Not a kludge; in fact, smart design. Those MFPs are modular. A module breaks down, plug it off, the rest works, albeit without that specific function (e.g. stapler).
It is a lot simpler than that. Last month I turned on my laptop's WiFi while replicating some troubleshooting steps and it popped saying it found 3 Wifi networks, not the usual 2 company-provided, password-protected ones. Turned out someone brought a router inside, plugged it in and used it for God-knows-what, then left it there, turned ON. Free WiFi for everyone!
This was a HUGE security breach, process breach, you-name-it breach. The guy was canned afterwards, but that's not the issue. What's funny is that pretty much all companies' buildings in that area have at least one unprotected WiFi network, freely accessible from any device. No username or password required.
You want to browse through most of the Top50 companies' "secured" networks? You got it. Sometimes I wonder where are all the damn hackers...
I beg to differ.
There's a wide array of free Data Visualization tools available, which can be used even by non-technical people to build nice looking reports and extract interesting data out of raw stuff. Tableau Public (http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/) is one of them, I used it extensively to understand many datasets - it's free and gets the job done with simplicity.
The problem resides somewhere else: The datasets are spread in a gazillion files, don't have an unified format, require a lot of work to download (each one is on separate pages/links, etc.), some are gathered together in weird formats (someone above mentioned read-only PDFs as an example; I've seen scanned TIFs, BMPs, you name it!) and so on.
I personally prefer large datasets with many columns which I can then filter the way aI want using either Tableau Public or more advanced data visualization tools (Miner3D, Oracle CRM On Demand Analytics, etc.) - as long as the data format is unified across the scale.
I think the next step in ensuring the data is as readable as possible would be to make governments unify data and present it in the same easily readable format. I'm sure there's a lot of people willing to analyze the data for free (myself included, although I am not from UK or US):)
I encourage Corporate IM. Faster than e-mail, can't become a huge e-mail chain with half the company CC'd and limits people to communicating only what's relevant (due to laziness, of course).
I work for a fairly large corporation. If you call somebody, you will usually reach their voicemail (everyone is given a VoIP phone number and a voicemail by default). They will only answer if they owe you a lot or if they are in a VERY good mood in that moment. But IM... that's something else.
Our corporate IM knows when you have a meeting in Calendar and automatically puts your account in DND mode (regardless how you manually set your client). One can still write IMs to you, but they'll pop up after your meeting ends. If you lock your machine, you're automatically being set to away. After business hours (which you define in the system), it automatically sets you to Extended Away (if your machine is locked). So I have a very good chance to know if someone's free, in a meeting, away or gone home.
E-mail is to be used for meaningful communications addressed to groups of people who are interested due to their job specifics. That part is fulfilled by mailing lists. The e-mail source can be either an individual or a generic e-mail address, created for specific purposes (corporate comms, local comms, LOB comms, office comms, floor comms, etc.).
One of the biggest problems I see after looking at how my colleagues manage their e-mail is the lack of rules. EVERYTHING comes to their Inbox, they never have time to clean it up, guess what happens. Information Rage at its best. "But-but-but I have a gazillion e-mails in my Inbox!". Yes, of you're a dumbass who can't set up a mail rule, you deserve it. I offered to help out many people with setting up rules, they said "I don't have time for this". Well guess what, you make up those 2 hours spent on creating rules in 2 days worth of e-mails.
I have 147 e-mail rules now and I add a couple every week or so. They are split into two types: local rules and server rules; server rules prevail, because I use multiple clients in multiple locations. Anything that doesn't fit a rule comes into my Inbox for review. Everything else comes in its own specific mail folder. Once a month I move old mails to a Local Folder which I back up.
Profit!
The results are impressive (to my management chain and colleagues at least). I can pull up any message, no matter how old, in a matter of minutes (and I have 8+ GB of it after 3.5 years of work) and follow up on it if needed. I can cover my ass anytime by pulling out a sent e-mail if someone asks why didn't this happen (and usually it's their fault, and this way I can prove that to them). The e-mails are well indexed, with priorities and so on.
You want a summary from 2 years ago telling this story about that team in those locations? Give me 5 minutes and I produce a dozen e-mails about it. No headaches, no rage, no "can't".
Took me days to set up this system, indeed, but it paid its value many times over since then.
