Unfortunately they've gone down hill lately, as proved by their new ads admitting that they have less fat than pizza hut pizzas and less salt than dominoes. Now, Hells are still better (by a huge margin in the case of dominoes), but by what stretch of the imagination is low fat & salt a good thing for a pizza?? I'm not eating pizza to lose weight and maintain a healthy heart or whatever, and personally I need my salt as I do quite a lot of exercise.
Anyway, Spagalimis do a better New Zealand pizza in my opinion, and they aren't as ridiculously expensive either.
All that is fine, but functionality should still be retained for people like me who know how to, and want to, maintain a good tidy filesystem. I don't think OSX or windows 7 has done this well.
Yes, that LOOKS like OSX, but the look wasn't what I was talking about. It's things like half functional multi tasking (only one menu bar at a time), no right clicking etc. that I'm talking about. OSX certainly has some points where it is better, but there are a lot of other areas where they have just tried too hard to be different and completely ruined it. I'm sure I would have no trouble using your desktop as is, while I absolutely hate doing the simplest task on OSX.
Think about it this way - does it really matter where things go specifically, so long as you can get there easily?
Yes. It does.
OK, for some people, maybe it doesn't. But that doesn't mean that a nice organised file/folder structure shouldn't be maintained. If I'm looking for a photo of my house for example, I'm not going to know what date it was taken, I probably haven't tagged or named it at all. How is a search based system best for that? I just want to know where it is and use the file manager to have a bit of a look. Some people may not want to deal with file systems, but I (and a lot of other people) ALWAYS will.
Problem is, OSs like windows 7 (maybe Vista? never used it) and OSX have these multiple "libraries" that don't seem to make any sense when you just use a file manager to look through them. Each user has one, and then there is a central one, and everything seems to be messily split up between them. What's wrong with the structure linux OSs and windows XP used? It made logical sense, everything is in one place. A search engine will work no matter how things are stored anyway.
Yes it really is horrible. I never appreciated just how bad it was until my GF got a macbook pro. Multitasking is only half functional since only one menu bar seems to show at once. It comes with a default media player that doesn't play any videos (just like windows) and when you try to change it to use VLC by default it freezes up. You don't seem to be able to get to network shares from the address bar in the file manager.... the list goes on.
However it in no way could be described as habitable by even the toughest forms of life found here.
Even if that were true, what significance does that have? Why would we expect alien life to be adapted to an environment like ours? Seeing as we only have a sample size of one, we have absolutely no idea what conditions can support life, so it's pointless to impose limitations based on what we happen to like.
Gimmickry. That's about it as far as I can see, the touch pad on the macbook pros is horrible to use anyway. Well, it's fine until you want to use the 'click anywhere' bit, which very quickly leads to sore hands. Not sure why, perhaps it has to do with the force required to click (they are quite stiff). Very hard to do a good fast double click with them too, I always feel like a newbie using them.
I do agree with you; However, many Americans do still seem to think they live in one of the (if not THE) "free-est" countries in the world, which is just as ridiculous. The USA does seem like a pretty authoritarian place compared to many countries.
Maybe planets that give rise to technologically advanced civilisations only come from n-th generation stars? Wouldn't the abundance of metal deposits increase with each generation of star? (
We're probably just the first advanced civilization in our galaxy. No Fermi paradox, no odd extinction events, no improbably rare Earth.
Perhaps, but what basis is there for that assumption?
Surely the fact that, from what we currently know, we should see more aliens around than we do would be one reason to postulate that we are the first, or at least among the first. While we can't give up the whole question and just assume we seem to be alone because we are the first technologically advanced species, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that it is always a possibility. Someone has to come first....
Interesting. But apart from our own system, surely we can't rule out the presence (past or present) of aliens in any other system just because we haven't seen any sign of them. Maybe there are aliens living all around the place, but it so happens that civilisations advanced enough to colonise distant star systems use a form of communication that we cannot detect?
Also, surely even once a civilisation has crossed the entire galaxy, it is likely that there will be large patches that remain empty -- after all, there are around 200 Billion stars to choose from. And we are, after all, located at the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm -- surely among the last places an intelligent species would want to live.
You're right, ethernet drivers are almost always present in any case, but your average person doesn't even have an ethernet cable these days -- everything is wireless. Common wireless adapters should be plug and play. This seems to be the case with Ubuntu, and simply isn't with windows.
