaming industry, with Sony at a close second IMO (Shadow of the Colossus was amazing). Third-party-wise, Nintendo rules the handheld market as well.
A few years ago, the school I went to gave out tablet computers to every student (not portable tablets, but laptop PCs with touch-screens to be used with styluses). Not only did I use one on a daily basis as a student, but I also voluntarily helped out with the "tech director" (or whatever his position was) of the school, doing things like troubleshooting computers and helping to set computers up. As someone who has worked with this kind of program before, let me just say that there's a VERY, VERY, VERY SMALL CHANCE that this could work well. The tablets that we used were expensive, about a thousand dollars per student and teacher. We'd have to ship out pile after pile of busted tablets every week to get replacements, and we used CloneZilla and Deep Freeze to make sure that all of them were the same. Kids fooled around on them in class (I even participated in a school-wide Halo deathmatch during Biology class), and it was very poorly managed. The tech, while the teachers found the technology useful, never added more than the students would get by simply using pencil and paper (they even had digital whiteboards with a projector in every classroom, called "Smart Boards" or something like that).
For iPads to work in a school environment, they would have to be very locked down and very well-managed. What can you possibly do with an iPad, besides use the internet or a specialized research application, that you can't do with pencil and paper? It's a huge cost to support, it doesn't add much, it's more complicated than simple pencil-and-paper, and, unless it can be well-integrated into the curriculum, would be totally useless. Take it from me, as someone who has dealt with this before. Schools just seem to think that, by adding random technology, grades and learning will somehow improve. It doesn't work like that; not one bit. I know this from real-life experience.
PS: Yes, I know that Deep Freeze isn't exactly a very good solution for computers that students keep with them all the time. If I was them, I'd use Linux with limited user permissions, and the "tech director" there agreed with me. Management wanted Windows and that's what we got. Sigh...