It's so hard to take you seriously when you keep using phrases like "nanny state" and "socialist". It would be better if you actually used those terms correctly.
I support Ubuntu's right to use whatever software they prefer, but this choice will prevent me from recommending it.
they've decided it's 'unfair' that users don't have the option to replace a bootloader
But it is, in fact, unfair if users don't have that option. Or, at least, it dramatically devalues the computer as you no longer really own it.
If the Linux Kernel was GPLv3, then you wouldn't have to root any phones to install Cyanogenmod: vendors would be required to provide an official method for the end user to replace the software with custom versions.
And wouldn't that be a wonderful world to live in?
I realize that this is an issue with Cisco more than with the concept of the cloud... but this is exactly the sort of thing that makes me allergic to cloud services generally. "The cloud" means giving up freedom and privacy having to trust entities that continue to demonstrate how deeply untrustworthy they are.
No cloud anything for me, thank you. I'm fine using my own private servers.
Why would I want to have to click to raise a window?
I don't know about you, but I most definitely want to have to take some kind of positive action to change focus. The location of the mouse pointer should never cause my workflow to change, menus to pop up, or anything like that. It makes it too easy to accidentally scramble things when I accidentally bump the mouse, and I have to pay careful attention to where the mouse pointer is, which means I have less attention to give to the work I'm actually trying to get done.
This issue alone is enough to get me to avoid using a particular desktop (and is a big part of why I HATE HATE HATE the KDE cashew).
You obviously have a different need, and this is why configurability is a wonderful thing.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "competitive". For me, KDE used to be the best desktop experience available, under any OS. That changed with the 4.x series -- now KDE has degraded to the point where it is not substantially better than Windows or Mac. So in my view, KDE has indeed become less competitive.
I'm not lying -- but I should add that it depends on the distro you're using. I've never had luck with Ubuntu -- I could never get even simple things like you mention to work in Ubuntu without a lot of pain.
It's not like Linux users don't have to jump through hoops to get stuff working anyway.
I a Linux user, and I haven't had to jump through hoops to get thing to work in years. Well, not any more hoops than I have to jump through for Windows or the Mac. Linux had long ago achieved parity in this respect.
Your clarification is nonsensical. I never mentioned leaving the company myself.I simply observed that the presence of one highly unpleasant employee caused other skilled and experienced employees to leave, leading to a net loss in skilled labor for the company. The company would have been better off to not have hired the unpleasant guy, regardless of his skill.
The purpose of going to the office is to get work done. However, it's a mistake to think that means it isn't a social environment and that the social dynamics don't have profound effects the quality of a company's work and its bottom line. People are people, not robots.
I go to the office to do the work, of course. That said, I have had coworkers who, while technically competent, were so unpleasant that they made the workplace undesirable. People quit for better working conditions as a result, and the unpleasant coworkers ended up being a net loss for the company.
I understand the ads. They suck, but at least you can get rid of them.
What gets me is that according to Skype, these aren't ads, they're "conversation starters" and they hope that we will discuss them with our friends. That's just downright insulting.
Show me the ad if you must. Don't tell me that I should like it and talk about it with others. I'm not your damned advertising agent.
Advertising is only unwanted when it's telling you about something you're not interested in.
This is provably untrue as a blanket statement. Advertising is unwanted when it distracts me from whatever it is that I'm paying attention to. Whether or not its relevant to my needs doesn't alter that at all.
If you don't like ads, you can pay to get rid of them.
If only that were true. Sometimes, you can. Increasingly often, you get to pay and see ads.
Let's say you are looking for low-priced diapers and happen to see an advert for low-price diapers. That's not an ad, that's a useful piece of information.
No, that's an ad. A useful piece of information is one that is actually informative. I have never in my life seen an ad that was informative enough to be useful -- at best, they only contain a tiny subset of relevant data that is slanted to make the product appear more appealing and omits the important information that may lead me to purchase something else.
I'll grant you, if I see an ad while I'm doing active research for something, it might lead to to useful information (although the ad itself is not). But if I see an ad when I'm doing something else -- even if the ads happens to match something I'm thinking of buying -- that's worthless to me.
But hasn't it been shown that simple, relevantly-tagetted text ads like Google Ads have been shown to be very effective? These hardly use any screen estate, and the screens on most portable 'smart' devices are actually getting quite large and hi-res and can display quite a lot compared to mobiles of old
I don't know. I do know that I don't find google's ads annoying on the desktop, but I find them intolerably annoying on my smartphone -- which has a large, hi-res screen.
