Oh I'm sure there are terminals with alpha on OSX, but I'm not interested in using it long enough to try and find one and the default OSX terminal just looks atrocious to me.
As for the mouse, I believe you are talking about exactly the same thing as me: sloppy focus (without auto-raise).
I could actually go on, for instance I hate XCode, library management on OSX is "clean" but also "incompatible and extremely impractical", package management is (or was?) a mess, and on and on. Of course this is from someone who's been using a variety of *nix distributions [primarily Debian or Debian based] for the last 15 years, so to me OSX just seems too artificial and dumbed down with a variety of unexplainable design quirks. So to me OSX is like having to work with mittens on and I only get a set of shiny plastic toys, while Linux would be the bare handed metal-tool equivalent.
Well what Japan did was they basically reduced prices by absorbing a lot of the production costs through interest free loans, which were given through banks and in turn approved by the government. That's another way of saying the Japanese government gave money to companies to produce superior products and cheaper prices than their competitors could in a "fair" market. For example each roll of Fujifilm film was cheaper than Kodak yet the film grade was higher. Why do this? Well, Kodak almost went bankrupt and that would have left Fujifilm the only real film supplier in the world, with a trusted name and a global following of people who equate film to Fujifilm as tissues are to Kleenex. From that point the price would increase, but even rising up to the price Kodak was running at they would have close to 100% of the market so profits would have been guaranteed.
Thing is Kodak complained, as did a lot of other companies that were being crushed, and then all the sudden the Japanese were doing something "unfair". Weather or not it's really unfair to do that is sort of a funny issue - the government is basically backing loans with tax money, making a bet that they can push their national industries into absolute and controlling positions in the global market and thusly gaining a greater sum economic return. That's pretty risky and pretty dynamic, but had foreign governments not stepped in a bitched about it it would have worked and nobody would remember the companies Kodak et.all ever existed.
China on the other hand is doing something a bit different. In the case of solar panels for example they are restricting exports of vital production materials while washing the prices down for national producers. They may well be able to pull it off as well - even if global governments bitch and scream and make up new rules China still has a lot of options on the table to drive down prices and their economy is so massive and so based on nonsense bullshit, not to mention they're not afraid of turning the rich among their population into dirt farmers, that they will make any move they feel necessary with little hesitation.
That's your opinion. I hate window behavior in OSX, I hate the dock, I hate the menus being at the top of the screen instead of in the windows, and I hate the pager/multiplexer system, I prefer sloppy focus and I love semi-transparent terminals. While I still prefer GNOME 2 I'd take GNOME 3 Shell any day over OSX.
They have Geiger Counters at most government facilities now and will come and check areas of concern. Out of curiosity I went to a nearby civic center and had my cars air filter checked out after I drove through Fukushima (on the Touhoku expressway) and it didn't read higher than normal. Then a week ago there were concerns over mushrooms from the area and my wife had some checked out. It's not just government facilities offering the service - depending on where you are community centers and other groups, supermarkets, and even a few taxi services have counters. In Tokyo independent groups have been regularly checking parks, gutters, etc. but they've not yet found any dangerous levels of radiation within Tokyo.
Otherwise they have basic detectors at many major electronics stores - they won't give you finite readings but an alarm will go off if the radiation level is too high. It's one of those alarms that detected the jar of material in Setagaya-ku - which by the way was not related to the reactor, it was a jar of radioactive powder that had been used as "medicine" in the 40's/50's.
Maybe you should read the news or check the facts before panicking and asking stupid questions on Slashdot.
"gnome 3 helps you do things faster, maybe not find your stuff faster" - very well put. The thing is if they just added the ability to add bars like in GNOME 2 then adding a task bar would be native and easy, and if they allowed for the top bar to be customized then they would have all the functionality of GNOME 2 + all the new functionality. And as you stated the new functionality does allow a lot of things to go much faster and smoother - hitting the super key (windows key) gives immediate access to a lot of functionality and ever since getting used to it I have noticed I can do a lot of things much faster than before.
