I want unity. I like it. I've used a half a dozen different linux guis and unity is the one that lives on my desktop every day. Sure it's got issues, but they all do in one way or another.
Also, new coke was preferred in taste tests prior to release over "classic" coke and pepsi -combined-.
The reason it failed was because the coca-cola corporation had underestimated the extent to which they themselves had integrated coke into american lifestyles and memories, and any perceived change to that would be viewed by the american public as dicking around with their childhood.
Yes it is popular, and that's part of the reason so many of the linux faithful hate it. Despite whatever many linux users claim about how it's the true best choice and everybody should use it, a good number of them like it specifically because it gives them computer hipster status. Ubuntu's popularity is a bad thing to them. if "the masses" use something, it -must- be bad, since the masses are idiots.
that said, rational discussion follows:
Having used both cinnamon (about a month) and unity (going on 3 months now I believe), I'll go out on the limb here and mention I actually prefer unity. for all the complaints i hear of "tablet interface", I swear I wonder if people don't realize you can resize the unity bar and unity icons. my unity bar and icons are only slightly larger than the windows 7 taskbar on the computer next to this one. Also, considering that on modern displays, horizontal screen space abounds and it is vertical screen space that is at a premium, I don't mind the taskbar on the left at all. I dig it actually.
I'm not saying I don't have any problems with unity, but 12.04's version at least (never tried any of the previous versions) isn't bad. I also applaud canonical for producing the first linux interface i've used that really feels as polished and modern as the competiting interfaces from apple and MS. sure maybe it's got a little knock on it here and there, but at least they're trying. good ole gnome 2 is rock solid and reliable but god is it boring and sterile. it feels like state-of-the-art circa 2001. unity has some character at least.
cinnamon is an interesting gnome3/gnome2 hybrid, but it was buggy as all fuck when last i used it in mint lisa. maybe it's better in the new mint? haven't tried mint again since I went to ubuntu 12.04.
On February 9, 2003, Curtis was caught attempting to buy a bag of marijuana on Manhattan's Lower East Side.[2] Curtis was arrested and charged with criminal possession of marijuana. Due to recognizability of Curtis, word of the arrest spread quickly through the media. A chain email of the story even cropped up as it was forwarded around the internet using the iconic parodied phrase "Dude, you're getting a cell!"
I miss the 16x10 ratio screens on the e6x00 and e6x10 models. with the e6x20, dell caved to the "1366x768 res is synonymous with 'laptop'" BS that has been going on the past few years.
Also, I like the keyboard on the non-backlit e6x00s the best (what I'm using right now).
other than that, I agree. The 6x20 series is a fantastically built laptop. light, smooth, incredibly sturdy. it inspires confidance in its build quality.
It's attractive too, without being gaudy. For some reason, consumer laptops the past few years from almost any manufacturer have been getting slapped with all sorts of weird textures, colors, patterns, and plastic cladding. looks like a 1990s honda civic owner got hold of the design team. the dell latitude series has managed to avoid that so far.
... because you can't do that now with a windows-based dell machine?
yes yes, I know, it's fashionable to hate ubuntu. Because if there's one thing that unites hardcore linux fanboys, it's hating any other distro except their own. Sometimes I wonder if they hate other distros more than they hate MS.
I've worked at 4 businesses in the past 10 years, varying in size from a small enviornmental testing lab (about 10 total employees) up to a prominent cosmetics company owned by a global conglomerage, including a software company that had about 400 support technicians and a giant room full of enterprise servers.
each and every one of those sourced the vast majority of their workstations from dell, and a good number of servers as well.
in my experience, it's 'who ISN'T buying dell' anymore.
No, they know what we want. They just don't care. They figure if you can afford a smartphone, you can afford damn near whatever they want to charge you. $40 a month plus $45 a device for 1gb? That's a deal so bad it needs to come with a complimentary tube of KY jelly, yet people are going to pay it, because there are no alternatives (or the alternatives suck).
