Wasn't this pretty much exactly what Microsoft's "Media Center PC" concept was, way back in 2003? Granted, the tech evolved, both on the PC side and the cable TV side.
Originally, Media Center PCs were sold as specific hardware/software packages, it wasn't a separate version of Windows XP available as software only. By the time Vista rolled around and then Win7, the software was built into Home Premium and Professional versions, and of course Ultimate. They took it out of Windows 8 because nobody much used it anymore, but it's still available as a cheap upgrade to Windows 8.x. It came free in my late-2012 Windows 8 Pro-pack upgrade when the were discounting Windows 8 Pro upgrade from Windows 8, with Media Center thrown in.
The Windows Media Center PCs back in the XP days came with a remote control, guaranteed compatible analog tuner, a great software interface, and a two-box-capable remote blaster. As Media Center evolved, multiple tuners, HDTV tuners, and ClearQAM got added.
The product you're asking for exists. Or existed, as a mainstream, biggest-names-branded product. From Microsoft and HP, or Dell, and other PC OEMs.
It just didn't sell. It worked great, for its time. My HP Media Center 2003-era Pentium IV PC pretty much replaced my 1999-era ReplayTV DVR. Neither had a subscription charge.
Time Warner has not owned Time Warner Cable for several years. Other than whatever royalty deal Time Warner has with Time Warner Cable to allow them to continue using the "Time Warner" name and the "Road Runner" IP, they have nothing to do with each other - except that Time Warner Cable is one of the independent TV distribution systems that Time Warner want to get paid by for having it distribute the various cable tv networks of Time Warner's Turner and other cable TV divisions - channels like HBO, Cartoon Network, CNN, Turner Classic Movies, etc.
Your "owns a lot of cable stations" is inaccurate and ambiguous? Do you mean, "owns a lot of cable systems"? If so, you're wrong, as I've explained. Time Warner does not own cable systems at all anymore, the entity called Time Warner Cable is an unrelated company.
Do you mean, "owns a lot of cable networks"? In which case, yes, HBO's owner owns quite a few other cable networks.
Your argument either works or is totally invalid, depending on what you mean. There is no such thing as a "cable station". CNN is a "cable network" owned by Time Warner, "Time Warner Cable of North Carolina" is a cable system owned by Time Warner Cable. The interests of Time Warner vs Time Warner Cable are not aligned.
HBO Go becoming independent, in terms of subscription availability, from having to also have HBO-the-cable-network subscription, might be a net positive for Time Warner the owner of HBO. It might be a negative to Time Warner Cable, because it would remove an "upsell package" opportunity of bundled or special deal premium network sales at huge markups. It would just be more bits, like Netflix or Amazon or Hulu.
But it might be a net positive for Time Warner Cable, and for Charter Cable, Verizon FiOS, AT&T U-Verse, CenturyLink DSL, as providers of high-speed broadband internet (ok, allegedly high-speed allegedly broadband allegedly internet, really minimal speed barely-broadband walled-garden). It might encourage more people to get high speed internet and to upgrade the speed and or monthly total data transfer allowances, because now Game of Thrones without TV.
I believe it would be the latter. But I believe that the cable system executives believe it would be the former, at least the ones that are originally/primarily cable-tv systems that then added data. I have no idea what the cable network and broadcast network executives feel about it.
Personally, I'd like every entertainment series available unbundled, released on the "broadcasting network" servers on a specific schedule, but available continuously after that "street date"/"air date". I'd like to be able to get Sleepy Hollow without having to get American Idol. I'd like to be able to get that Fox Network series without having to get a Chthulu Plus subscription. But if I found I liked enough series that were on Hulu, as one of their options, and that a Hulu Plus subscription was the most economical way to get them, then I'd like that option. If I instead only wanted to buy one series, I'd like the price to be very low, and I'd like it available simultaneous with "home network" air date and time. If it's on ABC broadcast network Tuesday at 8pm EST, I want to be able to start streaming it at 8pm EST that same Tuesday. Even if I'm in the Pacific Time Zone. Or in the Uruguayan Time Zone and IP block. (which I am).
Oh, and a pony.
But note I never said I wanted it to be totally free-as-in-beer. Well maybe the pony.
I'm not sure it's even possible to be a "lapsed Unitarian". Considering that there are UU-Pagan, UU-Taoist, UU-Jew, UU-Humanist, UU-Buddhist, UU-Hindu, UU-Confucian, UU-Animist, UU-Islam "fellowships" within the Unitarian-Universalist Society, there probably is a UU-Lapsed-UU official group too.
Which makes you (and me) still Unitarians!
But I still had MacOS9 running until late last year, on a purple-bubble iMac, with Windows 98 on it via pre-MSFT-VirtualPC, so I'm a heretical one.
You don't have to unblock Facebook to use most comment sections. More of the major new sites are using either Disqus or a site-specific instance of LiveFyre than are using Facebook Comments as their enhanced commenting platform. USA Today is probably the biggest site using Facebook Comments. A lot of local news stations and small-town papers have moved to Facebook Comments. Lots of blogs and special interest websites now use Disqus to get into that cross-web "discoverability" of their sites by being on the same comment platform as CNN, The Atlantic, etc. Some sites still use Intense Debate, though it's dropped off bigtime. Wonkette probably the biggest political commentary site still using it, some blogs, some small news sites. (Intense Debate had the "early mover disadvantage" - LiveFyre and Disqus are just much better.)
Even for the Facebook Comments-powered sites, you don't have to unblock Facebook globally, if you use the right tool.
Problem: You don't want to be tracked by Facebook all over creation, but you do want to be able to comment on the majority of sites. Including, if they use Facebook comments, those sites.
Solution: Use Ghostery (and I'm specifically recommending Ghostery, not alternatives like Disconnect; I explain why further in) with its fine granularity of global and site-specific blocking. 1. Turn off GhostRank, so you're not telling Evidon (Ghostery) who you're going to. It's off by default so they're being good guys. 2. Turn on auto-update and auto-block new elements. 3. Block everything. (It's just easier to start from blocking everything. 3 after 2 because sometimes first-use leaves stuff unblocked) 4. If you're a regular commenter and comment reader at major sites, unblock the "3pes" (Third Party Tracking Elements) for:
Disqus
LiveFyre
Intense Debate
If using the Firefox version of Ghostery, there's a Cookie tab. Repeat steps 3 and 4 on the Cookie tab.
Disqus and Intense Debate have cookies on their list, too, LiveFyre currently does not.) 5. Save (one save covers all the tab settings you've jumped between.)
Do not unblock Facebook or anything with Facebook in it here at the global level. You don't want Facebook knowing every site you've been at that has a Like or Follow button or a Facebook Social Reader app, just the ones you intend to actually read Facebook-powered comments at.
The last several versions of Ghostery for Firefox, and the most recent version for Chrome finally, have per-site per-tracker disabling. So go to the site where you can't see the comments. Click the Ghostery toolbar icon to see the list of trackers blocked. Don't whitelist the whole site. Next to each active tracker, Ghostery has a slide switch. You can unblock Facebook Connect or Facebook Social Graph or whatever you need, just for that site, then reload.
