Yep. Let me take a few good examples from switching from KDE3 to KDE4:
1. Where's the "Run..." that used to be there? Oh, it's gone. After googling I found that I can get it by using Alt-F2. That's intuitive. Not. 2. Same goes for the "Show desktop" button. Again I had to google for a solution, and it's called Ctrl-F12. Also intuitive. 3. I still don't know how to edit the menu in KDE4. Before I used to right click and edit, now it's just gone. There's probably a shortcut...
This isn't exactly a big deal for people that use the computer regularly and have shortcuts in memory anyway. For everyone else it means it's dark voodoo you must google for in order to figure out what to do. At least one thing I do hope takes off is the HTML5 video element. gnash just spectacularly fails at being a flash replacement. The other embedded media isn't exactly great either.
I guess on a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 being "out of business or useless with modern hardware" and 10 being global domination it's not a ten. But it's not a one either, it's still thriving within its geeky community and holding on to that. Things *are* much better than they were and as long as it keeps going in the right direction it'll get there. I figure we'll eventually run out of even better ways of reading a mail for open source to clone. Then again, Apple has done a pretty damn good job of proving my thoughts on OS maturity wrong...
First of all, you have to realize you can't give everyone "the best" treatment. For one being the seniormost expert on something is personal - whether it's based on cash or medical need that person can't treat everyone with that condition. Secondly there's an essentially limitless pool of marginally better care, particularly on chronic conditions. And not only on quality of care but availability of care, it's impossible to have full intensive care units ready in every little corner of the country. Basicly if you tried setting up a standard of best care and multiplied with the number of patients you'd probably find that there's not enough people to do it, even before you got into economical arguments.
Socalized medicine is about the reasonable. If I break a leg I should be brought no more than a reasonable distance to a hospital where there's a reasonable waiting time where a reasonably skilled physician will treat it and give reasonable medical care. Thousands of people do each year and in their own opinion fully recover. But if a pro athlete broke his leg, marginal differences that other people would never notice can be the difference between 9.87 and 9.89 on the 100m dash. That intense accelerated recovery can be the difference between making this year's championships or not. Or maybe just a millionaire with cash to spare. Either way you really got three alternatives:
1. Raise everyone to that standard 2. Forbid private medical treatment 3. Permit it
I already explained why the first is impossible. The second would be a very invasive regulation of private individuals, that as far as I know is not practised in any countries with socialized medicine either. You may need a license to practice but there's medical reasons for that. also it'd be fairly useless since it's implicit that whoever could pay for their own treatment also could do it abroad. So, even though I'm greatly in favor of socialized medicine I disagree, this is not a problem.
However, I do see it as a problem when large masses of the people abandon the public health care system. That instead of being a luxury, people choose private hospitals simply to get good workmanship. And quite frankly, your talk of "moral, decent life" creeps me out, if someone's doing time for fraud what does that have to do with they got cancer? Refusing medical care to criminals should go under the 8th amendment as "cruel and unusual punishment" in my opinion. Maybe if the condition was self-imposed like an alcoholic's liver failure but I doubt you'd really want the government to keep tabs on how many beers you've had and if you have a healthy and balanced diet.
That doesn't really say much unless you describe if and how they then become more autonomous. Take for example the military, they divide units into squads, platoons, companys etc. based on numbers but it's all top-down management. Splitting on numbers doesn't really say much more than that you've realized that there's a human limit on how many subordinates one manager can handle.
That's true for schedule and budget overruns, but not true for the massive amount of failures. It's extremely rare that say a construction firm says "Man, this house is bad. In fact, it ended up so poor we can't even sell it. We'll just have to demolish it and start over." Then, again few try to redesign the house while they're building it...
How hard is it for them to profile the owners of homes using high grade encryption and find likely political dissidents, then using laws they brought in to "catch high-tech paedophiles" physically seize computers and compel the owner to provide a password, which they have ruled is not protected by the 4th amendment and failure to do so is a crime?
