Their goal was obviously to accommodate touchscreen/tablet usage. But I think they failed... Notice how copy and paste are now less accessible than they used to be, and most of the buttons -- although fingertip-sized -- are now smaller.
Even worse --- Fire up Totem sometime. In its new incarnation you can't ever see a timeline unless you hover a mouse pointer over it, and the play list is gone in favor of showing multiple files/URLs as a grid of icons. But the grid cannot be manipulated in any way -- you can't add stuff to it!
So someone at the Gnome project decided that a text editor needed to be adapted to touchscreen use, but that a movie player shouldn't burden the user with something as simple as a LIST.
-
Re: OP -- Yes Gnome 3 feels more cohesive (a rare thing in the Linux world), but its cohesive shittiness. They really can't hold a candle to the top-down integration (and functional design sense) of elementaryOS.
I know that Caspar was active in the Qubes OS community and he is credited with introducing Qubes to the European Parliament before they recommended it as a mitigation against mass surveillance. He also served as a Director for the Tor Project.
Your economy is largely underpinned by expansion of the EU in the pursuit of relentless "economic growth". Business has been extremely good for countries like Germany because they have the EU hinterlands holding the currency valuation down. A Germany with just a Deutschmark would scarcely be able to find buyers for its expensive wares. Similarly, the EU countries that are largely justifying their existence by offering banking services to the world benefit greatly from dealing in a continent-wide currency.
So those are the upshots of EU expansionism (and all the exceptions eurocrats made when faced with the acquisition of new territory). The downside is that you cannot treat relatively un-industrialized / un-financialized lands just like they are France or Germany. You have the responsibility of either putting them into a 'Marshal Plan' to industrialize/financialize them, or structurally accommodate (subsidize) them based on their own economic profiles. Or, some measure of both.
There is also something to be learned from the Scandinavian rejection of the euro:
Most of its members’ governments did not seek their people’s approval to turn over their monetary sovereignty to the ECB. When Sweden’s did, Swedes said no. They understood that unemployment would rise if the country’s monetary policy were set by a central bank that focused single-mindedly on inflation (and also that there would be insufficient attention to financial stability). The economy would suffer, because the economic model underlying the eurozone was predicated on power relationships that disadvantaged workers.
Greeks are not entirely to blame for their situation. A lot of the dishonesty has come from the direction of the EU and EC, who started pushing policies to remake Europe in the image of the United States.
Even mere usage could be risky - If I code an application that utilizes most/all of a copyrighted API's objects and methods, then my program may include a reflection or copy of the API I'm using.
Making an API freely available to use by application programmers is an invitation to copy it in a sense. That's part of how its used. Its not much of a leap to say that implies that APIs are a special class of code covered entirely by fair-use if authors do not restrict who can code for them.
In any case... Does not every BIOS depend on APIs? How did we even get the PC compatible revolution in the first place?!
Perhaps its the media's fault for providing such bad raw material for the program in the first place. They condition it to be a movie junkie (presumably with a short attention span) and then expect it gracefully handle a _philosophical_ discussion? They might as well have asked it the secret to world peace.
Steve Jobs once said the Amiga was an inspiration for the NeXT computer (as I recall, he was quoted in BYTE magazine). What made the NeXT really interesting was not just on the software side (with heavy object-orientation and display postscript) but also in its hardware: DSP, smart IO controllers and plenty of DMA channels echo the Amiga's coprocessors attached to DMA channels.
What makes the newer keyboards mediocre is the change in layout, not the keys. The new layout removes some keys and changes the position of some others. Some models even have dedicated function keys removed. This, along with the removal of switches and indicator lights, is an attempt by Lenovo to out-Apple Apple in sleekness -- at some point you're just removing functionality that will be missed. The hardware minimalism has gone too far (and in the case of missing airplane-mode switches, robs of useful security features).
As for the keyboard, the new keycaps are flatter to save space, but are also wider and retain a sculpted shape. And they sit atop the same keyswitches from traditional Thinkpad keyboards. So the physical qualities of the new keys are the best of the old and the new. Lenovo should give us the old layout with the new keycaps.
Check this incident out. Naturally, Qubes could not protect him because his laptop did not have an IOMMU. But the real interesting thing to me is where/when this implant was actually put in his system (he says he bought it new, in person, and the symptoms appeared sometime after a period of normal behavior).
