there's very little in common. Madonna can't sing but can dance, Gaga is the opposite. They're both using costumes and scandal to get attention, but they're far from the only ones, nor the first (Cher anyone ?). I think Gaga is a much better writer/composer.
I love the "Excluded from inclusion in MARS are:" title, especially from a university. They probably mean the documents have been included in the exclusion list for MARS inclusion ?
Fortunately, the MARS mechanic robots can take advantage of the university level of altitude to fetch books at a high rate of speed.
The girl can sing, and write lyrics and music. Can't dance though. Some of her songs are very good in their unplugged versions, and she does not shy away from catering to mainstream tastes with overproduced studio versions, videos, and her looks.
I've actually given up on theaters, and watch movies at home. Too much noise, smartphone glare, impolite people...
On one of my last outings, someone actually smoked a joint, which at least was fun, and quite in the spirit of the movie. Then he started to loudly get into the film, which was also fun, especially since the film was quite bad.
it's a bit more complicated than that. Luminosity and contrast also play a role, and Apple is well known for using extremely bright screens, certainly to make up for their shininess.
1- it requires skill and knowledge, and it is frightening. As a newb linux user myself, I'm not sure which UI I should be using, and I don't have the time nor guts to install the handful of them (unity, kde, gnome, xfce, lvwm...) that seem major. Testing a UI in depth takes time (say 1 week of use, 1 day os setup ?) and may fail (my last attempt to switch to xfce led me to a completly passive screen, with a nice background image, but I could not find any menu, input zone.. nor support on the forums. I honestly don't want to try anymore and hose another install.
2- it rises the question of support. I f I use the mainstream default, I'm fairly sure i'll be getting updates and support. If I stray to another solution, both will probably be worse, or at least I have the perception they will be.
Also, in closed-source products, you DO have some choice. For example, much is being made of Unity having a vertical left-hand menu. I just dragged my Windows taskbar there, to see if I like it (I'll give it a week). Also, as a counter-example, LibreOffice does NOT have a "ribbon" option, just the plain old menu: those who actually like the ribon are left stranded. Well, they probably deserve that ^^
not really. Have any the the devs actually asked typical users what they wanted, and double-checked that they weren't being lied to ?
"typical user" needs to be defined, it can be a Linux user, a typical PC user, a knowledgeable computer user, a home user...
"being lied to" is frequent, there is usually a huge discrepancy between the lofty things people say when asked to think about something (yes, widgets are nice, yes, I want an interactive connected desktop...", and what happens in reality (this PC has no internets ! the thing I click on the bottom left to get it is not there !)
between what the devs want to do, and what the users want. In a commercial company, this conflict is handled by management weighing in on the side of users/customers. In OSS projects, the devs have free reins to play with new concepts, technologies, paradigms... whether anyone else is interested at all, or not. My take is that Gnome, KDE and Unity have evolved into cool geek research labs. 5-10 years from now, we might be using some ideas that originated there. Right now, most users want and need a simple interface that Just Works and emulates the Windows they know, not some buggy half-finished avant-garde stuff.
The main quality of an OS is to let me use my hardware and apps with minimum fuss.
But, not everyone can be brilliant. Isn't one of the purposes of education to teach people, even so-so ones, a job ? To paraphrase my friend cap. Obvious, not all programmers can be above average.
It's not about the OS, it's about the user. Don't run in admin mode, install an antivirus and OS/Apps updates, don't install crap from just anywhere, avoid Flash, IE, Firefox.
Been doing that in Windows for me and my parents for years, got a virus once, when an ex called bout a failing hard drive and I dumbly just connected it to my spare PC to try and salvage the files.
- Once on my brother's X10 mini pro. The thing was barely usable before, extremely slow, bloated crapware... With CM7 it feels like a new phone, much snappier, and with a much better interface and software portfolio.
- On my own WinMob 6.5 HTC HD2. More to check if it actually worked than to really use it, I am quite happy with WinMob since I don't do anything fancy with my phone. Well, strike that. I now run android all the time. The interface is much better, so are the apps... I only miss winmob's RDP server.
So kudos, and thanks, to the CM team. Phone manufacturers should pay you, or at least help you. You breathe new life into old and clunky phones.
One remark though, being totally new to modding phones, I struggled a bit with the instructions on the XDA-Dev site. The hackers there assume some knowledge of modding (how to boot in "Flash Update" mode, installing the root...). Following 10 lines of instructions for the X10 install took me about 3hrs, lots of cold sweat... but worked on the first try.
