Of course they could spend their money on any number of products that they want to keep out of competitors hands. Now, I'm the farthest thing you can be from a businessperson, but even I find it hard to imaging that it's a good practice to do this. Wasting tons of money on something just so the other guys don't get it just seems... wasteful.
Of course, even Google has succumbed to wasting large sums of cash on patents and the like, so perhaps they're not as smart as we hoped....
Uhh, in the U.S. copyright infringement is a criminal offense. Don't you actually read that FBI warning that comes up before EVERY bit of content on DVDs?
Who cares what the US government thinks, honestly? The copyright laws have been bought and paid for ever since the existence of the Disney Corporation, and everyone in the world knows it. Pay someone enough money and you'll get them to admit anything. The whole legal profession is based on it.
Also, there is no such thing as a victimless crime. Now, there are also civil charges for copyright infringement that can be applied, but it's a crime and there are people that suffer financial loss because of it.
I quite simply cannot understand how it someone could be considered a victim when they produced an artistic work, and people went out of their way to enjoy it. Those who choose to support it are going to. Personally, I've done my best to make sure that I give as little as possible to groups who take away my rights for their moneyed interests, while happily giving to those who make their content available in reasonable terms.
Those people usually don't include Hollywood as their profits keep going up despite copyright infringement. But, small production companies and artists trying to get their foot in the door do suffer real consequences of copyright infringement and do suffer real "hurt" because of it.
I think the main difference between large and small companies is that small companies have to put out quality to survive. Large companies in all honesty, don't and they often get by with rehashing the same old content and releasing it dozens of times. Example: Star Wars. Furthermore, copyright law does about as much as patent law to help these small companies, as the cost of litigation pretty much wipes out anything that they have to gain from the enforcement action, while large companies just use them to bully around people that they disagree with, even when they do nothing wrong.
Yes, but the one invariant is that copyright harms everyone else, with no help to be found. It's responsible for the repeated attempts at crippling the internet, gives us fundamentally broken technologies like DRM, wastes millions of dollars in the legal system, leads to obscenely non-constitutional laws and statutory penalties, thoroughly subverts the democratic process, and serves as the driving factor in several terrible economic/trade policies. In short, it completely sinks legitimate users as well as innocent bystanders, while the jury is out on whether it even serves any real purpose for the proprietors (and it really doesn't appear to at all, once you lose the farcical notion that each pirated copied is one (or hundreds, in the case of Jammie Rasset-Thomas) of lost sales).
We really need to reconsider our copyright policies. This world can't afford to be held back just because America chooses to sell itself out to moneyed interests.
There is no solution for stupidity. You accept that it will happen, try to mitigate it as best you can, and you move on. It's still not worth giving up your rights over.
It's still no excuse. YOU DO NOT OPEN ATTACHMENTS THAT YOU ARE NOT EXPECTING. It doesn't matter who the source is. Anyone could get hacked. Even if the source is someone you trust, but the message seems out of the blue and not something you expect, you get back in touch with them and ask if they sent it. Just because the message seems authentic doesn't mean that it is. It's still your fault as the user for trusting something that you shouldn't.
Nah, no matter what their licensing costs are, there would always be other competitors - especially open source/free platforms which would be impossible for them to compete with once they reach feature parity.
Their real failing is the fact that all their revenue is derived from one product. VMWare Company has zero diversification. That is why they are toast - because once that rug gets pulled from under them, they have nothing left to bring to the table.
But on the other hand, if an application is dependent on a platform that is not desirable, that reduces the overall value of the application, and it also opens the doors to competitors arise in other areas which could take their market share away.
Plus, an open platform's most valuable asset is its mindshare, and if large companies contribute to their development and invest more in the platform, that will bring more developers and more available software. There will always be managers who jump to choose platforms solely based on the availability of third-party support, rather than technical merits, but for those real engineers who want to move forward, more choices like this will enable much more progress.
I hate to be pedantic, but when someone says 'on the order of,' that generally implies that they're referring to orders of magnitude, which makes it silly to say 120,000, instead of 100,000, or 100.000 for our European friends, as well as others who use the same system.
Also, 'on the order of' makes the ~ in front of 120,000 redundant.
(Yes, I have to live with my brain every day. Someone please save me....)