I do run KDE, and have for years, but the changes that have been made in 4.x are, generally, frustrating and annoying. Yes, the later releases have fixed a lot of the most egregious problems, but my main problem is that the new paradigm is counterintuitive and gets in the way of what I want to do as often as not.
So yes, I still run KDE but wish that I didn't, and will switch to something else as soon as I have the time & energy to devote to making the change.
Marketing is not simple, nor is it straightforward, nor would an engineer be able to grasp delicate concepts like how people work - if you could, you'd be making 5x as much money, working 0.2x as hard as a consultant. You are not a representative sample of the population:)
Nice sidelong insult there!
There are quite a lot of engineers who grasp these delicate concepts quite well, thanks. But you are correct, engineers are not a representative sample of the population. Neither are advertisers.
For me, personally and not representing the general population, ads actively degrade everything they get attached to, and the fewer of them and less targeted they are, the happier I am.
Targeted ad's can be useful but it's a hard thing to do
I honestly can't imagine how targeted ads can be useful for me no matter how they're done.
If I'm not looking to buy something, there's no such thing as an ad that can be targeted to me in the first place, since I'm not looking to buy anything. If I am looking, then I'm already proactively researching to whatever degree seems important. As 99% of all ads are worthless (in that they're misleading and/or omit the data I need in order to make some kind of decision), looking at ads aren't and won't ever be part of my research.
Plus, ads that are obviously targeted (and the better they are at targeting, the more obvious it is) actively anger me and cause me to think ill of the company, because it raises into my consciousness the fact that I'm being constantly spied on by advertising agencies -- a fact I try to ignore as much as possible.
Uh, no, that's a terrible idea as a text message, too, unless it's entirely an opt-in sort of thing. Any ad that is sent to me as a text message means that the source of the message is immediately added to my blacklist and I think badly of the company who sent it.
If the sensitive systems are not connected to the internet (and they shouldn't be), and if standard security procedures are followed (and they should be), then the risk is really quite minimal. Not zero, of course -- but probably less (and centainly no greater) than before computerization.
Dude, you have some serious misapprehensions about the right wing. Supporting law enforcement doesn't mean supporting lawbreaking by police or other government agents.
In theory, but in practice it does seem to mean exactly that. I wouldn't say that it's unique to conservatives, but to authoritarians. Authoritarians are more likely to be conservatives than liberals, though.
Yeah, but this does nothing about the all-too-common practice cops have of charging someone with resisting arrest because they don't have anything else to charge them with, rather than because they actually resisted arrest.
My argument is that consumers get features sooner, so thats good.
Assuming that the consumers want the new features. It depends on the user, but there are lots for whom new features are problematic. They can introduce costs and uncertainty in the short term, and so have to be planned for. This takes time. If new feature come too frequently, it becomes too expensive or unwieldy to use the software.
The other side to it is that if an update breaks for you, then just dont update.
That's not how rapid release works. FF hasn't completely implemented it yet, but ultimately you will not even know that an update is coming or be asked if you want it. It will just happen in the background. It'll probably remain possible to turn off updating completely, but eventually that will lead to a different problems as more and more plugins and server software assume that your browser is always updated.
Why do people feel the need to be on the latest version and then complain about it. If it isn't what you want, dont do it...
Indeed! However once FF is fully rapid-release, the only reasonable way of not updating is to not use FF.
Well, gee, thanks for your incredibly helpful advice. I'm not quite sure why you seem to think that I believe that vendors should cater exclusively to me, though. Unless you think that only positive opinions are allowed to be expressed and anything else consists of unreasonable demands.
At home, this is what I use. At work, I must use Windows. There, I've actually done something I would have considered impossible before FF started going down its Bad Path: I've gone back to IE for my main browser (I still have to use other browsers in the course of my work, though, including FF, Chrome, etc.)
Read this site at -1 (go on, I dare you, and leave it at that setting), and you'll quickly understand why accounts are a requirement for civil discourse. You can't have moderation or attribution of comments in any meaningful sense without accounts.
I frequent a handful of sites that manage it quite well, so it's absolutely possible. I also know of a number of sites that require registration but have comment sections that are as much a cesspool as any.
Registration, as near as I can tell, doesn't really impact comment quality that much.
I would never create an account at a site unless I had a very compelling reason to do so.
I see - please do tell us what very compelling reason caused you to join Slashdot?
Continuity, essentially. I want all my various comments to be associated with each other.