Realize that the Internet is not the web. Install an ad/tracking blocker. Avoid, or delete your accounts on Facebook/Google/Apple/"social media". Pay for a domain(s), and use different email addresses for different accounts. Use a VPN. Regularly clear cookies in your browser. Vote for politicians who "get it," and truly understand the Internet, surveillance and privacy.
There's more, which is left as an exercise for the reader.
Add 'HTTPS Everywhere' extension to the list also.
A list of tracker blockers:
Disconnect
Blur
Ghostery
A 'public' VPN like privateinternetaccess.com will give you more anonymity than a VPN you run yourself.
Fingerprinting is an issue that I don't believe any of the above extensions address. Techies like us can have pretty unique browser fingerprints due to Linux and unusual plugins. These two extensions mask the unique information about browser software:
Blender
'Disable Plugin & Mimetype Enumeration' (Firefox)
Finally, if you *really* want privacy you have to have a secure computer. Compartmentalizing your casual browsing to untrusted domains in a high-security OS like Qubes is your best bet against having your private data stolen.
The trend probably has more to do with Rupert Murdoch being allowed to create an international, Anglophone echo chamber (and the USA being the source of the narratives) than it has with any particular form of voting. The countries that comprise the "Five Eyes" of global mass-surveillance appear to be under the influence of a common social contagion.
This is a primary reason why I2P (Invisible Internet Project) exists. Its much less centralized than Tor, mixes other peoples' traffic with yours by default, and over the years has typically used stronger encryption than Tor. Its just more private and secure overall.
The people who make the TAILS distro recognize Tor's shortcomings which is why they include I2P along with Tor. I2P isn't built to outproxy to the regular web (although it can), but you do get the ability to do fully decentralized/anonymized messaging and torrents, for instance, along with hidden websites. On top of being more private than Tor, its a protocol that's meant for general purpose use.
Desktop pretends to be (or maybe they actually believe that's what they are creating) a product for end users but is a product for admins and developers who are familiar and comfortable with the UNIX-like environment to use on their personal computers.
This is total BS. Lots of people who aren't computer experts use Linux desktops every day. My wife is one of them.
The obligatory Slashdot-Linux-enthusiast defense of "Desktop Linux for my relative" never ceases to make me chuckle. I can always spot the authentic ones, because they contain the "we have the Web so who needs a native UI or native apps" meme.
I can always spot the authentic ones, because they contain the "we have the Web so who needs a native UI or native apps" meme.
Did you ever consider that people advance this idea because it's true? There's plenty of people that JUST want email and the web. They don't care about native apps and never will. They use their computers to communicate with other people, and couldn't care one whit about doing their taxes on their computer, or editing video.
Its demonstrably UNtrue, otherwise Apple and Microsoft would not still be viable companies. "Plenty of people" apparently does not define the whole consumer electronics market.
That you think Chrome OS belongs in the Desktop Linux category is instructive... But Google doesn't even identify Chrome OS as Linux. They could switch to a different, closed kernel and hardly anyone using Chromebooks would notice or care. That's because a Chromebook is a type of mainframe terminal or client, not a personal computer (it may be converted to a PC, but that's not its design).
If you don't think this is a common windows experience, you're not paying attention.
The tragedy is that you can't even give a Desktop Linux distro away for free despite how awful that Windows experience has been.
The reasons why GP is far from an excellent reply:
1. Anecdotes are not data. Doubly so if its someone who lives with you.
2. Native apps still matter because they attract a wide-ranging ecosystem of talented people who move between native apps and the Web, and...
3....That range of people between grandma and kernel developers form networks of support and advocacy. If the Power Users don't like your pile of bytes called an OS, the more creative ones won't start writing interesting apps for their non-techie friends and colleagues, and they won't recommend the OS either.
4. People depend on the 'look and feel' of software environments. Its what enables tech support staff to deliver *usable* instructions in a way that doesn't feel threatening to users, and also to get reliable answers from those same users. Having a well-defined GUI is important, but Linux is very slippery in this area.
There are many more reasons why GP represents nerdy myopia and wishful thinking. Perhaps the most important one is that Apple and Microsoft laid down, by example, a de-facto definition of what Desktop Personal Computer is. The FOSS community actively sabotages itself whenever it tentatively tries to reverse engineer the *concept* of the desktop PC; I think most of those numbskulls would define it as some kind of aberration that needs to be stomped out. Where "platform" is supposed to evoke (feature) stability and recognizable surroundings, the Desktop Linux crowd instead create this.