You own the phone. If you choose to jailbreak it or if someone starts a project to wipe and erase the flash storage and put some variant of Android on it instead, so long as it doesn't mess with the carrier firmware or cellular network connectivity, and so long as the process of creating that alternate software doesn't involve breaking any laws, then you can do exactly what you propose.
I feel that expecting users to jailbreak their phones is a bit too extreme in order to have full property value of their product, especially given that this often results in voiding the device's warranty and can cause severe damage to the device, particularly if the user doesn't know what he or she is doing. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that it should work this way out of the box.
That's not the same as forcing Apple to let you do what YOU want on THEIR operating system. It's not an undisclosed secret. People know what they're buying.
As I stated at the end of my other post, giving vendors too much control over the platform results in users being left with less choice. If Apple and Google have too much control over their platform, then it isolates users who have more specific desires, relegating them to platforms that aren't as developed - BlackBerry, Windows, FirefoxOS, Ubuntu. Just because you know what you're being forced into doesn't mean you've been given a fair choice between vendors.
It does seem evil but apple is forcing a fair and profitable ecosystem for developers to get paid
Profitable, yes. Fair, no. Apple imposes a lot of (at best) questionable rules on what developers' apps are not allowed to do (too lazy to look up a comprehensive list, but e.g. web browsers). Google imposes their set of rules as well. But here we have a clear example of why it's good to have alternatives - to suit users and developers who value their privacy in ways that Google does not care to protect.
Should Apple have the ultimate deterministic right in what users are allowed to run on their phones? I do not think so. Vertical integration has never done anything to support anyone that wasn't in control of the process, and I sincerely doubt that allowing third-party app stores would in any way harm Apple, outside of perhaps introducing some reasonable competition in the available app stores on the platform.
Consider things this way - if it were not for the fact that Google allows third-party apps and app stores, then what options would there be for users who value their personal information be kept private from advertisers? Why should users in this category, and many others that Apple and Google may not cater to, be relegated to alternative platforms that have many other disadvantages?
I'm gonna get modded down here for bringing Apple into this, but it is relevant and is exactly an example of why having alternative app sources is important for users. I've long held that Apple must be forced to allow apps installed from third-party sources and here is an exact reason as to why that would be beneficial. Want to install something that the vendor agrees with? You can do it with Android thanks to the Amazon store, F-droid, and the like. And in all honesty, it's somewhat fair of Google to do this - if they've put up the Play Store, then they should have the right to determine what gets sold on it.
But the problem with Apple and the Iphone ecosystem is that you don't have any such choice - once you buy an Iphone, you do what Apple tells you and that's the end of the story, until you go to the lengths of exploiting the operating system to install what you like. And I don't want to hear that it's not a problem because Apple doesn't have a monopoly, which should somehow enable them to impose their decisions on their customers. We've seen such a backlash in the US over the people's right to unlock their phone's bootloader because once you buy it, it's yours. How is that different in the case of Apple forcing you to install only apps that they approve of? Once you buy it, it's yours - you should be able to run whatever you want on it if you should also have the right of unlocking it and doing what you wish. And you shouldn't have to go to the lengths over exploiting the OS in order to do it.
Regardless, I'm not an Android or Google fanboy (anymore, if I ever was one to begin with), and though they are in general better than Microsoft and Apple, they are distancing themselves from the goodness that comes from non-profit producers such as Mozilla. I'm pretty much set on dumping Android if/when I replace my phone in the next few years, and it's their vigorous policy towards advertising wiht such utter disregard for privacy that is pushing me that way. If there's one thinig I hate as a consumer, it's being treated like a sheep. Seems like FirefoxOS, Ubuntu Mobile, or crazily enough, maybe even Blackberry is the way to go.
- The New York Times has admitted on many occasions to suppressing stories for the sole reason that the White House asked them to. That was true under both the Obama and Bush administrations.
It's a shame that America's founding fathers gave groups like the NYT the freedom of press... and this is how they choose (not) to use it.
It's not inconceivable that someone would be in a position where they have to buy an Apple product. I know of schools that have forced students to buy them. So no, customers don't always have other options.
I believe the issue was that we needed 5.3.8, and the version installed on the system was 4.x. I was managing Joomla! as it is, which was painful enough - not sure if it's because it was set up badly (most likely the case), or the fact that Joomla! is a pain to deal with regardless. I'm guessing that it's the former though, as lots of sites seem to use one of its many (incompatible?) versions.
