I was referring to, and explicitly mentioned, Ubuntu Linux. Regardless of any FUD asserted my Microsoft, no court has yet ruled that it's illegal to use/distribute Linux. Are you just pointing out that under a Common Law derived legal regime nothing can ever be "fully legal", since the law itself is indeterminate?
In attacking BitTorrent, Microsoft is attacking a protocol, which may or may not contain something illegal.
Not only that, but the protocol is often used to download fully legal software that competes directly with Microsoft's products. I used BitTorrent to download the last three releases of Ubuntu.
Have you used a recent release of Unity? Early versions were buggy and had some UX issues. However it's been pretty stable & friendy since 11.10, and imho 12.04 is really quite nice. Even tho it's only one apt-get command away, I feel zero desire to go back to Gnome.
Echoing Grishnakh's reply, I strongly recommend Lenovo's Thinkpad line. Imho a very nice keyboard feel, centered trackpad, trackpoint nipple, solid construction, never any problems/hassles at all running Ubuntu. Also, critically important to anyone who likes using vi-keys, they have large escape buttons. Some models like my T400s have absolutely huge escape keys.
Like Macs, the Thinkpads tend to be kind of expensive. However many of them are sold to business users with 3-year transferable warranties. I've had very good experience buying 1 year old Thinkpads, with 2 years of remaning warranty, for the same price as a comparably-specced new consumer model. And yes, I have used the warranty without problems, and without having to pretend I'm the original owner or any shady crap like that.
Oddly, every developer I've talked with that has tried both loves one of them to death and hates the other with an ever burning passion.
FWIW I like them both equally. Never understood the religious war - they are not different like vi and emacs are different. They are conceptually very similar languages.
Try Go. It's like Python and C had a child, that turned out to be both strikingly beautiful and a great athlete. I've been writing Python professionally for a long time, and I think there's a good chance Go will completely displace Python for new development in 5 years time.
The vast majority of economists consider the gold standard to be a really really bad idea
The vast majority of economists are employed by banks, investment houses, and other financial companies with a strong vested interest in the current system of fiat currency. Just sayin'...
their maps or online doc or shopping search or payment systemed were no better than what others offered
Imho, when it was introduced Google Maps was crushingly superior to all of its major web-based competitors. At the time, it was the only service where one could drag the map around - the others all required tedious clicking and refreshing to move location.
Fair enough. I don't think it's unreasonable that commercial pilots, especially those flying large jets, be subject to a greater degree of scrutiny than average citizens. But that has nothing to do with TSA security theatre.
Forget the fortified cockpit door - leave it hanging wide open. Next time some religious nutjob stands up on a plane with a gun or bomb, he's gonna get bum rushed and beaten senseless by a dozen passengers. A repeat 911-style attack just isn't going to happen.
Pretty awful disaster. You gotta admit tho, it would be kinda worse if the whole area were also contaminated with radiation and uninhabitable for the next 20,000 years.
But if the Synaptic or whatever other package manager there is can't do the job, and the person has to go back to a terminal, then why would that person go for any of the polished distros, as opposed to working w/ a bareknuckles distro like Debian, Slackware, Gentoo or so on?
1. Synaptic can do the job. People are just writing "sudo apt-get install whatever" because it's way easier than typing out a tedious set of directions for clicking on Synaptic.
2. Personally, I find it easier to manage packages with apt-get than with any GUI package manager. Yet I still prefer Ubuntu precisely because it is fairly polished - it Just Works(tm) almost all the time.
Given that Mint has overtaken Ubuntu as the leading Linux distro on distrowatch, I'd say that most people are not prefering Unity to Mate/Cinnamon.
Distrowatch doesn't measure install base, just number of page hits. It could just as well be that Mint is harder to use than recent Unity-based Ubuntu releases. Most non-techies don't spend time on OS websites unless something is broken.
Thing is, the demographic for whom "sudo whatever" is too complicated are probably going to have zero desire to switch to an older, more complicated desktop. Coming from a Windoze or Mac background, the idea that it's even possible to change the window manager without changing the OS is going to be pretty alien.
