It's been around 10 or 11 years now since I stopped watching TV. The ridiculous monthly costs combined with the facts that 2/3 of the channels are uninteresting and those that are are filled with up to 40% commercial time, I just thought to myself one day "Why am I paying for this?"
Since canceling my cable, I chose to watch shows that I was interested in by on-line streaming or by just getting the DVDs, and that's worked out great so far. The added perk is that I'm not exposed to ANY commercials at all. The big Telco's have got to come to the realization sooner or later that embracing the more modern ways of media distribution is a lot more profitable and beneficial than constantly opposing them. They seem to forget that it is the consumer than "wants" the shows, and their job to deliver what the consumer wants, not what they think the consumer wants.
If they don't step into the 21st century soon, more and more folks are just going to do what I did and stop giving them any money at all. Personally... I think it was one of the best things I've ever done; I haven't a clue where I'd find time to sit in front of a TV nowadays.
I don't really get this one myself. I see it a lot in the Niagara region of Ontario; farmers absolutely opposed to wind turbines as well as solar farms. They state a number of baseless reasons as mentioned above like - my favourite being health concerns. Do they think they're radioactive or something? Or that they put out electromagnetic interference akin to a neutron star? Or that the Solar farms take up valuable farm land (currently sitting unused).
Any technology has its downsides - green energy is not 100% green, nor is it any cheaper than the old-school methods of power generation - that at least is cold hard fact. What these folks don't seem to understand is that this the inevitable future. As fossil-fuel-based power generation diminishes, it has to be replaced with something and we have only so many of those "something's" that we can resort to at the current time. Wind Turbines, solar and hydro-electric plants will -have- to be built unless the protesters happens to invent a newer and better means of fulfilling 21st century power needs. It's a simple reality that they really need to endeavour to understand. In fact, if they had taken as much time to read up on it as they did to make a protest sign, they'd probably realize how silly their protest was.
Even though it's barely out of the gates, I tried out Cinnamon, a fork of Gnome3 by the folks that brought us Mint Linux. MUCH better than the base Gnome3.
To keep things short, one could say the biggest point of contention with Gnome3 was how radically different it was from Gnome2, moving from a task-centric way of managing the shell to an application centric method. While great for a novice, this tended to frustrate a lot of power users. Cinnamon allows more flexibility in the shell's method of focus on tasks and applications, essentially letting the user pick whatever point on the scale they prefer. It's a good approach - perhaps the best approach.
I don't know if it's offered for Fedora or Red Hat based Linux's in package form, but you could build it from source if need be.
A lot of folks tend to banter back and forth over classic vs. the more modern metro and metro-like shells (such as Unity or the iOS, or Andriod). What it really comes down to is the type of user behind the computer. The more modern mobile/touch interfaces like Metro are an application-centric approach that caters best to a user who is interested in doing a specific thing quickly and easily. Older interface types with taskbars, window lists and so on are task-centric shells that cater more to power-users and/or administrators who tend to have a lot of things going on at once, and who need to be able to manage all the open applications with ease.
As such, task-centric shells are likely to always be preferred by the one group while the more average user will prefer the updated shells (even if some of them will initially complain about the need to relearn things). The most effective way to manage this situation is simple - just make sure to offer both worlds.
A good example of this is that recently Mint Linux made the move to Gnome 3, and with it, a more Application-centric shell. They provided a number of applets, and soon after a fork of Gnome 3 (Cinnamon), that were able to offer the user either extreme, and even multiple points between the two shell types. Ubuntu, on the other hand, did not really offer a choice and forced the users' hands in shifting to Unity. The result was a very large shift in popularity to Mint as the current preferred Linux distribution (as seen on Distrowatch's listings). As long as Microsoft offers a choice, I think they'll be able to keep both worlds happy. Well... as happy as can be expected for running Windows anyway.;)
I find a common problem with companies that have large IT departments is that too many users in those departments have "admin" level rights, which increases temptation and curiosity exponentially. Tighter controls on who needs elevated privileges and specifically where those privileges are needed are a way to help minimize exposure of sensitive data. On the other end of the problem, education is also helpful because most people who would go peeking likely don't understand the ramifications of that action should it be discovered.