The agonizing part was that there is no understandable filesystem hierarchy and the tools used to manage the OS were horribly antiquated. bash 3.0. I don't think vim was installed. The system was never updated making package installation difficult. I think GNU/readline (or whatever they use) was also horribly misconfigured. Several other standard UNIX utilities were also not available (find?). And simply put, Apache is a nightmare to admin given the filesystem hierarchy - particularly since there is very little help available. Everybody using Apache generally installs it on an OS that follows the standard UNIX filesystem hierarchy.
Learning programming before going to school is good advice. It can help you do problem sets if you expect them to be very computational. At the end of my grad work, I was just writing Python scripts and automatically importing them into Latex. Also, other grad students will respect you a lot, as will your advisor as there's never a shortage of computational work to be done. Even if it's just simple stuff like managing webservers and whatnot.
I wouldn't recommend killing yourself over it - it's probably not worth it if it's something you hate. But if it's something you've long thought you could be good at and make use of, now is the time to capitalize. You won't have the mental energy to do it later.
Cinnamon is a little weak, and I say this having used it for several months (nearly a year). gnome-panel in Gnome 2 far outshines what's available in Cinnamon. The menu is pretty, but not quite as functional as the good old menus of Gnome 2 - I believe this can be reverted, but don't remember how. The other issue that I have is that some dialog windows follow the same idiotic OS X scheme of bringing a window down from the top which cannot be moved or closed. Example: File -> Save in Firefox brings up a window which is 100% opaque and prevents any interaction with the window underneath. This is particularly problematic in Eclipse, which has all sorts of these windows, as well as several other applications.
I'll be fair: Cinnamon is a fairly good replacement for Gnome 2. But it doesn't have the mindshare that Gnome 2 did, nor the polish and functionality. It's a bit prettier, which is nice, but it also has its share of holes. I guess the panel is my only major gripe. It's pushing me back to XFCE, but I'm not quite there yet.
Perhaps it will improve in due time with some more developer focus, but for now it's still not as good as Gnome 2 was. Of course MATE is also an option but again, you have the issue of fragmented developer mindshare. Perhaps if de Icaza was so concerned about fragmentation, he wouldn't have been so steadfast on creating such a terrible desktop environment which has divided resources between Gnome Shell, Cinnamon and MATE.
I'm not sure what de Icaza is referring to in his article. He provides no specifics whatsoever when he complains about packages and software that aren't available, and really it just sounds like FUD because I have never experienced anything of the sort with Linux, nor has anyone else I've spoken to. I've used Arch, Ubuntu (Gnome, Xubuntu and Mint+Cinnamon) and Debian and have never had to chase down a binary package. Nor have I ever tried installing a Debian package on Ubuntu. If he's trying to install packages manually using dpkg or rpm, then he's an idiot. If he's "begging" people for a package, then maybe he should just use a better distro. Fragmentation? Nobody cares. I've always been able to find what I need on my distros of choice, and I don't know anybody else who hasn't been able to.
On the flip side, those 2-3 agonizing weeks I had to use a Mac (as an Apache admin no less) were atrocious. Horribly slow, powerless UI. PHP was installed via Fink I reckon, and when I had to install a module which wasn't in the default install (I forget which) - well, I gave up and told the team that it was no longer my problem. Not worth the effort. You want a server, use a server OS, but the manager was another hopeless Mac fanboy so I didn't bother trying to convince him as such.
Maybe now we can leave behind the monstrosity that is Gnome Shell and start moving back to a usable, human desktop. I suggest rebuilding the goodness that was Gnome 2 in Gnome 3. Start from Cinnamon, which is totally functional, but could use some nice enhancements and a more refined panel.
Unless de Icaza's awful UI philosophy pervades the entire Gnome team...
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You're totally right! I was running windows 7 like a champ for 4 WHOLE MONTHS before it started slowing down!
That's a 400% increase!
A glimpse into the world as seen by Larry Ellison
If I were Daniel Webster, I'd be kicking myself for not trying to copyright English....
Of course they could spend their money on any number of products that they want to keep out of competitors hands. Now, I'm the farthest thing you can be from a businessperson, but even I find it hard to imaging that it's a good practice to do this. Wasting tons of money on something just so the other guys don't get it just seems... wasteful.
Of course, even Google has succumbed to wasting large sums of cash on patents and the like, so perhaps they're not as smart as we hoped....