It's stupid of the GNOME team to get pissed about the dock because docks/taskbars are the exact feature GNOME 3 (shell) is missing that most of the users know they need. If they don't add something native I expect many people won't stick around.
I always used Debian for ARM, but a lot of people liked Angstrom. This was before the whole "tablet" and "multi-touch" craze started. The thing is now that all these tablets are available and so cheap I'd question why you wouldn't just modify a tablet?
I personally just don't like the behavior/feel of docks. Call me antique but I like the "taskbar" and separate "system tray" designs. I also hate having empty nothing space on the left and right sides of a dock, whereas empty space on a taskbar doesn't bother me so much. Having tasks lumped together also bugs the crap out of me especially when there's plenty of free space.
As it is now GNOME 2 had more shortcut keys, many shortcuts are not yet implemented in GNOME 3. The case here is that the shortcut behavior in GNOME 3 is different and in some ways quite impressively so. alt-tab for example shows you all running applications in groups, use tab or the arrow keys to select, hit down and get all the windows in that group and you can select from them all with thumb-nailed previews. Of course I'm told this was basically stolen from a Compiz plug-in, so giving credit for it to GNOME 3 is probably unfair.
GNOME 2 had much better mouse settings, though not specifically for synaptics I don't think. I don't think these settings are gone in GNOME 3 there just isn't a settings tool for them, so you need to do it in gconf probably.
Actually declaring # encoding: UTF-8 does not assume external libraries are in UTF-8, Ruby handles that pretty well and that's likely because a lot of older Ruby code was written with Shift-JIS. To be honest I've only dealt with non-UTF-8 encodings in Shift-JIS so maybe it only handles those, but I can tell you it works fine and give you a working sample to prove it.
"I wish Ruby wasn't written by a Japanese guy - we wouldn't even have to argue about this by now if it were different..." - I don't even know how to take that. Seriously.
"If it breaks for some Japanese people because they have some stupid religious objection to Unicode" - it doesn't break it, it works very very well and is a very practical real world implementation. But "practical" and "real world" mean engl-euro centric non CJK people want to do things like use a base "n" character and put "~" on top of it with an extended character and make every character 32bit instead of actually being sane and just using efficient standards like UTF-8.
If I'm not mistaken one of the reasons for UTF-8 was Japanese specifically, and han unicode is completely centered around CJK and UTF-8 is essentially an implementation of it. Furthermore, UTF-8 is on everything now, it's proven efficient and it works fantastically in Ruby in real life situations - I honestly don't care if I can't check to see if a Kanji is "capitalized" and get "non-standard" behavior because that's a nonsense operation which should give you an error just like it does in Ruby. If that bugs anyone then go ahead and patch it - Ruby is an open language.
Voxel is a pixel in a mapped 3D space, for a holographic display simply displaying voxel information you would run into the problem of being able to see things that are behind other things. Hogels have extra information that tells how light passes (or does not pass) through them at different angles - solving the problem of looking at a "solid" projection yet seeing what should be covered behind it.
You mean by a book that uses the construct of time as the 4th dimension? Yeah... that's an interesting and overly convenient construct to sell books about quasi-science BS. Did they use String Theory as an excuse for things in there as well?
There are actual 4D geometric constructs, but they must be displayed in 3D space so they are extremely hard to comprehend. If you search around you can find 3D Rubiks cubes and games that do things like expand on 3D affine matrices to show 4D spacial movement in 3D. Playing these games will deepen your understanding of 4D by giving you an intense headache.
I assume you are taking about things like poor integration of the NetworkManager in KDE - and you're correct. If the same thing start to happen where they have a good Unity version and a crummy GNOME version of things it's back to Debian for me.
I was of the exact opinion as you until a day ago. Since I upgraded to to Ubuntu 11.10 I got stuck with GNOME3 (sorry, I still hate Unity) and I had a variety of issues - but many I found could be resolved in very interesting ways. Lack of a lower task-bar for example, you can use tint2 or a dock like Avant Window Manager - and the bar that comes out when you hit the bottom right of the screen already has plug-ins and modifications to make it work like a taskbar. Multi-monitor behavior bugged me as well until I learned you can change it, but I actually got hooked on the default behavior. In general my hands leave the keyboard much less now as well - alt-tab switching with that drop down selector is very intuitive and the search/launch is much nicer and more idiot proof than alt-f2 or continually opening terminals. Then today I was giving a demo to some prospective customers (dirty mac users!) and they pointed out how nice they thought it was.