1gb. seriously 1gb? What is this, 1995? I go through about 200mb a day of wireless data usage, and that's being careful where I visit, using noscript and adblock to keep data usage to a minimum, and generally restraining myself. if I wasn't paying attention, I could do 1gb in less than a half an hour at 4g speeds.
obligatory slashdot analogy: telco - "Ok, here is your 200mph 4G car. it's going to cost you a damn pretty penny, but you've got it!" me - "sweet!" * vroomm 50mph, vrooooommmm 100mph, vrooooooomm 200mph! screeeeeeeeeaaaachhhhalt.* me - "what the hell? It only worked for 30 minutes, now it doesn't work anymore" telco - "oh, didn't we tell you? you can only drive at 200mph for 30 minutes a month unless you want to pay us again. pretty much the same ammount. for another 30 minutes." me - "why would you advertise that your network is that fast if I'm not allowed to go that fast for anything more than a few minutes?" telco - "you're new here, aren't you? just turn around and bend over."
I thought it was supposed to look just real enough (and conversely, just unreal enough) for your brain to suspend disbelief.
from what I've read about 48fps, that's exactly the problem people ran into. people said things like "my brain was not processing what I was seeing as 'two hobbits walking up a hill' but rather 'two actors in hobbit costumes walking up a hill'". They were having difficulty suspending disbelief.
I'll have to wait until I see it in person, but native 48fps will have to be a whole other world better than what the 120hz tv's software intrapolation does to 24fps film, cause that's distracting as all hell.
That's not even to mention that there is a huge disparity in quality between $0.99 games and $60 games.
Don't get me wrong, there are a TON of shit games released for full consoles that aren't worth $6, let alone $60, and there are a ton of excellent games available for android/ios that are easily worth the $1, $2, or even up to $5 price tags that go along with them...
but you aren't going to ever get a Diablo III / Mass effect / Modern Warfare / etc level game on android/ios for $1. ain't happening. sheer logistics of development team size.
and i'm cool with that. there's no need to have only one or the other. we can have both.
Floridians voted for president. the votes were counted. Bush won. However, the totals were within the statistical margin of error in 3 counties. So they were recounted. Bush won AGAIN. However, the totals were still within the margin of error, so -in violation of their own state laws- regarding when voting results have to be reported, florida decided to count again. At this point the supreme court stepped in and said "we need a result. you can't keep recounting forever until you get the result that lawyers want. this shit will go on forever if that happens. you have two certified results for bush in hand. give us either one of them".
THAT is what happened. it's not like this happened in 1581 and we have to guess what happened. these events happened within the adult lifetimes of most of the users of this board and are documented all to fuck. stop making shit up that makes you feel like you're morally superior, and go read.
i mean, i love my asus tf101, it's awesome, but it always saddens me when there's yet one more cool thing like thist that it won't support cause of lack of NEON instructions or limited video memory bandwidth or something like that.
No, you don't. If you're in a low enough income bracket, you don't have to pay the penalty, and in fact get a subsidy to purchase insurance.
a subsidy for the poor? where does the subsidy come from, taxes? where do taxes come from? everybody else.
so... everybody else is paying more money because some people can't afford health care. That sounds familiar... awfully familar... wait, I know where I've seen that phrase before!
Please explain how that isn't EXACTLY the same problem that the individual mandate was supposed to fix? the only difference I see is that the money goes to the government, then to the poor, then to the health care industry, whereas before it went directly to the health care industry. also please explain how it could possibly be less expensive in the long run now that there is at least one extra level of beuracracy (that must be paid for) in the middle.
does this imply that as soon as we have 3d printers in our homes capable of reproducing said hardware, their costs will also plummet to 0? Is the expertise in designing a new pair of sennheisers that is better than the old model worth nothing?
Sure. let's start with few of the more interesting ones he makes:
Why are we willing to pay for the hardware (sometimes exorbinant prices) to play music on/with, but not willing to pay for the music itself if we don't have to? Spending the kind of money we do on ipods, bose, and beats would imply we value the musical experience (even if we have poor taste)... but why do we not place a value on the music itself and those creating it?