Uhh, in the U.S. copyright infringement is a criminal offense. Don't you actually read that FBI warning that comes up before EVERY bit of content on DVDs?
Who cares what the US government thinks, honestly? The copyright laws have been bought and paid for ever since the existence of the Disney Corporation, and everyone in the world knows it. Pay someone enough money and you'll get them to admit anything. The whole legal profession is based on it.
Also, there is no such thing as a victimless crime. Now, there are also civil charges for copyright infringement that can be applied, but it's a crime and there are people that suffer financial loss because of it.
I quite simply cannot understand how it someone could be considered a victim when they produced an artistic work, and people went out of their way to enjoy it. Those who choose to support it are going to. Personally, I've done my best to make sure that I give as little as possible to groups who take away my rights for their moneyed interests, while happily giving to those who make their content available in reasonable terms.
Those people usually don't include Hollywood as their profits keep going up despite copyright infringement. But, small production companies and artists trying to get their foot in the door do suffer real consequences of copyright infringement and do suffer real "hurt" because of it.
I think the main difference between large and small companies is that small companies have to put out quality to survive. Large companies in all honesty, don't and they often get by with rehashing the same old content and releasing it dozens of times. Example: Star Wars. Furthermore, copyright law does about as much as patent law to help these small companies, as the cost of litigation pretty much wipes out anything that they have to gain from the enforcement action, while large companies just use them to bully around people that they disagree with, even when they do nothing wrong.
Yes, but the one invariant is that copyright harms everyone else, with no help to be found. It's responsible for the repeated attempts at crippling the internet, gives us fundamentally broken technologies like DRM, wastes millions of dollars in the legal system, leads to obscenely non-constitutional laws and statutory penalties, thoroughly subverts the democratic process, and serves as the driving factor in several terrible economic/trade policies. In short, it completely sinks legitimate users as well as innocent bystanders, while the jury is out on whether it even serves any real purpose for the proprietors (and it really doesn't appear to at all, once you lose the farcical notion that each pirated copied is one (or hundreds, in the case of Jammie Rasset-Thomas) of lost sales).
We really need to reconsider our copyright policies. This world can't afford to be held back just because America chooses to sell itself out to moneyed interests.
There is no solution for stupidity. You accept that it will happen, try to mitigate it as best you can, and you move on. It's still not worth giving up your rights over.
It's still no excuse. YOU DO NOT OPEN ATTACHMENTS THAT YOU ARE NOT EXPECTING. It doesn't matter who the source is. Anyone could get hacked. Even if the source is someone you trust, but the message seems out of the blue and not something you expect, you get back in touch with them and ask if they sent it. Just because the message seems authentic doesn't mean that it is. It's still your fault as the user for trusting something that you shouldn't.
No....
Phishing is not a flaw in the software - it's a flaw in the human that's using the software. PEBKAC, if you will (metaphorically of course).
Coming from a disillusioned Android user who's hoping to switch to FirefoxOS when possible.
Nah, no matter what their licensing costs are, there would always be other competitors - especially open source/free platforms which would be impossible for them to compete with once they reach feature parity.
Their real failing is the fact that all their revenue is derived from one product. VMWare Company has zero diversification. That is why they are toast - because once that rug gets pulled from under them, they have nothing left to bring to the table.
But on the other hand, if an application is dependent on a platform that is not desirable, that reduces the overall value of the application, and it also opens the doors to competitors arise in other areas which could take their market share away.
Plus, an open platform's most valuable asset is its mindshare, and if large companies contribute to their development and invest more in the platform, that will bring more developers and more available software. There will always be managers who jump to choose platforms solely based on the availability of third-party support, rather than technical merits, but for those real engineers who want to move forward, more choices like this will enable much more progress.
Great - one of America's last remaining exports is in a market with infinite supply. See how far that lasts....
Well, to me it's somewhat like saying 3.141592 +/- .01. The remaining digits lose significance if they're within the precision of the error bound.
I hate to be pedantic, but when someone says 'on the order of,' that generally implies that they're referring to orders of magnitude, which makes it silly to say 120,000, instead of 100,000, or 100.000 for our European friends, as well as others who use the same system.
Also, 'on the order of' makes the ~ in front of 120,000 redundant.
(Yes, I have to live with my brain every day. Someone please save me....)
