My thoughts exactly. I'm seriously considering switching to Thunderbird at work even though my company uses Exchange + Outlook. Of my morning login, Outlook easily eats half of it.
Of course, I don't know how much of that is waiting for Exchange (not to rib on Exchange... we have really old servers.)
I don't really read much BoingBoing, but I'll just bold everything that made me stop reading after the first couple paragraphs.
A source close to the British Labour Government has just given me reliable information about the most radical copyright proposal I've ever seen.
Secretary of State Peter Mandelson is planning to introduce changes to the Digital Economy Bill now under debate in Parliament. These changes will give the Secretary of State (Mandelson -- or his successor in the next government) the power to make "secondary legislation" (legislation that is passed without debate) to amend the provisions of Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (1988).
Doctorow claims to have a source that claims that someone in the UK government is going to try to attach a rider to a bill that no one would ever approve. Yeah, I'm gonna say this is a non-story.
after all, they give you a paycheck for work, not because you are pretty or something.
Teachers are underpaid, and the vast majority take their work home with them, for hours of grading after school.
Not that I necessarily disagree that he shouldn't have done this, but this more a question of using company property (which is obviously a bad idea) than using company time (which cannot be surmised from his posting on the Internet.)
But they don't pay sales taxes to customers in different states. This results in huge cashflow problems for the government, as these taxes are meant to be levied on most of the goods sold to their citizens. And the taxes are taxing the citizens just as much as Amazon. You still haven't presented a viable alternative tax reform plan that reflects the new reality.
Well, it depends on how you look at it. I mean really, Linux isn't Google's doing, so you basically have android - and really it's just an ad delivery platform that happens to contain all the elements of a proper GUI toolkit - which you need to show ads.
If a company throws a party with an open bar to advertise their products would you say they're breaking into the booze market?
Your argument is invalid because Amazon does use US infrastructure, in the form of roads, and regional shipping centers.
All US States rely on sales taxes for proper governance. These taxes must be levied, or we must re-engineer the tax system so that sales taxes are levied on a national level, and we turn over some equivalent tax to the states to keep them afloat. A bill restructuring the tax code would look cleaner from a corporations' rights standpoint, but it would require a massive power grab on the part of the federal government - outlawing local sales tax to level the playing field on the national level.
The only workable solution is to treat Internet retailers as residing in the city where they are shipping, that or the city they are shipping from.
The universe of course has limited total energy resources...
Unprovable assertion. Even if do in fact have a proper understanding of the big bang's entire sphere of influence, it seems implausible that other big bangs have not occurred and are not occurring in the same universe we occupy, separated by sufficient distance that they don't have a measurable impact on each other. Since it has happened once, I suspect it must happen more than once, and possibly frequently for some values of frequent.
Well, I'm talking about my experience with KDE 4.1 when it came out and I was still using a 2.8 ghz Celeron with 1.5 gigs of ram. Before the 4.1 "upgrade" Amarok was decently speedy and Kolourpaint was fast, sleek, and quick-starting. KTorrent was also my preferred BitTorrent client. (I ran a mix of KDE and Gnome.)
After 4.1, there were several issues that made me ditch it entirely:
Firstly there were several glaring feature regressions in Amarok that brought it down to feature parity with Rhythmbox, and Rhythmbox is still lighter than even Amarok 1.5. Amarok 2.0 was much slower starting, and generally clunky than 1.5.
Secondly, Kolourpaint now took as long to start as Inkscape, and drawing a line with the pencil tool caused my CPU to spike to something like 25%. A cursory inspection on my new Core 2 Quad box seems to indicate that this is fixed in the latest Karmic - so it may be one of those things that came from KDE4 being pushed out to users before it was really ready.
It also seems like the amount of crap you have to load to run KDE programs has ballooned - I'm not entirely sure. Regardless of just how much its memory footprint has ballooned, it has, and Gnome in contrast is sleek, responsive, and works out of the box with a comparably minimal memory footprint. You can also pick and choose elements of Gnome that work for you, rather than being forced to load the whole runtime.