I haven't exactly got research to back that up, but these days that's 80%+ of the bittorrent connections of the tens (hundreds?) of millions of people using bittorrent. On top of that comes everyone that VPN to work, remote manage their Linux server and tons of other applications. I think your paranoia is a bit excessive.
I further bet that if the school administration first spent 6 months coming up with a streamlined pay scale system and pigeonholed all the employees into it, the new payroll system would be a LOT easier to set up and maintain.
I'd rather try to handcode it in assembly with a blindfold than renegotiate salary with everybody. Even if you're essentially doing nothing at all you'll have employees and unions reading over it with a fine-tooth comb screaming at everything.
But I should point out that this outsized verdict (a) makes it inevitable that the verdict will be set aside, and (b) cripples the RIAA's attempts to justify their statutory damages theory as against constitutional attack. Had the jury awarded $50,000 or $60,000 the RIAA would have more of a chance to hold on to the verdict, and would have had a less embarrassing precedent to try to defend in other cases.
Considering their legal performance so far, I'm far from convinced they won't fumble in the supreme court too. That would be real nasty, if they've treated the subject once they're not likely to do so again for a long time. Unless the lawyer purposely bent over in this court to reach the supreme court but I'd call that a haphazard strategy, then again she's probably bankrupt anyway so they might as well bet it all. I think you're seriously underestimating their balls, I'm sure they'll argue this verdict is exactly how it should be. You try to spin it like a bad thing but at least on the short term it's not. Share 2 CDs of music, pay $2 million dollars. It's enough to instantly bankrupt most people, it's either settle or risk screwing up the rest of your life. It might turn the tide even more against them, but it makes it no better for those crushed underfoot.
Activation sucks, ran into the same issue with a game I purchased (online delivery) that I tried to track down a regression in WINE with. It had quite a few activations (never checked how many, probably in the forever long EULA). Reactivation after that was an email form that took two days to get a response. And if I ever needed to reinstall, I'd have to do that again. My response to that email "Thanks, but I already found a quicker, easier, permanent and probably illegal solution, but I don't care. Have a nice day." I found the DVD version + crack and had it downloaded in about an hour. I'm planning to buy the sequel too because the game is great, but I might as well get the uncrippled version to begin with.
(Heck, if you want to stay with computers, get certified to install fiber. It's only going to grow, and I've had trouble finding anyone to install it in the new house.) Something that doesn't expect you for the rest of your life to be answering the phone at 12:45am on random nights.
12:45am "OMG, our fiber connection is broken"
Just funny that you picked the other guys that also get called out at any time during major outages.
Also they are selling a rubbish product. 2Mbits is obsolite now. So do they then come back in a few years time, to take even more money to pay to upgrade it to say 8Mbits... then come back again and again taking ever more money every few years. Each time taking millions more to pay for incremental upgrades.
Get serious. Nobody's going to run fiberoptics to every farm on the countryside, if they tried you'd be paying 600 GBP instead of 6 GBP. Many people outside population centers are still stuck on dialup, and ADSL would be a big upgrade. At least if they mean 2Mbit and not "up to" in the week with three sundays. Broadband is probably one of the most disproportionally distributed services, everywhere you can get power and water and phones but 10Mbit+ lines is almost exclusively in big cities.
Sounds like an 11 hour art noir film. Those that made it might think so, the few still paying attention might think so but must people would like it to have ended five hours ago.
Atom + nVidia ION does full 1080p decoding and is capable to running a 3D desktop with any wiggly effects you might want. That covers a lot of ground in my book. Gaming and video editing is at the opposite end of the scale for me, having a HD cam it's one of the things that really give the machine a workout. But it's rather specific in either you got it or you don't. If you don't, and most people I know only have digicams, then Atom will do you just fine. For gaming, go dualcore + fast GPU, for video encoding go quadcore and forget GPU, the GPU encoding/trancoding tools I've seen so far have had too many limitations. And of course if you got plenty money almost anything is possible...
I can understand the desire that if you were to suffer a severe hand injury, you'd like to be able to continue being all geeky with computers. But personally I don't think that's what I'd really do, sure better accessability would make me suck less but I'd still suck. Without a good interface I'd just grow incredibly frustrated trying to get the flow of my mind through the trickle of my fingers. I think I'd just find a way to get by and instead focus on things that involve talking to people instead. It'd be tough but I think as disabled you have to accept that you've been dealt a new hand of cards (pun intended) and maybe play them differently.