Agreed. Depends what you mean by Hardcore. I mean exactly what it's supposed to mean for someone who has English as second language. My "core" is of a true gamer. Leftovers since I was 16, perhaps. Now the wrapping doesn't help anymore, so only the core remained hard:)
I'm what should be called "hardcore casual gamer". Sounds weird? Not quite: I play lots of games; most of them on easiest difficulty setting. I'll tell you why in a second.
My philosophy is fairly simple: I buy a game, therefore I own it (albeit the EULA saying that it's only rented/licensed/leased to you, blah-blah). Bottom line is I can play it however I want. So... that's what I do.
I know my limits. Aged 31 and working 'till 2 AM every night, I know that my reflexes aren't that good; my patience runs short; and I want to have fun. For me, fun is when you cruise through a game without wasting an insane amount of energy and frustration to advance. So in order to obtain that fun, I set the difficulty level to the lowest possible. I also try to grab all games which offer a rich sandbox mode. Examples: Prototype, Just Cause 2, Assassin's Creed, GTA 3, 4, The Saboteur, etc.
Metagaming and immersion is a lot more important than mindlessly following the main storyline through corridors from A to Z. I usually ignore the main storyline whenever I can and only follow it when I want to change something. I had endless hours of fun in Just Cause 2 (played for almost 100 hours of game time so far) and it's still fun to do stuff in there. Same for GTA 4. Same for Prototype. I just wish there were more games like these out there on the market.
One sandbox-type game that I did NOT like is Spore, because you always are summoned to do this and that and have to go there and do it, otherwise bad things happen. Ugly and unrewarding. Another bad sandbox game is Mafia 2: nothing to do except roam around in a car. Boring.
As for Multiplayer: I enjoy co-op PvE games (such as Serious Sam), but I dislike PvP. My aggressiveness is around -7 on a scale from 1 to 10; combined with my bad gaming skills and my unwillingness to improve (call me lazy, I don't care) makes for a bad set of prerequisites for PvP.
MMOs: I play browser-based MMOs, which are fun; OGame was one of the more interesting ones, up to a point when everything sort of got stuck (some sort of "endgame" where the server had too few people to make anything a challenge). I also play EVE Online, but lately it became to aggressive on all levels to be enjoyable. Everybody seems to fight everybody else for no apparent reason.
One more thing about pretty much all MMOs I have played: the trolls, jerks and pubeless snoogans vastly outnumber all other types of players, thus poisoning the gamevironment. Yes, even EVE Online is invaded by such archetypes, polluting forums, chatrooms, etc. I had hoped the complexity of the game would drive them off; sadly, it's not the case.
Well, anyway, staying on topic: I have no problem with dumbed down games. What I have a problem with are:
- games which cheat. A good example would be racing games where everybody is 1 lap behind in the last lap, and all of a sudden you are ranked 6th.
- inconsistent game difficulty. An example is the bloody ninja rope trial in Worms: Reloaded. I cruised through most levels (with few exceptions) but got stuck on that stupid level for the last 2 months or so. Epic Fail from the producer. Not to mention the ninja rope's mechanics is completely different from all other Worms games.
- Bad ports from consoles. No further comment here...
All in all, so what if the main storyline ends in 3 hours? Good, now we can concentrate on having fun in the sandbox mode:)
OK, managed to squeeze out a nice piece of dialogue:
[ Af:-2 At:-8 Sp:0] Let's try this topic. Do you like guys
war4peace - NO! Jesus! I'm a dude!
[ Af:-3 At:-9 Sp:0] Are you a man?
war4peace - Yeah
[ Af:-3 At:-10 Sp:0] Then I guess we needn't talk about men anymore.
war4peace - Agreed
[ Af:-2 At:-10 Sp:0] My ideal guy is smart, sexy, rich, lean, and well-read, with a great sense of humor and romance.
war4peace - But you just said...
[ Af:-2 At:-10 Sp:0] What was said in the past is irrelevant.
war4peace - Genius:)
Seems it stops unexpectedy after 3 lines.
Hi war4peace !
[ Af:0 At:7 Sp:0] Welcome, war4peace. Type "help" if you need it.
war4peace - 'ello
[ Af:0 At:8 Sp:0] Good afternoon.
war4peace - 00:35 here, not so afternoon I think
[ Af:0 At:8 Sp:0] Right. Moving on. What time-wasting activities do you resent the most?
war4peace - Uh, not sure. Chatting with bots, I'd say.
