I'm well aware of multi-desktops. I just rather not use them: why would I want to make extra clicks when I can just click directly on the task button I want? I don't like OSX's Expose for similar reasons.
FWIW I never claimed in my post to be a typical user (I even hinted about that when I mentioned the program I wrote for my own usage- that very few in the world would find useful:) ).
How about you just click on the relevant window's task button to raise that window?
For what it's worth, I don't like this GNOME idiocy either - it adds nothing to the people like me who have most stuff maximized, while it annoys people who like to minimize and maximize stuff.
Sure people like you could change the way you work, but why make you change the way you work? What benefit do the rest of us get?
It only benefits people who like most stuff maximized AND are so obsessive about how things look to the point where they can't stand those "ugly buttons".
It might seem a bit strange to make a big change based on only reasonable certainty, but more than that is hard to get. User studies can be informative, but in this area, we're really interested how experienced users work with a lot of windows, so the most basic approach of paying people off the street to sit in front of of a computer for an hour to do predesigned tasks wasn't going tell us much.
Yeah hilarious. Are they really interested in how experienced users work? Or have they been paid by someone to sabotage GNOME (just looking at the stupid ideas they've been coming up with).
Not sure if I count as an experienced user but the way I work with lots of windows (e.g. 30+) is, I use Windows (2K/XP/7) and have all the task buttons ungrouped and in two rows, so that I can click directly on them to raise the window I want. I also have a utility I wrote called LinkKey[1] so that I can quickly bind alt-1 to alt-9 to various windows - so for example if I have to work amongst 4 windows, I can just press alt-1,2,3,4 to switch amongst them.
GNOME or KDE don't suit me for handling lots of windows - they order task buttons vertically first then horizontally so if I close a window, ALL task buttons on its right change relative vertical positions making me lose track of where stuff is. Windows orders the task buttons horizontally first then vertically, so only a few edge buttons are affected.
I find it funny that friends I know who use unix/linux as their primary desktop tend to use "screen" to manage their tasks/"windows" quickly. To me that shows how crappy the GNOME and KDE GUIs are. They can't even beat "screen" after so many years.
[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/linkkey/ I have no idea who did the recommendation (wasn't me!). I think only a few people in the world will find it useful, but I figured I might as well put it on sourceforge.
Most can't. The big difference is we hold them personally responsible for it. And they often die in their own screw-ups which is about as accountable as you get.
The responsibility/accountability is the main problem: if Toyota released a self driving car and it crashed and killed people in "corner cases" where even a skilled human might, Toyota would still get in trouble.
Using the elevator is generally much safer than using the stairs. Fortunately for elevator manufacturers and suppliers an elevator shaft is a more predictable environment than a network of roads.
Yep, it's not Facebook despite the current habit of the media to link Facebook with everything (have they linked it with cancer yet?;) ). Egypt has to import lots of wheat. Russia and India banned exports. Australia had a bad crop.
So wheat shortage = expensive bread = lots of hungry unhappy people. But just hungry unhappy people doesn't mean revolution.
Revolutions happens when the hungry unhappy people think the rulers are to blame for the problem, and then they become hungry very angry people. You can be starving and not blame the ruler/Government for the situation.
Uh the problems are: 1) When stuff goes fine they pocket all the profits, but when stuff goes bad, they keep their profits and everyone else pays for it. 2) When they win the bet they keep the money, when they have bugs in their fancy programs and lose money, they rollback the transactions and/or even sue/jail the people who benefited from their bugs (yes this has happened). Note: I'm not talking about bugs in the "casino"'s software but bugs in the software the "gamblers" use to decide on what to bet on. 3) The well connected ones also get to "cheat" - they get to see and do stuff 30 milliseconds before everyone else does. This is a big advantage. Google for that if you don't believe me. This is unfair.
There is really no benefit to society from picosecond trading. All it produces is more fancy excuses the intelligent sociopaths can use to take money from us.
They can talk about liquidity and creating markets but it is all bullshit - just look at what has actually happened.
All that they've created are systems where gamblers can play fancy millisecond[1] games to gamble with OTHER people's money and collect big fees, salaries and bonuses for doing so. When they win big they keep the big profits. When they lose big, they keep their "normal profits" and we have to pay for the losses.
If I didn't have a conscience I'd be happy to do that too - it's free money.
[1] In fact to make the trading fair, transactions should be valid for a second or more otherwise the speed of light makes location matter. Currently they can issue transactions and cancel them within milliseconds before the other traders can act on them.