An open-source browser cannot legally read h264 video, that is the real issue that people seem to have trouble to understand. That is why the HTML standard only mandates a format that is not impaired by any legal restrictions: Theora.
Most companies obviously prefer to pay a license and avoid the legal risk. Consumers like myself do "apt-get install x264" and it installs from the *buntu multiverse repository. The people that actually seem to care are very, very few. Personally I'd damn near like a ban on everything else, h264 works just perfect under Linux IMO. I guess if you're on Windows it sucks to be you, but I cant' say I care:)
There are apparently a couple different kings of things that are both called "code reviews", which one are you talking about? There's also the issue that they're supposedly (as in, according to actual studies) pretty good, so maybe you could do them slightly differently and get much better (more in line with the study results) effects.
Formal reviews is only meaningful if you have an equally formal specification that is unlikely to change often or at all. A lot of heavy backend systems could benefit from that, but this isn't one of them they should definately stop. Of the lighter:
Over-the-shoulder One developer looks over the author's shoulder as the latter walks through the code. Email pass-around Source code management system emails code to reviewers automatically after checkin is made. Pair Programming Two authors develop code together at the same workstation, such is common in Extreme Programming. Tool-assisted code review Authors and reviewers use specialized tools designed for peer code review.
First one nearly never leads to good code in my experience, unless you manage to get just the right mix of writing code and helpful conversation, it's way too easy to zone out, take over, turn it into a lecture or whatever. Second one sounds like SPAM, who reads those? Pair programming can work, but I'm not sure it's worth the overhead.
Tool assisted is definately my favorite. Clone and branch then make your changes and request that they be merged back. You have to say something sensible about what you're doing as a whole, at least two people will look at it, they can comment or reject it. Not according to guidelines or design or whatever? Fix and resubmit. That, together with design meetings I think is the way to go.
If you and I disagree on what is an inherent right, who's the authority? You? Me? The government? The UN? The people? Wasn't the whole point of "inherent" that they can't be taken away by popular opinion or the government? God? Whose god(s), there's so many to choose from and many people don't even believe in one. Or would you rather try a humanitarian or natural law argument that bottoms out in us being equals, when we know that's an hidden assumption many have rejected of untermenschen, slaves, heathens and infidels? Or perhaps you'd like the circular philosophical argument that they exist because they're inherent and because they're inherent everyone agree they exist. And even if you got past that whole "would other humans have rights", I could claim I'm in the Matrix and everyone else are computer simulations so there's noone whose inherent rights I'd have to respect.
They can therefore ignore pretty much everything done before.
Uh, do you remember the episode where earth was invaded - probably the lawyer show - and it ended with the city shot to all hell and Fry commented how the trick to TV shows was that "at the end of the day, everything is back to normal". Great meta-joke, where they obviously next episode it was if it never happened.
At least in a game like poker you can say that they're protecting all the people you have taken money from or intended to try taking making money from. Yes, it's somewhat absurd because they're protecting those people from you and you from those people, but that's the essence of a gambling ban - it's regulating how adult consenting people redistribute their money.
I'd basicly consider it an extended job interview. See who's got sane ideas, sane estimates of what they can accomplish and sane code. If you get some working standalone addons too, great. Crowdsourcing = let's pretend people are stupid. And if they are that stupid, that we'll still get great results.
Mostly because you know what you're plugged into. Unless your computer is configured to only ever connect to the secure job wireless (very impractical if you take it anywhere else) most people would never notice a man-in-the-middle.
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Yep. Let me take a few good examples from switching from KDE3 to KDE4:
1. Where's the "Run..." that used to be there? Oh, it's gone. After googling I found that I can get it by using Alt-F2. That's intuitive. Not.
2. Same goes for the "Show desktop" button. Again I had to google for a solution, and it's called Ctrl-F12. Also intuitive.