Have I ever done it as a professional? No. I'll admit, it was very tempting in a past firm since I had access to everything and I knew there were layoffs, salary changes and such going on. Curiosity does not get the better of me though when it means crossing ethical lines, and even if that were not true, I was well aware of the legal fallout that could happen where I to be aware of that information. The same could not be said though for other IT employees with the same access. In this situation, the access we had was certainly not necessary.
Same - I keep a bootable XP partition for games and it only gets started up once and a while on the rare occasion that I have time to play them. Linux is the primary or sole OS on the other systems. I also keep a Windows XP VM around for work stuff as some vendors refuse to accept the fact that people have moved beyond Windows XP and IE6.
Agreed - the idea that the PC hardware industry is suddenly going to die because a lot of people are getting tablets and other mobile devices is just ridiculous. The best gaming laptop will never be able to compete against an even modest desktop at a fraction of the price. Tablets, while lightweight and simple, are essentially useless for anything but basic stuff because they're only a very small and weak computer. Reliable workstations, gaming stations and such are still better suited as desktops. For businesses, this is all the more a reality in that desktops are fare more easily serviced, reliable and upgradeable.
In the IT Network administration and engineering world, this move to rapid release has been nightmarish. Vendors were already months behind in rolling out support for prior versions of the browser, but since going to rapid release, vendor support has gotten far worse. Granted... most vendors seem to believe that no one uses anything but IE and Windows 2000/XP, but still. I've also found that the last version, 5.0, was horribly buggy - worse than any Firefox I've ever used. This rapid release move may well kill off the product.
Evil data-mining and tracking issues aside, there are still some of us out there that (thank the gods) don't have or want a cell phone/smart phone. Seems their approach is flawed in choosing a means that is not completely common-place.
Whether this change will be good or bad will be for history to judge. What I don't get is when they make changes like this, why is there no provision to still support the old feature as a "classic" or optional feature? Is it really so hard to include that?
I use minimize constantly to get a window out of the way when working on stuff. Without it, there's going to be nothing be extreme clutter on my desktop. That means I'll have to switch to a different window manager all because some developer(s) were too lazy to include the option to still have minimize. That's just sad.
"Angry Joe" from the infamous review site "That Guy with the Glasses" probably put it best (at least sums up most of my thoughts pretty well):
http://angryjoeshow.com/2010/10/star-wars-3d-rerelease/
Not quite suitable for work... LOT of F-bombs... understandably.
George... seriously man, just stop.
Hierarchical named directory structures is how I organize things. I've actually been relatively conservative with the data I keep around, and have about 600g of it, with maybe 100g being irreplaceable. Everything is organized via an appropriately named directory with appropriately named sub-directories, sub-sub-directories and so on. The files themselves are also named with an appropriate name as to contents. I was doing this long before libraries and "tags" and stuff came along, and I've just always kept doing it that way since I just don't have the time to go back and "tag" thousands if not tens of thousands of files.
For me, this named-directory approach has been best due to it's simplicity - the structure is easily transferable to any OS, and easily understood by anyone that sees it. It requires no application to handle it or interpret it either. I can't see myself deviating from this method even with 10 times more data as it would continue to be effective regardless of the amount of data I collected.
I store mine in several places. The primary store is on the main desktop system. These are then backed up to a portable drive which is kept locked in a fireproof/water-proof safety box when not in use. I also take the portable drive on occasion to work and backup the photos to a drive there as well so that I have the data in more than one location.
Agreed TES4 was a very sad let-down compared to TES3. I've played the TES series since the original Arena, and TES4 was the first one where the dumbed-down controls, dynamic level system and shallow story really made it feel like a shadow of the former games. There was, as such, little sense of achievement or involvement in TES4. Hopefully they got some new writers and realized their mistakes, but I'm not counting on it. This may be the first TES game I don't get, and I'll be waiting to see what the opinion is on it.
In my opinion, there has not been a good in-depth RPG of this type since TES3, and I'm beginning think there never will be.:(
I've noticed the same as well. One of my favourite examples was Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind vs Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Morrowind was a very detailed game with a huge world, wonderful story and a good deal of complexity to the world, controls and the parts you played in the main story. Oblivion was more advanced in terms of visuals, but the controls were simpler, there was a lot less flexibility in character-based spells and weapons customization, the quests were much, much easier (and used a computer-aided compass to point out precisely where they were), the world was smaller, and the story was weak. Your part in the story was even... well, kind of secondary in the end.