Slashdot Mirror
It's so hard to take you seriously when you keep using phrases like "nanny state" and "socialist". It would be better if you actually used those terms correctly.
I support Ubuntu's right to use whatever software they prefer, but this choice will prevent me from recommending it.
But it is, in fact, unfair if users don't have that option. Or, at least, it dramatically devalues the computer as you no longer really own it.
And wouldn't that be a wonderful world to live in?
Well, to be fair, Cisco's reputation had already gained a fair amount of tarnish before this.
I realize that this is an issue with Cisco more than with the concept of the cloud... but this is exactly the sort of thing that makes me allergic to cloud services generally. "The cloud" means giving up freedom and privacy having to trust entities that continue to demonstrate how deeply untrustworthy they are.
No cloud anything for me, thank you. I'm fine using my own private servers.
Why would I want to have to click to raise a window?
I don't know about you, but I most definitely want to have to take some kind of positive action to change focus. The location of the mouse pointer should never cause my workflow to change, menus to pop up, or anything like that. It makes it too easy to accidentally scramble things when I accidentally bump the mouse, and I have to pay careful attention to where the mouse pointer is, which means I have less attention to give to the work I'm actually trying to get done.
This issue alone is enough to get me to avoid using a particular desktop (and is a big part of why I HATE HATE HATE the KDE cashew).
You obviously have a different need, and this is why configurability is a wonderful thing.
Make that four. The OSX desktop is one of the worst I've ever used. Especially the dock.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "competitive". For me, KDE used to be the best desktop experience available, under any OS. That changed with the 4.x series -- now KDE has degraded to the point where it is not substantially better than Windows or Mac. So in my view, KDE has indeed become less competitive.
I'm not lying -- but I should add that it depends on the distro you're using. I've never had luck with Ubuntu -- I could never get even simple things like you mention to work in Ubuntu without a lot of pain.
Debian, however, has been a breeze for me.
It's not like Linux users don't have to jump through hoops to get stuff working anyway.
I a Linux user, and I haven't had to jump through hoops to get thing to work in years. Well, not any more hoops than I have to jump through for Windows or the Mac. Linux had long ago achieved parity in this respect.
Your clarification is nonsensical. I never mentioned leaving the company myself.I simply observed that the presence of one highly unpleasant employee caused other skilled and experienced employees to leave, leading to a net loss in skilled labor for the company. The company would have been better off to not have hired the unpleasant guy, regardless of his skill.
The purpose of going to the office is to get work done. However, it's a mistake to think that means it isn't a social environment and that the social dynamics don't have profound effects the quality of a company's work and its bottom line. People are people, not robots.
I go to the office to do the work, of course. That said, I have had coworkers who, while technically competent, were so unpleasant that they made the workplace undesirable. People quit for better working conditions as a result, and the unpleasant coworkers ended up being a net loss for the company.
I understand the ads. They suck, but at least you can get rid of them.
What gets me is that according to Skype, these aren't ads, they're "conversation starters" and they hope that we will discuss them with our friends. That's just downright insulting.
Show me the ad if you must. Don't tell me that I should like it and talk about it with others. I'm not your damned advertising agent.
Advertising is only unwanted when it's telling you about something you're not interested in.
This is provably untrue as a blanket statement. Advertising is unwanted when it distracts me from whatever it is that I'm paying attention to. Whether or not its relevant to my needs doesn't alter that at all.
If you don't like ads, you can pay to get rid of them.
If only that were true. Sometimes, you can. Increasingly often, you get to pay and see ads.
Let's say you are looking for low-priced diapers and happen to see an advert for low-price diapers. That's not an ad, that's a useful piece of information.
No, that's an ad. A useful piece of information is one that is actually informative. I have never in my life seen an ad that was informative enough to be useful -- at best, they only contain a tiny subset of relevant data that is slanted to make the product appear more appealing and omits the important information that may lead me to purchase something else.
I'll grant you, if I see an ad while I'm doing active research for something, it might lead to to useful information (although the ad itself is not). But if I see an ad when I'm doing something else -- even if the ads happens to match something I'm thinking of buying -- that's worthless to me.
Perhaps so, but for me, app ads have simply taught me to never use free apps.
But hasn't it been shown that simple, relevantly-tagetted text ads like Google Ads have been shown to be very effective? These hardly use any screen estate, and the screens on most portable 'smart' devices are actually getting quite large and hi-res and can display quite a lot compared to mobiles of old
I don't know. I do know that I don't find google's ads annoying on the desktop, but I find them intolerably annoying on my smartphone -- which has a large, hi-res screen.
