Except often that is the employee's choice: I have never seen a 9-5 job that offered a lunch hour (that would be a 35 hour work week). If you want a lunch hour, your schedule becomes 9-5:30 or 8:30-5... worse if you are a 40hr/wk employee.
More recently the problem is for my laptop and netbook, it detects the windows recovery partition in addition to (or possibly instead of) the actual windows partition.
Historically I would have a problem where it would point to the wrong partition... possibly due to the devices looking different to the installer versus the installed system. Since I started using LVM for my root partition this hasn't happened (but the issue may have been addressed with Grub 2).
* Graphics issues. Yep, needs some manual work if you want to run the latest Nvidia drivers. For heaven's sake, do NOT install the drivers using some script made by a random guy. Add the testing or unstable repositories to your apt-get config, and pin your system to the stable repository (or easier still, just install Debian testing). You can then install the latest and greatest Nvidia driver via official debian packages. I'm using the testing package myself, and it's perfectly fine. It's already been through unstable, so I'm assured that there aren't any "game-breaking" bugs in it. Debian testing is as stable as other distribution's full releases, except that Debian updates more often.
I ran testing for a while. A dependency mistake that made it through to test a year or so ago convinced me never to do that again. Admittedly I should only do safe-upgrades, but one time a dist-upgrade in "testing" resulted in *everything* (including Gnome and parts of X) being removed. I wish I could remember the exact package but it seems a required one from sid didn't filter to test when the rest of them did. It basically blew a hole in the dependency tree for anyone using Nvidia.
* Codec issues. Yep, not friendly to basic users. Can't be helped, though. Debian has always said that it is dedicated to completely free software. It was never going to include encumbered codecs in the main system. Not even in the non-free section. I dispute that the deb-multimedia repo is a "resort". It's an excellent source for these missing codecs
As someone who uses some of the more advanced things in deb-multimedia I agree it is a fantastic resource. But, it's a hoop that an Ubuntu-only user trying out Debian would be completely unfamiliar with.
* Iceweasel. Actually, I really like this name, especially when you know the story behind it. Believe me, it's not done to confuse. There is a reason, and it is good.
I remember the story now; I probably shouldn't have said "purposely." I have always (personally) liked the name. However, it is still a difference... Firefox is a nice island of familiarity for "average Joe Convert" which makes Ubuntu slightly (very slightly) less overwhelming than Debian.
Disclaimer: I love Debian and I believe it is the best OS money can't buy (with RHEL being the best distro money can buy but that is another topic)... for servers it is fantastic, for desktops it is excellent for building exactly what you want with absolutely no bloat. The support you can find online is consistently the best available.
*However* I cannot agree that replacing a DE is equivalent to installing Debian with your DE of choice. I find a Debian install is 95% finished when the installer completes, but that 5% can feel completely insurmountable to a Linux newcomer. These issues have included: -Bootloader problems. Nightmare to figure out if you have never manually dealt with a bootloader. A 2 minute fix if you have. Never seem to have this issue with Ubuntu. -Network (wired and wireless) problems, primarily caused by the insistence of non-free not being installed as part of the installer... having to USB over network drivers is a huge turnoff and leads to people ignoring this. Then when the closest equivalent "free" driver is used, you end up with things like a wireless that doesn't scan, or a wired NIC that randomly drops to 600 kilobit speed or cuts out entirely... Ubuntu just makes it happen. -Graphics issues. If I really wanted to run with what only free or outdated drivers can provide, I would install it in a VM under my Windows 7 partition. Having to use scripts some random guy made to properly suppress the dated repo packages and get the latest and greatest NVidia drivers is not ideal. Ubuntu generally keeps graphics drivers up to date in the packages. -Codec issues... Ubuntu IIRC it was just some checkboxes for "Good, Bad & Ugly", in Debian I had to resort to adding a 3rd party repository debian-multimedia (now deb-multimedia) just to get multithreaded Mplayer... -Printer installation. This is a "too much choice" problem, you can go with HP's stuff or plain ol' cups, both will work but there's no clear choice presented. I don't remember what Ubuntu's was but it was one of those "ah my printer's already here" moments. -Purposely making things confusing. One word: iceweasel.
I do love Debian but installing should be left for power users... after that 5% extra polishing anyone can use it, but that really is the difference between Debian and Ubuntu.