It may well turn iterative. For Facebook comments it certainly will. On USA Today, for example, if you click the little dialog bubble icon on the left panel from the story (which is their comment icon), Ghostery will increment by at least one more tracker, USAtoday didn't load the FB stuff till then. Unblock that and reload, you still won't get the comments. By unblocking Facebook Connect, now it could load Facebook Social Plugins. Now unblock that. Rinse and repeat.
I'm a pretty avid Disqus commenter and have it on all my and my clients' sites, so I leave it unblocked globally. But you could do the same with that, if you only want it to work at certain sites and don't want it knowing you're there at other Disqus-powered sites.
One thing I've found on a lot of sites - even with Disqus (or LiveFyre) unblocked, the site's JavaScript that in turn triggers the Disqus or LiveFyre plugin, won't fire unless you unblock something else. And sometimes that "something else" isn't particularly "safe" for folks who don't want any adverts or cross-web trackers. Omniture from Adobe's advertisin
I installed cyanogenmod and its going to get "kitkat" shortly.
Which expensive tablet only allows you to run what the vendor says you can?
Same thing I said to the iPad guy. Being able to install new ROMs matters exactly why, to this use case?
No, OP's dad isn't going to give a crap about cyanogen mod. Nor about any of the other "latest and greatest" that Android fanboyz and iFans each seem to thing is so important as you rush down to give the retailers more money every few months, and then root/jailbreak/mod the shiny you just bought.
And updates and patches matter in this use case, exactly why? Elderly person wanting to send some emails, browse some sites. Not needing nor wanting nor likely even aware of "latest and greatest"?
Get out of your own headspace and into that of the person using it.
Unless OP's father's memories of "like I used to use" were being stuck in AOL's or Prodigy's walled gardens, why would anybody recommend a "married to Jeff Bezos" Kindle Fire tablet?
Crippled Android fork of a very old version, no access to Google Play or other app stores, nor sideloading (you rooters go away, we're talking about normals here).
If you must recommend a bookstore-based Android-derived tablet, a Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet or, my choice which I own, a Kobo Arc family tablet, are now essentially open Android. Sure, they have their own launchers, own look-and-feel, and work auto-magically with their own bookstores. But they have full access to Google Play right out of the box. I love my Kobo Arc tablet - Android Jellybean, open access to sideloading, other than Kobo's home screen it looks and feels mostly like Android. My Kobo is my Nook eReader, my Google Play Books eReader, my general-EPUB Aldiko eReader, and one of my Kindle eReaders.
A Kindle Fire is a Kindle eReader. Other competing book apps are blocked. Same with many other competing content marketplaces and apps.
PC came out in 1982. "Personal Computers" AKA microcomputers were around several years before that: CP/M, MP/M, Epson laptop, more. These were in fact in offices at work. I should know, old-fart typing this at my Linux laptop but had a multi-node multi-OS multi-location mixed PC, oddball CP/M, and S-100 bus tri-state network up and running at a NY-based retailer in 1983, with all sorts of non-technical users doing spreadsheets, dBase, word processing, parts ordering, service tracking, rudimentary public electronic communication (Western Union and MCIMail including telexing suppliers in Japan from a desktop terminal or PC).
OP's dad in his 70s. Let's say 75. It's 2013, almost 2014. 1982 is when the PC revolution began, and Apple ][, CP/M, and oddball mixes like my "His networks are Insaaannne!" setup already around then.
Do the math. OP's dad was in his prime working years at the height of the PC revolution all the way up to the launch of the Web. 1982 was 31 years ago. OP's father was 44 or younger. And there wasn't nearly as much age discrimination back then. Let's say dad took early retirement at 62, 13 years ago. That was 2000. That was already the height of the dot-com bubble. Everybody in the office was shopping online at lunch (at other times too), and trading online.
Web invented in 1991. People adding Trumpet Winsock and Mosaic or Netscape right away to get on it from Windows 3.x. The moderatly-successful OS/2 2.0 and then Warp from IBM used "The web is built-in" as one of its selling point over Windows - it came with native OS/2 apps for IBM's own Mosaic-based browser, email, FTP, and gopher.
Back in the day, a lot of consumer routers and access points* came out of the box with remote management enabled. It was something that only we geeks knew how to turn off. More importantly, knew why to turn off, and if left on, we had good reason for so doing. With other than the default password. Which leaves the other 99.42% of buyers with it still wide open.
I remember at least one Linksys and one D-Link out of the half-dozen or so I went through in the late-90's through mid-2000's that defaulted to remote management on. After a while I gave up on them and used a homebuilt low-end desktop running Linux as my router, with good old Speakeasy multiple-fixed-IP DSL, and was a happy geek. I moved to the land of "Qwest or Comcast only", before Speakeasy got BestBought and went to evil shit. But Joe Doakes and Jane Smokes are just using those routers as-purchased.
As to a downstream comment about "what ISP provides a router?" the answer is "Most DSL, most fiber, and some cable ISPs." Up through mid-2012 when I left the States for good, Comcast in Colorado was still just providing a DOCSIS modem with one ethernet port. While I was unloading my place there I threw an old D-Link "router" (early-N single-band WiFi/router combo, maybe one of those on the list) downstream from it to get actual routing and DHCP. Time Warner Cable in North Carolina, in the late 2000's was still the same thing, just a modem. When I used Qwest-now-CenturyLink in CO and WA, they provided a combo unit that was DSL modem, router, and WiFi all built in.
So lots of cable modem subscribers have "routers" they bought sitting downstream from their cable modem. Less so, DSL subscribers but some do. A large amoujnt of them may have one of these D-Link units. Thankfully most of those units probably bricked themselves or burnt out by now, but ironically cheapo D-Link routers tended to last a lot longer than their low-end competition. Plenty still trucking along, open to this problem.
* I'm aware that "router", "access point" are different things and that what most consumers call a "router" is a combination of a router and a wireless access point. Point is, most consumers are not.
Oh sure, use Xmarks. Then watch your Chrome bookmarks get duplicated folders over and over again, some empty, some full, some half-empty (or half-full if you're an optimist). Yes, even if you do what they say, which is to disable Chrome sync and Firefox Sync for your bookmarks. God help you if you do still use RSS and use Firefox's Live Bookmarks feature: watch those become empty folders on Chrome, then circle back to Firefox and frak you over there.
There is a thread from Hades complaining about this on their support site, which they don't even run, it's a section, the abominable GetSatisfaction-dot-com, I spent more time cleaning up the frak-ups of using Xmarks cross-browser cross-machines weekly than it would have taken to just sync changes manually once every week or thereabouts. I let Mozilla sync handle syncing between PCs and intra-PC for Firefox, Aurora (alpha-test FF), Pale Moon, and synching with Firefox or Aurora on my Android phone/tablets. I let Chrome sync handle bookmark sync between various Chrome and Dragon instances on Windows and Linux, and on Android.
Once in a while I pick one Linux or Windows machine, one browser of each family (Chromium or Firefox-based, usually Comodo Dragon and Pale Moon), look at my most recent bookmark additions in each, and copy/paste them to the other. Then let their native syncs propagate them to all the other device/OS/browser instances I have.