No, most stuff on windows is plug, install drivers from mini CD that comes with the device that invariably tries to install bloatware at the same time, and play.
On the other hand, most stuff IS plug and play on ubuntu now. The drivers for the VAST majority of common peripherals are already installed, ready for use.
Take USB wireless adapters, for example. I lent out one of mine to a friend recently, he uses windows. Having only ever used it with linux, I didn't think and just told him to plug it in and use it. Of course, I soon got a phone call from him saying that it didn't work. I'd thrown out the little CD that came with it with the packaging, and he didn't have internet access since his wireless adapter didn't have a driver..... So I had to download the driver (which I had to select from a long list of possible drivers with obscure names). Plug and Play. Yeah, right.
It really sounds like most of the people posting here are comparing apples to oranges -- i.e. comparing two different panels, one that happens to be glossy and one that happens to be matte. Unless you are comparing two identical panels, one with a glossy coating, the other matte, you can't draw any conclusions about which is 'better'. Personally, I have a laptop with a glossy screen and a desktop with matte screens. The laptop screen has a dull and washed out look to it, while the desktop monitors have a crisp and vibrant look to them, but this has nothing to do with the fact that one is glossy and the other matte -- the laptop panel is just rubbish.
I will say that given the choice, I'd always go with a matte panel -- even if it does reduce vibrancy or brightness (of which I am skeptical), I very much value the ability to work in poor lighting conditions without angling the screen. I presume Apple's screens are among the best glossy panels available (you'd hope so for the price...) but I still hate using my girlfriend's macbook pro in a bright environment....
The laws of supply and demand seem to indicate that we have an incredible amount of food that we have no idea what to do with.
If the world has such a glut of food, why is starvation so prevalent, even in countries without closed borders?
Your problem is more likely that farmers in other locations can produce corn at much lower prices than you can, which is a good sign you should be looking at other crops.
Sorry to burst your little bubble, but bio fuels derived from crops take more energy to produce than you get out of them (not to mention taking up already scarce land needed for food production), as do hydrogen/oxygen mixtures obtained through electrolysis of water. Anyone with a basic knowledge of science can tell you that.
Exactly. A desktop PC can perform all of the tasks 99% of users want to do very quickly now. I can do fluid dynamics simulations on my desktop PC that would have required a mediocre supercomputer ten years ago. For the average user who uses a web browser, word processor, and maybe an image editing program, there simply isn't anything to be gained any more -- all these applications run flawlessly and quickly on modern hardware -- even five year old hardware for that matter. There will always be improvements to be made, but their magnitude and relevance will necessarily decrease as time goes on.
I don't buy the whole thing about Apple being a market leader in UI. I'd say quite the opposite, actually. From phones with touch screens instead of buttons (how do you use it without looking at it?) to laptops that you have to click with two fingers at once instead of just having a two buttons, their products are full of 'features' that do nothing to improve the user experience. Instead, they just look flashy or are simply different for the sake of being different. I find OSX the same, it's full of silly little quirks that make no sense other than to differentiate them from other OSs. Originally a windows user, I found it MUCH easier to find my way around linux operating systems than OSX. I still struggle every time I have to do set something up on a mac.
Obviously Apple are market leaders in a number of areas -- perhaps most notably advertising, but also in making attractive, well constructed hardware etc. For all their faults, I do like the well built feeling of their newer macbook pros. I just don't see that their UI design is anything special at all. For this reason, I'll be interested to see what canonical come up with. Pity it'll probably be based around gnome....
8 hours work, 8 hours gaming, 6 hours sleep (many could live on much less) leaving two hours for other stuff -- plenty of time. Remember that you can eat while working and playing games.
I finished undergrad three years ago, and am still at university doing postgrad work.... Some lecturers certainly do provide either hard or soft copies of all their notes, but plenty still don't. I can't see this changing, as they do it to encourage students to actually attend lectures, rather than just get the notes off the website and not bother.
There are certainly some papers in mechanical engineering that are still pretty heavy on copying down notes here -- and I don't see it as a bad thing, I actually learned more in this style of lecture simply because it forces you to pay a certain amount of attention....
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately they've gone down hill lately, as proved by their new ads admitting that they have less fat than pizza hut pizzas and less salt than dominoes. Now, Hells are still better (by a huge margin in the case of dominoes), but by what stretch of the imagination is low fat & salt a good thing for a pizza?? I'm not eating pizza to lose weight and maintain a healthy heart or whatever, and personally I need my salt as I do quite a lot of exercise.