Why are we as a generation willing to pay a little bit more for fair trade coffee, or purchase clothing from sweatshop-free clothing manufactuers, in order to make sure that the people working in those industries are fairly compensated, yet we don't feel the same way about compensating our musical artists?
how many touring bands and musical acts were there in the millenia before recorded music? how many genres of music?
the widespread exposure of your favorite bands that allows them to play huge halls and arenas and charge $100 per ticket is purely a result of broadcast and recorded music. you're also dismissing any band that isn't famous enough to play those huge halls or charge those large amounts of money. A lot of those bands produce music that, while not as popular as the arena bands, is quite often preferable to listen to.
to imply that we can simply "go back to the way it was before" is disingenous. This is a new playing field with new rules.
But some of the best albums I ever bought were by that 99%. I'd rather they had incentive to keep making music.
widespread popularity has -never- equated with perceived quality. if it did, mcdonalds french fries would be america's "best" food, budweiser would be america's "best" beer, and so on.
I want people who aren't megastars to keep making music cause a lot of it is worthwhile nonetheless.
as I pointed out before, you cant' make something legal just because lots of people want to do it, because people do what's best for themselves in the short term, not what's best for themselves in the long term or society in general. It's the tragedy of the commons.
you can, and certainly should, reconsider if something should be legal in the face of overwhelming popular support of it being legal. you can reconsider if the benefit in keeping it illegal is disportionate to the harm in legalizing it.
That doesn't mean that the answer to the mob should always be "yes, do whatever you want". Sometimes the best answer is "no".
We elect our leaders not just to represent our voices, but to -govern- us. I think we can all agree that they generally do a piss-poor job of this, but I'm talking about the theoretical here.
and to answer your question, I -don't- know whether file sharing of music should be illegal. Nor do I know it whether it should be legal. What I know is that it's a complex debate and we do ourselves a disservice by pretending otherwise. That is why I told GP to champion better arguements for his point.
To harken back to a previous arguement I made, ethics can trump economics. If not, we'd still have slavery.
Your arguement does point out a flaw that both sides are making however. They are equating the distribution of CDs and the distribution of Digital copies as if they were two different processes for the same result, that could be weighed vs each other. They are not the same thing.
The CD (cassette, album, whatever) always included in it's retail price the distribution cost, the advertising cost, the production cost, the management cost, and the payment to the talent for the original creation. They could get away with this method of bundling costs simply because until the mid-90s, CDs were not easily copied.
now that we have digital distribution (and digital copying), the industry will need to find a new way to monetize the other portions of the bundle, the advertising, the production, the management, and the talent payment. they need to find a way to do this not because their original method was the wrong way to do things, but only because it is now obsolete. A lot of people in the comments here are equating "0 price for distribution" now as "0 price for music, period", and that's simply wrong-headedness.
We've got a chance here to shape the way an industry and a cultural medium we all love (or else we wouldn't be in here) is reborn in the face of a new paradigm, and we're spending the time saying "lol fuck you mafiaa" instead.
The ironic thing is that the Beebers of the world will likely be the ones that survive the longest. The mega-stars, the obscenely-pushed "talent".
When the bottom drops out of an existing industry, it's never the top that feels it, it's the bottom. it's the 99% of profesisonal musicians who are filing tax returns averaging $33k a year with no benefits (TFA's statistics, not verified) who are hurt first. It will be years and years before this sort of thing affects the megastars, and by then they'll all be obscenely rich anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno, I think pepsi does pretty well for themselves.
especially considering that at the time of the whole coke classic / new coke debacle, pepsi was handily outselling coke.
I want unity. I like it. I've used a half a dozen different linux guis and unity is the one that lives on my desktop every day. Sure it's got issues, but they all do in one way or another.
Also, new coke was preferred in taste tests prior to release over "classic" coke and pepsi -combined-.
The reason it failed was because the coca-cola corporation had underestimated the extent to which they themselves had integrated coke into american lifestyles and memories, and any perceived change to that would be viewed by the american public as dicking around with their childhood.
http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/newcoke.asp
honestly, new coke was pretty good. I miss it.