I just don't let Xmarks go anywhere near any of them anymore.
Seriously, don't recommend Xmarks to people. It sucks to high hell.
It also is insecure, in that LastPass admits they analyze your bookmarks and use them for commercial purposes. Hell they have a "popular bookmarks" feature right on the site.
Chrome sync by default is scanned and used for marketing and targeting by Google, but they give you the option to encrypt with your own passphrase, not just your Google account. If you do that, they can't get at it for their own purposes, as even their decrypted clear version is still your in-browser encrypted version.
Mozilla sync works that way by default, in fact by your only choice. Your sync data is encrypted with your generated recovery key and they don't know it.
Problem is, running through another country, especially one that does not have an NSA-reciprocity deal, is itself most likely a marker to NSA to pay extra attention. Plus doesn't the NSA have full authority to monitor transmissions where at least one side is outside of the USA? Sure, they don't need no steenkin' warrants. But their surveillance becomes arguably even more legal (by US law) and less unconstitutional, if you have voluntarily routed outside of the USA.
I don't disagree with your advice; in fact I do the same thing often, VPNing to Venezuela, or Iceland, or random other countries first, when the sites/transactions I'm using do not require specific IP geolocation. It makes it harder to track, harder to decypher. But I don't think it is all that meaningful, because it puts in more on the NSA "radar". In part, I do it as a big FU to NSA, like a bumper sticker or political billboard. But I have little faith that it makes it all that much more difficult for NSA to determine patterns of my traffic, if they really want to do so. Sure, it keeps my ISP in the dark.
But my ISP is the freakin' government of Uruguay, via Antel, which is the fixed-internet monopoly in this "socialist" country. So I'm on the NSA radar anyhow, as one of those "evil Americans who leave the country". Though "Tio Pepe" Mujica, held for a dozen years in a US-funded jail, two at the bottom of a well, would probably tell them to FOAD anyhow. Just as he is doing to the toady EU countries that denied Evo Morales air overflight, by recalling Uruguay's ambassadors.
Have to? Negative. We could call a vote of no confidence in congress. We could DEMAND all government actions be made public record. However, this would require us to be as American as our founders...
Hate to be your missing middle school Social Studies/Civics teacher, but there is no such thing as a "no confidence vote" in a congressional-type system. You are calling for something that exists in parliamentary systems, such as the UK, Canada, Australia, where a no confidence vote can "bring down the government". At least in theory.
Not in the USA. Even if the US Congress, especially the gerrymandered-for-permanence House, were not so bought off that your vote for Party A's vs Party B's candidate had any real meaning, you only get to make that choice every 2 years for the House and 6 for any given Senate seat. There are no do-overs, no recalls, for the US Congress. In practice, no impeachments of Representatives or Senators. Sanctions (e.g. Charlie Rangel) that mean nothing.
The OP should either have used the commonly understood abbreviation, "WaPo", for the Washington Post, or used perhaps, "Wash. Post" which is a correct-US-English, though not US Postal Service, abbreviation for Washington, D.C.
"WA Post" makes it seem it might be out in Tacoma or Spokane or thereabouts.
I moved out here from the midwest 20 years ago and have no interest in moving back - same can be said of every coworker of mine (I think maybe 1 of 20+ of them are from the Bay Area originally).
Well yeah, compared to Omaha or Topeka or even Kansas-Google-Fiber-City, sure, it's exciting. Compared to a few miles away in SF itself it's boring as hell. And you're not just going to pop out at lunch to hit up that new trendy lunch kiosk or the funky clothing store. Or after work catch a play in a small off-off-Broadway type show that you are intrigued by, that perhaps your coworker is in. Nor pop out for your own audition, or to record a voiceover, or to meet your girlfriend/boyfriend (or both!) the dancer at the studio. Or join a group run training for a marathon.
It's not like those things, or their equivalents, aren't possible or arent' even available in the boonies. They are. Mostly. But they're all damn inconvenient and time-consuming to get to, require multiple transportation modes or at least costly long trips in your must-have car, and are all in different directions.
I've worked in office parks that were technology hubs in the overall New York Metro but in New Jersey, in the Greater Boston Metro on the Route 128 Corridor, but half-hour or more away, in some cases in another state (eg the failed/killed DEC's real-estate in NH taken over by BigGreenPyramidFinancialCo). In North Carolina's Research Triangle Park, but thus not in Raleigh nor Durham city centers or urban village areas themselves. In Zonamerica in greater Montivideo, Uruguay, which is out in the frakking boonies north of the airport, half-hour or more by bus to anywhere interesting in Montevideo. 20 minutes at least by car, if I wanted to have one here, to anywhere interesting at all.
It's mind-numbingly boring. Mind-numbingly suburbanized. Horribly non-green, even with things like Google buses or the Zonamerica shuttles.
I've also worked on Wall Street iitsellf (literally, address on Wall St.) or right around the corner on Broadway, and up a few blocks on Greenwich. On 57th St and 5th Av in midtown Manhattan. In downtown Boston. In downtown Denver right on the 16th St. Pedestrian way with the vast amount of funky restaurants, shopping, entertainment. Almost worked in the Montevideo World Trade Center in Pocitos when they were moving out of Zonamerica, but bagged the job to start a venture with my wife based out of our casita 3 blocks from the beach in a funky small town that is a walkable micropolis urban village with fibre-to-home and a variety of walkable pleasures.
During times living/working in one of those places, it was very possible without hassle and without car to do pretty much all of the stuff I mentioned above.
Hell of a lot more fun, any of those places. Either the big city, or the self-contained micropolis. Out in the boonies of tech parks, everybody knows this is nowhere. Eventually the real talent who are at all multifaceted in their life preferences go somewhere more stimulating to their many wants and needs, not just their tech-and-money needs. Leaving the B-ship people. Yes, we need the B-ship too. But that's not where creativity happens. That's not the one the multii-talented multi-intelligenced people want to be in for their career and life journeys.
Great, Dice posts story from a corporate-software-industrial-complex advertorial mag, with a link to their so-called blog. Which ironically is running WordPress, along with a bunch of common plugins like "Yoast WordPress SEO plugin v1.4.7" and "All in One SEO Pack 1.6.14.6". Right there tells me how clueless they are about WordPress, because unless you have a damn good special reason, you do not want to be running two separate SEO plugins. LeadGen contact form plugin, a bunch of ad and analytics beyond the usual, and no apparent caching plugin. Oh, and no Google Authorship id done the correct way, despite both of those SEO plugins having "fill in the blank" prompting for it (they do have an XFN tag on their contact info but don't do the full Google social.)
For more laughs, their verison of All-In-One SEO is downlevel. Exactly what Checkmarx themselfes warn agansit. They are on 1.6.14.6, current version is 2.0.2.
Yeah, I'm gonna listen to them about WordPress security.
When you click through their blog to the actual PDF report, guess what? They redacted the names of all those "at-risk" plugins, noting only 6 by name. Four of which they claim took their advice and fixed the problem, and two (WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache) which I recall getting fixes for months ago. Hot news. I guess that even though their supposed expertise is in scanning for vulnerabilities, they are not going to tell you which are at risk in the current environment, because you didn't pay them. Classic dipstick move. Total and utter unawareness of the karmic and $$ benefits of internet "gift culture", such as, the whole damn open source movement and the specific WordPress ecosystem in which they are supposedly expert.