Anyway, Spagalimis do a better New Zealand pizza in my opinion, and they aren't as ridiculously expensive either.
All that is fine, but functionality should still be retained for people like me who know how to, and want to, maintain a good tidy filesystem. I don't think OSX or windows 7 has done this well.
Yes, that LOOKS like OSX, but the look wasn't what I was talking about. It's things like half functional multi tasking (only one menu bar at a time), no right clicking etc. that I'm talking about. OSX certainly has some points where it is better, but there are a lot of other areas where they have just tried too hard to be different and completely ruined it. I'm sure I would have no trouble using your desktop as is, while I absolutely hate doing the simplest task on OSX.
Think about it this way - does it really matter where things go specifically, so long as you can get there easily?
Yes. It does.
OK, for some people, maybe it doesn't. But that doesn't mean that a nice organised file/folder structure shouldn't be maintained. If I'm looking for a photo of my house for example, I'm not going to know what date it was taken, I probably haven't tagged or named it at all. How is a search based system best for that? I just want to know where it is and use the file manager to have a bit of a look. Some people may not want to deal with file systems, but I (and a lot of other people) ALWAYS will.
Problem is, OSs like windows 7 (maybe Vista? never used it) and OSX have these multiple "libraries" that don't seem to make any sense when you just use a file manager to look through them. Each user has one, and then there is a central one, and everything seems to be messily split up between them. What's wrong with the structure linux OSs and windows XP used? It made logical sense, everything is in one place. A search engine will work no matter how things are stored anyway.
Yes it really is horrible. I never appreciated just how bad it was until my GF got a macbook pro. Multitasking is only half functional since only one menu bar seems to show at once. It comes with a default media player that doesn't play any videos (just like windows) and when you try to change it to use VLC by default it freezes up. You don't seem to be able to get to network shares from the address bar in the file manager.... the list goes on.
it shouldn't go in a different direction just to be "different" from Windows.
Exactly, you only have to look at OSX to see that needlessly trying to be different just ends up making things awkward.
However it in no way could be described as habitable by even the toughest forms of life found here.
Even if that were true, what significance does that have? Why would we expect alien life to be adapted to an environment like ours? Seeing as we only have a sample size of one, we have absolutely no idea what conditions can support life, so it's pointless to impose limitations based on what we happen to like.
Exactly. After half an hour of using my GFs macbook pro my hand starts cramping up -- and I'm only 26!!
Gimmickry. That's about it as far as I can see, the touch pad on the macbook pros is horrible to use anyway. Well, it's fine until you want to use the 'click anywhere' bit, which very quickly leads to sore hands. Not sure why, perhaps it has to do with the force required to click (they are quite stiff). Very hard to do a good fast double click with them too, I always feel like a newbie using them.
I do agree with you; However, many Americans do still seem to think they live in one of the (if not THE) "free-est" countries in the world, which is just as ridiculous. The USA does seem like a pretty authoritarian place compared to many countries.
Maybe planets that give rise to technologically advanced civilisations only come from n-th generation stars? Wouldn't the abundance of metal deposits increase with each generation of star? (
We're probably just the first advanced civilization in our galaxy. No Fermi paradox, no odd extinction events, no improbably rare Earth.
Perhaps, but what basis is there for that assumption?
Surely the fact that, from what we currently know, we should see more aliens around than we do would be one reason to postulate that we are the first, or at least among the first. While we can't give up the whole question and just assume we seem to be alone because we are the first technologically advanced species, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that it is always a possibility. Someone has to come first....
T-Rex, is that you?
Interesting. But apart from our own system, surely we can't rule out the presence (past or present) of aliens in any other system just because we haven't seen any sign of them. Maybe there are aliens living all around the place, but it so happens that civilisations advanced enough to colonise distant star systems use a form of communication that we cannot detect?
Also, surely even once a civilisation has crossed the entire galaxy, it is likely that there will be large patches that remain empty -- after all, there are around 200 Billion stars to choose from. And we are, after all, located at the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm -- surely among the last places an intelligent species would want to live.
You're right, ethernet drivers are almost always present in any case, but your average person doesn't even have an ethernet cable these days -- everything is wireless. Common wireless adapters should be plug and play. This seems to be the case with Ubuntu, and simply isn't with windows.
