Laptops and especially desktops don't have the faux "oh, your styling is out of date! You need to replace your car that will be perfectly good for another ten years!" thing going on that phones to some extent do.
So does mine, but it refuses to sync the contacts on my phone with the contacts at Gmail. Somehow it always seem to be the Google native apps that crap out.
Worth noting that it used to be the norm for Elections Canada to do door to door enumeration prior to elections to make sure that the voters' list was up to date and complete.
Several years back the government of the day eliminated that practice - probably under the guise of saving money - so that now the voters' list is of considerably less use - hence the rules to allow people to register at the polls, and the sometimes questionable practices that follow.
Needless to say, the people who fall off of the voters' list tend to be those who are most mobile - the young, the unemployed, the homeless - in other words, the ones most likely to vote on the Left of the political spectrum.
I'm using Mint Cinnamon, and am very happy with it. The "classic" desktop works fine - why the need to reinvent it?
I had a Mac for several years, and didn't find OS X - much less the idiotic Dock - to be any more useful than plain old Windows XP. I ran Ubuntu until Unity, which simply didn't offer any real added utility, just more pointless doo-dads.
The reason why so many people stick with XP, or Vista, or even Windows 2000 is because it just works. They understand it. They don't need added gobbledy-gook flying all over the screen, or the OS "hiding" stuff on the assumption that they don't need it.
Obviously someone just swallowed a thesaurus and burped out "skeuomorphic".
The linked Wikipedia page describes it thus: "Many music and audio computer programs employ a plugin architecture, and some of the plugins have a skeuomorphic interface to emulate expensive, fragile or obsolete instruments and audio processors. Functional input controls like knobs, buttons, switches and sliders are all careful duplicates of the ones on the original physical device being emulated. Even elements of the original that serve no function, like handles, screws and ventilation holes are graphically reproduced."
First, I'd argue that most software doesn't emulate physical artifacts - we don't "pull" open file drawers for instance. Second, this doesn't sound like anything that's really about GUI, it's just prettying stuff up - much like the concept of "skins."
I drive a lot, much of it on a controlled access highway that crosses the north shore of Vancouver. What I see, time and again, is that the RCMP and West Vancouver police enforce exactly three traffic laws:
Seatbelts, because all that they need to do is stand by a highway on ramp and nab cars as they enter.
Cel phones, because all that they need to do is stand by a highway on ramp and nab cars as they enter.
Speed limits, because all that they need to do is sit in the car and watch the radar gun.
Tailgating to the extreme of less than one car length at highway speeds? Weaving in and out of traffic? Generally over-aggressive behaviour? Overloaded trucks flying down the fast lane? Dweebs on electric bikes going 20 clicks UNDER the speed limit? Naaah - that's too much like work.
Our local library (yay!) loans e-readers, so over a month I tried a Sony, a Kindle, and a Kobo.
In a nutshell, each of them had some serious missing feature that drove me away.
Back-lighting. These should be ideal for reading in bed, but because they also need a lamp turned on I might as well stay with a book. I'd assumed that the screen would illuminate itself somehow for reading after dark.
Vendor tie in - our library system has lots of e-books available, but they aren't accessible on the Kindle, only Amazon supplied content. For library users this is a big hurdle.
Page turns - maybe these were older models, but it drove me crazy that every page turn required a blank of the screen followed by a redraw of the new page.
Lack of touch screen I'm used to swiping my phone screen - the "dead" screen on the e-readers drove me insane - always hunting for the darned page turn button, or cursoring through (not very well designed) menus.
All in all it seemed to me that each of the e-readers seemed primitive compared to my Nexus S.
The great weakness with this is that the value of sheet music is in the edition. Just as books benefit from a good editor, so does music.
My girlfriend has a music degree, and is an accomplished teacher of piano. She pulls her hair out whenever a student shows up with something downloaded from the Internet, or even worse, one of those oddball cheap Chinese editions. How the music is edited really does affect how it is played.
Aside from that, it's weird that the music listings aren't by composer. Do these folks not know how many "String Quartets in C major" have been written?
I don't do gaming beyond solitaire, but I'm assuming that the biggest obstacle to getting serious games happening on Linux is video drivers and related stuff. This based on seemingly endless forum posts grumbling about how badly video makers support Linux.
Seems to me that if Valve is serious about this we could see a big push to build good, solid, fully featured Linux drivers for most common (gaming-capable) video cards. That presumable would mean drivers aimed specifically at Ubuntu, but still should be overall a very good thing.
Ubuntu was the first distro (after regular attempts over many years) that actually just installed and ran on my PC with no mucking about. I've since moved on to Mint, but the point is that I haven't looked back. With Libre Office and a few other essentials reaching maturity there is now literally one program that still forces me to boot back to Windows.
I think that Valve could bring along a big chunk of the gaming community - how about a downloadable Valve specific Ubuntu variant that would just install and work, and give new users a base to install and run games?
Quickbooks is the one thing that keeps Windows on my machine, and is the only reason I ever boot into it.
I tried hard to beat WINE into running it, but alas no luck - at least the version I run.
I looked at what's out there in Linux accounting software, and either it was really obscure, apparently abandoned, or aimed at mega-corps, not small and home businesses. Plus none of it offered an easy way to handle Canadian tax frameworks.
And of course we wanted an accounting package that our accountant would accept at year end. That means one of Quickbooks or Simply Accounting.