Smells like a smart investment: 1- they get the Average Sale Price of PCs a bit up, which makes them less crappy compared to Macs. Lots of people will look at their $400 PC or $300 netbook, compare it to a $1000 Mac, and conclude, Wow, Mac is so much better. The cheapest MacBook seems to 999euros for 13.3", the cheapest 13.3" Dell is 450. both 2GB, 250GB, dualcores, Apple has a better CPU and is a lot sexier. I wouldn't hazard a guess about build quality nor service and support. So for $699, students should be able to get a significantly better (if not cuter) PC than a *more* expensive Mac. MS is closing the luxury gap
2- They get people familiar with their product. Today's students are tomorrow's executives, and people will be partial to what they know. Even if it's not that good... and, honestly, Windows Seven *is* good.
3- They get people sucked into their Live thing.
I don't know what the real cost of the campaign will be, once you balance giving out a $200 (probably costs less to build, by now), getting $40 for a windows license, $10 per game, 10 games per console (?) (got that from another post, I have no clue if this is accurate), and Live subscriptions/purchases. I'm guessing it's not a bad return, with "converted" users and referrers as a bonus ?
Plus it does not hurt their presence at the very bottom end. I got a HP Mini 110 for 150euros. That's about the price for an Apple keyboard plus mouse without any computer to use them with.
On the desktop - mass storage side of things, I always found USB 1 and 2 somewhat sucky, with compatibility issues (I had to force some ports to USB1 for some of my supposedly USB2 gadgets to work at all), so-so real throughput, and high CPU usage with some chipsets. FW never had any of those issues, but was indeed more expensive especially on the peripheral side, and less prevalent. I'm already having problems with USB3, so I'm guessing the situation could very well repeat itself, with TB being more reliable, somewhat faster, and more efficient, but more expensive and not ubiquitous.
But, I think the crux of the matter is that TB can be that lone connector on our shiny smartphones and tablets; while USB3 can't. TB can do it all: video, mass storage, LAN, keyboard, mouse, sound, in theory even GPU...and USB... **all at the same time**, and with minimal interfacing upheaval. USB can't do most of that, let alone simultaneously. I really hope 2 years from now, my phone and tablet will have TB, and I'll be able to buy, and re-use, cheap standard TB docks for them.
I think that's because of two reasons: 1- it's hard to make money while being open. Huge investments are required (development, hosting, deals with telcos...), and by definition you get no lock-in. I'm not sure how anyone can do all that, especially since most of those are up-front costs, and still hope to make money or at least convince investors to fund the start up. Few companies have the money without need for anyone (Google comes to mind) 2- proprietary does move faster. Apart from Google seeming to be able to move Android along quite fast, most other open specs lag behind their proprietary equivalents. And fragmentation is rife: HTML, Javascript, Linux... take forever to implement new stuff, and tend to do so in multiple, incompatible ways, that do plug the gap in the mean time, but tend to persist once the official spec is out.
There's a SIP client for my phone. I never could manage to get it to run (admittedly, I spent no more than 3hrs tring). Skype came pre-installed and Just Worked. I'd love for IM, video/audio calls to be "open"... I'm not holding my breath.
I have a few quite celebrity-aware friends. I'm always amazed at how many celebrities (A- to D-list) I come across when I'm with them. I can conceive of a poor immigrant woman not having either knowledge nor interest about the west's current nomenklatura. I'm French and, honestly, before this, I probably wouldn't have recognized him either. His name I would, his face,not.
She's been cleaning $3000 a night rooms for 3 years. If she wanted to blackmail people, she wouldn't run off to the police, she would probably target business, sports, show-business people rather than politicians, and above all she would ask privately for money, not publicly for justice.
at least B10 is proven true by this pebkac ^^. I assure you that while investing why rsync had issues going ntfs to ntfs, I came across several docs that had no indication whatsoever of what version they applied to (had to go by the date of the forum posts to make a guess), and the man pages were of no help at all.
I concede on the extra step to open the run command, sorry. windows-r is kinda embedded in my fingers by now.
As for having to supply credentials, you don't, you do have to accept the UAC alert, though. IIRC, in linux I got to open the terminal, launch the editor, edit the file... and get a "need admin rights" error only when trying to save the file after making the edits. not sure IRC though.
I stand by my point that modifying a key value is a lot less error-prone than typing a full line in a (even well-documented) config file.