But we should listen to them, because: Checkmarx was recognized by Gartner as sole visionary in their latest SAST magic quadrant and as Cool vendor in application security.
Right, and e-gold before it. Only criminals and terrorists have any need for an alternative, secure, somewhat anonymous, non-government-controlled (really non-Corporatocracy Bankster-controlling-government-controlled) currency. Think of the children. Think of the Homeland! Do the right thing, Citizen!
The only reason I'd want Apache Open Office to merge into / with / from LibreOffice is this: To get the overall better suite, LO, using some of the uniquely cool features in IBM's very different fork of OO.o into IBM Lotus Symphony. Which, for those who remember the end-of-CP/M-start-of-PC era, has nada to do with Lotus Symphony, Lotus Development's follow-on to Lotus 1-2-3, which never met with its predecessor's success. But, it was a very early attempt at an "office suite" (spreadsheet-centric, MS/PC-DOS-based). So IBM got the name/trademark when they bought Lotus.
Around 2010-ish, they released IBM Lotus Symphony, a Win32, Linux, and I think MacOS, office suite based on OO.o core code - but with a lot of differences. Differences in 3 big areas:
1) Only the 3 major apps - Word Processing, Spreadsheet, and Presentations. Nothing based on Draw, Math, Base.
2) Very different and non-standard menu structure, that hearkens back to Lotus Windows products. For example, no Windows (and IBM SAA, and just normal)-standard "Insert" menu - most of what you expect there is in its "Create" menu.
3) Everything is in a single window, tabbed interface, with multiple slide-out right sidebars: A wide, well-organized Properties panel, and some widget panels for add-ons. Based on the Lotus Expeditor framework for the devilspawn Lotus Notes. Yet sometimes the son of the devil can be a good guy (e.g. Hellboy).
Number 3 has made it my absolute favorite office suite. For the same reasons we all love tabbed browsers and trashed browsers back in the day that didn't have it. Everything is right there, in context, without too much window-hopping. The Properties panel exposes all the major properties without having to dig through menus and open different dialog boxes depending on if you're formatting colors, number types, custom cell formatting, etc., and without having to crap up a giant multiline toolbar or frakking ribbon to make functions discoverable.
I go back far enough to have been used to different word processors and different spreadsheet programs to have different interfaces and menu structures, even different keyboard shortcuts. Heck, I even remember some of the differences in that between WordStar (real WordStar, up through 3.3), its competitor NewWord that cloned it and then got HandSpringed into WordStar 4.0 (Yes, I still have WordStar 7.0 on my Windows 7 and Windows 8 PCs). Then some time with Ami Pro, on both OS/2 and Windows 3.x, that later became Lotus WordPro (that one I didn't use), with a short sidetrip into WordPerfect for Windows, before being funneled into the Corporate Tool MS-Word world, and then slightly out to OO.o/LO. So I can make the mental shift between different menu structures pretty easily.
I love the property panel as well as the tabbed interface. Unfortunately, though IBM donated the entire codebase to Apache, they are not using the tabbed interface in AOO. They are starting to use, and announced they will fully implement, the Symphony-based property panels. That alone would make me likely go back to OpenOffice from LibreOffice, except that LibreOffice is so far ahead of AOO in functionality, stability, and killing off of Java.
For now, I still use Symphony, on both Windows and Linux. It continues to get the occasional FixPack (IBMese for service pack) and continues to Just Work. Especially on creative writing where I may have reference docs, character backgrounds, outlines all open, or similarly for technical writing, the tabbed interface really helps to keep everything accessible and surfaced. Also for projects involving a combo of word processing documents and spreadsheets, and [$DEITY] help me sometimes even presentations - it's a lot easier to work everything up if I have that clear context, rather than a cluster of windows.
I do keep LO installed, for when I want the other modules, and for dealing with editing documents in MS.docx,.xlsx,.pptx format. Symphony can open them, and
Can't get Mint installed on sub GB RAM hardware, resource waste is my biggest beef with Unity and Mint doesn't solve it (and it seems only the installer is the bottleneck).
That's odd, considering I'm replying on my 2004-vintage HP Compaq Presario X1000 Pentium M 1.7MHz laptop with 768M RAM, running Mint.
Mint XFCE works just dandy on low-resource early 2000s hardware. I had it happily running on a revitalized homebuilt-in-1999 tower whose last upgrade was in 2002 to a Pentium III 850MHz (from original Pentium II 350), with all of 448MB RAM. Used that one as my primary computer for months at my old place before moving out, nuking the drive, reinstalling it, and leaving it out by the condo dumpster with a note with the password.
On this laptop, I can happily run Firefox and Thunderbird together, while running a VNC client into my other machine, and supporting a VNC server to go the other way, and manage to use LibreOffice or the GIMP at the same time. It streams videos fine, runs jEdit fine for a decent universal code editor. Runs Chrome OK, but just like on Windows, modern Firefox is lower-memory than Chrome once a few tabs and extensions are loaded, so Chrome is non-optimal on this, and was non-optimal on the tower. But Chrome is non-optimal on my wife's Windows 7 netbook with a dual-core N570 Atom and 1GB RAM too. This 768MB laptop even runs IBM Lotus Symphony decently, which I happen to prefer over its LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org relatives due to its tabbed interface and preference panels, especially when doing creative writing or articles where I have lots of research and notes open. (Yes, ducking tomatoes for using non-free-as-in-beer variants, but IBM did give the whole thing to Apache, so now it is.)
If you're trying to use Mint Mate, or Mint Cinnamon, or Mint KDE editions on a sub-GB machine, just don't. You'll be lucky to be able to install, or even boot the Live DVD with those, and if you do, a lot of the window chrome either won't paint, or will paint while you go out to get lunch. But Mint XFCE edition works like a charm. The previous low-resource official versions of Mint that had LXDE also were great on this hardware. I am staying on the Mint 13 Maya Long-Term-Support version, but prior to that I was using Mint 12 Lisa LXDE Edition which was slightly faster. You can always install LXDE but I haven't really seen the need. I think if I still had that tower, which was even lower resource, I might have gone back to LXDE, but I did use the heck out of it with XFCE.
I have to get around to switching the netbook to Mint LXDE one of these days. Everything that my wife and I use is available for Linux. We do switch off using that or the new better laptop (Windows 8 with Start8 login-to-desktop) depending on any given day's respective workload and deadlines. If I upgrade the netbook to Mint, maybe I can get the fast laptop back!
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Wasn't this pretty much exactly what Microsoft's "Media Center PC" concept was, way back in 2003? Granted, the tech evolved, both on the PC side and the cable TV side.
Originally, Media Center PCs were sold as specific hardware/software packages, it wasn't a separate version of Windows XP available as software only. By the time Vista rolled around and then Win7, the software was built into Home Premium and Professional versions, and of course Ultimate. They took it out of Windows 8 because nobody much used it anymore, but it's still available as a cheap upgrade to Windows 8.x. It came free in my late-2012 Windows 8 Pro-pack upgrade when the were discounting Windows 8 Pro upgrade from Windows 8, with Media Center thrown in.