Why can't you manually lock it when you're about to walk away from it? You know, just bind one of those useless media keys to "lock computer" and you're done. There nothing complicated about that.
Yes, because you always know ahead of time whether you're stepping away for a few minutes or for longer. The default is far more useful.
Also, if it's auto-locked after a few minutes, people are free to use it if they start just as soon as you're out of the room.
In the 10 seconds I thought of this I can come up with about 10 scenarios where an autolock is better than your suggestion.
I wouldn't live with people I can't trust. If you think your roommate/gf will use snoop into your computer while you're asleep, you should get a new roommate/gf. Seriously.
Spoken like someone who has never gone away to college - the way mine was set up the desks were in a shared common area with 5 other people. You could fit a desk in the bedroom by stacking the dressers and bunking the beds, but then, who gets the desk? And I bet you had to edit your response from saying "get a new sibling". As far as the girlfriend thing is concerned, "likely to want to use my computer while I'm away" doesn't even make my list of disqualifiers, but to each their own.
My whole point is, not everyone's needs are the same as yours. This new option is useful for people who have their computers in a shared space. Those who live in their parent's basement or alone with their cat need not apply.
Says someone who has never used Gnome, or possibly ever linux. How did you ever get to +2 by pulling stuff like this out of your ass?
For most popular Linux distros, the gnome screensaver by default locks after several minutes of inactivity. Locking screensavers are quite useful if your computer is in a quasi-public area, such as a kitchen, college dorm, library, etc.
And a particularly stupid counter of yours:
Again, do you need to lock your computer to do this? If someone's going to use it while you're sleeping, they might just steal it too.
In addition to it being impractical to disable/enable the auto-lock situationally, do you really feel it is more likely for your sibling/college roommate/girlfriend to steal your computer than poke around out of curiosity?
I would say the volume control's true benefit is being able to lower/mute the volume while locked. Handy situations? -You want to play mp3s while reading a book / cooking / whatever, but having to type your password to adjust the volume is a chore. -your alarm clock is an mp3 played by cron (I solve this by turning off my speakers, not really an option for laptops). -you are in a lecture, the lock screen has come on, and that web page with randomly cycling ads has just started playing a loud flash ad (current solution: pull battery). -a metal/rock/etc song somehow made it into your "nature sounds for sleeping" mp3 list, somewhere around two hours into the list. You need to lower the volume to avoid pissing off neighbors. The act of entering your 16+character passphrase with requisite numbers and special characters is enough to bring you back to "fully awake".
In the city, I had a free school-provided transit pass at 13. After school I would go to various shopping centers, visit friends, tourist attractions, or simply explore the city after school.
I always imagined that having to wait 3 more years for that freedom would have been hell. I think your post has confirmed that fear for me. I actually do not know what I would have done with my time without that freedom.
I will probably move back there, I think it is a great way to raise a child to have a sense of personal responsibility at an early age, that simply isn't possible in a suburb (or smaller city).
It is amazing how many people don't understand this. A car parked in sunlight all day, and they refuse to open the window for the first few minutes after getting in because "the A/C is on". It cools off a hell of a lot faster if you drive for a minute with the windows down so that you're starting with the cooler outside air as the baseline!
Mod up! paint.net is far more usable than the GIMP, and at same price tag (for the end user). Only problem of course is that it's for Windows, and there is no Wine support.
But yeah, all of Photoshopy features I actually used were in it (layers, levels, history, effects) with a UI I could understand and use efficiently immediately, unlike the GIMP (at least when I switched).
What's rather interesting is some electronics are actually made in the US but will appear to be made in China. A few years ago I got a factory tour of a small US company that makes all of their electronics except for the PCBs they go on. The PCB has in giant white letters MADE IN CHINA, but the Made in China part was simply the green board. The soldering of capacitors and connectors, guiding the things through machines that do the more finer details, testing, putting cases on, etc was all done in New Jersey.
Obviously, anything is fine "in moderation", but what makes you think this kid was drinking it in moderation?
Which is more likely: The kid's lunch includes a standard 4, 6, or 8oz juice box of Apple Juice, or a 64oz jug of the stuff that probably is about 1/3rd her height?
For poor people tap water is often less healthy simply due to crappy/old plumbing, and there *is* nutritional value in apple juice since nowadays they add in vitamins and calcium, making it more value than bottled water. You could also say milk would work, but it could easily spoil if stored carelessly.