Part of this dumbing down of games, in my opinion, comes from the game consoles. As most games today are made for the consoles as the primary market, it seems they focus on making the controls simpler. There is also greater pressure to get games pumped out quickly, and a larger market to throw into upheaval if a game is not to their liking.
Working in a university campus, my impression of the youths that comprise the younger portion of today's gamers is that they seem to have a shorter attention span (which, given the massive media exposure they have is not surprising). Perhaps the dumbing-down of games is also an attempt to hold their interest?
London, ON is quite a ways from the epicentre of the quake, so here it was more of a rumble probably in the realm of 4.2 to 4.5 on the scale. I work in the Support Services Building of the University of Western Ontario, and here a lot of us thought it was just one of our Physical Plant or MAC groups moving something heavy across the building bridge again - we get rumbles that shake the building all the time as a result of that sort of thing, so a lot of us didn't think too much of it until we learned later it was an earthquake.
My experience was less a bit rocky at first. Previous upgrades never caused a problem, but on doing Karmic, my work laptop (Dell Precision M65) had the blank, flicking screen issue. It was a problem with it trying to use the Nvidia 180 drivers. Whatever the driver problem did, it locked up the system so bad that the keyboard was not usable, so I had to log in via another system to terminate gdm before the system was usable again. I removed all Nvidia drivers, copied the xorg.conf.failsafe to xorg.conf, rebooted, and reinstalled the Nvidia stuff going with the 185 driver instead - all was fine after that.
My other Ubuntu machine updated without issue.
I work as a Network Admin. at UWO, and we do support well known Linux distros, as well as the MacOS and of course Windows. We find the number of students choosing to use Linux is increasing every year, so we try to accommodate it as best as possible. Many of the folks in the NOC use Linux (an have used *nix OS's for years), but the weak link so far is in getting documentation to accurately reflect alternate OS's as much as Windows. Statistically, we're at about 5 to 7% *nix, 20% MacOS, and the rest as Windows (in the student population).
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It's been around 10 or 11 years now since I stopped watching TV. The ridiculous monthly costs combined with the facts that 2/3 of the channels are uninteresting and those that are are filled with up to 40% commercial time, I just thought to myself one day "Why am I paying for this?"
Since canceling my cable, I chose to watch shows that I was interested in by on-line streaming or by just getting the DVDs, and that's worked out great so far. The added perk is that I'm not exposed to ANY commercials at all. The big Telco's have got to come to the realization sooner or later that embracing the more modern ways of media distribution is a lot more profitable and beneficial than constantly opposing them. They seem to forget that it is the consumer than "wants" the shows, and their job to deliver what the consumer wants, not what they think the consumer wants.
If they don't step into the 21st century soon, more and more folks are just going to do what I did and stop giving them any money at all. Personally... I think it was one of the best things I've ever done; I haven't a clue where I'd find time to sit in front of a TV nowadays.
I don't really get this one myself. I see it a lot in the Niagara region of Ontario; farmers absolutely opposed to wind turbines as well as solar farms. They state a number of baseless reasons as mentioned above like - my favourite being health concerns. Do they think they're radioactive or something? Or that they put out electromagnetic interference akin to a neutron star? Or that the Solar farms take up valuable farm land (currently sitting unused).
Any technology has its downsides - green energy is not 100% green, nor is it any cheaper than the old-school methods of power generation - that at least is cold hard fact. What these folks don't seem to understand is that this the inevitable future. As fossil-fuel-based power generation diminishes, it has to be replaced with something and we have only so many of those "something's" that we can resort to at the current time. Wind Turbines, solar and hydro-electric plants will -have- to be built unless the protesters happens to invent a newer and better means of fulfilling 21st century power needs. It's a simple reality that they really need to endeavour to understand. In fact, if they had taken as much time to read up on it as they did to make a protest sign, they'd probably realize how silly their protest was.
Even though it's barely out of the gates, I tried out Cinnamon, a fork of Gnome3 by the folks that brought us Mint Linux. MUCH better than the base Gnome3.
To keep things short, one could say the biggest point of contention with Gnome3 was how radically different it was from Gnome2, moving from a task-centric way of managing the shell to an application centric method. While great for a novice, this tended to frustrate a lot of power users. Cinnamon allows more flexibility in the shell's method of focus on tasks and applications, essentially letting the user pick whatever point on the scale they prefer. It's a good approach - perhaps the best approach.