The Windows Media Center PCs back in the XP days came with a remote control, guaranteed compatible analog tuner, a great software interface, and a two-box-capable remote blaster. As Media Center evolved, multiple tuners, HDTV tuners, and ClearQAM got added.
The product you're asking for exists. Or existed, as a mainstream, biggest-names-branded product. From Microsoft and HP, or Dell, and other PC OEMs.
It just didn't sell. It worked great, for its time. My HP Media Center 2003-era Pentium IV PC pretty much replaced my 1999-era ReplayTV DVR. Neither had a subscription charge.
Time Warner has not owned Time Warner Cable for several years. Other than whatever royalty deal Time Warner has with Time Warner Cable to allow them to continue using the "Time Warner" name and the "Road Runner" IP, they have nothing to do with each other - except that Time Warner Cable is one of the independent TV distribution systems that Time Warner want to get paid by for having it distribute the various cable tv networks of Time Warner's Turner and other cable TV divisions - channels like HBO, Cartoon Network, CNN, Turner Classic Movies, etc.
Your "owns a lot of cable stations" is inaccurate and ambiguous? Do you mean, "owns a lot of cable systems"? If so, you're wrong, as I've explained. Time Warner does not own cable systems at all anymore, the entity called Time Warner Cable is an unrelated company.
Do you mean, "owns a lot of cable networks"? In which case, yes, HBO's owner owns quite a few other cable networks.
Your argument either works or is totally invalid, depending on what you mean. There is no such thing as a "cable station". CNN is a "cable network" owned by Time Warner, "Time Warner Cable of North Carolina" is a cable system owned by Time Warner Cable. The interests of Time Warner vs Time Warner Cable are not aligned.
HBO Go becoming independent, in terms of subscription availability, from having to also have HBO-the-cable-network subscription, might be a net positive for Time Warner the owner of HBO. It might be a negative to Time Warner Cable, because it would remove an "upsell package" opportunity of bundled or special deal premium network sales at huge markups. It would just be more bits, like Netflix or Amazon or Hulu.
But it might be a net positive for Time Warner Cable, and for Charter Cable, Verizon FiOS, AT&T U-Verse, CenturyLink DSL, as providers of high-speed broadband internet (ok, allegedly high-speed allegedly broadband allegedly internet, really minimal speed barely-broadband walled-garden). It might encourage more people to get high speed internet and to upgrade the speed and or monthly total data transfer allowances, because now Game of Thrones without TV.
I believe it would be the latter. But I believe that the cable system executives believe it would be the former, at least the ones that are originally/primarily cable-tv systems that then added data. I have no idea what the cable network and broadcast network executives feel about it.
Personally, I'd like every entertainment series available unbundled, released on the "broadcasting network" servers on a specific schedule, but available continuously after that "street date"/"air date". I'd like to be able to get Sleepy Hollow without having to get American Idol. I'd like to be able to get that Fox Network series without having to get a Chthulu Plus subscription. But if I found I liked enough series that were on Hulu, as one of their options, and that a Hulu Plus subscription was the most economical way to get them, then I'd like that option. If I instead only wanted to buy one series, I'd like the price to be very low, and I'd like it available simultaneous with "home network" air date and time. If it's on ABC broadcast network Tuesday at 8pm EST, I want to be able to start streaming it at 8pm EST that same Tuesday. Even if I'm in the Pacific Time Zone. Or in the Uruguayan Time Zone and IP block. (which I am).
Oh, and a pony.
But note I never said I wanted it to be totally free-as-in-beer. Well maybe the pony.
I'm a Unitarian, but I'm a lapsed Unitarian.
I'm not sure it's even possible to be a "lapsed Unitarian". Considering that there are UU-Pagan, UU-Taoist, UU-Jew, UU-Humanist, UU-Buddhist, UU-Hindu, UU-Confucian, UU-Animist, UU-Islam "fellowships" within the Unitarian-Universalist Society, there probably is a UU-Lapsed-UU official group too.
Which makes you (and me) still Unitarians!
But I still had MacOS9 running until late last year, on a purple-bubble iMac, with Windows 98 on it via pre-MSFT-VirtualPC, so I'm a heretical one.
I live in Uruguay and don't have any Bitcoin, you insensitive clod!
You don't have to unblock Facebook to use most comment sections. More of the major new sites are using either Disqus or a site-specific instance of LiveFyre than are using Facebook Comments as their enhanced commenting platform. USA Today is probably the biggest site using Facebook Comments. A lot of local news stations and small-town papers have moved to Facebook Comments. Lots of blogs and special interest websites now use Disqus to get into that cross-web "discoverability" of their sites by being on the same comment platform as CNN, The Atlantic, etc. Some sites still use Intense Debate, though it's dropped off bigtime. Wonkette probably the biggest political commentary site still using it, some blogs, some small news sites. (Intense Debate had the "early mover disadvantage" - LiveFyre and Disqus are just much better.)
Even for the Facebook Comments-powered sites, you don't have to unblock Facebook globally, if you use the right tool.
Problem: You don't want to be tracked by Facebook all over creation, but you do want to be able to comment on the majority of sites. Including, if they use Facebook comments, those sites.
Solution: Use Ghostery (and I'm specifically recommending Ghostery, not alternatives like Disconnect; I explain why further in) with its fine granularity of global and site-specific blocking.
1. Turn off GhostRank, so you're not telling Evidon (Ghostery) who you're going to. It's off by default so they're being good guys.
2. Turn on auto-update and auto-block new elements.
3. Block everything. (It's just easier to start from blocking everything. 3 after 2 because sometimes first-use leaves stuff unblocked)
4. If you're a regular commenter and comment reader at major sites, unblock the "3pes" (Third Party Tracking Elements) for:
Disqus
LiveFyre
Intense Debate
If using the Firefox version of Ghostery, there's a Cookie tab. Repeat steps 3 and 4 on the Cookie tab.
Disqus and Intense Debate have cookies on their list, too, LiveFyre currently does not.)
5. Save (one save covers all the tab settings you've jumped between.)
Do not unblock Facebook or anything with Facebook in it here at the global level. You don't want Facebook knowing every site you've been at that has a Like or Follow button or a Facebook Social Reader app, just the ones you intend to actually read Facebook-powered comments at.
The last several versions of Ghostery for Firefox, and the most recent version for Chrome finally, have per-site per-tracker disabling. So go to the site where you can't see the comments. Click the Ghostery toolbar icon to see the list of trackers blocked. Don't whitelist the whole site. Next to each active tracker, Ghostery has a slide switch. You can unblock Facebook Connect or Facebook Social Graph or whatever you need, just for that site, then reload.
It may well turn iterative. For Facebook comments it certainly will. On USA Today, for example, if you click the little dialog bubble icon on the left panel from the story (which is their comment icon), Ghostery will increment by at least one more tracker, USAtoday didn't load the FB stuff till then. Unblock that and reload, you still won't get the comments. By unblocking Facebook Connect, now it could load Facebook Social Plugins. Now unblock that. Rinse and repeat.