Perhaps I should start using stronger words than "numbskull" for these true believers.
The reasons why GP is far from an excellent reply:
1. Anecdotes are not data. Doubly so if its someone who lives with you.
2. Native apps still matter because they attract a wide-ranging ecosystem of talented people who move between native apps and the Web, and...
3....That range of people between grandma and kernel developers form networks of support and advocacy. If the Power Users don't like your pile of bytes called an OS, the more creative ones won't start writing interesting apps for their non-techie friends and colleagues, and they won't recommend the OS either.
4. People depend on the 'look and feel' of software environments. Its what enables tech support staff to deliver *usable* instructions in a way that doesn't feel threatening to users, and also to get reliable answers from those same users. Having a well-defined GUI is important, but Linux is very slippery in this area.
There are many more reasons why GP represents nerdy myopia and wishful thinking. Perhaps the most important one is that Apple and Microsoft laid down, by example, a de-facto definition of what Desktop Personal Computer is. The FOSS community actively sabotages itself whenever it tentatively tries to reverse engineer the *concept* of the desktop PC; I think most of those numbskulls would define it as some kind of aberration that needs to be stomped out. Where "platform" is supposed to evoke (feature) stability and recognizable surroundings, the Desktop Linux crowd instead create this.
Desktop pretends to be (or maybe they actually believe that's what they are creating) a product for end users but is a product for admins and developers who are familiar and comfortable with the UNIX-like environment to use on their personal computers.
This is total BS. Lots of people who aren't computer experts use Linux desktops every day. My wife is one of them.
The obligatory Slashdot-Linux-enthusiast defense of "Desktop Linux for my relative" never ceases to make me chuckle. I can always spot the authentic ones, because they contain the "we have the Web so who needs a native UI or native apps" meme.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? Gnome borrowed the design language of tablet touchscreens with the expectation that users would resort to using the keyboard more?
Their goal was obviously to accommodate touchscreen/tablet usage. But I think they failed... Notice how copy and paste are now less accessible than they used to be, and most of the buttons -- although fingertip-sized -- are now smaller.
Even worse --- Fire up Totem sometime. In its new incarnation you can't ever see a timeline unless you hover a mouse pointer over it, and the play list is gone in favor of showing multiple files/URLs as a grid of icons. But the grid cannot be manipulated in any way -- you can't add stuff to it!
So someone at the Gnome project decided that a text editor needed to be adapted to touchscreen use, but that a movie player shouldn't burden the user with something as simple as a LIST.
-
Re: OP -- Yes Gnome 3 feels more cohesive (a rare thing in the Linux world), but its cohesive shittiness.
They really can't hold a candle to the top-down integration (and functional design sense) of elementaryOS.
I know that Caspar was active in the Qubes OS community and he is credited with introducing Qubes to the European Parliament before they recommended it as a mitigation against mass surveillance. He also served as a Director for the Tor Project.
Computing UK has posted an obituary here.
America has large tracts of un-salable houses, too, since 2008. And much of that is new development.
You confused tidal energy with wave energy. The latter comes from wind driven by the sun.
The potential for exploiting tidal energy on Earth is rather low. You cannot setup a tidal energy collector just anywhere.
Your economy is largely underpinned by expansion of the EU in the pursuit of relentless "economic growth". Business has been extremely good for countries like Germany because they have the EU hinterlands holding the currency valuation down. A Germany with just a Deutschmark would scarcely be able to find buyers for its expensive wares. Similarly, the EU countries that are largely justifying their existence by offering banking services to the world benefit greatly from dealing in a continent-wide currency.
So those are the upshots of EU expansionism (and all the exceptions eurocrats made when faced with the acquisition of new territory). The downside is that you cannot treat relatively un-industrialized / un-financialized lands just like they are France or Germany. You have the responsibility of either putting them into a 'Marshal Plan' to industrialize/financialize them, or structurally accommodate (subsidize) them based on their own economic profiles. Or, some measure of both.
There is also something to be learned from the Scandinavian rejection of the euro:
Most of its members’ governments did not seek their people’s approval to turn over their monetary sovereignty to the ECB. When Sweden’s did, Swedes said no. They understood that unemployment would rise if the country’s monetary policy were set by a central bank that focused single-mindedly on inflation (and also that there would be insufficient attention to financial stability). The economy would suffer, because the economic model underlying the eurozone was predicated on power relationships that disadvantaged workers.