My original statement may not have been entirely accurate if you're running the whole KDE desktop on something other than Kubuntu, but I don't really have the patience to install a new distro and configure all sorts of stuff when I know that I'm unlikely to give up Fluxbox + gnome. KDE is generally less responsive, and I wouldn't expect that even if I find its memory footprint is comparable to Gnome without Gnome involved.
And KDE is balls slow on older hardware. We're looking for a reasonably priced solution that can run on a cheap machine with a cheap monitor. There's no technical reason it can't be done, it's just that no one seems to be manufacturing it.
Not to mention the fact that 'Large Fonts' are actually not that large if you're sitting more than a foot from the monitor. Personally I like to sit about 3 feet from the monitor, partially because this means I have notes on my desk between me and the monitor.
And large fonts are not that large because nobody writes software to scale properly - that's partially why Gmail is such a breeze, there's the implicit assumption in (good) web development that you cannot control fonts.
Debugging is part of coding. If you're looking for the source of a bug, you are coding. And yes, I would call a function that fails under 25% of inputs bugged. Even if you've decided to write another method to handle those 25% of inputs, it's probable that the bug is not confined to the known problem cases.
Well, the advantage of having it integrated with the OS is you don't need battery-draining Flash ads. You can do the same thing with natively coded ads, and unlike the appstore no one's going to complain about needing a strict approval process for the code that goes into your ad.
It increasingly seems like the major software companies are determined to use any CPU cycles wrung out of Moore's law beyond 2005 levels exclusively for their own benefit, leaving us with our 3 ghz 1 gb machine, and quite content. This sort of nonsense removes the primary benefit of a computer, which is its ability to do things for you without your input. Now it does things for someone else, and it requires your input.
No. But something growing for an arbitrary length of time in vitro is different from a temporarily detached limb. The mildly disturbing thing is that it seems to be somewhat human, yet immortal and unthinking.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, sure, but that's only because I have
while [$TRUE]; do ; killall kitten; sleep 1; done;
In my .xinitrc.
My thoughts exactly. I'm seriously considering switching to Thunderbird at work even though my company uses Exchange + Outlook. Of my morning login, Outlook easily eats half of it.
Of course, I don't know how much of that is waiting for Exchange (not to rib on Exchange... we have really old servers.)
i/o is still a long way off. This is only computer input mechanisms. One way, man to machine. Machine can't alter man yet.
I don't really read much BoingBoing, but I'll just bold everything that made me stop reading after the first couple paragraphs.
Doctorow claims to have a source that claims that someone in the UK government is going to try to attach a rider to a bill that no one would ever approve. Yeah, I'm gonna say this is a non-story.
How would system instability improve the user experience? Or were you suggesting that they move to Xfce and not KDE?
The biggest issue I see is that Adobe has Photoshop / Illustrator and Linux has Gimp / Inkscape.
Of the four, I vastly prefer Inkscape and wish there were a raster program with a comparable interface.
I thought that the Gimp was originally a tech demo for GTK that kind of got a little out of hand.
Didn't say anything about where he was born.
Teachers are underpaid, and the vast majority take their work home with them, for hours of grading after school.
Not that I necessarily disagree that he shouldn't have done this, but this more a question of using company property (which is obviously a bad idea) than using company time (which cannot be surmised from his posting on the Internet.)
Install nightly tester tools. I don't imagine those will ever become incompatible, seeing as they're used for people testing the nightly builds.
Too late.
But they don't pay sales taxes to customers in different states. This results in huge cashflow problems for the government, as these taxes are meant to be levied on most of the goods sold to their citizens. And the taxes are taxing the citizens just as much as Amazon. You still haven't presented a viable alternative tax reform plan that reflects the new reality.
Well, it depends on how you look at it. I mean really, Linux isn't Google's doing, so you basically have android - and really it's just an ad delivery platform that happens to contain all the elements of a proper GUI toolkit - which you need to show ads.
If a company throws a party with an open bar to advertise their products would you say they're breaking into the booze market?
Your argument is invalid because Amazon does use US infrastructure, in the form of roads, and regional shipping centers.
