Tmobile isn't the decent carrier... It's only notable because they are att compatible. Sprint is the decent cell provider in the Us. With their prepaid services like boost mobile you can get unlimited voice text, and 3g data for 45$/mo. Virgin has some good deals too. And you can opt for a modest flat rate if your a lite user, and save tons. And everywhere I've tried, Sprint's network has been superior to Verizon, with far fewer dropped calls here in SoCal. Plus they've got nice cheap 4g service, and have much longer than the rest.
If nothing else, Sprint is forcing att & verizon to provide almost as reasonable prepaid plans.
But the reality is, that even if your car is driving itself, you should still be there to take over in case something malfunctions. If you have to pay attention anyway, you might as well be driving.
I'd say the existence of cruise control and automatic transmissions completely undermines your argument. Who ever said they want choke controls back in their cars, since there are other things they have to do manually, anyhow?
The better reaction time, and ability to be looking in all directions at once, of autonomous cars is a great feature. Even if I still have to handle changing lanes, making turns, etc, I'd still love to have a computer handle staying between the lines and not rear ending or side swiping anyone. And there's no question that in inclement weather, that computerized sensors can see the lines in the road, the car in front of you, better than a human. I don't see anyone saying they don't want the new safety features just because they can't read the newspaper while driving.
Windows misbehaving, bluescreening and doing strange things, in the other hand, is something usual in this world.
Windows is a flaming pile of crap. Linux and BSD aren't perfect either... HOWEVER, computers are just math machines, and math can be perfect, both theoretically and in reality.
The reason computers crash in the real world is simply because stability isn't valuable enough to warrant the added cost of development. Put a watchdog timer in it, and just reboot it when it misbehaves, is good enough protection for most systems. But economics aside, it is a solved problem.
A microkernel based system can be unbreakable... You have a truely tiny core, something like 30k in size for QNX last I heard about it, that needs to be very well written and fully debugged. After that, all the other kernel modules can be complete junk, and the core will simply kill and restart them when they fail. They can't cause any problems to any other modules, because they are strictly restricted and seperated by the core, and only strictly defined messages can pass between the various components. Even if you have buggy as hell memory, outside of the kernel core 30k (which could be in rom or some such), the overall system can, and does remain stable.
These incredible benefits are what has kept OpenVMS relevant over the decades, even while most other proprietary server OSes have fallen by the wayside against the onslaught of free OSes like Linux, and dirt cheap x86 hardware.
you've identified the objects, so they're no longer UFOs!
That's really not a problem. There are many seemingly-oxymoronic terms, which are perfectly valid. In most cases it's simply that convex is being ignored. Jumbo shrimp isn't an oxymoron as shrimp is used as a noun. Ufo has also become a noun in it's own right, even though it was not originally formed as a noun...
The difference is screen size, and it's a huge one. On my phone, I want text from edge to edge. On my desktop, my eyes would be tired in 3 lines... On a phone, one app at a time, always full screen, makes perfect sense. On a desktop, you'd hate every second of it...
Tablets aren't desktops, but they're vastly closer to them than phones. Can you imagine a 3 column mail client like outlook/evolution on your phone? It works on a desktop, and it would work on a tablet... Don't take my word for it... On your desktop, go to http://en.m.wikipedia.com/ and read though a few nice long articles, and tell me how what works wonderfully on a tiny screen is better than the desktop version when you've got a huge screen to work with...
And finally, I've read a few reviews of honeycomb, and they all say it's a big improvement, and the feel of using a tablet os, rather than a giant phone, is a major plus.
I started looking at the nook color, but decided against it. Why bother with a device you have to jump though hoops to make a capable device, when there are decent full fledged android tablets out there for the same price? The Archos 70 is fairly popular, has similar specs, is slightly cheaper, and EVERYTHING WORKS, you don't have to wait for hacks to get peripherals working...
I give Archos credit for their 250gb hdd model, as even apple doesn't seem to have figured out multimedia is a killer app for the tablet, like the ipod before it...