Greeks are not entirely to blame for their situation. A lot of the dishonesty has come from the direction of the EU and EC, who started pushing policies to remake Europe in the image of the United States.
Are you saying Pluto is a model of something?
Is a pygmy owl still an owl?
Even mere usage could be risky - If I code an application that utilizes most/all of a copyrighted API's objects and methods, then my program may include a reflection or copy of the API I'm using.
Making an API freely available to use by application programmers is an invitation to copy it in a sense. That's part of how its used. Its not much of a leap to say that implies that APIs are a special class of code covered entirely by fair-use if authors do not restrict who can code for them.
In any case... Does not every BIOS depend on APIs? How did we even get the PC compatible revolution in the first place?!
PC clone BIOS would be a better example of why Oracle is wrong.
Perhaps its the media's fault for providing such bad raw material for the program in the first place. They condition it to be a movie junkie (presumably with a short attention span) and then expect it gracefully handle a _philosophical_ discussion? They might as well have asked it the secret to world peace.
I second that. Anything between 16:10 and 4:3 would be an improvement. 16:9 doesn't suit the presentation of data.
Steve Jobs once said the Amiga was an inspiration for the NeXT computer (as I recall, he was quoted in BYTE magazine). What made the NeXT really interesting was not just on the software side (with heavy object-orientation and display postscript) but also in its hardware: DSP, smart IO controllers and plenty of DMA channels echo the Amiga's coprocessors attached to DMA channels.
What makes the newer keyboards mediocre is the change in layout, not the keys. The new layout removes some keys and changes the position of some others. Some models even have dedicated function keys removed. This, along with the removal of switches and indicator lights, is an attempt by Lenovo to out-Apple Apple in sleekness -- at some point you're just removing functionality that will be missed. The hardware minimalism has gone too far (and in the case of missing airplane-mode switches, robs of useful security features).
As for the keyboard, the new keycaps are flatter to save space, but are also wider and retain a sculpted shape. And they sit atop the same keyswitches from traditional Thinkpad keyboards. So the physical qualities of the new keys are the best of the old and the new. Lenovo should give us the old layout with the new keycaps.
...respond to government requests for zero-days, whether official or unofficial.
And I'm sure they don't have a satisfactory answer for why they dug in their heels.
Check this incident out. Naturally, Qubes could not protect him because his laptop did not have an IOMMU. But the real interesting thing to me is where/when this implant was actually put in his system (he says he bought it new, in person, and the symptoms appeared sometime after a period of normal behavior).
That would be 'Tyranorestaurantasaur Rexsey'.
"How?"
Realize that the Internet is not the web. Install an ad/tracking blocker. Avoid, or delete your accounts on Facebook/Google/Apple/"social media". Pay for a domain(s), and use different email addresses for different accounts. Use a VPN. Regularly clear cookies in your browser. Vote for politicians who "get it," and truly understand the Internet, surveillance and privacy.
Donate to the the EFF.
There's more, which is left as an exercise for the reader.
Add 'HTTPS Everywhere' extension to the list also.
A list of tracker blockers:
Disconnect
Blur
Ghostery
A 'public' VPN like privateinternetaccess.com will give you more anonymity than a VPN you run yourself.
Fingerprinting is an issue that I don't believe any of the above extensions address. Techies like us can have pretty unique browser fingerprints due to Linux and unusual plugins. These two extensions mask the unique information about browser software:
Blender
'Disable Plugin & Mimetype Enumeration' (Firefox)
Finally, if you *really* want privacy you have to have a secure computer. Compartmentalizing your casual browsing to untrusted domains in a high-security OS like Qubes is your best bet against having your private data stolen.
The trend probably has more to do with Rupert Murdoch being allowed to create an international, Anglophone echo chamber (and the USA being the source of the narratives) than it has with any particular form of voting. The countries that comprise the "Five Eyes" of global mass-surveillance appear to be under the influence of a common social contagion.
This is a primary reason why I2P (Invisible Internet Project) exists. Its much less centralized than Tor, mixes other peoples' traffic with yours by default, and over the years has typically used stronger encryption than Tor. Its just more private and secure overall.
The people who make the TAILS distro recognize Tor's shortcomings which is why they include I2P along with Tor. I2P isn't built to outproxy to the regular web (although it can), but you do get the ability to do fully decentralized/anonymized messaging and torrents, for instance, along with hidden websites. On top of being more private than Tor, its a protocol that's meant for general purpose use.
https://geti2p.net/en/
Desktop pretends to be (or maybe they actually believe that's what they are creating) a product for end users but is a product for admins and developers who are familiar and comfortable with the UNIX-like environment to use on their personal computers.