Yes it is popular, and that's part of the reason so many of the linux faithful hate it. Despite whatever many linux users claim about how it's the true best choice and everybody should use it, a good number of them like it specifically because it gives them computer hipster status. Ubuntu's popularity is a bad thing to them. if "the masses" use something, it -must- be bad, since the masses are idiots.
that said, rational discussion follows:
Having used both cinnamon (about a month) and unity (going on 3 months now I believe), I'll go out on the limb here and mention I actually prefer unity. for all the complaints i hear of "tablet interface", I swear I wonder if people don't realize you can resize the unity bar and unity icons. my unity bar and icons are only slightly larger than the windows 7 taskbar on the computer next to this one. Also, considering that on modern displays, horizontal screen space abounds and it is vertical screen space that is at a premium, I don't mind the taskbar on the left at all. I dig it actually.
I'm not saying I don't have any problems with unity, but 12.04's version at least (never tried any of the previous versions) isn't bad. I also applaud canonical for producing the first linux interface i've used that really feels as polished and modern as the competiting interfaces from apple and MS. sure maybe it's got a little knock on it here and there, but at least they're trying. good ole gnome 2 is rock solid and reliable but god is it boring and sterile. it feels like state-of-the-art circa 2001. unity has some character at least.
cinnamon is an interesting gnome3/gnome2 hybrid, but it was buggy as all fuck when last i used it in mint lisa. maybe it's better in the new mint? haven't tried mint again since I went to ubuntu 12.04.
On February 9, 2003, Curtis was caught attempting to buy a bag of marijuana on Manhattan's Lower East Side.[2] Curtis was arrested and charged with criminal possession of marijuana. Due to recognizability of Curtis, word of the arrest spread quickly through the media. A chain email of the story even cropped up as it was forwarded around the internet using the iconic parodied phrase "Dude, you're getting a cell!"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Curtis_(actor)
I miss the 16x10 ratio screens on the e6x00 and e6x10 models. with the e6x20, dell caved to the "1366x768 res is synonymous with 'laptop'" BS that has been going on the past few years.
Also, I like the keyboard on the non-backlit e6x00s the best (what I'm using right now).
other than that, I agree. The 6x20 series is a fantastically built laptop. light, smooth, incredibly sturdy. it inspires confidance in its build quality.
It's attractive too, without being gaudy. For some reason, consumer laptops the past few years from almost any manufacturer have been getting slapped with all sorts of weird textures, colors, patterns, and plastic cladding. looks like a 1990s honda civic owner got hold of the design team. the dell latitude series has managed to avoid that so far.
... because you can't do that now with a windows-based dell machine?
yes yes, I know, it's fashionable to hate ubuntu. Because if there's one thing that unites hardcore linux fanboys, it's hating any other distro except their own. Sometimes I wonder if they hate other distros more than they hate MS.
i should note, for on-topic's sake, that the dell laptop i'm writing this on -is- running ubuntu 12.04, but I put it on there, not them.
I've worked at 4 businesses in the past 10 years, varying in size from a small enviornmental testing lab (about 10 total employees) up to a prominent cosmetics company owned by a global conglomerage, including a software company that had about 400 support technicians and a giant room full of enterprise servers.
each and every one of those sourced the vast majority of their workstations from dell, and a good number of servers as well.
in my experience, it's 'who ISN'T buying dell' anymore.
Hell, even I'm writing this on a dell laptop.
A. you've apparently never been to anyplace out west where roads are straight and flat for miles and miles. Or portions of europe for that matter.
B. if it's a "omg 4g costs so much" problem, explain why 4g data access and 3g data access costs the same?
No, they know what we want. They just don't care. They figure if you can afford a smartphone, you can afford damn near whatever they want to charge you.
$40 a month plus $45 a device for 1gb? That's a deal so bad it needs to come with a complimentary tube of KY jelly, yet people are going to pay it, because there are no alternatives (or the alternatives suck).