I do run KDE, and have for years, but the changes that have been made in 4.x are, generally, frustrating and annoying. Yes, the later releases have fixed a lot of the most egregious problems, but my main problem is that the new paradigm is counterintuitive and gets in the way of what I want to do as often as not.
So yes, I still run KDE but wish that I didn't, and will switch to something else as soon as I have the time & energy to devote to making the change.
Marketing is not simple, nor is it straightforward, nor would an engineer be able to grasp delicate concepts like how people work - if you could, you'd be making 5x as much money, working 0.2x as hard as a consultant. You are not a representative sample of the population :)
Nice sidelong insult there!
There are quite a lot of engineers who grasp these delicate concepts quite well, thanks. But you are correct, engineers are not a representative sample of the population. Neither are advertisers.
For me, personally and not representing the general population, ads actively degrade everything they get attached to, and the fewer of them and less targeted they are, the happier I am.
Targeted ad's can be useful but it's a hard thing to do
I honestly can't imagine how targeted ads can be useful for me no matter how they're done.
If I'm not looking to buy something, there's no such thing as an ad that can be targeted to me in the first place, since I'm not looking to buy anything. If I am looking, then I'm already proactively researching to whatever degree seems important. As 99% of all ads are worthless (in that they're misleading and/or omit the data I need in order to make some kind of decision), looking at ads aren't and won't ever be part of my research.
Plus, ads that are obviously targeted (and the better they are at targeting, the more obvious it is) actively anger me and cause me to think ill of the company, because it raises into my consciousness the fact that I'm being constantly spied on by advertising agencies -- a fact I try to ignore as much as possible.
Uh, no, that's a terrible idea as a text message, too, unless it's entirely an opt-in sort of thing. Any ad that is sent to me as a text message means that the source of the message is immediately added to my blacklist and I think badly of the company who sent it.
If the sensitive systems are not connected to the internet (and they shouldn't be), and if standard security procedures are followed (and they should be), then the risk is really quite minimal. Not zero, of course -- but probably less (and centainly no greater) than before computerization.
Dude, you have some serious misapprehensions about the right wing. Supporting law enforcement doesn't mean supporting lawbreaking by police or other government agents.
In theory, but in practice it does seem to mean exactly that. I wouldn't say that it's unique to conservatives, but to authoritarians. Authoritarians are more likely to be conservatives than liberals, though.
Solution: Don't resist arrest
Yeah, but this does nothing about the all-too-common practice cops have of charging someone with resisting arrest because they don't have anything else to charge them with, rather than because they actually resisted arrest.
My argument is that consumers get features sooner, so thats good.
Assuming that the consumers want the new features. It depends on the user, but there are lots for whom new features are problematic. They can introduce costs and uncertainty in the short term, and so have to be planned for. This takes time. If new feature come too frequently, it becomes too expensive or unwieldy to use the software.
The other side to it is that if an update breaks for you, then just dont update.
That's not how rapid release works. FF hasn't completely implemented it yet, but ultimately you will not even know that an update is coming or be asked if you want it. It will just happen in the background. It'll probably remain possible to turn off updating completely, but eventually that will lead to a different problems as more and more plugins and server software assume that your browser is always updated.
Why do people feel the need to be on the latest version and then complain about it. If it isn't what you want, dont do it...
Indeed! However once FF is fully rapid-release, the only reasonable way of not updating is to not use FF.
Well, gee, thanks for your incredibly helpful advice. I'm not quite sure why you seem to think that I believe that vendors should cater exclusively to me, though. Unless you think that only positive opinions are allowed to be expressed and anything else consists of unreasonable demands.
In which case my opinion is that you're wrong.
At home, this is what I use. At work, I must use Windows. There, I've actually done something I would have considered impossible before FF started going down its Bad Path: I've gone back to IE for my main browser (I still have to use other browsers in the course of my work, though, including FF, Chrome, etc.)
Read this site at -1 (go on, I dare you, and leave it at that setting), and you'll quickly understand why accounts are a requirement for civil discourse. You can't have moderation or attribution of comments in any meaningful sense without accounts.
I frequent a handful of sites that manage it quite well, so it's absolutely possible. I also know of a number of sites that require registration but have comment sections that are as much a cesspool as any.
Registration, as near as I can tell, doesn't really impact comment quality that much.
I would never create an account at a site unless I had a very compelling reason to do so.
I see - please do tell us what very compelling reason caused you to join Slashdot?
Continuity, essentially. I want all my various comments to be associated with each other.