I really really understand the feeling of loss and confusion over GNOME3 vs 2, I do miss my old desktop - but with just a few customization options (that look like they will come in future releases) I think I'll stick it out and enjoy the new.
By the way, rough calculation we've been using GNOME now for something like 12 years. Really up until now the biggest change was moving to the upper and lower bar by default (which I love(d)), that and ditching the stone texture on the icons...
Yeah, read slide #26, 27, 28 - note how they basically point out Ruby deals with real world situations pretty damn nimbly. Just because you don't understand how the Ruby Unicode system works doesn't mean it's bad. The comment about "han unification" in the slides is proof whoever wrote those slides has idealogical issues that totally don't take into account the reality - probably because he doesn't deal with CJK and thusly doesn't understand its necessity. As someone who deals with multi-locale Ruby code (including CJK) almost every day I can tell you right now it works very well and I have never encountered any real problems in practical implementations. Of course if you want to whine about capital and lower case handling in CJK the go ahead... BECAUSE WE DON'T EVEN HAVE CASES and you shouldn't be wasting space or reducing compatibility by encoding ASCII capable fragments in U32.
Now if you want to make the argument that Perl handling of Unicode is superior then go ahead, it's not like I or the majority of the coding world even care about Perl anymore. And unlike Ruby, Perl is a text oriented language so we could only hope it can handle it better.
Rails 3.1 is just coming out and offers some really, really nice features. Rails use is becoming more and more wide spread, and there are even hosts and cloud services that focus on it specifically (EG; Heroku).
Sounds like you haven't touched Rails in 10 years. It handles unicode extremely well now, arguably better than any other framework out there, and even has an extended set of localization options that are way more accessible than probably anything else. As for your other arguments: 1. Monkey patching is dangerous in any language - luckily with modern Rails there is significantly less need for it and it's generally discouraged 2. ?? Sounds like you were doing something wrong 3. You don't understand what the C in MVC means, do you?
In the case of the iPad, one of the primary uses is to impress people^h^h^h^h^h^h women who don't bathe and dress in dirty vintage clothing yet pay $8 for crappy coffee from across the room^h^h^h^h independent, organic free-trade coffee shop.
So, yes, 10 feet is the usual using distance.
Yeah, but in those cases the other people usually see the side or back of the device, which are clearly different on the Samsung and Apple products. So this "tell the fronts apart from 10 feet" is clearly bogus.
If I buy the Samsung do I get to have these types of people avoid me? Like some sort of technological hipster repellent? If so I'll take the Samsung.
And now the Japanese say the same things about American products...
I'm not talking about the past or the future, I'm talking about now. And now Huwei makes absolute crap. If they constantly have that pointed out to them then at some point perhaps they'll get their act together and make things that are good, until then they're crap.
I've dealt with Huwei wireless gear on and off and have constantly found it to be absolutely awful. That is unless you expect things like 3G data adapters to tweak out after 5 minutes because they overheat or IP Phone boxes that drop connections like it's a sport. Seriously, I'd trust tin cans and string with my life before a Huwei product.
As for core capability it looks like Siri is slightly superior (voice intonations change) but as for core functionality the systems look to be about the same. The Android voice API is very accessible, and you can already to things like use it for a launcher and dialer. The API is also easy to use, so I'd expect Siri like integration in many apps is not far off.
And claiming a technology is far superior because you watched a commercial about it is a pretty stupid thing to do - all the Siri videos I've seen so far have been in the "ideal" environments and conditions and don't show it failing ever. Unless you can give an actual real life comparison of Siri VS Android Voice performance you're just as ignorant, though perhaps more susceptible to marketing.
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Oh I'm sure there are terminals with alpha on OSX, but I'm not interested in using it long enough to try and find one and the default OSX terminal just looks atrocious to me.