I never did buy a 70... Can't seem to find a case with bluetooth keyboard that fits perfectly, and the fact it won't charge from microusb is a major annoyance. The slow cpu and lack of gps also discouraged me. Any happy or angry owners are welcome to chime in with their pov...
Your problem is that you don't understand that people have different ends in mind. It's the fundamental difference between Windows and Linux... Do you want something that is quick and easy to setup in the simple cases, which will have numerous problems and require constant fiddling, and in the complex cases can't be made to work at all? Or do you want to spend a bit more time to get everything in a good state, where everything will work perfectly, be trivial to keep up to date, and just keep working without any thought given, for years?
In your specific case, the binary blobs simply aren't as stable as their open source equivalents, won't continue to work forever (discontinuing support on newer systems, and the old blob will be incompatible with future kernels), won't be upgraded.by the normal system upgrade process (tim/apt), etc.
You just cited a business model that no longer exists (free ad-supported TV)
Did I miss something? The free, ad supported Tv I'm watching sure seems to exist. And what's more, the ratings for the big broadcast networks blow away all others, so it's certainly not a failing model either. And with the uptake of digital and hdtv, the quality is better than anything else, and the selection has exploded, while viewership has risen.
For ample demonstration, just go read Keeping Stuff [grinnell.edu], a delightful essay by a comp sci professor at Grinnell
Delightful? Hardly. His talk amounts to obsessing over trivial changes to formatting. If that's your problem with digital preservation, the solution is to lighten the hell up. Only a tiny niche care about the formatting of a text, decades later. The rest of us human beings are ecstatic merely to have the content preserved, and easily accessible, and any text or markup based format will do so just fine for centuries to come.
For video, raw (RGB) formats will certainly work. for practicality, though, I would recommend MPEG-2, as the data savings are vast, quality loss can be minimal, and accessibility is maximized, which again, is far more important than the durability of books you are touting.
For physical storage, no, hard drives won't last forever, but keeping them online allows wide distribution and easy transfer to the latest storage format. For offline storage (which should only be a backup, as I've said) I'd be willing to bet on someone having a cdrom a century from now.
Your article merely explains that CRL implementations are fail safe. A CRL isn't something that's needed 99.999% of the time, so depending on the CRL server being available would be a serious risk. Ignoring the CRL being unavailable is a good thing. A pop up warning would be unnecessary noise. The likelihood of an attacker getting a cert is remote, and being able to also block the CRL server is astronomically unlikely.
Google's didn't want all-12V servers for the sake of central power supplies, that was just one of the uses they threw out there. It's clear google wants everything at 12V so their unique UPS system (connecting a VR-SLA battery between the PSU and motherboard) will work. It's an interesting design, but one that lacks the monitoring and transparent testing that seems to work only in the most massive clustered environments.
And more in general, the drive for DC in the datacenter died off around the time 80plus.org started up. With 90% efficient PSUs widely and inexpensively available, and 95% available for those paying more, there really isn't much improvement to be had, yet it would require major redesigns and expensive niche products that don't have the same economies of scale.
Pre paid plans have to contend more directly on price, so their monthly service is far cheaper, even though it's the same infrastructure.
Boost mobile is the best. Unlimited everything as low as $35/mo. but the data service that comes with it isn't even dial up speed. The 3G upgrade is only available for Blackberry users, and it's an extra $10/mo.
Alternatively, you could try virgin mobile, which is also part of sprint, like boost.
TMobile is slightly cheaper for those who never, ever use it for anything....
Because the old way of doing things never measures the full end to end cost.
Hence the term, non renewable. No need to waste your breath.
It's still perfectly valid to ask why we can't do "green" a lot cheaper.
My answer to that is: because "green" is defined as being considerably more expensive. Once a less destructive way of doing things comes close to being economical, it ceases to be "green" and just becomes "the way everyone does it".