I actually like all those - and do use wikipedia to find out info about such stuff.
But I also want the "old man murray" type of articles because in the future Google might not find anything: a) The rest of the web often has a short memory b) I might get a whole bunch of spam sites instead.
Gambling= when stuff goes really bad you lose all your money and then some.
"Investment banking" = when stuff goes really bad you lose everyone else's money but keep your bonuses, fees and salaries. Gamble with other people's money, get paid really big bucks when it goes well, get paid big bucks when it goes poof. Privatise the profits, socialize the losses.
So clearly investment banking is a smarter choice for intelligent sociopaths. And they can even use lots of fancy words to justify what they're doing - providing liquidity to the market etc.
When all they are doing is just transferring the money from the stupid (and/or those with a conscience) to themselves. Directly and through inflation.
The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an "effective procedure" (essentially, a computer program) is capable of proving all facts about the natural numbers. For any such system, there will always be statements about the natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system.
The second incompleteness theorem shows that if such a system is also capable of proving certain basic facts about the natural numbers, then one particular arithmetic truth the system cannot prove is the consistency of the system itself.
If the virtualization is perfect AND hidden by design, you can't test it. There would be no way for the stuff inside to "break out" or detect an "outside" without the help of those already outside (those outside might be able to copy or move stuff out).
Of course the virtualization could be perfect but the design might intentionally leave clues of an "outside", just like some virtual machines will indicate "vmware" as the brand of some "hardware".
I believe the mathematicians and physicists have already realized all this long ago. Can't remember the reference or what it's called though.
Microsoft spokesman Tom Pilla on Tuesday confirmed with iPod Observer that his company initiated the creation of the iPod packaging parody video that was first reported last month. "It was an internal-only video clip commissioned by our packaging [team] to humorously highlight the challenges we have faced RE: packaging and to educate marketers here about the pitfalls of packaging/branding," he said via e-mail.
The hardest job at MS would be their security experts. Imagine trying to do a job and having every last move you make either neutered or cancelled entirely by Marketing.
But this new Intel SSD uses a Marvell controller - the same as one used by Crucial's C300. Why should people pay a higher price for an SSD with the same controller? The uninformative article says nothing about that - no proper benchmarks or tests (random reads/writes, sequential/read writes, max latency of a random read/write transaction that interrupts those random/sequential read writes, read/writes of high/mid/low compressible data). Such an article should be pretty useless for real Slashdot nerd.
As for Sandforce, apparently they have problems when waking up from hibernation (google for that). This is not a problem for many desktop users but a showstopper for many laptop users (I won't be buying a sandforce drive for this reason alone).
AFAIK this new Intel SSD is using the same Marvell controller as Crucial's RealSSD C300, which goes for about USD490 for the 256GB drives in lots of 1 unit. Just look at Amazon, or even Crucial's own site.
So I'm not sure what makes the Intel drive better than the Crucial one which has been around for many months (and gone through some pains and fixes... ).
A supposedly nerd site like Slashdot linking to low-info press release or marketing article on Computerworld is stupid.
China isn't having those sort of problems yet because there are also the carrots. It's not all sticks. People in China have got richer (though the gap has widened) and thus got more and more to lose over the decades. There's hope of improvement and obesity is even becoming a problem.
Not true for too many people in Tunisia, Egypt etc. When you have large numbers of discontented people with little to lose, you have a big problem.
Once more and more people have low confidence that they or their loved ones would be alive even a month later[1], they stop getting so scared of you even if you threaten to kill them and their families.
[1] Apparently Egypt is very dependent on wheat imports. Russia (and India) stopped exporting wheat last year due to poor harvests. The "bread and circuses" stuff stops working when you run out of bread.
Most people sign it because: 1) They find reading difficult 2) They don't care or thinks it matters much 3) They aren't going to create anything new on their own anyway.
So a company that has such policies is selecting against employees that can read, care about following company policies, are able to create stuff and might want to do some creative stuff in their spare time.
Web developers stopped testing their sites with Netscape 6 ages ago.
Because Netscape 6 was a piece of shit not worth the time it took to download it. And it's not as if Netscape was so great at "web standards compliance" either.
Fact is 15 years ago netscape 4.x was inferior. It was worse than IE4. Yes IE1 2 and 3 were worse than Netscape 1-3.0, but IE had caught up, and then the Netscape team screwed up...
Netscape 6, 7 were pieces of bloated shit. If you thought Netscape 4 and IE4 were crap, they were worse. They really really sucked.