You own the phone. If you choose to jailbreak it or if someone starts a project to wipe and erase the flash storage and put some variant of Android on it instead, so long as it doesn't mess with the carrier firmware or cellular network connectivity, and so long as the process of creating that alternate software doesn't involve breaking any laws, then you can do exactly what you propose.
I feel that expecting users to jailbreak their phones is a bit too extreme in order to have full property value of their product, especially given that this often results in voiding the device's warranty and can cause severe damage to the device, particularly if the user doesn't know what he or she is doing. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that it should work this way out of the box.
That's not the same as forcing Apple to let you do what YOU want on THEIR operating system. It's not an undisclosed secret. People know what they're buying.
As I stated at the end of my other post, giving vendors too much control over the platform results in users being left with less choice. If Apple and Google have too much control over their platform, then it isolates users who have more specific desires, relegating them to platforms that aren't as developed - BlackBerry, Windows, FirefoxOS, Ubuntu. Just because you know what you're being forced into doesn't mean you've been given a fair choice between vendors.
It does seem evil but apple is forcing a fair and profitable ecosystem for developers to get paid
Profitable, yes. Fair, no. Apple imposes a lot of (at best) questionable rules on what developers' apps are not allowed to do (too lazy to look up a comprehensive list, but e.g. web browsers). Google imposes their set of rules as well. But here we have a clear example of why it's good to have alternatives - to suit users and developers who value their privacy in ways that Google does not care to protect.
Should Apple have the ultimate deterministic right in what users are allowed to run on their phones? I do not think so. Vertical integration has never done anything to support anyone that wasn't in control of the process, and I sincerely doubt that allowing third-party app stores would in any way harm Apple, outside of perhaps introducing some reasonable competition in the available app stores on the platform.
Consider things this way - if it were not for the fact that Google allows third-party apps and app stores, then what options would there be for users who value their personal information be kept private from advertisers? Why should users in this category, and many others that Apple and Google may not cater to, be relegated to alternative platforms that have many other disadvantages?
I'm gonna get modded down here for bringing Apple into this, but it is relevant and is exactly an example of why having alternative app sources is important for users. I've long held that Apple must be forced to allow apps installed from third-party sources and here is an exact reason as to why that would be beneficial. Want to install something that the vendor agrees with? You can do it with Android thanks to the Amazon store, F-droid, and the like. And in all honesty, it's somewhat fair of Google to do this - if they've put up the Play Store, then they should have the right to determine what gets sold on it.
But the problem with Apple and the Iphone ecosystem is that you don't have any such choice - once you buy an Iphone, you do what Apple tells you and that's the end of the story, until you go to the lengths of exploiting the operating system to install what you like. And I don't want to hear that it's not a problem because Apple doesn't have a monopoly, which should somehow enable them to impose their decisions on their customers. We've seen such a backlash in the US over the people's right to unlock their phone's bootloader because once you buy it, it's yours. How is that different in the case of Apple forcing you to install only apps that they approve of? Once you buy it, it's yours - you should be able to run whatever you want on it if you should also have the right of unlocking it and doing what you wish. And you shouldn't have to go to the lengths over exploiting the OS in order to do it.
Regardless, I'm not an Android or Google fanboy (anymore, if I ever was one to begin with), and though they are in general better than Microsoft and Apple, they are distancing themselves from the goodness that comes from non-profit producers such as Mozilla. I'm pretty much set on dumping Android if/when I replace my phone in the next few years, and it's their vigorous policy towards advertising wiht such utter disregard for privacy that is pushing me that way. If there's one thinig I hate as a consumer, it's being treated like a sheep. Seems like FirefoxOS, Ubuntu Mobile, or crazily enough, maybe even Blackberry is the way to go.
- The New York Times has admitted on many occasions to suppressing stories for the sole reason that the White House asked them to. That was true under both the Obama and Bush administrations.
It's a shame that America's founding fathers gave groups like the NYT the freedom of press... and this is how they choose (not) to use it.
Ungrateful mongrels...
Indeed. But I would sure hate if someone forced me to buy an Ipad.
It is. But since Apple don't have an overwhelming share of the mobile space, that's allowed:
This may be changing - in terms of usage, Android market share seems to be progressively taking more and more Apple market share (correct me if I'm wrong). However, in terms of developer mindshare, I would think Apple is still beating out Android, particularly in tablet space (source: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/07/divine-intervention-googles-nexus-7-is-a-fantastic-200-tablet/3/-lasttwoparagraphs).
customers got other options.