This is total BS. Lots of people who aren't computer experts use Linux desktops every day. My wife is one of them.
The obligatory Slashdot-Linux-enthusiast defense of "Desktop Linux for my relative" never ceases to make me chuckle. I can always spot the authentic ones, because they contain the "we have the Web so who needs a native UI or native apps" meme.
I can always spot the authentic ones, because they contain the "we have the Web so who needs a native UI or native apps" meme.
Did you ever consider that people advance this idea because it's true? There's plenty of people that JUST want email and the web. They don't care about native apps and never will. They use their computers to communicate with other people, and couldn't care one whit about doing their taxes on their computer, or editing video.
Its demonstrably UNtrue, otherwise Apple and Microsoft would not still be viable companies. "Plenty of people" apparently does not define the whole consumer electronics market.
That you think Chrome OS belongs in the Desktop Linux category is instructive... But Google doesn't even identify Chrome OS as Linux. They could switch to a different, closed kernel and hardly anyone using Chromebooks would notice or care. That's because a Chromebook is a type of mainframe terminal or client, not a personal computer (it may be converted to a PC, but that's not its design).
If you don't think this is a common windows experience, you're not paying attention.
The tragedy is that you can't even give a Desktop Linux distro away for free despite how awful that Windows experience has been.
The reasons why GP is far from an excellent reply:
1. Anecdotes are not data. Doubly so if its someone who lives with you.
2. Native apps still matter because they attract a wide-ranging ecosystem of talented people who move between native apps and the Web, and...
3. ...That range of people between grandma and kernel developers form networks of support and advocacy. If the Power Users don't like your pile of bytes called an OS, the more creative ones won't start writing interesting apps for their non-techie friends and colleagues, and they won't recommend the OS either.
4. People depend on the 'look and feel' of software environments. Its what enables tech support staff to deliver *usable* instructions in a way that doesn't feel threatening to users, and also to get reliable answers from those same users. Having a well-defined GUI is important, but Linux is very slippery in this area.
There are many more reasons why GP represents nerdy myopia and wishful thinking. Perhaps the most important one is that Apple and Microsoft laid down, by example, a de-facto definition of what Desktop Personal Computer is. The FOSS community actively sabotages itself whenever it tentatively tries to reverse engineer the *concept* of the desktop PC; I think most of those numbskulls would define it as some kind of aberration that needs to be stomped out. Where "platform" is supposed to evoke (feature) stability and recognizable surroundings, the Desktop Linux crowd instead create this.
Perhaps I should start using stronger words than "numbskull" for these true believers.
The reasons why GP is far from an excellent reply:
1. Anecdotes are not data. Doubly so if its someone who lives with you.
2. Native apps still matter because they attract a wide-ranging ecosystem of talented people who move between native apps and the Web, and...
3. ...That range of people between grandma and kernel developers form networks of support and advocacy. If the Power Users don't like your pile of bytes called an OS, the more creative ones won't start writing interesting apps for their non-techie friends and colleagues, and they won't recommend the OS either.
4. People depend on the 'look and feel' of software environments. Its what enables tech support staff to deliver *usable* instructions in a way that doesn't feel threatening to users, and also to get reliable answers from those same users. Having a well-defined GUI is important, but Linux is very slippery in this area.
There are many more reasons why GP represents nerdy myopia and wishful thinking. Perhaps the most important one is that Apple and Microsoft laid down, by example, a de-facto definition of what Desktop Personal Computer is. The FOSS community actively sabotages itself whenever it tentatively tries to reverse engineer the *concept* of the desktop PC; I think most of those numbskulls would define it as some kind of aberration that needs to be stomped out. Where "platform" is supposed to evoke (feature) stability and recognizable surroundings, the Desktop Linux crowd instead create this.
Desktop pretends to be (or maybe they actually believe that's what they are creating) a product for end users but is a product for admins and developers who are familiar and comfortable with the UNIX-like environment to use on their personal computers.
This is total BS. Lots of people who aren't computer experts use Linux desktops every day. My wife is one of them.
The obligatory Slashdot-Linux-enthusiast defense of "Desktop Linux for my relative" never ceases to make me chuckle. I can always spot the authentic ones, because they contain the "we have the Web so who needs a native UI or native apps" meme.