Believe me I was looking for something better than IE after using Netscape from v3 to v4.8, but there just wasn't any thing better for windows[1].
From IE4 to IE6 (1998 to 2005) tell me which browser was better than IE that ran on windows? Definitely not Netscape/Mozilla. Konqueror didn't run on Windows. Mosaic? Hahaha.
Mozilla Firefox only started getting usable in 2006 by my standards (my standards = crash less than IE). And it took them two more years to reduce those memory issues (I was using a desktop linux machine at work from 2006-2008 and it was common for firefox to use more memory than my vmware virtual machine running Windows XP and IE!).
I even tried Opera in 2006+ and it was actually slower than Firefox for my usage, and it even leaked lots of memory (yes we can blame it on flash but I'm just going to use what works).
Just look at how much Google Chrome has caught up in such a short time and you can see the alternative browsers just weren't good enough. Even nongeeks were seeing the difference between Chrome and IE and telling their nongeek friends to use it. Yes I know Chrome was based on Webkit and Webkit was based on Konqueror. But fact is there weren't good enough geniuses working on the "IE alternative" problem back then.
[1] If anyone thinks I should have switched to Desktop Linux back then, they're either stupid or delusional. Even 10 years later Desktop Linux still hasn't got _basic_ desktop stuff like sound right.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm well aware of multi-desktops. I just rather not use them: why would I want to make extra clicks when I can just click directly on the task button I want? I don't like OSX's Expose for similar reasons.
FWIW I never claimed in my post to be a typical user (I even hinted about that when I mentioned the program I wrote for my own usage- that very few in the world would find useful :) ).
Here's more about how I set up Windows 9x/2K/XP (no longer works for Windows 7 unfortunately): http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=175866&cid=14627608
Why would I need to taskbar hunt? The 30+ buttons will remain where I remember them as long as the UI doesn't shuffle them.
If I use virtual desktops it would be slower, because I would:
1) have to switch to a desktop first
2) take extra time to move windows to a desktop.
How about you just click on the relevant window's task button to raise that window?
For what it's worth, I don't like this GNOME idiocy either - it adds nothing to the people like me who have most stuff maximized, while it annoys people who like to minimize and maximize stuff.
Sure people like you could change the way you work, but why make you change the way you work? What benefit do the rest of us get?
It only benefits people who like most stuff maximized AND are so obsessive about how things look to the point where they can't stand those "ugly buttons".
It might seem a bit strange to make a big change based on only reasonable certainty, but more than that is hard to get. User studies can be informative, but in this area, we're really interested how experienced users work with a lot of windows, so the most basic approach of paying people off the street to sit in front of of a computer for an hour to do predesigned tasks wasn't going tell us much.
Yeah hilarious. Are they really interested in how experienced users work? Or have they been paid by someone to sabotage GNOME (just looking at the stupid ideas they've been coming up with).
Not sure if I count as an experienced user but the way I work with lots of windows (e.g. 30+) is, I use Windows (2K/XP/7) and have all the task buttons ungrouped and in two rows, so that I can click directly on them to raise the window I want. I also have a utility I wrote called LinkKey[1] so that I can quickly bind alt-1 to alt-9 to various windows - so for example if I have to work amongst 4 windows, I can just press alt-1,2,3,4 to switch amongst them.
GNOME or KDE don't suit me for handling lots of windows - they order task buttons vertically first then horizontally so if I close a window, ALL task buttons on its right change relative vertical positions making me lose track of where stuff is. Windows orders the task buttons horizontally first then vertically, so only a few edge buttons are affected.
I find it funny that friends I know who use unix/linux as their primary desktop tend to use "screen" to manage their tasks/"windows" quickly. To me that shows how crappy the GNOME and KDE GUIs are. They can't even beat "screen" after so many years.
[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/linkkey/
I have no idea who did the recommendation (wasn't me!). I think only a few people in the world will find it useful, but I figured I might as well put it on sourceforge.
Most can't. The big difference is we hold them personally responsible for it. And they often die in their own screw-ups which is about as accountable as you get.
The responsibility/accountability is the main problem: if Toyota released a self driving car and it crashed and killed people in "corner cases" where even a skilled human might, Toyota would still get in trouble.
Using the elevator is generally much safer than using the stairs. Fortunately for elevator manufacturers and suppliers an elevator shaft is a more predictable environment than a network of roads.
Yeah, if I were a malware/trojan author I'd copy this:
http://code.google.com/p/ie6-upgrade-warning/
instead of that obnoxious crap ( http://ieai.pieroxy.net/ieai-screenshot.png ).