I'm not arguing that the registry is better than individual config files (that's an entirely different discussion, I think I prefer config files, and programs that don't have a whole lot of external dependencies ^^ ), I'm arguing that some kind of interface to edit system parameters is less error-prone than editing them free-form.
A) Windows A1- Here's the doc A2- type regedit A3- change the key as indicated Done !
B) Linux B1- look for the doc B2- open a terminal B3- sudo B3b- type in credentials B4- open the file B5- edit as per doc, being careful of where you add your line, misspellings
that's already a few more steps and more possible mistakes... but now the real fun begins:
B6- find out the doc was only good for Horny Huckster (which is 9.7), you have 10.5 (which is... Priapic Prong ? maybe), look again B7- don't find any doc you're 100% sure is germane to your setup/issue B8- try a few, fail B9- ask on the forums B10- get shot down as a noob who can't even search for an answer nor ask a question right, 'coz everybody knows the right term is NCSI.
I'm exaggerating a bit, but this happens more often than not, and is the main reason why I'm still using windows. Linux mostly works out of the box, but any issue is hard to find docs or support for. In my experience, issues no longer happen as early (drivers are OK, installs have been auto-completing for me for a couple of years), but more advanced stuff is still very badly documented nor version-ed.
Example of cases this happened to me over the last year: clean up the grub2 boot menu. Couldn't do it in the end, still had 3 choices for Windows (only 1 installed), one for my unbootable data partition... did find where to get rid of older linux kernels setup RDP server get rsync to work for NTFS to NTFS backups
you SHOULD pay MORE to SLASHDOT for EXCESSIVE and RANDOM use of CAPS.
I can't help imagining the random-capitalizers as either banging the table, shouting, or e-nun-ci-a-ting IRL... makes me smile. Actually, everyone has probably already tagged them as sententious bores, so they only have the internets left for their preaching.
Slashdot Mirror
there's very little in common. Madonna can't sing but can dance, Gaga is the opposite. They're both using costumes and scandal to get attention, but they're far from the only ones, nor the first (Cher anyone ?). I think Gaga is a much better writer/composer.
I love the "Excluded from inclusion in MARS are:" title, especially from a university. They probably mean the documents have been included in the exclusion list for MARS inclusion ?
Fortunately, the MARS mechanic robots can take advantage of the university level of altitude to fetch books at a high rate of speed.
The girl can sing, and write lyrics and music. Can't dance though. Some of her songs are very good in their unplugged versions, and she does not shy away from catering to mainstream tastes with overproduced studio versions, videos, and her looks.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiqHICcqi9s for an unplugged pokerface
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Zet3eLu-ms#t=2m43s just for fun, another good unplugged something else, by someone else.
1- when you no longer have any money, what do you need to make more ? some time ...
2- money is time: taking the plane to somewhere is a lot faster (and more expensive) than hitch-hiking.
I've actually given up on theaters, and watch movies at home. Too much noise, smartphone glare, impolite people...
On one of my last outings, someone actually smoked a joint, which at least was fun, and quite in the spirit of the movie. Then he started to loudly get into the film, which was also fun, especially since the film was quite bad.
it's a bit more complicated than that. Luminosity and contrast also play a role, and Apple is well known for using extremely bright screens, certainly to make up for their shininess.
there's 2 issues with changing:
1- it requires skill and knowledge, and it is frightening. As a newb linux user myself, I'm not sure which UI I should be using, and I don't have the time nor guts to install the handful of them (unity, kde, gnome, xfce, lvwm...) that seem major. Testing a UI in depth takes time (say 1 week of use, 1 day os setup ?) and may fail (my last attempt to switch to xfce led me to a completly passive screen, with a nice background image, but I could not find any menu, input zone.. nor support on the forums. I honestly don't want to try anymore and hose another install.
2- it rises the question of support. I f I use the mainstream default, I'm fairly sure i'll be getting updates and support. If I stray to another solution, both will probably be worse, or at least I have the perception they will be.
Also, in closed-source products, you DO have some choice. For example, much is being made of Unity having a vertical left-hand menu. I just dragged my Windows taskbar there, to see if I like it (I'll give it a week). Also, as a counter-example, LibreOffice does NOT have a "ribbon" option, just the plain old menu: those who actually like the ribon are left stranded. Well, they probably deserve that ^^
not really. Have any the the devs actually asked typical users what they wanted, and double-checked that they weren't being lied to ?
"typical user" needs to be defined, it can be a Linux user, a typical PC user, a knowledgeable computer user, a home user...