A decade ago, "excessive package" was the environmentalist's bane. Now, everything has bare minimal packaging. Why? Because it ceased to just be"green" and became economical, even profitable after a short while.
When cheap plastic alternatives come along, they won't be "green" either, they'll just be the way plastic is made...
You've got it backwards, actually. The US is a bit odd in that it's content to be everyone else's scapegoat. Consider China the polar opposite, which won't accept the slightest public criticism, even when they amply deserve it, and more...
In short, yes the US uses it's influence to get what they want. Do you think any politician would have a career if they signed up to give the US everything they want, no strings attached? But how about if they made a deal that sounds good, only to have the big bad US back out of their obligations? Well then it's not their fault, is it? After a thousand such broken deals, how could they know this would happen again? Oh, yeah, but whatever we do, we can't stop keeping up our side of it, of course....
The tablet is just the next evolution of protable computers. First it was the PDA craze, circa 2000. If you were in the Palm camp, you paid a lot of money for a glorified alarm clock and personal organizer. If you were in the WinCE camp you got the high end hardware with an OS so horrible that all the bullet-list features were actually useless. The Psion camp had the only decent PDAs, but they let their device stagnate, not adding wifi, not upgrading the devices, but letting them stagnate as they spun off Symbian and hoped others would do the work, but that didn't pan out.
Then came the laptop / desktop replacement craze several years ago... I HATED the very idea that people would trade the great interface of a desktop for a crap laptop.
After that was the netbook craze. Aim for low specs and you can make something very small, and cheap. A good idea, done poorly by most netbooks I saw.
Somewhere in there was the smartphone craze... Blackberry first, then iPhone and Android. While things have improved slightly, they aren't much better than the PDAs of a decade ago... Many lessons still not learned. Some inherent limitations that never will be overcome.
Now it's tablets. But what is a tablet? It's a wireless laptop running a smartphone OS. Get yourself a bluetooth keyboard and you're better off than you would be with a laptop... The screen and keyboard are seperate, the UI is better suited, battery life is longer, etc. As far as I'm concerned, the only thing they're missing is rootless X11 so that we can port any desktop apps lacking a mobile equivalent. The big ones being NX client and xterm.
There are open source projects porting real Linux OSes to a few popular tablets. A few tablets (like the archos 70 250GB) have hard drives too, if space is the problem.
Do you also want to decide for yourself what software runs on the computer in your car?
I do. For the sake of a single sensor going dead, your car won't run. Before 96, you could just jumper two pins and read the flashing lights. Now, you need to buy a code reader, and get a new one every year...
How about the computer in your toaster?
Absolutely! Before computerization, everything was exposed to the the end user. You can open the thing up, figure out what's wrong. Now, it's a black box that you can't expect to have any way to interface with, debug, or repair. Screw that. If it has a computer, it's mine, an I should have the ability to understand, debug, and replace the software as I see fit.
I guess the second option will give better audio quality at one third the bitrate.
You would be wrong... You're proposing a lossy codec that discards and distorts sound in the audible range, for the benefit of high frequencies nobody can really hear in the first place.
Furthermore, almost all lossy audio codecs are frequency domain, which are unable to accurately reproduce fast non-tonal changes without artifacts (like pre-echo).
I wonder if all the complaints about "micro-managing" are just because of big egos and perhaps a short-sighted view of things.
I've worked at both extremes. Places where trivial decisions require multiple meetings, and start-ups where it's a complete free-for-all. While both extremes are bad, I'd lean towards the former, not the later.
What do you get with hands-off management? The inmates running the asylum. The best example I can give is finding a single server that was running 4 completely different databases at the same time... Why? Because person 1 likes Postges, person 2 likes Oracle, and person 3 just happened to find a howto to setup syslog/snort/etc. which uses MySQL. Like it or not, this is where managers can and do help. In everyone's short term view, their favorite way is quiker and easier. In the long term, it's a maintenance nightmare.