As for the mouse, I believe you are talking about exactly the same thing as me: sloppy focus (without auto-raise).
I could actually go on, for instance I hate XCode, library management on OSX is "clean" but also "incompatible and extremely impractical", package management is (or was?) a mess, and on and on. Of course this is from someone who's been using a variety of *nix distributions [primarily Debian or Debian based] for the last 15 years, so to me OSX just seems too artificial and dumbed down with a variety of unexplainable design quirks. So to me OSX is like having to work with mittens on and I only get a set of shiny plastic toys, while Linux would be the bare handed metal-tool equivalent.
Well what Japan did was they basically reduced prices by absorbing a lot of the production costs through interest free loans, which were given through banks and in turn approved by the government. That's another way of saying the Japanese government gave money to companies to produce superior products and cheaper prices than their competitors could in a "fair" market. For example each roll of Fujifilm film was cheaper than Kodak yet the film grade was higher. Why do this? Well, Kodak almost went bankrupt and that would have left Fujifilm the only real film supplier in the world, with a trusted name and a global following of people who equate film to Fujifilm as tissues are to Kleenex. From that point the price would increase, but even rising up to the price Kodak was running at they would have close to 100% of the market so profits would have been guaranteed.
Thing is Kodak complained, as did a lot of other companies that were being crushed, and then all the sudden the Japanese were doing something "unfair". Weather or not it's really unfair to do that is sort of a funny issue - the government is basically backing loans with tax money, making a bet that they can push their national industries into absolute and controlling positions in the global market and thusly gaining a greater sum economic return. That's pretty risky and pretty dynamic, but had foreign governments not stepped in a bitched about it it would have worked and nobody would remember the companies Kodak et.all ever existed.
China on the other hand is doing something a bit different. In the case of solar panels for example they are restricting exports of vital production materials while washing the prices down for national producers. They may well be able to pull it off as well - even if global governments bitch and scream and make up new rules China still has a lot of options on the table to drive down prices and their economy is so massive and so based on nonsense bullshit, not to mention they're not afraid of turning the rich among their population into dirt farmers, that they will make any move they feel necessary with little hesitation.
That's your opinion. I hate window behavior in OSX, I hate the dock, I hate the menus being at the top of the screen instead of in the windows, and I hate the pager/multiplexer system, I prefer sloppy focus and I love semi-transparent terminals. While I still prefer GNOME 2 I'd take GNOME 3 Shell any day over OSX.
They have Geiger Counters at most government facilities now and will come and check areas of concern. Out of curiosity I went to a nearby civic center and had my cars air filter checked out after I drove through Fukushima (on the Touhoku expressway) and it didn't read higher than normal. Then a week ago there were concerns over mushrooms from the area and my wife had some checked out. It's not just government facilities offering the service - depending on where you are community centers and other groups, supermarkets, and even a few taxi services have counters. In Tokyo independent groups have been regularly checking parks, gutters, etc. but they've not yet found any dangerous levels of radiation within Tokyo.
Otherwise they have basic detectors at many major electronics stores - they won't give you finite readings but an alarm will go off if the radiation level is too high. It's one of those alarms that detected the jar of material in Setagaya-ku - which by the way was not related to the reactor, it was a jar of radioactive powder that had been used as "medicine" in the 40's/50's.
Maybe you should read the news or check the facts before panicking and asking stupid questions on Slashdot.
"gnome 3 helps you do things faster, maybe not find your stuff faster" - very well put. The thing is if they just added the ability to add bars like in GNOME 2 then adding a task bar would be native and easy, and if they allowed for the top bar to be customized then they would have all the functionality of GNOME 2 + all the new functionality. And as you stated the new functionality does allow a lot of things to go much faster and smoother - hitting the super key (windows key) gives immediate access to a lot of functionality and ever since getting used to it I have noticed I can do a lot of things much faster than before.
It's stupid of the GNOME team to get pissed about the dock because docks/taskbars are the exact feature GNOME 3 (shell) is missing that most of the users know they need. If they don't add something native I expect many people won't stick around.