I'm a pretty avid Disqus commenter and have it on all my and my clients' sites, so I leave it unblocked globally. But you could do the same with that, if you only want it to work at certain sites and don't want it knowing you're there at other Disqus-powered sites.
One thing I've found on a lot of sites - even with Disqus (or LiveFyre) unblocked, the site's JavaScript that in turn triggers the Disqus or LiveFyre plugin, won't fire unless you unblock something else. And sometimes that "something else" isn't particularly "safe" for folks who don't want any adverts or cross-web trackers. Omniture from Adobe's advertisin
My Samsung galaxy tab 2.
I installed cyanogenmod and its going to get "kitkat" shortly.
Which expensive tablet only allows you to run what the vendor says you can?
Same thing I said to the iPad guy. Being able to install new ROMs matters exactly why, to this use case?
No, OP's dad isn't going to give a crap about cyanogen mod. Nor about any of the other "latest and greatest" that Android fanboyz and iFans each seem to thing is so important as you rush down to give the retailers more money every few months, and then root/jailbreak/mod the shiny you just bought.
Everyone is not you.
And updates and patches matter in this use case, exactly why? Elderly person wanting to send some emails, browse some sites. Not needing nor wanting nor likely even aware of "latest and greatest"?
Get out of your own headspace and into that of the person using it.
Unless OP's father's memories of "like I used to use" were being stuck in AOL's or Prodigy's walled gardens, why would anybody recommend a "married to Jeff Bezos" Kindle Fire tablet?
Crippled Android fork of a very old version, no access to Google Play or other app stores, nor sideloading (you rooters go away, we're talking about normals here).
If you must recommend a bookstore-based Android-derived tablet, a Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet or, my choice which I own, a Kobo Arc family tablet, are now essentially open Android. Sure, they have their own launchers, own look-and-feel, and work auto-magically with their own bookstores. But they have full access to Google Play right out of the box. I love my Kobo Arc tablet - Android Jellybean, open access to sideloading, other than Kobo's home screen it looks and feels mostly like Android. My Kobo is my Nook eReader, my Google Play Books eReader, my general-EPUB Aldiko eReader, and one of my Kindle eReaders.
A Kindle Fire is a Kindle eReader. Other competing book apps are blocked. Same with many other competing content marketplaces and apps.
PC came out in 1982. "Personal Computers" AKA microcomputers were around several years before that: CP/M, MP/M, Epson laptop, more. These were in fact in offices at work. I should know, old-fart typing this at my Linux laptop but had a multi-node multi-OS multi-location mixed PC, oddball CP/M, and S-100 bus tri-state network up and running at a NY-based retailer in 1983, with all sorts of non-technical users doing spreadsheets, dBase, word processing, parts ordering, service tracking, rudimentary public electronic communication (Western Union and MCIMail including telexing suppliers in Japan from a desktop terminal or PC).
OP's dad in his 70s. Let's say 75. It's 2013, almost 2014. 1982 is when the PC revolution began, and Apple ][, CP/M, and oddball mixes like my "His networks are Insaaannne!" setup already around then.
Do the math. OP's dad was in his prime working years at the height of the PC revolution all the way up to the launch of the Web. 1982 was 31 years ago. OP's father was 44 or younger. And there wasn't nearly as much age discrimination back then. Let's say dad took early retirement at 62, 13 years ago. That was 2000. That was already the height of the dot-com bubble. Everybody in the office was shopping online at lunch (at other times too), and trading online.
Web invented in 1991. People adding Trumpet Winsock and Mosaic or Netscape right away to get on it from Windows 3.x. The moderatly-successful OS/2 2.0 and then Warp from IBM used "The web is built-in" as one of its selling point over Windows - it came with native OS/2 apps for IBM's own Mosaic-based browser, email, FTP, and gopher.
You damn kids these days. No sense of history.
Back in the day, a lot of consumer routers and access points* came out of the box with remote management enabled. It was something that only we geeks knew how to turn off. More importantly, knew why to turn off, and if left on, we had good reason for so doing. With other than the default password. Which leaves the other 99.42% of buyers with it still wide open.
I remember at least one Linksys and one D-Link out of the half-dozen or so I went through in the late-90's through mid-2000's that defaulted to remote management on. After a while I gave up on them and used a homebuilt low-end desktop running Linux as my router, with good old Speakeasy multiple-fixed-IP DSL, and was a happy geek. I moved to the land of "Qwest or Comcast only", before Speakeasy got BestBought and went to evil shit. But Joe Doakes and Jane Smokes are just using those routers as-purchased.
As to a downstream comment about "what ISP provides a router?" the answer is "Most DSL, most fiber, and some cable ISPs." Up through mid-2012 when I left the States for good, Comcast in Colorado was still just providing a DOCSIS modem with one ethernet port. While I was unloading my place there I threw an old D-Link "router" (early-N single-band WiFi/router combo, maybe one of those on the list) downstream from it to get actual routing and DHCP. Time Warner Cable in North Carolina, in the late 2000's was still the same thing, just a modem. When I used Qwest-now-CenturyLink in CO and WA, they provided a combo unit that was DSL modem, router, and WiFi all built in.
So lots of cable modem subscribers have "routers" they bought sitting downstream from their cable modem. Less so, DSL subscribers but some do. A large amoujnt of them may have one of these D-Link units. Thankfully most of those units probably bricked themselves or burnt out by now, but ironically cheapo D-Link routers tended to last a lot longer than their low-end competition. Plenty still trucking along, open to this problem.
* I'm aware that "router", "access point" are different things and that what most consumers call a "router" is a combination of a router and a wireless access point. Point is, most consumers are not.
Oh sure, use Xmarks. Then watch your Chrome bookmarks get duplicated folders over and over again, some empty, some full, some half-empty (or half-full if you're an optimist). Yes, even if you do what they say, which is to disable Chrome sync and Firefox Sync for your bookmarks. God help you if you do still use RSS and use Firefox's Live Bookmarks feature: watch those become empty folders on Chrome, then circle back to Firefox and frak you over there.
There is a thread from Hades complaining about this on their support site, which they don't even run, it's a section, the abominable GetSatisfaction-dot-com, I spent more time cleaning up the frak-ups of using Xmarks cross-browser cross-machines weekly than it would have taken to just sync changes manually once every week or thereabouts. I let Mozilla sync handle syncing between PCs and intra-PC for Firefox, Aurora (alpha-test FF), Pale Moon, and synching with Firefox or Aurora on my Android phone/tablets. I let Chrome sync handle bookmark sync between various Chrome and Dragon instances on Windows and Linux, and on Android.
Once in a while I pick one Linux or Windows machine, one browser of each family (Chromium or Firefox-based, usually Comodo Dragon and Pale Moon), look at my most recent bookmark additions in each, and copy/paste them to the other. Then let their native syncs propagate them to all the other device/OS/browser instances I have.
I just don't let Xmarks go anywhere near any of them anymore.
Seriously, don't recommend Xmarks to people. It sucks to high hell.
It also is insecure, in that LastPass admits they analyze your bookmarks and use them for commercial purposes. Hell they have a "popular bookmarks" feature right on the site.