As an extreme example, how about everyone getting to pick their own programming language? After all, I'll be quicker to do this bit in perl, this other bit in python, this bit in java, etc. If your manager is hands off, who's to stop you, or your coworkers from deciding to do just that?
The company is going to last considerably longer than the employee is going to be there. Each will bring their own biases, and it's management that needs to bring them into the fold, and in-line with how the rest of the company does things, and an eye towards the long term implications of any decision.
Yeah, I hated being micro-managed, but I can see past my own nose and tell that being completely unmanaged has vastly worse side-effects.
Hey thats great if you have a wheel mouse / 3 button mouse ALL OF WHICH LAPTOPS DO NOT HAVE!
All these features can be accessed with a 2-button mouse. It would be foolish, however, to NOT add convenient and time-saving features available for those who aren't as constrained as you...
Besides, input devices on laptops are universally horrendous. It was actually far better in the early days, when the first laptops had pretty good trackballs. I can't imagine why we don't have them these days. A touch-screen (ala tablets/phones) will at least be a significant improvement.
Now, instead of minimizing, a better method is to move it down a screen (right-click, move to workspace down), or zoom out to activity view, drag the screen from one screen to another.
All things you could already do with any decent X11 window manager. How is it that GNOME's removing easy access to these features, and cluttering the context menu making them much harder to access, only to come back around and make them easier again, is a positive feature? Hell, if GNOME/KDE weren't trying so hard to imitate Windows all the time, they wouldn't have to remove the normal options, to FORCE people to kick their Windows habits, which GNOME/KDE have been encouraging, while all other X11 WMs used a different and superior model to Windows.
I use blackbox based WM's because they make it this quicker and easier than anything else. Mouse-over the title-bar and wheel-up to shade, wheel-down to unshade. Mouse-over the maximize button, and middle-click to maximize vertically-only, or left-click for horizontal-only maximization, in addition to the normal left-click. Right-click on the titlebar and the top entry is "send-to", select the workspace and it's gone. Don't need to mouse-over a tiny "switcher" applet to switch workspaces, either, mouse-over any blank area on the desktop, and wheel-up/down to go next/prev. Or you can middle-click for a list, or you can always use the toolbar (but you don't NEED the toolbar at all, if you don't want it).
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Tmobile isn't the decent carrier... It's only notable because they are att compatible. Sprint is the decent cell provider in the Us. With their prepaid services like boost mobile you can get unlimited voice text, and 3g data for 45$/mo. Virgin has some good deals too. And you can opt for a modest flat rate if your a lite user, and save tons. And everywhere I've tried, Sprint's network has been superior to Verizon, with far fewer dropped calls here in SoCal. Plus they've got nice cheap 4g service, and have much longer than the rest.
If nothing else, Sprint is forcing att & verizon to provide almost as reasonable prepaid plans.
OpenBSD and related projects (eg OpenSSH) certainly aren't.
I'd say the existence of cruise control and automatic transmissions completely undermines your argument. Who ever said they want choke controls back in their cars, since there are other things they have to do manually, anyhow?
The better reaction time, and ability to be looking in all directions at once, of autonomous cars is a great feature. Even if I still have to handle changing lanes, making turns, etc, I'd still love to have a computer handle staying between the lines and not rear ending or side swiping anyone. And there's no question that in inclement weather, that computerized sensors can see the lines in the road, the car in front of you, better than a human. I don't see anyone saying they don't want the new safety features just because they can't read the newspaper while driving.
Windows is a flaming pile of crap. Linux and BSD aren't perfect either... HOWEVER, computers are just math machines, and math can be perfect, both theoretically and in reality.
The reason computers crash in the real world is simply because stability isn't valuable enough to warrant the added cost of development. Put a watchdog timer in it, and just reboot it when it misbehaves, is good enough protection for most systems. But economics aside, it is a solved problem.