Please pontificate about apple juice elsewhere. There are many evils in this world, but Mott's isn't one of them.
I would agree reducing janitors if instead of poor kids, it was *all* kids, on a rotating schedule like is done in some countries. Kids who are spoiled at home need to be taught to clean up after themselves.
And I don't know about Detroit (#1 poorest city), but Buffalo (#3 poorest city in the US) just got an infusing of $1 billion state dollars as it is the poorest city in NY... a good test to see if the method of throwing government money at the problem makes it better.
There are also Vocational High Schools, for example Transit Tech. Anyone intelligent who goes there can pretty much walk onto a civil service job with the Transit Authority (the Civil Service exam being an immediately useful test to teach to...).
I have that same Ben Franklin shirt... one time I was visiting Boston and happened to be videotaping while passing the Prudential tower (in the Prudential Center). Security guard A comes over and says I can't be videotaping here. Security guard B (with more fluff on his uniform, probably A's boss) takes one look at the shirt and says "don't worry about it, you're fine."
That came across like a bad "Three Wolves" shirt review but it really does work.
While your statement is certainly true for some places, it's far more dangerous to underestimate the dress code. Showing up in a suit *and* being the right one for the job puts you above the guys in sandals and shorts in most places. It answers an unspoken question: "*can* he dress up if needed?" Even if the day to day position does not require anything more than business casual, there are a few situations that may arise:
-Is the incumbent capable of showing up for the Regional Manager's "east coast division-wide all-staff quarterly general update" meeting dressed appropriately? -Can this person be made presentable to meet with clients/customers, and give off an appropriate aura of professionalism? -Can he handle a temporary dress code bump for when the CIO,COO,CEO, or other VIP decides to make a visit tomorrow?
Showing up in a suit automatically says you can handle all three situations without suddenly needing to go out and buy one, and that you at least have a means of getting a tie tied before abovementioned $OCCASION.
Furthermore it denies the obvious reality that many Asian countries actually do have free speech.
Yes but their free speech comes with the concept of honor & responsibility... ie: situations like Westboro Baptist Church do not happen, even if the letter of the law allows it...
I'm not saying this is the case with any culture moving towards free speech at the moment, but I can see how citizens of countries with many nutjob fundamentalist groups might actually want restrictions in place...
The (start) menu system if you examine it and clean it up as you might in XP.
The problem is you're trying to clean it up. If you can break your habit of it, you'll realize that the combination of search+click, and pinning the few things that you access frequently enough are far, far superior.
I used to try and organize my start menu in XP, but it truly is an exercise in futility. If you use multiple computers at work and home, you spend so much time organizing that storing a folder with a bunch of.lnk's on your network share or memorizing command names for the run box becomes more efficient. It's madness.
Except the start menu search box makes the mousing a lot less tedious. I *never* organized my start menu and cannot be bothered to do so. The XP way, you have to mouse over menus until you find what you want, sometimes (especially for system things) right clicking and choosing a menu option. Since every application is important enough to want its own folder (sometimes folder tree) you eventually have so many things that you either have columns or have to scroll (or need to start organizing the start menu, a huge timewaster).
The Windows 7 way, you can simply hit the windows key, start typing and you are now one click away from whatever you wanted, as long as it's *somewhere* in your start menu (or one of the many keywords that are attached to various control panel things). If you find yourself doing it a lot, it's trivially easy to pin whatever application you keep going for to the start menu or taskbar.
That, and the desktop slideshow were the two main features that got me off of Windows XP (64 bit) for my Windows partition. For Linux I still use Debian with either Gnome 2, LXDE, or Trinity depending on the device. When you can bind a key to open a command prompt anywhere, menu efficiency is a non-issue.
NTFS has been updated pretty consistently actually (the last being Windows XP with NTFS 3.1). Since then the Windows OS on top of it has evolved to actually take advantage of the features of 3.1.
What you said is akin to, "You mean, since the last time the default *nix file system was updated? I can't believe they're still using the aging ext file system, with all of it's 90s features like 'symbolic links' ".
**This**. While RedHat is IMO the best Linux money can buy, if you don't have that money a RedHat clone isn't going to help you much. Why? Debian is easier to roll your own fixes because the free support you get is excellent. Between IRC, forums and the tons of howto sites you get out there, someone, somewhere has definitely wanted to do what you are trying to do. Since there is no paywall to Debian's support, you will not have better answers hidden from public view.