Chrome sync by default is scanned and used for marketing and targeting by Google, but they give you the option to encrypt with your own passphrase, not just your Google account. If you do that, they can't get at it for their own purposes, as even their decrypted clear version is still your in-browser encrypted version.
Mozilla sync works that way by default, in fact by your only choice. Your sync data is encrypted with your generated recovery key and they don't know it.
Peter F. Hamilton's OCTattos from his Commonwealth Saga become reality.
Problem is, running through another country, especially one that does not have an NSA-reciprocity deal, is itself most likely a marker to NSA to pay extra attention. Plus doesn't the NSA have full authority to monitor transmissions where at least one side is outside of the USA? Sure, they don't need no steenkin' warrants. But their surveillance becomes arguably even more legal (by US law) and less unconstitutional, if you have voluntarily routed outside of the USA.
I don't disagree with your advice; in fact I do the same thing often, VPNing to Venezuela, or Iceland, or random other countries first, when the sites/transactions I'm using do not require specific IP geolocation. It makes it harder to track, harder to decypher. But I don't think it is all that meaningful, because it puts in more on the NSA "radar". In part, I do it as a big FU to NSA, like a bumper sticker or political billboard. But I have little faith that it makes it all that much more difficult for NSA to determine patterns of my traffic, if they really want to do so. Sure, it keeps my ISP in the dark.
But my ISP is the freakin' government of Uruguay, via Antel, which is the fixed-internet monopoly in this "socialist" country. So I'm on the NSA radar anyhow, as one of those "evil Americans who leave the country". Though "Tio Pepe" Mujica, held for a dozen years in a US-funded jail, two at the bottom of a well, would probably tell them to FOAD anyhow. Just as he is doing to the toady EU countries that denied Evo Morales air overflight, by recalling Uruguay's ambassadors.
Have to? Negative. We could call a vote of no confidence in congress. We could DEMAND all government actions be made public record. However, this would require us to be as American as our founders...
Hate to be your missing middle school Social Studies/Civics teacher, but there is no such thing as a "no confidence vote" in a congressional-type system. You are calling for something that exists in parliamentary systems, such as the UK, Canada, Australia, where a no confidence vote can "bring down the government". At least in theory.
Not in the USA. Even if the US Congress, especially the gerrymandered-for-permanence House, were not so bought off that your vote for Party A's vs Party B's candidate had any real meaning, you only get to make that choice every 2 years for the House and 6 for any given Senate seat. There are no do-overs, no recalls, for the US Congress. In practice, no impeachments of Representatives or Senators. Sanctions (e.g. Charlie Rangel) that mean nothing.
Correct, and the GP, Happy Canada Day.
The OP should either have used the commonly understood abbreviation, "WaPo", for the Washington Post, or used perhaps, "Wash. Post" which is a correct-US-English, though not US Postal Service, abbreviation for Washington, D.C.
"WA Post" makes it seem it might be out in Tacoma or Spokane or thereabouts.
I moved out here from the midwest 20 years ago and have no interest in moving back - same can be said of every coworker of mine (I think maybe 1 of 20+ of them are from the Bay Area originally).
Well yeah, compared to Omaha or Topeka or even Kansas-Google-Fiber-City, sure, it's exciting. Compared to a few miles away in SF itself it's boring as hell. And you're not just going to pop out at lunch to hit up that new trendy lunch kiosk or the funky clothing store. Or after work catch a play in a small off-off-Broadway type show that you are intrigued by, that perhaps your coworker is in. Nor pop out for your own audition, or to record a voiceover, or to meet your girlfriend/boyfriend (or both!) the dancer at the studio. Or join a group run training for a marathon.
It's not like those things, or their equivalents, aren't possible or arent' even available in the boonies. They are. Mostly. But they're all damn inconvenient and time-consuming to get to, require multiple transportation modes or at least costly long trips in your must-have car, and are all in different directions.
I've worked in office parks that were technology hubs in the overall New York Metro but in New Jersey, in the Greater Boston Metro on the Route 128 Corridor, but half-hour or more away, in some cases in another state (eg the failed/killed DEC's real-estate in NH taken over by BigGreenPyramidFinancialCo). In North Carolina's Research Triangle Park, but thus not in Raleigh nor Durham city centers or urban village areas themselves. In Zonamerica in greater Montivideo, Uruguay, which is out in the frakking boonies north of the airport, half-hour or more by bus to anywhere interesting in Montevideo. 20 minutes at least by car, if I wanted to have one here, to anywhere interesting at all.
It's mind-numbingly boring. Mind-numbingly suburbanized. Horribly non-green, even with things like Google buses or the Zonamerica shuttles.
I've also worked on Wall Street iitsellf (literally, address on Wall St.) or right around the corner on Broadway, and up a few blocks on Greenwich. On 57th St and 5th Av in midtown Manhattan. In downtown Boston. In downtown Denver right on the 16th St. Pedestrian way with the vast amount of funky restaurants, shopping, entertainment. Almost worked in the Montevideo World Trade Center in Pocitos when they were moving out of Zonamerica, but bagged the job to start a venture with my wife based out of our casita 3 blocks from the beach in a funky small town that is a walkable micropolis urban village with fibre-to-home and a variety of walkable pleasures.
During times living/working in one of those places, it was very possible without hassle and without car to do pretty much all of the stuff I mentioned above.
Hell of a lot more fun, any of those places. Either the big city, or the self-contained micropolis. Out in the boonies of tech parks, everybody knows this is nowhere. Eventually the real talent who are at all multifaceted in their life preferences go somewhere more stimulating to their many wants and needs, not just their tech-and-money needs. Leaving the B-ship people. Yes, we need the B-ship too. But that's not where creativity happens. That's not the one the multii-talented multi-intelligenced people want to be in for their career and life journeys.
Great, Dice posts story from a corporate-software-industrial-complex advertorial mag, with a link to their so-called blog. Which ironically is running WordPress, along with a bunch of common plugins like "Yoast WordPress SEO plugin v1.4.7" and "All in One SEO Pack 1.6.14.6". Right there tells me how clueless they are about WordPress, because unless you have a damn good special reason, you do not want to be running two separate SEO plugins. LeadGen contact form plugin, a bunch of ad and analytics beyond the usual, and no apparent caching plugin. Oh, and no Google Authorship id done the correct way, despite both of those SEO plugins having "fill in the blank" prompting for it (they do have an XFN tag on their contact info but don't do the full Google social.)
For more laughs, their verison of All-In-One SEO is downlevel. Exactly what Checkmarx themselfes warn agansit. They are on 1.6.14.6, current version is 2.0.2.
Yeah, I'm gonna listen to them about WordPress security.
When you click through their blog to the actual PDF report, guess what? They redacted the names of all those "at-risk" plugins, noting only 6 by name. Four of which they claim took their advice and fixed the problem, and two (WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache) which I recall getting fixes for months ago. Hot news. I guess that even though their supposed expertise is in scanning for vulnerabilities, they are not going to tell you which are at risk in the current environment, because you didn't pay them. Classic dipstick move. Total and utter unawareness of the karmic and $$ benefits of internet "gift culture", such as, the whole damn open source movement and the specific WordPress ecosystem in which they are supposedly expert.