Get more installs that way ;).
If it becomes accepted enough maybe the malware authors might start using it too, if they aren't already doing it. ;)
Yep, it's not Facebook despite the current habit of the media to link Facebook with everything (have they linked it with cancer yet? ;) ). Egypt has to import lots of wheat. Russia and India banned exports. Australia had a bad crop.
So wheat shortage = expensive bread = lots of hungry unhappy people. But just hungry unhappy people doesn't mean revolution.
Revolutions happens when the hungry unhappy people think the rulers are to blame for the problem, and then they become hungry very angry people. You can be starving and not blame the ruler/Government for the situation.
http://theweek.com/article/index/212433/fighting-over-food
Is that followed by tutorials on bandaging and stitching?
Or are you supposed to watch those tutorials first...
Uh the problems are:
1) When stuff goes fine they pocket all the profits, but when stuff goes bad, they keep their profits and everyone else pays for it.
2) When they win the bet they keep the money, when they have bugs in their fancy programs and lose money, they rollback the transactions and/or even sue/jail the people who benefited from their bugs (yes this has happened). Note: I'm not talking about bugs in the "casino"'s software but bugs in the software the "gamblers" use to decide on what to bet on.
3) The well connected ones also get to "cheat" - they get to see and do stuff 30 milliseconds before everyone else does. This is a big advantage. Google for that if you don't believe me. This is unfair.
There is really no benefit to society from picosecond trading. All it produces is more fancy excuses the intelligent sociopaths can use to take money from us.
They can talk about liquidity and creating markets but it is all bullshit - just look at what has actually happened.
All that they've created are systems where gamblers can play fancy millisecond[1] games to gamble with OTHER people's money and collect big fees, salaries and bonuses for doing so. When they win big they keep the big profits. When they lose big, they keep their "normal profits" and we have to pay for the losses.
If I didn't have a conscience I'd be happy to do that too - it's free money.
[1] In fact to make the trading fair, transactions should be valid for a second or more otherwise the speed of light makes location matter. Currently they can issue transactions and cancel them within milliseconds before the other traders can act on them.
I actually like all those - and do use wikipedia to find out info about such stuff.
But I also want the "old man murray" type of articles because in the future Google might not find anything:
a) The rest of the web often has a short memory
b) I might get a whole bunch of spam sites instead.
Yeah, his 7 remaining lives have to take turns one after each other.
There's a small but significant difference.
Gambling= when stuff goes really bad you lose all your money and then some.
"Investment banking" = when stuff goes really bad you lose everyone else's money but keep your bonuses, fees and salaries. Gamble with other people's money, get paid really big bucks when it goes well, get paid big bucks when it goes poof. Privatise the profits, socialize the losses.
So clearly investment banking is a smarter choice for intelligent sociopaths. And they can even use lots of fancy words to justify what they're doing - providing liquidity to the market etc.
When all they are doing is just transferring the money from the stupid (and/or those with a conscience) to themselves. Directly and through inflation.
Uh, go read Godel's theorem it again. It says nothing about the impossibility of perfect virtualization.
And the "unable to prove" situations are all from the perspective of being _within_ the system. Not outside.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godel's_incompleteness_theorems
The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an "effective procedure" (essentially, a computer program) is capable of proving all facts about the natural numbers. For any such system, there will always be statements about the natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system.
The second incompleteness theorem shows that if such a system is also capable of proving certain basic facts about the natural numbers, then one particular arithmetic truth the system cannot prove is the consistency of the system itself.
The issue in this case isn't in the kernel or drivers. It's that people write malware and people are tricked into installing them.
If the virtualization is perfect AND hidden by design, you can't test it. There would be no way for the stuff inside to "break out" or detect an "outside" without the help of those already outside (those outside might be able to copy or move stuff out).
Of course the virtualization could be perfect but the design might intentionally leave clues of an "outside", just like some virtual machines will indicate "vmware" as the brand of some "hardware".
I believe the mathematicians and physicists have already realized all this long ago. Can't remember the reference or what it's called though.
I've proposed:"How Do You Kill That Which Has No Life?" and "Mom! Bathroom!" for a title/achievment track in an MMORPG before... Didn't succeed :).
Yeah. The nice guys won't sleep around because they know most girls don't really like it.
The bad guys on the other hand don't care about such stuff.