"being lied to" is frequent, there is usually a huge discrepancy between the lofty things people say when asked to think about something (yes, widgets are nice, yes, I want an interactive connected desktop...", and what happens in reality (this PC has no internets ! the thing I click on the bottom left to get it is not there !)
between what the devs want to do, and what the users want. In a commercial company, this conflict is handled by management weighing in on the side of users/customers. In OSS projects, the devs have free reins to play with new concepts, technologies, paradigms... whether anyone else is interested at all, or not. My take is that Gnome, KDE and Unity have evolved into cool geek research labs. 5-10 years from now, we might be using some ideas that originated there. Right now, most users want and need a simple interface that Just Works and emulates the Windows they know, not some buggy half-finished avant-garde stuff.
The main quality of an OS is to let me use my hardware and apps with minimum fuss.
But, not everyone can be brilliant. Isn't one of the purposes of education to teach people, even so-so ones, a job ? To paraphrase my friend cap. Obvious, not all programmers can be above average.
It's not about the OS, it's about the user. Don't run in admin mode, install an antivirus and OS/Apps updates, don't install crap from just anywhere, avoid Flash, IE, Firefox.
Been doing that in Windows for me and my parents for years, got a virus once, when an ex called bout a failing hard drive and I dumbly just connected it to my spare PC to try and salvage the files.
I have installed CM7 twice:
- Once on my brother's X10 mini pro. The thing was barely usable before, extremely slow, bloated crapware... With CM7 it feels like a new phone, much snappier, and with a much better interface and software portfolio.
- On my own WinMob 6.5 HTC HD2. More to check if it actually worked than to really use it, I am quite happy with WinMob since I don't do anything fancy with my phone. Well, strike that. I now run android all the time. The interface is much better, so are the apps... I only miss winmob's RDP server.
So kudos, and thanks, to the CM team. Phone manufacturers should pay you, or at least help you. You breathe new life into old and clunky phones.
One remark though, being totally new to modding phones, I struggled a bit with the instructions on the XDA-Dev site. The hackers there assume some knowledge of modding (how to boot in "Flash Update" mode, installing the root...). Following 10 lines of instructions for the X10 install took me about 3hrs, lots of cold sweat... but worked on the first try.
email+calendar, then IM and (video-)phone, and then documents and apps, from easier to more difficult/riskier.
Smells like a smart investment:
1- they get the Average Sale Price of PCs a bit up, which makes them less crappy compared to Macs. Lots of people will look at their $400 PC or $300 netbook, compare it to a $1000 Mac, and conclude, Wow, Mac is so much better. The cheapest MacBook seems to 999euros for 13.3", the cheapest 13.3" Dell is 450. both 2GB, 250GB, dualcores, Apple has a better CPU and is a lot sexier. I wouldn't hazard a guess about build quality nor service and support. So for $699, students should be able to get a significantly better (if not cuter) PC than a *more* expensive Mac. MS is closing the luxury gap
2- They get people familiar with their product. Today's students are tomorrow's executives, and people will be partial to what they know. Even if it's not that good... and, honestly, Windows Seven *is* good.
3- They get people sucked into their Live thing.
I don't know what the real cost of the campaign will be, once you balance giving out a $200 (probably costs less to build, by now), getting $40 for a windows license, $10 per game, 10 games per console (?) (got that from another post, I have no clue if this is accurate), and Live subscriptions/purchases. I'm guessing it's not a bad return, with "converted" users and referrers as a bonus ?
Plus it does not hurt their presence at the very bottom end. I got a HP Mini 110 for 150euros. That's about the price for an Apple keyboard plus mouse without any computer to use them with.
On the desktop - mass storage side of things, I always found USB 1 and 2 somewhat sucky, with compatibility issues (I had to force some ports to USB1 for some of my supposedly USB2 gadgets to work at all), so-so real throughput, and high CPU usage with some chipsets. FW never had any of those issues, but was indeed more expensive especially on the peripheral side, and less prevalent. I'm already having problems with USB3, so I'm guessing the situation could very well repeat itself, with TB being more reliable, somewhat faster, and more efficient, but more expensive and not ubiquitous.
But, I think the crux of the matter is that TB can be that lone connector on our shiny smartphones and tablets; while USB3 can't. TB can do it all: video, mass storage, LAN, keyboard, mouse, sound, in theory even GPU...and USB... **all at the same time**, and with minimal interfacing upheaval. USB can't do most of that, let alone simultaneously. I really hope 2 years from now, my phone and tablet will have TB, and I'll be able to buy, and re-use, cheap standard TB docks for them.