But we should listen to them, because: Checkmarx was recognized by Gartner as sole visionary in their latest SAST magic quadrant and as
Cool vendor in application security.
Right, and e-gold before it. Only criminals and terrorists have any need for an alternative, secure, somewhat anonymous, non-government-controlled (really non-Corporatocracy Bankster-controlling-government-controlled) currency. Think of the children. Think of the Homeland! Do the right thing, Citizen!
2. In capitalism, even though corporations may become powerful, they don't have the power to arrest or kill you.
Oh really? Why don't you tell it to these people, threatened with arrest, or in fact arrested for trying to close accounts at Citi and BofA.
Cristina? Sra. Presidenta, está usted?
The only reason I'd want Apache Open Office to merge into / with / from LibreOffice is this: To get the overall better suite, LO, using some of the uniquely cool features in IBM's very different fork of OO.o into IBM Lotus Symphony. Which, for those who remember the end-of-CP/M-start-of-PC era, has nada to do with Lotus Symphony, Lotus Development's follow-on to Lotus 1-2-3, which never met with its predecessor's success. But, it was a very early attempt at an "office suite" (spreadsheet-centric, MS/PC-DOS-based). So IBM got the name/trademark when they bought Lotus.
Around 2010-ish, they released IBM Lotus Symphony, a Win32, Linux, and I think MacOS, office suite based on OO.o core code - but with a lot of differences. Differences in 3 big areas:
1) Only the 3 major apps - Word Processing, Spreadsheet, and Presentations. Nothing based on Draw, Math, Base.
2) Very different and non-standard menu structure, that hearkens back to Lotus Windows products. For example, no Windows (and IBM SAA, and just normal)-standard "Insert" menu - most of what you expect there is in its "Create" menu.
3) Everything is in a single window, tabbed interface, with multiple slide-out right sidebars: A wide, well-organized Properties panel, and some widget panels for add-ons. Based on the Lotus Expeditor framework for the devilspawn Lotus Notes. Yet sometimes the son of the devil can be a good guy (e.g. Hellboy).
Number 3 has made it my absolute favorite office suite. For the same reasons we all love tabbed browsers and trashed browsers back in the day that didn't have it. Everything is right there, in context, without too much window-hopping. The Properties panel exposes all the major properties without having to dig through menus and open different dialog boxes depending on if you're formatting colors, number types, custom cell formatting, etc., and without having to crap up a giant multiline toolbar or frakking ribbon to make functions discoverable.
I go back far enough to have been used to different word processors and different spreadsheet programs to have different interfaces and menu structures, even different keyboard shortcuts. Heck, I even remember some of the differences in that between WordStar (real WordStar, up through 3.3), its competitor NewWord that cloned it and then got HandSpringed into WordStar 4.0 (Yes, I still have WordStar 7.0 on my Windows 7 and Windows 8 PCs). Then some time with Ami Pro, on both OS/2 and Windows 3.x, that later became Lotus WordPro (that one I didn't use), with a short sidetrip into WordPerfect for Windows, before being funneled into the Corporate Tool MS-Word world, and then slightly out to OO.o/LO. So I can make the mental shift between different menu structures pretty easily.
I love the property panel as well as the tabbed interface. Unfortunately, though IBM donated the entire codebase to Apache, they are not using the tabbed interface in AOO. They are starting to use, and announced they will fully implement, the Symphony-based property panels. That alone would make me likely go back to OpenOffice from LibreOffice, except that LibreOffice is so far ahead of AOO in functionality, stability, and killing off of Java.
For now, I still use Symphony, on both Windows and Linux. It continues to get the occasional FixPack (IBMese for service pack) and continues to Just Work. Especially on creative writing where I may have reference docs, character backgrounds, outlines all open, or similarly for technical writing, the tabbed interface really helps to keep everything accessible and surfaced. Also for projects involving a combo of word processing documents and spreadsheets, and [$DEITY] help me sometimes even presentations - it's a lot easier to work everything up if I have that clear context, rather than a cluster of windows.
I do keep LO installed, for when I want the other modules, and for dealing with editing documents in MS .docx, .xlsx, .pptx format. Symphony can open them, and
Wouldn't the obvious choice be Zephram? After all, he was from Alpha Centuri before he was from Montana.
Well, depending on your subjective timeline, that is.
Either that, or name it Londo.
Can't get Mint installed on sub GB RAM hardware, resource waste is my biggest beef with Unity and Mint doesn't solve it (and it seems only the installer is the bottleneck).
That's odd, considering I'm replying on my 2004-vintage HP Compaq Presario X1000 Pentium M 1.7MHz laptop with 768M RAM, running Mint.
Mint XFCE works just dandy on low-resource early 2000s hardware. I had it happily running on a revitalized homebuilt-in-1999 tower whose last upgrade was in 2002 to a Pentium III 850MHz (from original Pentium II 350), with all of 448MB RAM. Used that one as my primary computer for months at my old place before moving out, nuking the drive, reinstalling it, and leaving it out by the condo dumpster with a note with the password.
On this laptop, I can happily run Firefox and Thunderbird together, while running a VNC client into my other machine, and supporting a VNC server to go the other way, and manage to use LibreOffice or the GIMP at the same time. It streams videos fine, runs jEdit fine for a decent universal code editor. Runs Chrome OK, but just like on Windows, modern Firefox is lower-memory than Chrome once a few tabs and extensions are loaded, so Chrome is non-optimal on this, and was non-optimal on the tower. But Chrome is non-optimal on my wife's Windows 7 netbook with a dual-core N570 Atom and 1GB RAM too. This 768MB laptop even runs IBM Lotus Symphony decently, which I happen to prefer over its LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org relatives due to its tabbed interface and preference panels, especially when doing creative writing or articles where I have lots of research and notes open. (Yes, ducking tomatoes for using non-free-as-in-beer variants, but IBM did give the whole thing to Apache, so now it is.)
If you're trying to use Mint Mate, or Mint Cinnamon, or Mint KDE editions on a sub-GB machine, just don't. You'll be lucky to be able to install, or even boot the Live DVD with those, and if you do, a lot of the window chrome either won't paint, or will paint while you go out to get lunch. But Mint XFCE edition works like a charm. The previous low-resource official versions of Mint that had LXDE also were great on this hardware. I am staying on the Mint 13 Maya Long-Term-Support version, but prior to that I was using Mint 12 Lisa LXDE Edition which was slightly faster. You can always install LXDE but I haven't really seen the need. I think if I still had that tower, which was even lower resource, I might have gone back to LXDE, but I did use the heck out of it with XFCE.
I have to get around to switching the netbook to Mint LXDE one of these days. Everything that my wife and I use is available for Linux. We do switch off using that or the new better laptop (Windows 8 with Start8 login-to-desktop) depending on any given day's respective workload and deadlines. If I upgrade the netbook to Mint, maybe I can get the fast laptop back!
Yes, TSA scans your boarding pass barcode, if it is a mobile boarding pass on a smartphone.
Sadly, there are a lot more of Honey Boo Boo folks than there are of us.