1gb. seriously 1gb? What is this, 1995? I go through about 200mb a day of wireless data usage, and that's being careful where I visit, using noscript and adblock to keep data usage to a minimum, and generally restraining myself. if I wasn't paying attention, I could do 1gb in less than a half an hour at 4g speeds.
obligatory slashdot analogy:
telco - "Ok, here is your 200mph 4G car. it's going to cost you a damn pretty penny, but you've got it!"
me - "sweet!"
* vroomm 50mph, vrooooommmm 100mph, vrooooooomm 200mph! screeeeeeeeeaaaachhhhalt.*
me - "what the hell? It only worked for 30 minutes, now it doesn't work anymore"
telco - "oh, didn't we tell you? you can only drive at 200mph for 30 minutes a month unless you want to pay us again. pretty much the same ammount. for another 30 minutes."
me - "why would you advertise that your network is that fast if I'm not allowed to go that fast for anything more than a few minutes?"
telco - "you're new here, aren't you? just turn around and bend over."
I wonder... can I get a patent on filing stupid patents?
I mean just think, that will pre-empt thousands and thousands of these things.
it'll be a god damn money pit.
It's supposed to look real.
I thought it was supposed to look just real enough (and conversely, just unreal enough) for your brain to suspend disbelief.
from what I've read about 48fps, that's exactly the problem people ran into. people said things like "my brain was not processing what I was seeing as 'two hobbits walking up a hill' but rather 'two actors in hobbit costumes walking up a hill'". They were having difficulty suspending disbelief.
I'll have to wait until I see it in person, but native 48fps will have to be a whole other world better than what the 120hz tv's software intrapolation does to 24fps film, cause that's distracting as all hell.
That's not even to mention that there is a huge disparity in quality between $0.99 games and $60 games.
Don't get me wrong, there are a TON of shit games released for full consoles that aren't worth $6, let alone $60, and there are a ton of excellent games available for android/ios that are easily worth the $1, $2, or even up to $5 price tags that go along with them...
but you aren't going to ever get a Diablo III / Mass effect / Modern Warfare / etc level game on android/ios for $1. ain't happening. sheer logistics of development team size.
and i'm cool with that. there's no need to have only one or the other. we can have both.
Floridians voted for president.
the votes were counted.
Bush won.
However, the totals were within the statistical margin of error in 3 counties. So they were recounted.
Bush won AGAIN.
However, the totals were still within the margin of error, so -in violation of their own state laws- regarding when voting results have to be reported, florida decided to count again.
At this point the supreme court stepped in and said "we need a result. you can't keep recounting forever until you get the result that lawyers want. this shit will go on forever if that happens. you have two certified results for bush in hand. give us either one of them".
THAT is what happened. it's not like this happened in 1581 and we have to guess what happened. these events happened within the adult lifetimes of most of the users of this board and are documented all to fuck. stop making shit up that makes you feel like you're morally superior, and go read.
I remember when the tegra 2 was hot shit.
i mean, i love my asus tf101, it's awesome, but it always saddens me when there's yet one more cool thing like thist that it won't support cause of lack of NEON instructions or limited video memory bandwidth or something like that.
The government has a pretty consistant track record of never paying for something that it's not allowed to manage.
No, you don't. If you're in a low enough income bracket, you don't have to pay the penalty, and in fact get a subsidy to purchase insurance.
a subsidy for the poor? where does the subsidy come from, taxes?
where do taxes come from? everybody else.
so... everybody else is paying more money because some people can't afford health care. That sounds familiar... awfully familar... wait, I know where I've seen that phrase before!
Please explain how that isn't EXACTLY the same problem that the individual mandate was supposed to fix? the only difference I see is that the money goes to the government, then to the poor, then to the health care industry, whereas before it went directly to the health care industry. also please explain how it could possibly be less expensive in the long run now that there is at least one extra level of beuracracy (that must be paid for) in the middle.
how did the comments get this far without somebody quoting Billy Bob Thorton: "That'd be like shooting a bb gun at a freight train doc"
does this imply that as soon as we have 3d printers in our homes capable of reproducing said hardware, their costs will also plummet to 0? Is the expertise in designing a new pair of sennheisers that is better than the old model worth nothing?