I don't know if it's offered for Fedora or Red Hat based Linux's in package form, but you could build it from source if need be.
A lot of folks tend to banter back and forth over classic vs. the more modern metro and metro-like shells (such as Unity or the iOS, or Andriod). What it really comes down to is the type of user behind the computer. The more modern mobile/touch interfaces like Metro are an application-centric approach that caters best to a user who is interested in doing a specific thing quickly and easily. Older interface types with taskbars, window lists and so on are task-centric shells that cater more to power-users and/or administrators who tend to have a lot of things going on at once, and who need to be able to manage all the open applications with ease.
As such, task-centric shells are likely to always be preferred by the one group while the more average user will prefer the updated shells (even if some of them will initially complain about the need to relearn things). The most effective way to manage this situation is simple - just make sure to offer both worlds.
A good example of this is that recently Mint Linux made the move to Gnome 3, and with it, a more Application-centric shell. They provided a number of applets, and soon after a fork of Gnome 3 (Cinnamon), that were able to offer the user either extreme, and even multiple points between the two shell types. Ubuntu, on the other hand, did not really offer a choice and forced the users' hands in shifting to Unity. The result was a very large shift in popularity to Mint as the current preferred Linux distribution (as seen on Distrowatch's listings). As long as Microsoft offers a choice, I think they'll be able to keep both worlds happy. Well... as happy as can be expected for running Windows anyway. ;)
I find a common problem with companies that have large IT departments is that too many users in those departments have "admin" level rights, which increases temptation and curiosity exponentially. Tighter controls on who needs elevated privileges and specifically where those privileges are needed are a way to help minimize exposure of sensitive data. On the other end of the problem, education is also helpful because most people who would go peeking likely don't understand the ramifications of that action should it be discovered. Have I ever done it as a professional? No. I'll admit, it was very tempting in a past firm since I had access to everything and I knew there were layoffs, salary changes and such going on. Curiosity does not get the better of me though when it means crossing ethical lines, and even if that were not true, I was well aware of the legal fallout that could happen where I to be aware of that information. The same could not be said though for other IT employees with the same access. In this situation, the access we had was certainly not necessary.
Same - I keep a bootable XP partition for games and it only gets started up once and a while on the rare occasion that I have time to play them. Linux is the primary or sole OS on the other systems. I also keep a Windows XP VM around for work stuff as some vendors refuse to accept the fact that people have moved beyond Windows XP and IE6.
Agreed - the idea that the PC hardware industry is suddenly going to die because a lot of people are getting tablets and other mobile devices is just ridiculous. The best gaming laptop will never be able to compete against an even modest desktop at a fraction of the price. Tablets, while lightweight and simple, are essentially useless for anything but basic stuff because they're only a very small and weak computer. Reliable workstations, gaming stations and such are still better suited as desktops. For businesses, this is all the more a reality in that desktops are fare more easily serviced, reliable and upgradeable.
In the IT Network administration and engineering world, this move to rapid release has been nightmarish. Vendors were already months behind in rolling out support for prior versions of the browser, but since going to rapid release, vendor support has gotten far worse. Granted... most vendors seem to believe that no one uses anything but IE and Windows 2000/XP, but still. I've also found that the last version, 5.0, was horribly buggy - worse than any Firefox I've ever used. This rapid release move may well kill off the product.
Evil data-mining and tracking issues aside, there are still some of us out there that (thank the gods) don't have or want a cell phone/smart phone. Seems their approach is flawed in choosing a means that is not completely common-place.
Dang... no kidding! Cheaper fix for the guy: put your phone DOWN. Enjoy the bath.
Whether this change will be good or bad will be for history to judge. What I don't get is when they make changes like this, why is there no provision to still support the old feature as a "classic" or optional feature? Is it really so hard to include that? I use minimize constantly to get a window out of the way when working on stuff. Without it, there's going to be nothing be extreme clutter on my desktop. That means I'll have to switch to a different window manager all because some developer(s) were too lazy to include the option to still have minimize. That's just sad.
"Angry Joe" from the infamous review site "That Guy with the Glasses" probably put it best (at least sums up most of my thoughts pretty well): http://angryjoeshow.com/2010/10/star-wars-3d-rerelease/ Not quite suitable for work... LOT of F-bombs... understandably. George... seriously man, just stop.