Also, think about staffing: -Someone who knows the ins and outs of a RedHat system to be able to function without a support safety net is probably RHCE (or at the very least, capable of getting said cert). This automatically makes them more expensive. Your rank and file sysadmins would need to be at RHCSA level. -In a pinch, anyone who messed with Ubuntu enough to have dealt with the command line can perform minor system administration on a Debian box. These could be employees within the company working desktop support, a call center or some other IT function. The learning curve to turn these people into full sysadmins is much smaller, and you'll already know the type of person they are, eliminating the hardest part of hiring someone new.
Not every PD is like Oakland. Maybe in Texas it is, but for upstate NY, Occupy Albany has an ally in the police.
City hall and the State Capitol are right across from each other, with a park in between. Half the park belongs to the state, the other half the city. Once the 11PM curfew hit (the park closes then), the state police were all ready to make arrests, but the city police refused to... so the protesters simply walked over to the city side of the line, and stayed there ever since. The recent snowfall is the only thing thus far that has pressured the movement to leave.
The Governor (and initially the mayor) were pissed at the police, but they can't do anything about it. The mayor is now backing the police.
Dude, I once had to go to the ER for constipation. Why? Because I had no PCP, and don't drive. Is it so hard to expect that there be easily accessible places for simple medical care? Why are there 2 hosptials on one bus line, but their affiliated urgent care centers (really just needed a simple clinic) are located in the middle of buttfuck nowhere with not so much as a sidewalk?
For some reason medical care here is structured for disaster recovery, and completely fails at basic maintenance, to the point where it seems ludicrous to go to a hospital for a cold. And then people's kids die of pneumonia and scarlet fever.
Not sure how you're a troll, this is completely true.
BUT, I know a few shops that successfully switched their users to OpenOffice to avoid ribbon (the Oracle name on the splash screen helped too). So Microsoft radically changing the Window UI combined with Apple's continued rejection of corporate desires might be just the push needed to get Linux on the desktop...
Slashdot Mirror
Except often that is the employee's choice: I have never seen a 9-5 job that offered a lunch hour (that would be a 35 hour work week). If you want a lunch hour, your schedule becomes 9-5:30 or 8:30-5... worse if you are a 40hr/wk employee.
Bootloader problems
More recently the problem is for my laptop and netbook, it detects the windows recovery partition in addition to (or possibly instead of) the actual windows partition.
Historically I would have a problem where it would point to the wrong partition... possibly due to the devices looking different to the installer versus the installed system. Since I started using LVM for my root partition this hasn't happened (but the issue may have been addressed with Grub 2).
* Graphics issues. Yep, needs some manual work if you want to run the latest Nvidia drivers. For heaven's sake, do NOT install the drivers using some script made by a random guy. Add the testing or unstable repositories to your apt-get config, and pin your system to the stable repository (or easier still, just install Debian testing). You can then install the latest and greatest Nvidia driver via official debian packages. I'm using the testing package myself, and it's perfectly fine. It's already been through unstable, so I'm assured that there aren't any "game-breaking" bugs in it. Debian testing is as stable as other distribution's full releases, except that Debian updates more often.
I ran testing for a while. A dependency mistake that made it through to test a year or so ago convinced me never to do that again. Admittedly I should only do safe-upgrades, but one time a dist-upgrade in "testing" resulted in *everything* (including Gnome and parts of X) being removed. I wish I could remember the exact package but it seems a required one from sid didn't filter to test when the rest of them did. It basically blew a hole in the dependency tree for anyone using Nvidia.
* Codec issues. Yep, not friendly to basic users. Can't be helped, though. Debian has always said that it is dedicated to completely free software. It was never going to include encumbered codecs in the main system. Not even in the non-free section. I dispute that the deb-multimedia repo is a "resort". It's an excellent source for these missing codecs
As someone who uses some of the more advanced things in deb-multimedia I agree it is a fantastic resource. But, it's a hoop that an Ubuntu-only user trying out Debian would be completely unfamiliar with.
* Iceweasel. Actually, I really like this name, especially when you know the story behind it. Believe me, it's not done to confuse. There is a reason, and it is good.
I remember the story now; I probably shouldn't have said "purposely." I have always (personally) liked the name. However, it is still a difference... Firefox is a nice island of familiarity for "average Joe Convert" which makes Ubuntu slightly (very slightly) less overwhelming than Debian.