A microkernel based system can be unbreakable... You have a truely tiny core, something like 30k in size for QNX last I heard about it, that needs to be very well written and fully debugged. After that, all the other kernel modules can be complete junk, and the core will simply kill and restart them when they fail. They can't cause any problems to any other modules, because they are strictly restricted and seperated by the core, and only strictly defined messages can pass between the various components. Even if you have buggy as hell memory, outside of the kernel core 30k (which could be in rom or some such), the overall system can, and does remain stable.
These incredible benefits are what has kept OpenVMS relevant over the decades, even while most other proprietary server OSes have fallen by the wayside against the onslaught of free OSes like Linux, and dirt cheap x86 hardware.
Just because someone bad doesn't like something, doesn't mean it's a good thing.
That's really not a problem. There are many seemingly-oxymoronic terms, which are perfectly valid. In most cases it's simply that convex is being ignored. Jumbo shrimp isn't an oxymoron as shrimp is used as a noun. Ufo has also become a noun in it's own right, even though it was not originally formed as a noun...
The difference is screen size, and it's a huge one. On my phone, I want text from edge to edge. On my desktop, my eyes would be tired in 3 lines... On a phone, one app at a time, always full screen, makes perfect sense. On a desktop, you'd hate every second of it...
Tablets aren't desktops, but they're vastly closer to them than phones. Can you imagine a 3 column mail client like outlook/evolution on your phone? It works on a desktop, and it would work on a tablet... Don't take my word for it... On your desktop, go to http://en.m.wikipedia.com/ and read though a few nice long articles, and tell me how what works wonderfully on a tiny screen is better than the desktop version when you've got a huge screen to work with...
And finally, I've read a few reviews of honeycomb, and they all say it's a big improvement, and the feel of using a tablet os, rather than a giant phone, is a major plus.
I started looking at the nook color, but decided against it. Why bother with a device you have to jump though hoops to make a capable device, when there are decent full fledged android tablets out there for the same price? The Archos 70 is fairly popular, has similar specs, is slightly cheaper, and EVERYTHING WORKS, you don't have to wait for hacks to get peripherals working...
I give Archos credit for their 250gb hdd model, as even apple doesn't seem to have figured out multimedia is a killer app for the tablet, like the ipod before it...
I never did buy a 70... Can't seem to find a case with bluetooth keyboard that fits perfectly, and the fact it won't charge from microusb is a major annoyance. The slow cpu and lack of gps also discouraged me. Any happy or angry owners are welcome to chime in with their pov...
Your problem is that you don't understand that people have different ends in mind. It's the fundamental difference between Windows and Linux... Do you want something that is quick and easy to setup in the simple cases, which will have numerous problems and require constant fiddling, and in the complex cases can't be made to work at all? Or do you want to spend a bit more time to get everything in a good state, where everything will work perfectly, be trivial to keep up to date, and just keep working without any thought given, for years?
In your specific case, the binary blobs simply aren't as stable as their open source equivalents, won't continue to work forever (discontinuing support on newer systems, and the old blob will be incompatible with future kernels), won't be upgraded.by the normal system upgrade process (tim/apt), etc.
Did I miss something? The free, ad supported Tv I'm watching sure seems to exist. And what's more, the ratings for the big broadcast networks blow away all others, so it's certainly not a failing model either. And with the uptake of digital and hdtv, the quality is better than anything else, and the selection has exploded, while viewership has risen.
Where's the failed model again?
Delightful? Hardly. His talk amounts to obsessing over trivial changes to formatting. If that's your problem with digital preservation, the solution is to lighten the hell up. Only a tiny niche care about the formatting of a text, decades later. The rest of us human beings are ecstatic merely to have the content preserved, and easily accessible, and any text or markup based format will do so just fine for centuries to come.
For video, raw (RGB) formats will certainly work. for practicality, though, I would recommend MPEG-2, as the data savings are vast, quality loss can be minimal, and accessibility is maximized, which again, is far more important than the durability of books you are touting.