I always used Debian for ARM, but a lot of people liked Angstrom. This was before the whole "tablet" and "multi-touch" craze started. The thing is now that all these tablets are available and so cheap I'd question why you wouldn't just modify a tablet?
At this point reverting back to GNOME 2 would be more effort than continuing to use GNOME 3.
I personally just don't like the behavior/feel of docks. Call me antique but I like the "taskbar" and separate "system tray" designs. I also hate having empty nothing space on the left and right sides of a dock, whereas empty space on a taskbar doesn't bother me so much. Having tasks lumped together also bugs the crap out of me especially when there's plenty of free space.
Yes. No. Yes. Yes.
As it is now GNOME 2 had more shortcut keys, many shortcuts are not yet implemented in GNOME 3. The case here is that the shortcut behavior in GNOME 3 is different and in some ways quite impressively so. alt-tab for example shows you all running applications in groups, use tab or the arrow keys to select, hit down and get all the windows in that group and you can select from them all with thumb-nailed previews. Of course I'm told this was basically stolen from a Compiz plug-in, so giving credit for it to GNOME 3 is probably unfair.
Excellent points. ... but I will not use a dock.
GNOME 2 had much better mouse settings, though not specifically for synaptics I don't think. I don't think these settings are gone in GNOME 3 there just isn't a settings tool for them, so you need to do it in gconf probably.
Actually declaring # encoding: UTF-8 does not assume external libraries are in UTF-8, Ruby handles that pretty well and that's likely because a lot of older Ruby code was written with Shift-JIS. To be honest I've only dealt with non-UTF-8 encodings in Shift-JIS so maybe it only handles those, but I can tell you it works fine and give you a working sample to prove it.
"I wish Ruby wasn't written by a Japanese guy - we wouldn't even have to argue about this by now if it were different..." - I don't even know how to take that. Seriously.
"If it breaks for some Japanese people because they have some stupid religious objection to Unicode" - it doesn't break it, it works very very well and is a very practical real world implementation. But "practical" and "real world" mean engl-euro centric non CJK people want to do things like use a base "n" character and put "~" on top of it with an extended character and make every character 32bit instead of actually being sane and just using efficient standards like UTF-8.
If I'm not mistaken one of the reasons for UTF-8 was Japanese specifically, and han unicode is completely centered around CJK and UTF-8 is essentially an implementation of it. Furthermore, UTF-8 is on everything now, it's proven efficient and it works fantastically in Ruby in real life situations - I honestly don't care if I can't check to see if a Kanji is "capitalized" and get "non-standard" behavior because that's a nonsense operation which should give you an error just like it does in Ruby. If that bugs anyone then go ahead and patch it - Ruby is an open language.
Voxel is a pixel in a mapped 3D space, for a holographic display simply displaying voxel information you would run into the problem of being able to see things that are behind other things. Hogels have extra information that tells how light passes (or does not pass) through them at different angles - solving the problem of looking at a "solid" projection yet seeing what should be covered behind it.
You mean by a book that uses the construct of time as the 4th dimension? Yeah... that's an interesting and overly convenient construct to sell books about quasi-science BS. Did they use String Theory as an excuse for things in there as well?
There are actual 4D geometric constructs, but they must be displayed in 3D space so they are extremely hard to comprehend. If you search around you can find 3D Rubiks cubes and games that do things like expand on 3D affine matrices to show 4D spacial movement in 3D. Playing these games will deepen your understanding of 4D by giving you an intense headache.
I assume you are taking about things like poor integration of the NetworkManager in KDE - and you're correct. If the same thing start to happen where they have a good Unity version and a crummy GNOME version of things it's back to Debian for me.