Personal observation suggests people with limited technical skill find Unity much easier to use than Gnome. Nothing is stopping an advanced user from switching to whatever crazy complicated desktop they want. So why not have a user-friendly system by default?
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I've been using Unity on my 24" vertical display at home since 11.10. It took about 2 days to get used to it, but now I like it better than the old Gnome desktop. It's clean, stays out of the way, and is pretty good at dealing with tons of windows open simultaneously.
And Facebook, which is based around a successful idea and very simple code, has been plagued by poor programming since it went live.
I hate PHP as much as the next guy, but that's not the (only) reason Facebook's code sucks balls. I was recently told by a team manager inside Facebook that - and I paraphrase - "philosophically, we do not believe in testing our software." Apparently out of 1500 developers in Palo Alto, FB has "one or two" QA testers. I'm going to jump out on a limb and suggest that's probably why Facebook has so many bugs.
NoSQL is widely taken to be a joke by professionals, who can easily achieve the same scalability using relational databases, without giving up their many useful and even necessary features.
Ralph Kimball disagrees with you, and said so at a TDWI speech in the Valley last year. But hey, maybe the father of data warehousing doesn't count as a "real professional" in your book.
Don't let the bigmedia fool you - crazy religious nuts are only a small (but extremely vocal) minority, even in "conservative" parts of America. Even most churchgoing folks are nice, sane, civilized people who's faith is much closer to comfortable hypocrisy than fundamentalism.
When some douche stole my bicyle wheel the other day, I was not in the least concerned about having lost exclusivity of its use. Rather, I was concerned because the fucking wheel was gone and I had thus been deprived of its use altogether. See how real theft of physical property is different from "theft" of idea monopoly?
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I was referring to, and explicitly mentioned, Ubuntu Linux. Regardless of any FUD asserted my Microsoft, no court has yet ruled that it's illegal to use/distribute Linux. Are you just pointing out that under a Common Law derived legal regime nothing can ever be "fully legal", since the law itself is indeterminate?
In attacking BitTorrent, Microsoft is attacking a protocol, which may or may not contain something illegal.
Not only that, but the protocol is often used to download fully legal software that competes directly with Microsoft's products. I used BitTorrent to download the last three releases of Ubuntu.
I'm outside all the time, and have not seen this police state you're blabbing about.
Been to the airport lately?
Have you used a recent release of Unity? Early versions were buggy and had some UX issues. However it's been pretty stable & friendy since 11.10, and imho 12.04 is really quite nice. Even tho it's only one apt-get command away, I feel zero desire to go back to Gnome.
Echoing Grishnakh's reply, I strongly recommend Lenovo's Thinkpad line. Imho a very nice keyboard feel, centered trackpad, trackpoint nipple, solid construction, never any problems/hassles at all running Ubuntu. Also, critically important to anyone who likes using vi-keys, they have large escape buttons. Some models like my T400s have absolutely huge escape keys.
Like Macs, the Thinkpads tend to be kind of expensive. However many of them are sold to business users with 3-year transferable warranties. I've had very good experience buying 1 year old Thinkpads, with 2 years of remaning warranty, for the same price as a comparably-specced new consumer model. And yes, I have used the warranty without problems, and without having to pretend I'm the original owner or any shady crap like that.
Oddly, every developer I've talked with that has tried both loves one of them to death and hates the other with an ever burning passion.
FWIW I like them both equally. Never understood the religious war - they are not different like vi and emacs are different. They are conceptually very similar languages.
Sure, tell that to twitter or YouTube. or many, many other large web sites. Hint: they're not using java. Or C. or Go.
A substantial chunk of the Youtube backend is written in Go.
Try Go. It's like Python and C had a child, that turned out to be both strikingly beautiful and a great athlete. I've been writing Python professionally for a long time, and I think there's a good chance Go will completely displace Python for new development in 5 years time.
The vast majority of economists consider the gold standard to be a really really bad idea
The vast majority of economists are employed by banks, investment houses, and other financial companies with a strong vested interest in the current system of fiat currency. Just sayin'...
their maps or online doc or shopping search or payment systemed were no better than what others offered
Imho, when it was introduced Google Maps was crushingly superior to all of its major web-based competitors. At the time, it was the only service where one could drag the map around - the others all required tedious clicking and refreshing to move location.