All US States rely on sales taxes for proper governance. These taxes must be levied, or we must re-engineer the tax system so that sales taxes are levied on a national level, and we turn over some equivalent tax to the states to keep them afloat. A bill restructuring the tax code would look cleaner from a corporations' rights standpoint, but it would require a massive power grab on the part of the federal government - outlawing local sales tax to level the playing field on the national level.
The only workable solution is to treat Internet retailers as residing in the city where they are shipping, that or the city they are shipping from.
Yes! Amazon operates in the clouds! Why don't people understand this?
Unprovable assertion. Even if do in fact have a proper understanding of the big bang's entire sphere of influence, it seems implausible that other big bangs have not occurred and are not occurring in the same universe we occupy, separated by sufficient distance that they don't have a measurable impact on each other. Since it has happened once, I suspect it must happen more than once, and possibly frequently for some values of frequent.
Well, I'm talking about my experience with KDE 4.1 when it came out and I was still using a 2.8 ghz Celeron with 1.5 gigs of ram. Before the 4.1 "upgrade" Amarok was decently speedy and Kolourpaint was fast, sleek, and quick-starting. KTorrent was also my preferred BitTorrent client. (I ran a mix of KDE and Gnome.)
After 4.1, there were several issues that made me ditch it entirely:
Firstly there were several glaring feature regressions in Amarok that brought it down to feature parity with Rhythmbox, and Rhythmbox is still lighter than even Amarok 1.5. Amarok 2.0 was much slower starting, and generally clunky than 1.5.
Secondly, Kolourpaint now took as long to start as Inkscape, and drawing a line with the pencil tool caused my CPU to spike to something like 25%. A cursory inspection on my new Core 2 Quad box seems to indicate that this is fixed in the latest Karmic - so it may be one of those things that came from KDE4 being pushed out to users before it was really ready.
It also seems like the amount of crap you have to load to run KDE programs has ballooned - I'm not entirely sure. Regardless of just how much its memory footprint has ballooned, it has, and Gnome in contrast is sleek, responsive, and works out of the box with a comparably minimal memory footprint. You can also pick and choose elements of Gnome that work for you, rather than being forced to load the whole runtime.
My original statement may not have been entirely accurate if you're running the whole KDE desktop on something other than Kubuntu, but I don't really have the patience to install a new distro and configure all sorts of stuff when I know that I'm unlikely to give up Fluxbox + gnome. KDE is generally less responsive, and I wouldn't expect that even if I find its memory footprint is comparable to Gnome without Gnome involved.
And KDE is balls slow on older hardware. We're looking for a reasonably priced solution that can run on a cheap machine with a cheap monitor. There's no technical reason it can't be done, it's just that no one seems to be manufacturing it.
RTFS, moron. Or hell, if that's too much work for you, read the fucking title.
Not to mention the fact that 'Large Fonts' are actually not that large if you're sitting more than a foot from the monitor. Personally I like to sit about 3 feet from the monitor, partially because this means I have notes on my desk between me and the monitor.
And large fonts are not that large because nobody writes software to scale properly - that's partially why Gmail is such a breeze, there's the implicit assumption in (good) web development that you cannot control fonts.
Debugging is part of coding. If you're looking for the source of a bug, you are coding. And yes, I would call a function that fails under 25% of inputs bugged. Even if you've decided to write another method to handle those 25% of inputs, it's probable that the bug is not confined to the known problem cases.
Only if you're not also responsible for fixing the code in a few months when it comes back to you anyway with a serious bug.
Well, the advantage of having it integrated with the OS is you don't need battery-draining Flash ads. You can do the same thing with natively coded ads, and unlike the appstore no one's going to complain about needing a strict approval process for the code that goes into your ad.
It increasingly seems like the major software companies are determined to use any CPU cycles wrung out of Moore's law beyond 2005 levels exclusively for their own benefit, leaving us with our 3 ghz 1 gb machine, and quite content. This sort of nonsense removes the primary benefit of a computer, which is its ability to do things for you without your input. Now it does things for someone else, and it requires your input.
No. But something growing for an arbitrary length of time in vitro is different from a temporarily detached limb. The mildly disturbing thing is that it seems to be somewhat human, yet immortal and unthinking.