3. I still don't know how to edit the menu in KDE4. Before I used to right click and edit, now it's just gone. There's probably a shortcut...
This isn't exactly a big deal for people that use the computer regularly and have shortcuts in memory anyway. For everyone else it means it's dark voodoo you must google for in order to figure out what to do. At least one thing I do hope takes off is the HTML5 video element. gnash just spectacularly fails at being a flash replacement. The other embedded media isn't exactly great either.
I guess on a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 being "out of business or useless with modern hardware" and 10 being global domination it's not a ten. But it's not a one either, it's still thriving within its geeky community and holding on to that. Things *are* much better than they were and as long as it keeps going in the right direction it'll get there. I figure we'll eventually run out of even better ways of reading a mail for open source to clone. Then again, Apple has done a pretty damn good job of proving my thoughts on OS maturity wrong...
First of all, you have to realize you can't give everyone "the best" treatment. For one being the seniormost expert on something is personal - whether it's based on cash or medical need that person can't treat everyone with that condition. Secondly there's an essentially limitless pool of marginally better care, particularly on chronic conditions. And not only on quality of care but availability of care, it's impossible to have full intensive care units ready in every little corner of the country. Basicly if you tried setting up a standard of best care and multiplied with the number of patients you'd probably find that there's not enough people to do it, even before you got into economical arguments.
Socalized medicine is about the reasonable. If I break a leg I should be brought no more than a reasonable distance to a hospital where there's a reasonable waiting time where a reasonably skilled physician will treat it and give reasonable medical care. Thousands of people do each year and in their own opinion fully recover. But if a pro athlete broke his leg, marginal differences that other people would never notice can be the difference between 9.87 and 9.89 on the 100m dash. That intense accelerated recovery can be the difference between making this year's championships or not. Or maybe just a millionaire with cash to spare. Either way you really got three alternatives:
1. Raise everyone to that standard
2. Forbid private medical treatment
3. Permit it
I already explained why the first is impossible. The second would be a very invasive regulation of private individuals, that as far as I know is not practised in any countries with socialized medicine either. You may need a license to practice but there's medical reasons for that. also it'd be fairly useless since it's implicit that whoever could pay for their own treatment also could do it abroad. So, even though I'm greatly in favor of socialized medicine I disagree, this is not a problem.
However, I do see it as a problem when large masses of the people abandon the public health care system. That instead of being a luxury, people choose private hospitals simply to get good workmanship. And quite frankly, your talk of "moral, decent life" creeps me out, if someone's doing time for fraud what does that have to do with they got cancer? Refusing medical care to criminals should go under the 8th amendment as "cruel and unusual punishment" in my opinion. Maybe if the condition was self-imposed like an alcoholic's liver failure but I doubt you'd really want the government to keep tabs on how many beers you've had and if you have a healthy and balanced diet.
That doesn't really say much unless you describe if and how they then become more autonomous. Take for example the military, they divide units into squads, platoons, companys etc. based on numbers but it's all top-down management. Splitting on numbers doesn't really say much more than that you've realized that there's a human limit on how many subordinates one manager can handle.
That's true for schedule and budget overruns, but not true for the massive amount of failures. It's extremely rare that say a construction firm says "Man, this house is bad. In fact, it ended up so poor we can't even sell it. We'll just have to demolish it and start over." Then, again few try to redesign the house while they're building it...
How hard is it for them to profile the owners of homes using high grade encryption and find likely political dissidents, then using laws they brought in to "catch high-tech paedophiles" physically seize computers and compel the owner to provide a password, which they have ruled is not protected by the 4th amendment and failure to do so is a crime?
I haven't exactly got research to back that up, but these days that's 80%+ of the bittorrent connections of the tens (hundreds?) of millions of people using bittorrent. On top of that comes everyone that VPN to work, remote manage their Linux server and tons of other applications. I think your paranoia is a bit excessive.
I further bet that if the school administration first spent 6 months coming up with a streamlined pay scale system and pigeonholed all the employees into it, the new payroll system would be a LOT easier to set up and maintain.