Here's the claim: http://www.ipodobserver.com/ipo/article/Microsoft_Confirms_it_Originated_iPod_Box_Parody_Video/
Microsoft spokesman Tom Pilla on Tuesday confirmed with iPod Observer that his company initiated the creation of the iPod packaging parody video that was first reported last month. "It was an internal-only video clip commissioned by our packaging [team] to humorously highlight the challenges we have faced RE: packaging and to educate marketers here about the pitfalls of packaging/branding," he said via e-mail.
The hardest job at MS would be their security experts. Imagine trying to do a job and having every last move you make either neutered or cancelled entirely by Marketing.
Seems the following video was created by people in Microsoft: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeXAcwriid0
If that's true they also have marketing talent (or had ;) ). Their stuff just gets "microsofted" on the way out.
But this new Intel SSD uses a Marvell controller - the same as one used by Crucial's C300. Why should people pay a higher price for an SSD with the same controller? The uninformative article says nothing about that - no proper benchmarks or tests (random reads/writes, sequential/read writes, max latency of a random read/write transaction that interrupts those random/sequential read writes, read/writes of high/mid/low compressible data). Such an article should be pretty useless for real Slashdot nerd.
As for Sandforce, apparently they have problems when waking up from hibernation (google for that). This is not a problem for many desktop users but a showstopper for many laptop users (I won't be buying a sandforce drive for this reason alone).
AFAIK this new Intel SSD is using the same Marvell controller as Crucial's RealSSD C300, which goes for about USD490 for the 256GB drives in lots of 1 unit. Just look at Amazon, or even Crucial's own site.
So I'm not sure what makes the Intel drive better than the Crucial one which has been around for many months (and gone through some pains and fixes... ).
A supposedly nerd site like Slashdot linking to low-info press release or marketing article on Computerworld is stupid.
China isn't having those sort of problems yet because there are also the carrots. It's not all sticks. People in China have got richer (though the gap has widened) and thus got more and more to lose over the decades. There's hope of improvement and obesity is even becoming a problem.
Not true for too many people in Tunisia, Egypt etc. When you have large numbers of discontented people with little to lose, you have a big problem.
Once more and more people have low confidence that they or their loved ones would be alive even a month later[1], they stop getting so scared of you even if you threaten to kill them and their families.
[1] Apparently Egypt is very dependent on wheat imports. Russia (and India) stopped exporting wheat last year due to poor harvests. The "bread and circuses" stuff stops working when you run out of bread.
Most people sign it because:
1) They find reading difficult
2) They don't care or thinks it matters much
3) They aren't going to create anything new on their own anyway.
So a company that has such policies is selecting against employees that can read, care about following company policies, are able to create stuff and might want to do some creative stuff in their spare time.
Web developers stopped testing their sites with Netscape 6 ages ago.
Because Netscape 6 was a piece of shit not worth the time it took to download it. And it's not as if Netscape was so great at "web standards compliance" either.
Fact is 15 years ago netscape 4.x was inferior. It was worse than IE4. Yes IE1 2 and 3 were worse than Netscape 1-3.0, but IE had caught up, and then the Netscape team screwed up...
Netscape 6, 7 were pieces of bloated shit. If you thought Netscape 4 and IE4 were crap, they were worse. They really really sucked.
Believe me I was looking for something better than IE after using Netscape from v3 to v4.8, but there just wasn't any thing better for windows[1].
From IE4 to IE6 (1998 to 2005) tell me which browser was better than IE that ran on windows? Definitely not Netscape/Mozilla. Konqueror didn't run on Windows. Mosaic? Hahaha.
See: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Timeline_of_web_browsers.svg
Mozilla Firefox only started getting usable in 2006 by my standards (my standards = crash less than IE). And it took them two more years to reduce those memory issues (I was using a desktop linux machine at work from 2006-2008 and it was common for firefox to use more memory than my vmware virtual machine running Windows XP and IE!).
I even tried Opera in 2006+ and it was actually slower than Firefox for my usage, and it even leaked lots of memory (yes we can blame it on flash but I'm just going to use what works).
Just look at how much Google Chrome has caught up in such a short time and you can see the alternative browsers just weren't good enough. Even nongeeks were seeing the difference between Chrome and IE and telling their nongeek friends to use it. Yes I know Chrome was based on Webkit and Webkit was based on Konqueror. But fact is there weren't good enough geniuses working on the "IE alternative" problem back then.
[1] If anyone thinks I should have switched to Desktop Linux back then, they're either stupid or delusional. Even 10 years later Desktop Linux still hasn't got _basic_ desktop stuff like sound right.