[ Af:0 At:9 Sp:0] So why are you here?
war4peace - Because your creator posted something about you on Slashdot.
Well what can I say... lately, Slashdot is full of Apple News. And as much as I like Slashdot's uniqueness, this Apple fanboism flood of news kind of makes me puke. Enough is enough, already.
Your sig aside, isn't that what Canonical was supposed to do? Has done really? That's the problem, when you get down to it. Canonical has done everything right. Ubuntu is easy to install, easy to configure, easy to patch, has about as good of driver support as is reasonably possible given manufacturer reluctance, its package management system is extensive and has a nice front end... There's nothing at all that Canonical did *wrong* to make a great Desktop OS, people just aren't interested.
Let's see. Apps hang for no reason and no visual feedback of some sort; cryptic error messages appear 3 times an hour;
Java doesn't work properly;
Flash needs Terminal stuff to work under Firefox;
Audacious always stutters when playing pretty much any radio stream (and no, it's not a bandwidth issue or resource issue);
Ubuntu One doesn't work (on one machine it works, on the other errors out at login);
"global" proxy settings are not carried over to all programs (notably Synaptics Package Manager);
some Compiz effects work flawlessly (window resize, fade, snap), others mess up horribly (Rain Effect mangles the screen like there's no tomorrow);
Ubuntu Software Center installations randomly hang forever while installing, can't be canceled and after restart the whole thing doesn't work anymore;
Java-based form applications start, hang and after that no buttons ever work (not even Shutdown, restart - I had to reset my machine);
minimize, maximize and close buttons are now on the left side of the window (I know they can be reconfigured, but speaking from an Average Joe's point of view, it sucks);
some games don't work properly (e.g. Pacman doesn't refresh the window);
countless clicks not being recognized by the system (you click but nothing happens; you click again and it works);
mouse scroll button works when it wants, randomly stops working, then starts again;
different machines yield totally different OS experience; a VM installation acts completely different from a Desktop installation, and I don't mean performance (the only difference is 3D Acceleration missing on the VM);
VMWare VM Bridged network ceased working under Ubuntu after a shutdown; I had to switch to NAS to make it work; all other VMs work with bridged LAN settings;
All those after 3 days of using Ubuntu. And yes, I am interested, I badly want to switch, mainly because I want Linux-based OS to succeed; I want Microsoft to have competition; I want Apple to have competition. But right now... the added level of frustration caused by the OS's inconsistency in behavior has yet again left me with a bitter taste. I still have both instances running and slowly make my way through kludging them here and there until I get fed up with it. But let me reiterate this: right now, Desktop Linux experience is still way behind what both Windows and MacOS offer.
Funny you should say that...
Back in the days I was trying to get accustomed with... gentoo (yeah I know, horrible learning curve and all that, but I was brave). It all went to shit after I joined several LUG discussion lists and started asking questions. I know I was a noob and maybe my expectations were high on the help I could've received, but between "RTFM", "you dumb shit" and continuous never ending everyone-arguing-with-everyone-else story, I kind of gave up in disgust.
I think the community's attitude and willingness to help newbies counts more than the OS itself. The OS might have a gazillion issues, but if the community is great and helpful, people will trust there's someone out there ready to help them resolve whatever popped up. Then again, the OS might be great, but with weird and shady support methods (yeah, tons of documentations but people don't know where to look in the first place) there's not going to be a large amount of people switching.
You know, this is funny. I installed Ubuntu 10.10 on a virtual machine at home and liked it so much that I also installed it on my desktop at work. Despite some issues with basic configuration (that damn Java thing still ain't working right!), it seems to be working pretty fine.
What I think might drive new users away is the enormous amount of "small issues" which are not critical but lead to dangerous frustration buildups. Examples:
- streamtuner + Audacious combination is unreliable; upon testing radio stations, most of them heavily skip if I do something else on the machine (dual core, 2 gigs of RAM) - NOT an issue if using the same radio stations from Windows. Also, more than once I have seen Audacious hang when changing radio stations.
- screenshot feast: print screen works fine, but when trying to copy a screenshot to clipboard and paste in Gimp, Gimp says there's no image in the clipboard. No shit. Then why I can copy from Ubuntu and paste the image to Windows 7 (when running Ubuntu off a VM)?