For physical storage, no, hard drives won't last forever, but keeping them online allows wide distribution and easy transfer to the latest storage format. For offline storage (which should only be a backup, as I've said) I'd be willing to bet on someone having a cdrom a century from now.
No they aren't.
Your article merely explains that CRL implementations are fail safe. A CRL isn't something that's needed 99.999% of the time, so depending on the CRL server being available would be a serious risk. Ignoring the CRL being unavailable is a good thing. A pop up warning would be unnecessary noise. The likelihood of an attacker getting a cert is remote, and being able to also block the CRL server is astronomically unlikely.
Google's didn't want all-12V servers for the sake of central power supplies, that was just one of the uses they threw out there. It's clear google wants everything at 12V so their unique UPS system (connecting a VR-SLA battery between the PSU and motherboard) will work. It's an interesting design, but one that lacks the monitoring and transparent testing that seems to work only in the most massive clustered environments.
And more in general, the drive for DC in the datacenter died off around the time 80plus.org started up. With 90% efficient PSUs widely and inexpensively available, and 95% available for those paying more, there really isn't much improvement to be had, yet it would require major redesigns and expensive niche products that don't have the same economies of scale.
Pre paid plans have to contend more directly on price, so their monthly service is far cheaper, even though it's the same infrastructure.
Boost mobile is the best. Unlimited everything as low as $35/mo. but the data service that comes with it isn't even dial up speed. The 3G upgrade is only available for Blackberry users, and it's an extra $10/mo.
Alternatively, you could try virgin mobile, which is also part of sprint, like boost.
TMobile is slightly cheaper for those who never, ever use it for anything....
Hence the term, non renewable. No need to waste your breath.
It's still perfectly valid to ask why we can't do "green" a lot cheaper.
My answer to that is: because "green" is defined as being considerably more expensive. Once a less destructive way of doing things comes close to being economical, it ceases to be "green" and just becomes "the way everyone does it".
A decade ago, "excessive package" was the environmentalist's bane. Now, everything has bare minimal packaging. Why? Because it ceased to just be"green" and became economical, even profitable after a short while.
When cheap plastic alternatives come along, they won't be "green" either, they'll just be the way plastic is made...
You've got it backwards, actually. The US is a bit odd in that it's content to be everyone else's scapegoat. Consider China the polar opposite, which won't accept the slightest public criticism, even when they amply deserve it, and more...
In short, yes the US uses it's influence to get what they want. Do you think any politician would have a career if they signed up to give the US everything they want, no strings attached? But how about if they made a deal that sounds good, only to have the big bad US back out of their obligations? Well then it's not their fault, is it? After a thousand such broken deals, how could they know this would happen again? Oh, yeah, but whatever we do, we can't stop keeping up our side of it, of course....
The tablet is just the next evolution of protable computers. First it was the PDA craze, circa 2000. If you were in the Palm camp, you paid a lot of money for a glorified alarm clock and personal organizer. If you were in the WinCE camp you got the high end hardware with an OS so horrible that all the bullet-list features were actually useless. The Psion camp had the only decent PDAs, but they let their device stagnate, not adding wifi, not upgrading the devices, but letting them stagnate as they spun off Symbian and hoped others would do the work, but that didn't pan out.
Then came the laptop / desktop replacement craze several years ago... I HATED the very idea that people would trade the great interface of a desktop for a crap laptop.
After that was the netbook craze. Aim for low specs and you can make something very small, and cheap. A good idea, done poorly by most netbooks I saw.
Somewhere in there was the smartphone craze... Blackberry first, then iPhone and Android. While things have improved slightly, they aren't much better than the PDAs of a decade ago... Many lessons still not learned. Some inherent limitations that never will be overcome.
Now it's tablets. But what is a tablet? It's a wireless laptop running a smartphone OS. Get yourself a bluetooth keyboard and you're better off than you would be with a laptop... The screen and keyboard are seperate, the UI is better suited, battery life is longer, etc. As far as I'm concerned, the only thing they're missing is rootless X11 so that we can port any desktop apps lacking a mobile equivalent. The big ones being NX client and xterm.