I was of the exact opinion as you until a day ago. Since I upgraded to to Ubuntu 11.10 I got stuck with GNOME3 (sorry, I still hate Unity) and I had a variety of issues - but many I found could be resolved in very interesting ways. Lack of a lower task-bar for example, you can use tint2 or a dock like Avant Window Manager - and the bar that comes out when you hit the bottom right of the screen already has plug-ins and modifications to make it work like a taskbar. Multi-monitor behavior bugged me as well until I learned you can change it, but I actually got hooked on the default behavior. In general my hands leave the keyboard much less now as well - alt-tab switching with that drop down selector is very intuitive and the search/launch is much nicer and more idiot proof than alt-f2 or continually opening terminals. Then today I was giving a demo to some prospective customers (dirty mac users!) and they pointed out how nice they thought it was.
I really really understand the feeling of loss and confusion over GNOME3 vs 2, I do miss my old desktop - but with just a few customization options (that look like they will come in future releases) I think I'll stick it out and enjoy the new.
By the way, rough calculation we've been using GNOME now for something like 12 years. Really up until now the biggest change was moving to the upper and lower bar by default (which I love(d)), that and ditching the stone texture on the icons...
Yeah, read slide #26, 27, 28 - note how they basically point out Ruby deals with real world situations pretty damn nimbly. Just because you don't understand how the Ruby Unicode system works doesn't mean it's bad. The comment about "han unification" in the slides is proof whoever wrote those slides has idealogical issues that totally don't take into account the reality - probably because he doesn't deal with CJK and thusly doesn't understand its necessity. As someone who deals with multi-locale Ruby code (including CJK) almost every day I can tell you right now it works very well and I have never encountered any real problems in practical implementations. Of course if you want to whine about capital and lower case handling in CJK the go ahead... BECAUSE WE DON'T EVEN HAVE CASES and you shouldn't be wasting space or reducing compatibility by encoding ASCII capable fragments in U32.
Now if you want to make the argument that Perl handling of Unicode is superior then go ahead, it's not like I or the majority of the coding world even care about Perl anymore. And unlike Ruby, Perl is a text oriented language so we could only hope it can handle it better.
Rails 3.1 is just coming out and offers some really, really nice features. Rails use is becoming more and more wide spread, and there are even hosts and cloud services that focus on it specifically (EG; Heroku).
Sounds like you haven't touched Rails in 10 years. It handles unicode extremely well now, arguably better than any other framework out there, and even has an extended set of localization options that are way more accessible than probably anything else. As for your other arguments:
1. Monkey patching is dangerous in any language - luckily with modern Rails there is significantly less need for it and it's generally discouraged
2. ?? Sounds like you were doing something wrong
3. You don't understand what the C in MVC means, do you?
In the case of the iPad, one of the primary uses is to impress people^h^h^h^h^h^h women who don't bathe and dress in dirty vintage clothing yet pay $8 for crappy coffee from across the room^h^h^h^h independent, organic free-trade coffee shop.
So, yes, 10 feet is the usual using distance.
Yeah, but in those cases the other people usually see the side or back of the device, which are clearly different on the Samsung and Apple products. So this "tell the fronts apart from 10 feet" is clearly bogus.
If I buy the Samsung do I get to have these types of people avoid me? Like some sort of technological hipster repellent? If so I'll take the Samsung.
And now the Japanese say the same things about American products...
I'm not talking about the past or the future, I'm talking about now. And now Huwei makes absolute crap. If they constantly have that pointed out to them then at some point perhaps they'll get their act together and make things that are good, until then they're crap.
I've dealt with Huwei wireless gear on and off and have constantly found it to be absolutely awful. That is unless you expect things like 3G data adapters to tweak out after 5 minutes because they overheat or IP Phone boxes that drop connections like it's a sport. Seriously, I'd trust tin cans and string with my life before a Huwei product.
As for core capability it looks like Siri is slightly superior (voice intonations change) but as for core functionality the systems look to be about the same. The Android voice API is very accessible, and you can already to things like use it for a launcher and dialer. The API is also easy to use, so I'd expect Siri like integration in many apps is not far off.
And claiming a technology is far superior because you watched a commercial about it is a pretty stupid thing to do - all the Siri videos I've seen so far have been in the "ideal" environments and conditions and don't show it failing ever. Unless you can give an actual real life comparison of Siri VS Android Voice performance you're just as ignorant, though perhaps more susceptible to marketing.