- At one point, I inadvertedly pressed ctrl+r in the Ubuntu VM (honestly, didn't know where the focus was) - managed to somehow restart the whole VM (no questions asked or warnings displayed).
- Ubuntu Software Center managed to mangle an application installation (never finished even after 2h of waiting, no error displayed) - so badly that it wouldn't install anything anymore, also Synaptic Package Manager was erroring out at start, saying dpkg was somehow messed up. I followed some Internet tutorial and got it fixed, point is it shouldn't have behaved this way.
All in all, an interesting experience (I have a lot of fun with Compiz), but plagued with small inconsistencies that slowly pile up, up to the point where one would say "wtf is this shit, I'm tired of it!". Just sayin'...
And no, I am not yet tired of it:)
You know what's insightful on that map? You see white spots. And then map those over real countries. Bang! There's North Korea, the most internet-free, Microsoft-free, infection-free country in the world! Also Sudan and Iran. Interesting...
I mean, was there any shadow of doubt? It's a request for a service which Google can provide, but is not mandatory, either by law or by Google's internal rules and regulations.
I see no faux pas here. Pay enough and we will help you.
I only hope the price is sufficiently high.
I was under the same impression.
I work with data and data visualization. I prefer drill-down visualization techniques starting with a general view and extending interaction via drill-downs.
The samples presented don't tell much. The level of visualization is too granular for a general view. IMO, it+s a bunch of tangled nonsense, helping in no way. But it's "shiny" and nicely colored - so managers might like it a lot:)
Let me rephrase.
You read a news entry about "the guy who committed the crime". Never in the summary do they mention the guy's name or what crime he committed, but they emphasize on how dangerous the guy is and how horrible the crime was. Now let me know if that sort of approach doesn't, um, I don't know, miss something essential.
This is not about me being lazy and not reading the article (I did), but about the summary missing some essential information (it does).
Slashdot Mirror
Not a kludge; in fact, smart design. Those MFPs are modular. A module breaks down, plug it off, the rest works, albeit without that specific function (e.g. stapler).
I would definitely mod you informative, dear sir.
It is a lot simpler than that. Last month I turned on my laptop's WiFi while replicating some troubleshooting steps and it popped saying it found 3 Wifi networks, not the usual 2 company-provided, password-protected ones. Turned out someone brought a router inside, plugged it in and used it for God-knows-what, then left it there, turned ON. Free WiFi for everyone!
This was a HUGE security breach, process breach, you-name-it breach. The guy was canned afterwards, but that's not the issue. What's funny is that pretty much all companies' buildings in that area have at least one unprotected WiFi network, freely accessible from any device. No username or password required.
You want to browse through most of the Top50 companies' "secured" networks? You got it. Sometimes I wonder where are all the damn hackers...
I beg to differ.
:)
There's a wide array of free Data Visualization tools available, which can be used even by non-technical people to build nice looking reports and extract interesting data out of raw stuff. Tableau Public (http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/) is one of them, I used it extensively to understand many datasets - it's free and gets the job done with simplicity.
The problem resides somewhere else: The datasets are spread in a gazillion files, don't have an unified format, require a lot of work to download (each one is on separate pages/links, etc.), some are gathered together in weird formats (someone above mentioned read-only PDFs as an example; I've seen scanned TIFs, BMPs, you name it!) and so on.
I personally prefer large datasets with many columns which I can then filter the way aI want using either Tableau Public or more advanced data visualization tools (Miner3D, Oracle CRM On Demand Analytics, etc.) - as long as the data format is unified across the scale.
I think the next step in ensuring the data is as readable as possible would be to make governments unify data and present it in the same easily readable format. I'm sure there's a lot of people willing to analyze the data for free (myself included, although I am not from UK or US)
I encourage Corporate IM. Faster than e-mail, can't become a huge e-mail chain with half the company CC'd and limits people to communicating only what's relevant (due to laziness, of course).
I work for a fairly large corporation. If you call somebody, you will usually reach their voicemail (everyone is given a VoIP phone number and a voicemail by default). They will only answer if they owe you a lot or if they are in a VERY good mood in that moment. But IM... that's something else.
Our corporate IM knows when you have a meeting in Calendar and automatically puts your account in DND mode (regardless how you manually set your client). One can still write IMs to you, but they'll pop up after your meeting ends. If you lock your machine, you're automatically being set to away. After business hours (which you define in the system), it automatically sets you to Extended Away (if your machine is locked). So I have a very good chance to know if someone's free, in a meeting, away or gone home.