There are open source projects porting real Linux OSes to a few popular tablets. A few tablets (like the archos 70 250GB) have hard drives too, if space is the problem.
I do. For the sake of a single sensor going dead, your car won't run. Before 96, you could just jumper two pins and read the flashing lights. Now, you need to buy a code reader, and get a new one every year...
Absolutely!
Before computerization, everything was exposed to the the end user. You can open the thing up, figure out what's wrong. Now, it's a black box that you can't expect to have any way to interface with, debug, or repair. Screw that. If it has a computer, it's mine, an I should have the ability to understand, debug, and replace the software as I see fit.
You would be wrong... You're proposing a lossy codec that discards and distorts sound in the audible range, for the benefit of high frequencies nobody can really hear in the first place.
Furthermore, almost all lossy audio codecs are frequency domain, which are unable to accurately reproduce fast non-tonal changes without artifacts (like pre-echo).
I wonder if all the complaints about "micro-managing" are just because of big egos and perhaps a short-sighted view of things.
I've worked at both extremes. Places where trivial decisions require multiple meetings, and start-ups where it's a complete free-for-all. While both extremes are bad, I'd lean towards the former, not the later.
What do you get with hands-off management? The inmates running the asylum. The best example I can give is finding a single server that was running 4 completely different databases at the same time... Why? Because person 1 likes Postges, person 2 likes Oracle, and person 3 just happened to find a howto to setup syslog/snort/etc. which uses MySQL. Like it or not, this is where managers can and do help. In everyone's short term view, their favorite way is quiker and easier. In the long term, it's a maintenance nightmare.
As an extreme example, how about everyone getting to pick their own programming language? After all, I'll be quicker to do this bit in perl, this other bit in python, this bit in java, etc. If your manager is hands off, who's to stop you, or your coworkers from deciding to do just that?
The company is going to last considerably longer than the employee is going to be there. Each will bring their own biases, and it's management that needs to bring them into the fold, and in-line with how the rest of the company does things, and an eye towards the long term implications of any decision.
Yeah, I hated being micro-managed, but I can see past my own nose and tell that being completely unmanaged has vastly worse side-effects.
Up next, using cell phones to track traffic patterns. I can't wait!
All these features can be accessed with a 2-button mouse. It would be foolish, however, to NOT add convenient and time-saving features available for those who aren't as constrained as you...
Besides, input devices on laptops are universally horrendous. It was actually far better in the early days, when the first laptops had pretty good trackballs. I can't imagine why we don't have them these days. A touch-screen (ala tablets/phones) will at least be a significant improvement.
Yeah, lots of wikipedia articles have that same effect on me, too...
All things you could already do with any decent X11 window manager. How is it that GNOME's removing easy access to these features, and cluttering the context menu making them much harder to access, only to come back around and make them easier again, is a positive feature? Hell, if GNOME/KDE weren't trying so hard to imitate Windows all the time, they wouldn't have to remove the normal options, to FORCE people to kick their Windows habits, which GNOME/KDE have been encouraging, while all other X11 WMs used a different and superior model to Windows.
I use blackbox based WM's because they make it this quicker and easier than anything else. Mouse-over the title-bar and wheel-up to shade, wheel-down to unshade. Mouse-over the maximize button, and middle-click to maximize vertically-only, or left-click for horizontal-only maximization, in addition to the normal left-click. Right-click on the titlebar and the top entry is "send-to", select the workspace and it's gone. Don't need to mouse-over a tiny "switcher" applet to switch workspaces, either, mouse-over any blank area on the desktop, and wheel-up/down to go next/prev. Or you can middle-click for a list, or you can always use the toolbar (but you don't NEED the toolbar at all, if you don't want it).
Are you suggesting every x86 system built has AMT support? If not, you've completely missed my point.