Which, again, requires an internet connection. Not very helpful if you're trying to get your network adapter working.
No, most stuff on windows is plug, install drivers from mini CD that comes with the device that invariably tries to install bloatware at the same time, and play.
On the other hand, most stuff IS plug and play on ubuntu now. The drivers for the VAST majority of common peripherals are already installed, ready for use.
Take USB wireless adapters, for example. I lent out one of mine to a friend recently, he uses windows. Having only ever used it with linux, I didn't think and just told him to plug it in and use it. Of course, I soon got a phone call from him saying that it didn't work. I'd thrown out the little CD that came with it with the packaging, and he didn't have internet access since his wireless adapter didn't have a driver..... So I had to download the driver (which I had to select from a long list of possible drivers with obscure names). Plug and Play. Yeah, right.
Yes, well, we don't all have the luxury of working in revolving restaurants!
It really sounds like most of the people posting here are comparing apples to oranges -- i.e. comparing two different panels, one that happens to be glossy and one that happens to be matte. Unless you are comparing two identical panels, one with a glossy coating, the other matte, you can't draw any conclusions about which is 'better'. Personally, I have a laptop with a glossy screen and a desktop with matte screens. The laptop screen has a dull and washed out look to it, while the desktop monitors have a crisp and vibrant look to them, but this has nothing to do with the fact that one is glossy and the other matte -- the laptop panel is just rubbish.
I will say that given the choice, I'd always go with a matte panel -- even if it does reduce vibrancy or brightness (of which I am skeptical), I very much value the ability to work in poor lighting conditions without angling the screen. I presume Apple's screens are among the best glossy panels available (you'd hope so for the price...) but I still hate using my girlfriend's macbook pro in a bright environment....
The laws of supply and demand seem to indicate that we have an incredible amount of food that we have no idea what to do with.
If the world has such a glut of food, why is starvation so prevalent, even in countries without closed borders?
Your problem is more likely that farmers in other locations can produce corn at much lower prices than you can, which is a good sign you should be looking at other crops.
Sorry to burst your little bubble, but bio fuels derived from crops take more energy to produce than you get out of them (not to mention taking up already scarce land needed for food production), as do hydrogen/oxygen mixtures obtained through electrolysis of water. Anyone with a basic knowledge of science can tell you that.
Exactly. A desktop PC can perform all of the tasks 99% of users want to do very quickly now. I can do fluid dynamics simulations on my desktop PC that would have required a mediocre supercomputer ten years ago. For the average user who uses a web browser, word processor, and maybe an image editing program, there simply isn't anything to be gained any more -- all these applications run flawlessly and quickly on modern hardware -- even five year old hardware for that matter. There will always be improvements to be made, but their magnitude and relevance will necessarily decrease as time goes on.
I don't buy the whole thing about Apple being a market leader in UI. I'd say quite the opposite, actually. From phones with touch screens instead of buttons (how do you use it without looking at it?) to laptops that you have to click with two fingers at once instead of just having a two buttons, their products are full of 'features' that do nothing to improve the user experience. Instead, they just look flashy or are simply different for the sake of being different. I find OSX the same, it's full of silly little quirks that make no sense other than to differentiate them from other OSs. Originally a windows user, I found it MUCH easier to find my way around linux operating systems than OSX. I still struggle every time I have to do set something up on a mac.
Obviously Apple are market leaders in a number of areas -- perhaps most notably advertising, but also in making attractive, well constructed hardware etc. For all their faults, I do like the well built feeling of their newer macbook pros. I just don't see that their UI design is anything special at all. For this reason, I'll be interested to see what canonical come up with. Pity it'll probably be based around gnome....
8 hours work, 8 hours gaming, 6 hours sleep (many could live on much less) leaving two hours for other stuff -- plenty of time. Remember that you can eat while working and playing games.
I finished undergrad three years ago, and am still at university doing postgrad work.... Some lecturers certainly do provide either hard or soft copies of all their notes, but plenty still don't. I can't see this changing, as they do it to encourage students to actually attend lectures, rather than just get the notes off the website and not bother.
There are certainly some papers in mechanical engineering that are still pretty heavy on copying down notes here -- and I don't see it as a bad thing, I actually learned more in this style of lecture simply because it forces you to pay a certain amount of attention....