E-mail is to be used for meaningful communications addressed to groups of people who are interested due to their job specifics. That part is fulfilled by mailing lists. The e-mail source can be either an individual or a generic e-mail address, created for specific purposes (corporate comms, local comms, LOB comms, office comms, floor comms, etc.).
One of the biggest problems I see after looking at how my colleagues manage their e-mail is the lack of rules. EVERYTHING comes to their Inbox, they never have time to clean it up, guess what happens. Information Rage at its best. "But-but-but I have a gazillion e-mails in my Inbox!". Yes, of you're a dumbass who can't set up a mail rule, you deserve it. I offered to help out many people with setting up rules, they said "I don't have time for this". Well guess what, you make up those 2 hours spent on creating rules in 2 days worth of e-mails.
I have 147 e-mail rules now and I add a couple every week or so. They are split into two types: local rules and server rules; server rules prevail, because I use multiple clients in multiple locations. Anything that doesn't fit a rule comes into my Inbox for review. Everything else comes in its own specific mail folder. Once a month I move old mails to a Local Folder which I back up.
Profit!
The results are impressive (to my management chain and colleagues at least). I can pull up any message, no matter how old, in a matter of minutes (and I have 8+ GB of it after 3.5 years of work) and follow up on it if needed. I can cover my ass anytime by pulling out a sent e-mail if someone asks why didn't this happen (and usually it's their fault, and this way I can prove that to them). The e-mails are well indexed, with priorities and so on.
You want a summary from 2 years ago telling this story about that team in those locations? Give me 5 minutes and I produce a dozen e-mails about it. No headaches, no rage, no "can't".
Took me days to set up this system, indeed, but it paid its value many times over since then.
If you can't distinguish between the two, why would you be a manager?
Agreed. Depends what you mean by Hardcore. I mean exactly what it's supposed to mean for someone who has English as second language. My "core" is of a true gamer. Leftovers since I was 16, perhaps. Now the wrapping doesn't help anymore, so only the core remained hard :)
I'm what should be called "hardcore casual gamer". Sounds weird? Not quite: I play lots of games; most of them on easiest difficulty setting. I'll tell you why in a second. :)
My philosophy is fairly simple: I buy a game, therefore I own it (albeit the EULA saying that it's only rented/licensed/leased to you, blah-blah). Bottom line is I can play it however I want. So... that's what I do.
I know my limits. Aged 31 and working 'till 2 AM every night, I know that my reflexes aren't that good; my patience runs short; and I want to have fun. For me, fun is when you cruise through a game without wasting an insane amount of energy and frustration to advance. So in order to obtain that fun, I set the difficulty level to the lowest possible. I also try to grab all games which offer a rich sandbox mode. Examples: Prototype, Just Cause 2, Assassin's Creed, GTA 3, 4, The Saboteur, etc.
Metagaming and immersion is a lot more important than mindlessly following the main storyline through corridors from A to Z. I usually ignore the main storyline whenever I can and only follow it when I want to change something. I had endless hours of fun in Just Cause 2 (played for almost 100 hours of game time so far) and it's still fun to do stuff in there. Same for GTA 4. Same for Prototype. I just wish there were more games like these out there on the market.
One sandbox-type game that I did NOT like is Spore, because you always are summoned to do this and that and have to go there and do it, otherwise bad things happen. Ugly and unrewarding. Another bad sandbox game is Mafia 2: nothing to do except roam around in a car. Boring.
As for Multiplayer: I enjoy co-op PvE games (such as Serious Sam), but I dislike PvP. My aggressiveness is around -7 on a scale from 1 to 10; combined with my bad gaming skills and my unwillingness to improve (call me lazy, I don't care) makes for a bad set of prerequisites for PvP.
MMOs: I play browser-based MMOs, which are fun; OGame was one of the more interesting ones, up to a point when everything sort of got stuck (some sort of "endgame" where the server had too few people to make anything a challenge). I also play EVE Online, but lately it became to aggressive on all levels to be enjoyable. Everybody seems to fight everybody else for no apparent reason.
One more thing about pretty much all MMOs I have played: the trolls, jerks and pubeless snoogans vastly outnumber all other types of players, thus poisoning the gamevironment. Yes, even EVE Online is invaded by such archetypes, polluting forums, chatrooms, etc. I had hoped the complexity of the game would drive them off; sadly, it's not the case.