It's not inconceivable that someone would be in a position where they have to buy an Apple product. I know of schools that have forced students to buy them. So no, customers don't always have other options.
I believe the issue was that we needed 5.3.8, and the version installed on the system was 4.x. I was managing Joomla! as it is, which was painful enough - not sure if it's because it was set up badly (most likely the case), or the fact that Joomla! is a pain to deal with regardless. I'm guessing that it's the former though, as lots of sites seem to use one of its many (incompatible?) versions.
The agonizing part was that there is no understandable filesystem hierarchy and the tools used to manage the OS were horribly antiquated. bash 3.0. I don't think vim was installed. The system was never updated making package installation difficult. I think GNU/readline (or whatever they use) was also horribly misconfigured. Several other standard UNIX utilities were also not available (find?). And simply put, Apache is a nightmare to admin given the filesystem hierarchy - particularly since there is very little help available. Everybody using Apache generally installs it on an OS that follows the standard UNIX filesystem hierarchy.
Learning programming before going to school is good advice. It can help you do problem sets if you expect them to be very computational. At the end of my grad work, I was just writing Python scripts and automatically importing them into Latex. Also, other grad students will respect you a lot, as will your advisor as there's never a shortage of computational work to be done. Even if it's just simple stuff like managing webservers and whatnot.
I wouldn't recommend killing yourself over it - it's probably not worth it if it's something you hate. But if it's something you've long thought you could be good at and make use of, now is the time to capitalize. You won't have the mental energy to do it later.
Cinnamon is a little weak, and I say this having used it for several months (nearly a year). gnome-panel in Gnome 2 far outshines what's available in Cinnamon. The menu is pretty, but not quite as functional as the good old menus of Gnome 2 - I believe this can be reverted, but don't remember how. The other issue that I have is that some dialog windows follow the same idiotic OS X scheme of bringing a window down from the top which cannot be moved or closed. Example: File -> Save in Firefox brings up a window which is 100% opaque and prevents any interaction with the window underneath. This is particularly problematic in Eclipse, which has all sorts of these windows, as well as several other applications.
I'll be fair: Cinnamon is a fairly good replacement for Gnome 2. But it doesn't have the mindshare that Gnome 2 did, nor the polish and functionality. It's a bit prettier, which is nice, but it also has its share of holes. I guess the panel is my only major gripe. It's pushing me back to XFCE, but I'm not quite there yet.
Perhaps it will improve in due time with some more developer focus, but for now it's still not as good as Gnome 2 was. Of course MATE is also an option but again, you have the issue of fragmented developer mindshare. Perhaps if de Icaza was so concerned about fragmentation, he wouldn't have been so steadfast on creating such a terrible desktop environment which has divided resources between Gnome Shell, Cinnamon and MATE.
I'm not sure what de Icaza is referring to in his article. He provides no specifics whatsoever when he complains about packages and software that aren't available, and really it just sounds like FUD because I have never experienced anything of the sort with Linux, nor has anyone else I've spoken to. I've used Arch, Ubuntu (Gnome, Xubuntu and Mint+Cinnamon) and Debian and have never had to chase down a binary package. Nor have I ever tried installing a Debian package on Ubuntu. If he's trying to install packages manually using dpkg or rpm, then he's an idiot. If he's "begging" people for a package, then maybe he should just use a better distro. Fragmentation? Nobody cares. I've always been able to find what I need on my distros of choice, and I don't know anybody else who hasn't been able to.
On the flip side, those 2-3 agonizing weeks I had to use a Mac (as an Apache admin no less) were atrocious. Horribly slow, powerless UI. PHP was installed via Fink I reckon, and when I had to install a module which wasn't in the default install (I forget which) - well, I gave up and told the team that it was no longer my problem. Not worth the effort. You want a server, use a server OS, but the manager was another hopeless Mac fanboy so I didn't bother trying to convince him as such.
Maybe now we can leave behind the monstrosity that is Gnome Shell and start moving back to a usable, human desktop. I suggest rebuilding the goodness that was Gnome 2 in Gnome 3. Start from Cinnamon, which is totally functional, but could use some nice enhancements and a more refined panel.
Unless de Icaza's awful UI philosophy pervades the entire Gnome team...