Disclaimer: I love Debian and I believe it is the best OS money can't buy (with RHEL being the best distro money can buy but that is another topic)... for servers it is fantastic, for desktops it is excellent for building exactly what you want with absolutely no bloat. The support you can find online is consistently the best available.
*However* I cannot agree that replacing a DE is equivalent to installing Debian with your DE of choice. I find a Debian install is 95% finished when the installer completes, but that 5% can feel completely insurmountable to a Linux newcomer. These issues have included:
-Bootloader problems. Nightmare to figure out if you have never manually dealt with a bootloader. A 2 minute fix if you have. Never seem to have this issue with Ubuntu.
-Network (wired and wireless) problems, primarily caused by the insistence of non-free not being installed as part of the installer... having to USB over network drivers is a huge turnoff and leads to people ignoring this. Then when the closest equivalent "free" driver is used, you end up with things like a wireless that doesn't scan, or a wired NIC that randomly drops to 600 kilobit speed or cuts out entirely... Ubuntu just makes it happen.
-Graphics issues. If I really wanted to run with what only free or outdated drivers can provide, I would install it in a VM under my Windows 7 partition. Having to use scripts some random guy made to properly suppress the dated repo packages and get the latest and greatest NVidia drivers is not ideal. Ubuntu generally keeps graphics drivers up to date in the packages.
-Codec issues... Ubuntu IIRC it was just some checkboxes for "Good, Bad & Ugly", in Debian I had to resort to adding a 3rd party repository debian-multimedia (now deb-multimedia) just to get multithreaded Mplayer...
-Printer installation. This is a "too much choice" problem, you can go with HP's stuff or plain ol' cups, both will work but there's no clear choice presented. I don't remember what Ubuntu's was but it was one of those "ah my printer's already here" moments.
-Purposely making things confusing. One word: iceweasel.
I do love Debian but installing should be left for power users... after that 5% extra polishing anyone can use it, but that really is the difference between Debian and Ubuntu.
Why can't you manually lock it when you're about to walk away from it? You know, just bind one of those useless media keys to "lock computer" and you're done. There nothing complicated about that.
Yes, because you always know ahead of time whether you're stepping away for a few minutes or for longer. The default is far more useful.
Also, if it's auto-locked after a few minutes, people are free to use it if they start just as soon as you're out of the room.
In the 10 seconds I thought of this I can come up with about 10 scenarios where an autolock is better than your suggestion.
I wouldn't live with people I can't trust. If you think your roommate/gf will use snoop into your computer while you're asleep, you should get a new roommate/gf. Seriously.
Spoken like someone who has never gone away to college - the way mine was set up the desks were in a shared common area with 5 other people. You could fit a desk in the bedroom by stacking the dressers and bunking the beds, but then, who gets the desk?
And I bet you had to edit your response from saying "get a new sibling".
As far as the girlfriend thing is concerned, "likely to want to use my computer while I'm away" doesn't even make my list of disqualifiers, but to each their own.
My whole point is, not everyone's needs are the same as yours. This new option is useful for people who have their computers in a shared space. Those who live in their parent's basement or alone with their cat need not apply.
Says someone who has never used Gnome, or possibly ever linux. How did you ever get to +2 by pulling stuff like this out of your ass?
For most popular Linux distros, the gnome screensaver by default locks after several minutes of inactivity. Locking screensavers are quite useful if your computer is in a quasi-public area, such as a kitchen, college dorm, library, etc.
And a particularly stupid counter of yours:
Again, do you need to lock your computer to do this? If someone's going to use it while you're sleeping, they might just steal it too.
In addition to it being impractical to disable/enable the auto-lock situationally, do you really feel it is more likely for your sibling/college roommate/girlfriend to steal your computer than poke around out of curiosity?
It's an optional feature, just don't enable it.
I would say the volume control's true benefit is being able to lower/mute the volume while locked. Handy situations?
-You want to play mp3s while reading a book / cooking / whatever, but having to type your password to adjust the volume is a chore.
-your alarm clock is an mp3 played by cron (I solve this by turning off my speakers, not really an option for laptops).
-you are in a lecture, the lock screen has come on, and that web page with randomly cycling ads has just started playing a loud flash ad (current solution: pull battery).