Well, anyway, staying on topic: I have no problem with dumbed down games. What I have a problem with are:
- games which cheat. A good example would be racing games where everybody is 1 lap behind in the last lap, and all of a sudden you are ranked 6th.
- inconsistent game difficulty. An example is the bloody ninja rope trial in Worms: Reloaded. I cruised through most levels (with few exceptions) but got stuck on that stupid level for the last 2 months or so. Epic Fail from the producer. Not to mention the ninja rope's mechanics is completely different from all other Worms games.
- Bad ports from consoles. No further comment here...
All in all, so what if the main storyline ends in 3 hours? Good, now we can concentrate on having fun in the sandbox mode
What? LINUX-based system crashed??? Nooooo!!! You are a LIAR! This is... UN-possible!
Yes! Furthermore, by "But you just said..." I explicitly attempted to have the bot go crazy. Turned out to be quite the other way around!
OK, managed to squeeze out a nice piece of dialogue: :)
[ Af:-2 At:-8 Sp:0] Let's try this topic. Do you like guys
war4peace - NO! Jesus! I'm a dude!
[ Af:-3 At:-9 Sp:0] Are you a man?
war4peace - Yeah
[ Af:-3 At:-10 Sp:0] Then I guess we needn't talk about men anymore.
war4peace - Agreed
[ Af:-2 At:-10 Sp:0] My ideal guy is smart, sexy, rich, lean, and well-read, with a great sense of humor and romance.
war4peace - But you just said...
[ Af:-2 At:-10 Sp:0] What was said in the past is irrelevant.
war4peace - Genius
Seems it stops unexpectedy after 3 lines.
Hi war4peace !
[ Af:0 At:7 Sp:0] Welcome, war4peace. Type "help" if you need it.
war4peace - 'ello
[ Af:0 At:8 Sp:0] Good afternoon.
war4peace - 00:35 here, not so afternoon I think
[ Af:0 At:8 Sp:0] Right. Moving on. What time-wasting activities do you resent the most?
war4peace - Uh, not sure. Chatting with bots, I'd say.
[ Af:0 At:9 Sp:0] So why are you here?
war4peace - Because your creator posted something about you on Slashdot.
Nothing after that.
Hush! It's sleeping now!
But yeah, she doesn't answer me either.
Well what can I say... lately, Slashdot is full of Apple News. And as much as I like Slashdot's uniqueness, this Apple fanboism flood of news kind of makes me puke. Enough is enough, already.
Your sig aside, isn't that what Canonical was supposed to do? Has done really? That's the problem, when you get down to it. Canonical has done everything right. Ubuntu is easy to install, easy to configure, easy to patch, has about as good of driver support as is reasonably possible given manufacturer reluctance, its package management system is extensive and has a nice front end... There's nothing at all that Canonical did *wrong* to make a great Desktop OS, people just aren't interested.
Let's see. Apps hang for no reason and no visual feedback of some sort;
cryptic error messages appear 3 times an hour;
Java doesn't work properly;
Flash needs Terminal stuff to work under Firefox;
Audacious always stutters when playing pretty much any radio stream (and no, it's not a bandwidth issue or resource issue);
Ubuntu One doesn't work (on one machine it works, on the other errors out at login);
"global" proxy settings are not carried over to all programs (notably Synaptics Package Manager);
some Compiz effects work flawlessly (window resize, fade, snap), others mess up horribly (Rain Effect mangles the screen like there's no tomorrow);
Ubuntu Software Center installations randomly hang forever while installing, can't be canceled and after restart the whole thing doesn't work anymore;
Java-based form applications start, hang and after that no buttons ever work (not even Shutdown, restart - I had to reset my machine);
minimize, maximize and close buttons are now on the left side of the window (I know they can be reconfigured, but speaking from an Average Joe's point of view, it sucks);
some games don't work properly (e.g. Pacman doesn't refresh the window);
countless clicks not being recognized by the system (you click but nothing happens; you click again and it works);
mouse scroll button works when it wants, randomly stops working, then starts again;
different machines yield totally different OS experience; a VM installation acts completely different from a Desktop installation, and I don't mean performance (the only difference is 3D Acceleration missing on the VM);
VMWare VM Bridged network ceased working under Ubuntu after a shutdown; I had to switch to NAS to make it work; all other VMs work with bridged LAN settings;
All those after 3 days of using Ubuntu. And yes, I am interested, I badly want to switch, mainly because I want Linux-based OS to succeed; I want Microsoft to have competition; I want Apple to have competition. But right now... the added level of frustration caused by the OS's inconsistency in behavior has yet again left me with a bitter taste. I still have both instances running and slowly make my way through kludging them here and there until I get fed up with it. But let me reiterate this: right now, Desktop Linux experience is still way behind what both Windows and MacOS offer.