I'd rather try to handcode it in assembly with a blindfold than renegotiate salary with everybody. Even if you're essentially doing nothing at all you'll have employees and unions reading over it with a fine-tooth comb screaming at everything.
"She's a bitch and how hard can we slap her?" would be my best bet. I really can't see any other reason than anger.
But I should point out that this outsized verdict (a) makes it inevitable that the verdict will be set aside, and (b) cripples the RIAA's attempts to justify their statutory damages theory as against constitutional attack. Had the jury awarded $50,000 or $60,000 the RIAA would have more of a chance to hold on to the verdict, and would have had a less embarrassing precedent to try to defend in other cases.
Considering their legal performance so far, I'm far from convinced they won't fumble in the supreme court too. That would be real nasty, if they've treated the subject once they're not likely to do so again for a long time. Unless the lawyer purposely bent over in this court to reach the supreme court but I'd call that a haphazard strategy, then again she's probably bankrupt anyway so they might as well bet it all. I think you're seriously underestimating their balls, I'm sure they'll argue this verdict is exactly how it should be. You try to spin it like a bad thing but at least on the short term it's not. Share 2 CDs of music, pay $2 million dollars. It's enough to instantly bankrupt most people, it's either settle or risk screwing up the rest of your life. It might turn the tide even more against them, but it makes it no better for those crushed underfoot.
Well doh, they're a PR firm so they have to sell it like something they can do something about. Anything like "principled" sounds tough to change.
Activation sucks, ran into the same issue with a game I purchased (online delivery) that I tried to track down a regression in WINE with. It had quite a few activations (never checked how many, probably in the forever long EULA). Reactivation after that was an email form that took two days to get a response. And if I ever needed to reinstall, I'd have to do that again. My response to that email "Thanks, but I already found a quicker, easier, permanent and probably illegal solution, but I don't care. Have a nice day." I found the DVD version + crack and had it downloaded in about an hour. I'm planning to buy the sequel too because the game is great, but I might as well get the uncrippled version to begin with.
Especially on laptops, a $350 32GB SSD (also entry level) can get you quite far
I bought a last-gen drive (Vertex 120GB) for about 375 USD (excluding VAT) in march or april. Oddly enough, since then prices have only gone up.
(Heck, if you want to stay with computers, get certified to install fiber. It's only going to grow, and I've had trouble finding anyone to install it in the new house.) Something that doesn't expect you for the rest of your life to be answering the phone at 12:45am on random nights.
12:45am "OMG, our fiber connection is broken"
Just funny that you picked the other guys that also get called out at any time during major outages.
Also they are selling a rubbish product. 2Mbits is obsolite now. So do they then come back in a few years time, to take even more money to pay to upgrade it to say 8Mbits ... then come back again and again taking ever more money every few years. Each time taking millions more to pay for incremental upgrades.
Get serious. Nobody's going to run fiberoptics to every farm on the countryside, if they tried you'd be paying 600 GBP instead of 6 GBP. Many people outside population centers are still stuck on dialup, and ADSL would be a big upgrade. At least if they mean 2Mbit and not "up to" in the week with three sundays. Broadband is probably one of the most disproportionally distributed services, everywhere you can get power and water and phones but 10Mbit+ lines is almost exclusively in big cities.
Sounds like an 11 hour art noir film. Those that made it might think so, the few still paying attention might think so but must people would like it to have ended five hours ago.
Atom + nVidia ION does full 1080p decoding and is capable to running a 3D desktop with any wiggly effects you might want. That covers a lot of ground in my book. Gaming and video editing is at the opposite end of the scale for me, having a HD cam it's one of the things that really give the machine a workout. But it's rather specific in either you got it or you don't. If you don't, and most people I know only have digicams, then Atom will do you just fine. For gaming, go dualcore + fast GPU, for video encoding go quadcore and forget GPU, the GPU encoding/trancoding tools I've seen so far have had too many limitations. And of course if you got plenty money almost anything is possible...