-a metal/rock/etc song somehow made it into your "nature sounds for sleeping" mp3 list, somewhere around two hours into the list. You need to lower the volume to avoid pissing off neighbors. The act of entering your 16+character passphrase with requisite numbers and special characters is enough to bring you back to "fully awake".
In the city, I had a free school-provided transit pass at 13. After school I would go to various shopping centers, visit friends, tourist attractions, or simply explore the city after school.
I always imagined that having to wait 3 more years for that freedom would have been hell. I think your post has confirmed that fear for me. I actually do not know what I would have done with my time without that freedom.
I will probably move back there, I think it is a great way to raise a child to have a sense of personal responsibility at an early age, that simply isn't possible in a suburb (or smaller city).
It is amazing how many people don't understand this. A car parked in sunlight all day, and they refuse to open the window for the first few minutes after getting in because "the A/C is on". It cools off a hell of a lot faster if you drive for a minute with the windows down so that you're starting with the cooler outside air as the baseline!
Mod up! paint.net is far more usable than the GIMP, and at same price tag (for the end user). Only problem of course is that it's for Windows, and there is no Wine support.
But yeah, all of Photoshopy features I actually used were in it (layers, levels, history, effects) with a UI I could understand and use efficiently immediately, unlike the GIMP (at least when I switched).
What's rather interesting is some electronics are actually made in the US but will appear to be made in China. A few years ago I got a factory tour of a small US company that makes all of their electronics except for the PCBs they go on. The PCB has in giant white letters MADE IN CHINA, but the Made in China part was simply the green board. The soldering of capacitors and connectors, guiding the things through machines that do the more finer details, testing, putting cases on, etc was all done in New Jersey.
Obviously, anything is fine "in moderation", but what makes you think this kid was drinking it in moderation?
Which is more likely: The kid's lunch includes a standard 4, 6, or 8oz juice box of Apple Juice, or a 64oz jug of the stuff that probably is about 1/3rd her height?
For poor people tap water is often less healthy simply due to crappy/old plumbing, and there *is* nutritional value in apple juice since nowadays they add in vitamins and calcium, making it more value than bottled water. You could also say milk would work, but it could easily spoil if stored carelessly.
Please pontificate about apple juice elsewhere. There are many evils in this world, but Mott's isn't one of them.
I would agree reducing janitors if instead of poor kids, it was *all* kids, on a rotating schedule like is done in some countries. Kids who are spoiled at home need to be taught to clean up after themselves.
And I don't know about Detroit (#1 poorest city), but Buffalo (#3 poorest city in the US) just got an infusing of $1 billion state dollars as it is the poorest city in NY... a good test to see if the method of throwing government money at the problem makes it better.
Yup, mod parent up!
There are also Vocational High Schools, for example Transit Tech. Anyone intelligent who goes there can pretty much walk onto a civil service job with the Transit Authority (the Civil Service exam being an immediately useful test to teach to...).
I have that same Ben Franklin shirt... one time I was visiting Boston and happened to be videotaping while passing the Prudential tower (in the Prudential Center). Security guard A comes over and says I can't be videotaping here. Security guard B (with more fluff on his uniform, probably A's boss) takes one look at the shirt and says "don't worry about it, you're fine."
That came across like a bad "Three Wolves" shirt review but it really does work.
While your statement is certainly true for some places, it's far more dangerous to underestimate the dress code. Showing up in a suit *and* being the right one for the job puts you above the guys in sandals and shorts in most places. It answers an unspoken question: "*can* he dress up if needed?" Even if the day to day position does not require anything more than business casual, there are a few situations that may arise:
-Is the incumbent capable of showing up for the Regional Manager's "east coast division-wide all-staff quarterly general update" meeting dressed appropriately?
-Can this person be made presentable to meet with clients/customers, and give off an appropriate aura of professionalism?
-Can he handle a temporary dress code bump for when the CIO,COO,CEO, or other VIP decides to make a visit tomorrow?
Showing up in a suit automatically says you can handle all three situations without suddenly needing to go out and buy one, and that you at least have a means of getting a tie tied before abovementioned $OCCASION.
Wow, apartment buildings/condos didn't even enter into your reasoning with that, did it?
McMansions allow for easier sprawl, and all the problems associated with it.
Furthermore it denies the obvious reality that many Asian countries actually do have free speech.
Yes but their free speech comes with the concept of honor & responsibility... ie: situations like Westboro Baptist Church do not happen, even if the letter of the law allows it...