Fair enough. I don't think it's unreasonable that commercial pilots, especially those flying large jets, be subject to a greater degree of scrutiny than average citizens. But that has nothing to do with TSA security theatre.
Forget the fortified cockpit door - leave it hanging wide open. Next time some religious nutjob stands up on a plane with a gun or bomb, he's gonna get bum rushed and beaten senseless by a dozen passengers. A repeat 911-style attack just isn't going to happen.
Damn straight - if we can speed up the destruction of our environment, why not? Go nuclear!
Pretty awful disaster. You gotta admit tho, it would be kinda worse if the whole area were also contaminated with radiation and uninhabitable for the next 20,000 years.
Seriously...how is THAT interstate commerce?!?!
The congressmen who voted for it were bought by out-of-state lobbyists?
But if the Synaptic or whatever other package manager there is can't do the job, and the person has to go back to a terminal, then why would that person go for any of the polished distros, as opposed to working w/ a bareknuckles distro like Debian, Slackware, Gentoo or so on?
1. Synaptic can do the job. People are just writing "sudo apt-get install whatever" because it's way easier than typing out a tedious set of directions for clicking on Synaptic.
2. Personally, I find it easier to manage packages with apt-get than with any GUI package manager. Yet I still prefer Ubuntu precisely because it is fairly polished - it Just Works(tm) almost all the time.
Given that Mint has overtaken Ubuntu as the leading Linux distro on distrowatch, I'd say that most people are not prefering Unity to Mate/Cinnamon.
Distrowatch doesn't measure install base, just number of page hits. It could just as well be that Mint is harder to use than recent Unity-based Ubuntu releases. Most non-techies don't spend time on OS websites unless something is broken.
Thing is, the demographic for whom "sudo whatever" is too complicated are probably going to have zero desire to switch to an older, more complicated desktop. Coming from a Windoze or Mac background, the idea that it's even possible to change the window manager without changing the OS is going to be pretty alien.
Personal observation suggests people with limited technical skill find Unity much easier to use than Gnome. Nothing is stopping an advanced user from switching to whatever crazy complicated desktop they want. So why not have a user-friendly system by default?
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I've been using Unity on my 24" vertical display at home since 11.10. It took about 2 days to get used to it, but now I like it better than the old Gnome desktop. It's clean, stays out of the way, and is pretty good at dealing with tons of windows open simultaneously.
And Facebook, which is based around a successful idea and very simple code, has been plagued by poor programming since it went live.
I hate PHP as much as the next guy, but that's not the (only) reason Facebook's code sucks balls. I was recently told by a team manager inside Facebook that - and I paraphrase - "philosophically, we do not believe in testing our software." Apparently out of 1500 developers in Palo Alto, FB has "one or two" QA testers. I'm going to jump out on a limb and suggest that's probably why Facebook has so many bugs.
forget even thinking about those longer hours and just pay your coders by the line. That will get you ahead.
It will certainly get you ahead in the contest for needlessly long, verbose code....
NoSQL is widely taken to be a joke by professionals, who can easily achieve the same scalability using relational databases, without giving up their many useful and even necessary features.
Ralph Kimball disagrees with you, and said so at a TDWI speech in the Valley last year. But hey, maybe the father of data warehousing doesn't count as a "real professional" in your book.
That - or scared of the social disapproval and abuse from aggressive religious loudmouths in their community.
Don't let the bigmedia fool you - crazy religious nuts are only a small (but extremely vocal) minority, even in "conservative" parts of America. Even most churchgoing folks are nice, sane, civilized people who's faith is much closer to comfortable hypocrisy than fundamentalism.
When some douche stole my bicyle wheel the other day, I was not in the least concerned about having lost exclusivity of its use. Rather, I was concerned because the fucking wheel was gone and I had thus been deprived of its use altogether. See how real theft of physical property is different from "theft" of idea monopoly?
Filing overbroad patents is just like Microsoft.
Tardmunch.
Google is the new Microsoft.