Yes, I do that as well for some things like Pictures, videos and some document types. Again, simple, but works well. :)
Hierarchical named directory structures is how I organize things. I've actually been relatively conservative with the data I keep around, and have about 600g of it, with maybe 100g being irreplaceable. Everything is organized via an appropriately named directory with appropriately named sub-directories, sub-sub-directories and so on. The files themselves are also named with an appropriate name as to contents. I was doing this long before libraries and "tags" and stuff came along, and I've just always kept doing it that way since I just don't have the time to go back and "tag" thousands if not tens of thousands of files. For me, this named-directory approach has been best due to it's simplicity - the structure is easily transferable to any OS, and easily understood by anyone that sees it. It requires no application to handle it or interpret it either. I can't see myself deviating from this method even with 10 times more data as it would continue to be effective regardless of the amount of data I collected.
I store mine in several places. The primary store is on the main desktop system. These are then backed up to a portable drive which is kept locked in a fireproof/water-proof safety box when not in use. I also take the portable drive on occasion to work and backup the photos to a drive there as well so that I have the data in more than one location.
Agreed TES4 was a very sad let-down compared to TES3. I've played the TES series since the original Arena, and TES4 was the first one where the dumbed-down controls, dynamic level system and shallow story really made it feel like a shadow of the former games. There was, as such, little sense of achievement or involvement in TES4. Hopefully they got some new writers and realized their mistakes, but I'm not counting on it. This may be the first TES game I don't get, and I'll be waiting to see what the opinion is on it. In my opinion, there has not been a good in-depth RPG of this type since TES3, and I'm beginning think there never will be. :(
I've noticed the same as well. One of my favourite examples was Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind vs Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Morrowind was a very detailed game with a huge world, wonderful story and a good deal of complexity to the world, controls and the parts you played in the main story. Oblivion was more advanced in terms of visuals, but the controls were simpler, there was a lot less flexibility in character-based spells and weapons customization, the quests were much, much easier (and used a computer-aided compass to point out precisely where they were), the world was smaller, and the story was weak. Your part in the story was even... well, kind of secondary in the end. Part of this dumbing down of games, in my opinion, comes from the game consoles. As most games today are made for the consoles as the primary market, it seems they focus on making the controls simpler. There is also greater pressure to get games pumped out quickly, and a larger market to throw into upheaval if a game is not to their liking. Working in a university campus, my impression of the youths that comprise the younger portion of today's gamers is that they seem to have a shorter attention span (which, given the massive media exposure they have is not surprising). Perhaps the dumbing-down of games is also an attempt to hold their interest?
Umm... not to devalue their achievement, but The University of Western Ontario's already got one of those: http://communications.uwo.ca/com/western_news/stories/'3_little_pigs'_facility_eager_to_blow_the_house_down_20051021434073/ It's been operational for several years now.
London, ON is quite a ways from the epicentre of the quake, so here it was more of a rumble probably in the realm of 4.2 to 4.5 on the scale. I work in the Support Services Building of the University of Western Ontario, and here a lot of us thought it was just one of our Physical Plant or MAC groups moving something heavy across the building bridge again - we get rumbles that shake the building all the time as a result of that sort of thing, so a lot of us didn't think too much of it until we learned later it was an earthquake.
My experience was less a bit rocky at first. Previous upgrades never caused a problem, but on doing Karmic, my work laptop (Dell Precision M65) had the blank, flicking screen issue. It was a problem with it trying to use the Nvidia 180 drivers. Whatever the driver problem did, it locked up the system so bad that the keyboard was not usable, so I had to log in via another system to terminate gdm before the system was usable again. I removed all Nvidia drivers, copied the xorg.conf.failsafe to xorg.conf, rebooted, and reinstalled the Nvidia stuff going with the 185 driver instead - all was fine after that. My other Ubuntu machine updated without issue.
I work as a Network Admin. at UWO, and we do support well known Linux distros, as well as the MacOS and of course Windows. We find the number of students choosing to use Linux is increasing every year, so we try to accommodate it as best as possible. Many of the folks in the NOC use Linux (an have used *nix OS's for years), but the weak link so far is in getting documentation to accurately reflect alternate OS's as much as Windows. Statistically, we're at about 5 to 7% *nix, 20% MacOS, and the rest as Windows (in the student population).