I can understand the desire that if you were to suffer a severe hand injury, you'd like to be able to continue being all geeky with computers. But personally I don't think that's what I'd really do, sure better accessability would make me suck less but I'd still suck. Without a good interface I'd just grow incredibly frustrated trying to get the flow of my mind through the trickle of my fingers. I think I'd just find a way to get by and instead focus on things that involve talking to people instead. It'd be tough but I think as disabled you have to accept that you've been dealt a new hand of cards (pun intended) and maybe play them differently.
An open-source browser cannot legally read h264 video, that is the real issue that people seem to have trouble to understand. That is why the HTML standard only mandates a format that is not impaired by any legal restrictions: Theora.
Most companies obviously prefer to pay a license and avoid the legal risk. Consumers like myself do "apt-get install x264" and it installs from the *buntu multiverse repository. The people that actually seem to care are very, very few. Personally I'd damn near like a ban on everything else, h264 works just perfect under Linux IMO. I guess if you're on Windows it sucks to be you, but I cant' say I care :)
There are apparently a couple different kings of things that are both called "code reviews", which one are you talking about? There's also the issue that they're supposedly (as in, according to actual studies) pretty good, so maybe you could do them slightly differently and get much better (more in line with the study results) effects.
Formal reviews is only meaningful if you have an equally formal specification that is unlikely to change often or at all. A lot of heavy backend systems could benefit from that, but this isn't one of them they should definately stop. Of the lighter:
Over-the-shoulder One developer looks over the author's shoulder as the latter walks through the code.
Email pass-around Source code management system emails code to reviewers automatically after checkin is made.
Pair Programming Two authors develop code together at the same workstation, such is common in Extreme Programming.
Tool-assisted code review Authors and reviewers use specialized tools designed for peer code review.
First one nearly never leads to good code in my experience, unless you manage to get just the right mix of writing code and helpful conversation, it's way too easy to zone out, take over, turn it into a lecture or whatever. Second one sounds like SPAM, who reads those? Pair programming can work, but I'm not sure it's worth the overhead.
Tool assisted is definately my favorite. Clone and branch then make your changes and request that they be merged back. You have to say something sensible about what you're doing as a whole, at least two people will look at it, they can comment or reject it. Not according to guidelines or design or whatever? Fix and resubmit. That, together with design meetings I think is the way to go.
The whole "inherent" discussion is bogus.
If you and I disagree on what is an inherent right, who's the authority? You? Me? The government? The UN? The people? Wasn't the whole point of "inherent" that they can't be taken away by popular opinion or the government? God? Whose god(s), there's so many to choose from and many people don't even believe in one. Or would you rather try a humanitarian or natural law argument that bottoms out in us being equals, when we know that's an hidden assumption many have rejected of untermenschen, slaves, heathens and infidels? Or perhaps you'd like the circular philosophical argument that they exist because they're inherent and because they're inherent everyone agree they exist. And even if you got past that whole "would other humans have rights", I could claim I'm in the Matrix and everyone else are computer simulations so there's noone whose inherent rights I'd have to respect.
They can therefore ignore pretty much everything done before.
Uh, do you remember the episode where earth was invaded - probably the lawyer show - and it ended with the city shot to all hell and Fry commented how the trick to TV shows was that "at the end of the day, everything is back to normal". Great meta-joke, where they obviously next episode it was if it never happened.
I know of a huge forgotten area, but it's too difficult to get to for most WoW players. It's called real life.
It's all real life. But I've heard of this mysterious land AFK, haven't explored that yet...
Call her parents and ask. The aftermath could be... interesting.
At least in a game like poker you can say that they're protecting all the people you have taken money from or intended to try taking making money from. Yes, it's somewhat absurd because they're protecting those people from you and you from those people, but that's the essence of a gambling ban - it's regulating how adult consenting people redistribute their money.
I'd basicly consider it an extended job interview. See who's got sane ideas, sane estimates of what they can accomplish and sane code. If you get some working standalone addons too, great. Crowdsourcing = let's pretend people are stupid. And if they are that stupid, that we'll still get great results.
Mostly because you know what you're plugged into. Unless your computer is configured to only ever connect to the secure job wireless (very impractical if you take it anywhere else) most people would never notice a man-in-the-middle.