Sure. let's start with few of the more interesting ones he makes:
Why are we willing to pay for the hardware (sometimes exorbinant prices) to play music on/with, but not willing to pay for the music itself if we don't have to? Spending the kind of money we do on ipods, bose, and beats would imply we value the musical experience (even if we have poor taste)... but why do we not place a value on the music itself and those creating it?
Why are we as a generation willing to pay a little bit more for fair trade coffee, or purchase clothing from sweatshop-free clothing manufactuers, in order to make sure that the people working in those industries are fairly compensated, yet we don't feel the same way about compensating our musical artists?
how many touring bands and musical acts were there in the millenia before recorded music? how many genres of music?
the widespread exposure of your favorite bands that allows them to play huge halls and arenas and charge $100 per ticket is purely a result of broadcast and recorded music. you're also dismissing any band that isn't famous enough to play those huge halls or charge those large amounts of money. A lot of those bands produce music that, while not as popular as the arena bands, is quite often preferable to listen to.
to imply that we can simply "go back to the way it was before" is disingenous. This is a new playing field with new rules.
But some of the best albums I ever bought were by that 99%. I'd rather they had incentive to keep making music.
widespread popularity has -never- equated with perceived quality. if it did, mcdonalds french fries would be america's "best" food, budweiser would be america's "best" beer, and so on.
I want people who aren't megastars to keep making music cause a lot of it is worthwhile nonetheless.
as I pointed out before, you cant' make something legal just because lots of people want to do it, because people do what's best for themselves in the short term, not what's best for themselves in the long term or society in general. It's the tragedy of the commons.
you can, and certainly should, reconsider if something should be legal in the face of overwhelming popular support of it being legal. you can reconsider if the benefit in keeping it illegal is disportionate to the harm in legalizing it.
That doesn't mean that the answer to the mob should always be "yes, do whatever you want". Sometimes the best answer is "no".
We elect our leaders not just to represent our voices, but to -govern- us. I think we can all agree that they generally do a piss-poor job of this, but I'm talking about the theoretical here.
and to answer your question, I -don't- know whether file sharing of music should be illegal. Nor do I know it whether it should be legal. What I know is that it's a complex debate and we do ourselves a disservice by pretending otherwise. That is why I told GP to champion better arguements for his point.
To harken back to a previous arguement I made, ethics can trump economics. If not, we'd still have slavery.
Your arguement does point out a flaw that both sides are making however. They are equating the distribution of CDs and the distribution of Digital copies as if they were two different processes for the same result, that could be weighed vs each other. They are not the same thing.
The CD (cassette, album, whatever) always included in it's retail price the distribution cost, the advertising cost, the production cost, the management cost, and the payment to the talent for the original creation. They could get away with this method of bundling costs simply because until the mid-90s, CDs were not easily copied.
now that we have digital distribution (and digital copying), the industry will need to find a new way to monetize the other portions of the bundle, the advertising, the production, the management, and the talent payment. they need to find a way to do this not because their original method was the wrong way to do things, but only because it is now obsolete. A lot of people in the comments here are equating "0 price for distribution" now as "0 price for music, period", and that's simply wrong-headedness.
We've got a chance here to shape the way an industry and a cultural medium we all love (or else we wouldn't be in here) is reborn in the face of a new paradigm, and we're spending the time saying "lol fuck you mafiaa" instead.
The ironic thing is that the Beebers of the world will likely be the ones that survive the longest. The mega-stars, the obscenely-pushed "talent".
When the bottom drops out of an existing industry, it's never the top that feels it, it's the bottom. it's the 99% of profesisonal musicians who are filing tax returns averaging $33k a year with no benefits (TFA's statistics, not verified) who are hurt first. It will be years and years before this sort of thing affects the megastars, and by then they'll all be obscenely rich anyway.