Funny you should say that...
Back in the days I was trying to get accustomed with... gentoo (yeah I know, horrible learning curve and all that, but I was brave). It all went to shit after I joined several LUG discussion lists and started asking questions. I know I was a noob and maybe my expectations were high on the help I could've received, but between "RTFM", "you dumb shit" and continuous never ending everyone-arguing-with-everyone-else story, I kind of gave up in disgust.
I think the community's attitude and willingness to help newbies counts more than the OS itself. The OS might have a gazillion issues, but if the community is great and helpful, people will trust there's someone out there ready to help them resolve whatever popped up. Then again, the OS might be great, but with weird and shady support methods (yeah, tons of documentations but people don't know where to look in the first place) there's not going to be a large amount of people switching.
You know, this is funny. I installed Ubuntu 10.10 on a virtual machine at home and liked it so much that I also installed it on my desktop at work. Despite some issues with basic configuration (that damn Java thing still ain't working right!), it seems to be working pretty fine. :)
What I think might drive new users away is the enormous amount of "small issues" which are not critical but lead to dangerous frustration buildups. Examples:
- streamtuner + Audacious combination is unreliable; upon testing radio stations, most of them heavily skip if I do something else on the machine (dual core, 2 gigs of RAM) - NOT an issue if using the same radio stations from Windows. Also, more than once I have seen Audacious hang when changing radio stations. - screenshot feast: print screen works fine, but when trying to copy a screenshot to clipboard and paste in Gimp, Gimp says there's no image in the clipboard. No shit. Then why I can copy from Ubuntu and paste the image to Windows 7 (when running Ubuntu off a VM)?
- At one point, I inadvertedly pressed ctrl+r in the Ubuntu VM (honestly, didn't know where the focus was) - managed to somehow restart the whole VM (no questions asked or warnings displayed).
- Ubuntu Software Center managed to mangle an application installation (never finished even after 2h of waiting, no error displayed) - so badly that it wouldn't install anything anymore, also Synaptic Package Manager was erroring out at start, saying dpkg was somehow messed up. I followed some Internet tutorial and got it fixed, point is it shouldn't have behaved this way.
All in all, an interesting experience (I have a lot of fun with Compiz), but plagued with small inconsistencies that slowly pile up, up to the point where one would say "wtf is this shit, I'm tired of it!". Just sayin'...
And no, I am not yet tired of it
I do that all the time when known shitty companies would call me for an interview.
You know what's insightful on that map? You see white spots. And then map those over real countries. Bang! There's North Korea, the most internet-free, Microsoft-free, infection-free country in the world! Also Sudan and Iran. Interesting...
I mean, was there any shadow of doubt? It's a request for a service which Google can provide, but is not mandatory, either by law or by Google's internal rules and regulations.
I see no faux pas here. Pay enough and we will help you.
I only hope the price is sufficiently high.
Although I admit, to my shame, that I never heard of Jacques Barzun before... yes, that's what I am trying to say.
It's Dymdym, which is the new and improved measurement for common nonsense, such as in TFA.
Everybody is wrong. The date is 10. Seize the day! Who cares about the rest?
I was under the same impression. :)
I work with data and data visualization. I prefer drill-down visualization techniques starting with a general view and extending interaction via drill-downs.
The samples presented don't tell much. The level of visualization is too granular for a general view. IMO, it+s a bunch of tangled nonsense, helping in no way. But it's "shiny" and nicely colored - so managers might like it a lot
Let me rephrase.
You read a news entry about "the guy who committed the crime". Never in the summary do they mention the guy's name or what crime he committed, but they emphasize on how dangerous the guy is and how horrible the crime was. Now let me know if that sort of approach doesn't, um, I don't know, miss something essential.
This is not about me being lazy and not reading the article (I did), but about the summary missing some essential information (it does).