I think that's because of two reasons:
1- it's hard to make money while being open. Huge investments are required (development, hosting, deals with telcos...), and by definition you get no lock-in. I'm not sure how anyone can do all that, especially since most of those are up-front costs, and still hope to make money or at least convince investors to fund the start up. Few companies have the money without need for anyone (Google comes to mind)
2- proprietary does move faster. Apart from Google seeming to be able to move Android along quite fast, most other open specs lag behind their proprietary equivalents. And fragmentation is rife: HTML, Javascript, Linux... take forever to implement new stuff, and tend to do so in multiple, incompatible ways, that do plug the gap in the mean time, but tend to persist once the official spec is out.
There's a SIP client for my phone. I never could manage to get it to run (admittedly, I spent no more than 3hrs tring). Skype came pre-installed and Just Worked. I'd love for IM, video/audio calls to be "open"... I'm not holding my breath.
Great memories though. 4DOS under DesqView with QEMM386 was sooo much better than DOS 4.0 ! I remember multitasking WordStar and Lotus 123 with ease !
Then I met Framework and the path was set for Windows...
I have a few quite celebrity-aware friends. I'm always amazed at how many celebrities (A- to D-list) I come across when I'm with them. I can conceive of a poor immigrant woman not having either knowledge nor interest about the west's current nomenklatura. I'm French and, honestly, before this, I probably wouldn't have recognized him either. His name I would, his face,not.
She's been cleaning $3000 a night rooms for 3 years. If she wanted to blackmail people, she wouldn't run off to the police, she would probably target business, sports, show-business people rather than politicians, and above all she would ask privately for money, not publicly for justice.
at least B10 is proven true by this pebkac ^^. I assure you that while investing why rsync had issues going ntfs to ntfs, I came across several docs that had no indication whatsoever of what version they applied to (had to go by the date of the forum posts to make a guess), and the man pages were of no help at all.
I concede on the extra step to open the run command, sorry. windows-r is kinda embedded in my fingers by now.
As for having to supply credentials, you don't, you do have to accept the UAC alert, though. IIRC, in linux I got to open the terminal, launch the editor, edit the file... and get a "need admin rights" error only when trying to save the file after making the edits. not sure IRC though.
I stand by my point that modifying a key value is a lot less error-prone than typing a full line in a (even well-documented) config file.
I'm not arguing that the registry is better than individual config files (that's an entirely different discussion, I think I prefer config files, and programs that don't have a whole lot of external dependencies ^^ ), I'm arguing that some kind of interface to edit system parameters is less error-prone than editing them free-form.
nope, sorry, didn't read your post ^^
Oh my... you know you can do that once and for all ?
I'll bite
A) Windows
A1- Here's the doc
A2- type regedit
A3- change the key as indicated
Done !
B) Linux
B1- look for the doc
B2- open a terminal
B3- sudo
B3b- type in credentials
B4- open the file
B5- edit as per doc, being careful of where you add your line, misspellings
that's already a few more steps and more possible mistakes... but now the real fun begins:
B6- find out the doc was only good for Horny Huckster (which is 9.7), you have 10.5 (which is ... Priapic Prong ? maybe), look again
B7- don't find any doc you're 100% sure is germane to your setup/issue
B8- try a few, fail
B9- ask on the forums
B10- get shot down as a noob who can't even search for an answer nor ask a question right, 'coz everybody knows the right term is NCSI.
I'm exaggerating a bit, but this happens more often than not, and is the main reason why I'm still using windows. Linux mostly works out of the box, but any issue is hard to find docs or support for. In my experience, issues no longer happen as early (drivers are OK, installs have been auto-completing for me for a couple of years), but more advanced stuff is still very badly documented nor version-ed.
Example of cases this happened to me over the last year:
clean up the grub2 boot menu. Couldn't do it in the end, still had 3 choices for Windows (only 1 installed), one for my unbootable data partition... did find where to get rid of older linux kernels
setup RDP server
get rsync to work for NTFS to NTFS backups
goodbye karma ....
you SHOULD pay MORE to SLASHDOT for EXCESSIVE and RANDOM use of CAPS.
I can't help imagining the random-capitalizers as either banging the table, shouting, or e-nun-ci-a-ting IRL... makes me smile. Actually, everyone has probably already tagged them as sententious bores, so they only have the internets left for their preaching.
I think the GP is about regular use, not install.
This may depend on your main monitor's size, though.