I'm not saying this is the case with any culture moving towards free speech at the moment, but I can see how citizens of countries with many nutjob fundamentalist groups might actually want restrictions in place...
Also breast milk.
The (start) menu system if you examine it and clean it up as you might in XP.
The problem is you're trying to clean it up. If you can break your habit of it, you'll realize that the combination of search+click, and pinning the few things that you access frequently enough are far, far superior.
I used to try and organize my start menu in XP, but it truly is an exercise in futility. If you use multiple computers at work and home, you spend so much time organizing that storing a folder with a bunch of .lnk's on your network share or memorizing command names for the run box becomes more efficient. It's madness.
Except the start menu search box makes the mousing a lot less tedious. I *never* organized my start menu and cannot be bothered to do so. The XP way, you have to mouse over menus until you find what you want, sometimes (especially for system things) right clicking and choosing a menu option. Since every application is important enough to want its own folder (sometimes folder tree) you eventually have so many things that you either have columns or have to scroll (or need to start organizing the start menu, a huge timewaster).
The Windows 7 way, you can simply hit the windows key, start typing and you are now one click away from whatever you wanted, as long as it's *somewhere* in your start menu (or one of the many keywords that are attached to various control panel things). If you find yourself doing it a lot, it's trivially easy to pin whatever application you keep going for to the start menu or taskbar.
That, and the desktop slideshow were the two main features that got me off of Windows XP (64 bit) for my Windows partition.
For Linux I still use Debian with either Gnome 2, LXDE, or Trinity depending on the device. When you can bind a key to open a command prompt anywhere, menu efficiency is a non-issue.
NTFS has been updated pretty consistently actually (the last being Windows XP with NTFS 3.1). Since then the Windows OS on top of it has evolved to actually take advantage of the features of 3.1.
What you said is akin to, "You mean, since the last time the default *nix file system was updated? I can't believe they're still using the aging ext file system, with all of it's 90s features like 'symbolic links' ".
**This**.
While RedHat is IMO the best Linux money can buy, if you don't have that money a RedHat clone isn't going to help you much.
Why? Debian is easier to roll your own fixes because the free support you get is excellent. Between IRC, forums and the tons of howto sites you get out there, someone, somewhere has definitely wanted to do what you are trying to do. Since there is no paywall to Debian's support, you will not have better answers hidden from public view.
Also, think about staffing:
-Someone who knows the ins and outs of a RedHat system to be able to function without a support safety net is probably RHCE (or at the very least, capable of getting said cert). This automatically makes them more expensive. Your rank and file sysadmins would need to be at RHCSA level.
-In a pinch, anyone who messed with Ubuntu enough to have dealt with the command line can perform minor system administration on a Debian box. These could be employees within the company working desktop support, a call center or some other IT function. The learning curve to turn these people into full sysadmins is much smaller, and you'll already know the type of person they are, eliminating the hardest part of hiring someone new.
Not every PD is like Oakland. Maybe in Texas it is, but for upstate NY, Occupy Albany has an ally in the police.
City hall and the State Capitol are right across from each other, with a park in between. Half the park belongs to the state, the other half the city. Once the 11PM curfew hit (the park closes then), the state police were all ready to make arrests, but the city police refused to... so the protesters simply walked over to the city side of the line, and stayed there ever since. The recent snowfall is the only thing thus far that has pressured the movement to leave.
The Governor (and initially the mayor) were pissed at the police, but they can't do anything about it. The mayor is now backing the police.
Dude, I once had to go to the ER for constipation. Why? Because I had no PCP, and don't drive. Is it so hard to expect that there be easily accessible places for simple medical care? Why are there 2 hosptials on one bus line, but their affiliated urgent care centers (really just needed a simple clinic) are located in the middle of buttfuck nowhere with not so much as a sidewalk?
For some reason medical care here is structured for disaster recovery, and completely fails at basic maintenance, to the point where it seems ludicrous to go to a hospital for a cold. And then people's kids die of pneumonia and scarlet fever.
Not sure how you're a troll, this is completely true.
BUT, I know a few shops that successfully switched their users to OpenOffice to avoid ribbon (the Oracle name on the splash screen helped too). So Microsoft radically changing the Window UI combined with Apple's continued rejection of corporate desires might be just the push needed to get Linux on the desktop...