Gnucash is most assuredly not a replacement for Quickbooks, if for no other reason that ta some point you need to interface with a real accountant, and Handing over your files from Quickbooks or Simply Accounting makes that MUCH easier.
New Zealand and rights holders reckon it halved the number of infringements in the first month.
Or just as likely, the heaviest downloaders just found better ways to fly under the radar. If "success" is measured by a drop from eighty percent to forty percent of users "stealing" content, I'd say it's time for the Industry to admit total defeat.
Leaving aside that two of your choices are both Bell, from this I can assume that in Montreal you already have amazing options in choosing your mix of channels and pay low low prices?
Or perhaps do you pay the same price as everywhere else - that somehow creeps towards $100 a month for most households?
The Canadian CableCos are about as "competitive" as the Cel companies. Then again, they're usually both.
The likelihood of any ordinary consumer seeing any saving from this is more or less zero. You now have two choices:
a) Accept bundles of channels that include all sorts of crap you don't want.
b) Pay through the nose to choose a smaller number of channels, the result being that your monthly bill doesn't change.
"The 'goodness' and cost-effectiveness of the job will be whether it a) reduces the ratepayer's bills, and/or b) increases utility profits (not sure of the regulatory structure out there), and/or c) increases the reliability of the grid.
I'm pretty damned sure it'll be:
a) No way in hell.
b) Goes without saying
c) Highly unlikely.
"The plant is estimated to cost $350 million-plus, and will create about 20 to 25 permanent jobs."
Seriously, is there any conceivable business case for this? Aside from "My buddies in the legislature are going to give me several truckloads of cash, tax incentives, and a guarantee to buy the "new" power I generate at a premium price?"
But hey, $14 million per person seems a reasonable amount to spend to "create a job."
Reality Check - however much we may love our various e-mail tools (I'm a g-mail man myself, 'cause it works well with my Linux box and my Android phone) Joe Average user is in a different camp.
They don't want to change e-mail clients every year or two. I'd love to know how many Outlook Express installs are still out there. For many, many people it has been Good Enough for - ten years? Especially for the millions still using Windows XP.
I recently moved my Girlfriend from OE to Windows Live Mail (that is, the desktop version of Windows Live E-mail, not the web version) and have to say that it was not an easy transition. After that experience I'd think long and hard before moving to another MS client.
(Always found Outlook more irritating than useful, but that's my taste. Fondly remember Pegasus Mail when it was the pinnacle of e-mail clients.)
Wow. With a domain name like that how can they lose?
At the end of the day I seem to keep returning to Facebook (family) Twitter (news and stuff that matters), and to a lesser extent Slashdot and a handful of RSS feeds.
LinkedIn? Digg? Pictionary.. uh, I mean Pinterest? Flattr? Etc Etc Etc?
Or maybe I'm just waiting for the Next Big Thing. Which will likely require 3D glasses.
"July is always one of the hottest months in the U.S., but this year the heat got an early start."
Was it really only six months ago that Timothy posted the question "January is always one of the coldest months in the U.S., but this year the cold got an early start."?
Slashdot Mirror
Wow - surely you could find a way to work in a Cap'n Crunch whistle?
Sigh, if only there were other ways to control peaceful pro... ah mobs of anarchists.
Like pepper spray, water cannons, clubs, horses, dogs, sonic weapons, machine guns, truncheons, whips, tear gas.....
$47 million. You could make a good start at buying an election with that kind of money.
Laptops and especially desktops don't have the faux "oh, your styling is out of date! You need to replace your car that will be perfectly good for another ten years!" thing going on that phones to some extent do.
Not an Apple customer I take it?
(ducks!)
Just occurred to me that I honestly have no idea what the current version of IE might be. I think I've used it maybe twice in the last year?
So does mine, but it refuses to sync the contacts on my phone with the contacts at Gmail. Somehow it always seem to be the Google native apps that crap out.
Worth noting that it used to be the norm for Elections Canada to do door to door enumeration prior to elections to make sure that the voters' list was up to date and complete.
Several years back the government of the day eliminated that practice - probably under the guise of saving money - so that now the voters' list is of considerably less use - hence the rules to allow people to register at the polls, and the sometimes questionable practices that follow.
Needless to say, the people who fall off of the voters' list tend to be those who are most mobile - the young, the unemployed, the homeless - in other words, the ones most likely to vote on the Left of the political spectrum.
Yes, I'm saying that was intentional.
I'm using Mint Cinnamon, and am very happy with it. The "classic" desktop works fine - why the need to reinvent it?
I had a Mac for several years, and didn't find OS X - much less the idiotic Dock - to be any more useful than plain old Windows XP. I ran Ubuntu until Unity, which simply didn't offer any real added utility, just more pointless doo-dads.
The reason why so many people stick with XP, or Vista, or even Windows 2000 is because it just works. They understand it. They don't need added gobbledy-gook flying all over the screen, or the OS "hiding" stuff on the assumption that they don't need it.
Obviously someone just swallowed a thesaurus and burped out "skeuomorphic".
The linked Wikipedia page describes it thus: "Many music and audio computer programs employ a plugin architecture, and some of the plugins have a skeuomorphic interface to emulate expensive, fragile or obsolete instruments and audio processors. Functional input controls like knobs, buttons, switches and sliders are all careful duplicates of the ones on the original physical device being emulated. Even elements of the original that serve no function, like handles, screws and ventilation holes are graphically reproduced."
First, I'd argue that most software doesn't emulate physical artifacts - we don't "pull" open file drawers for instance. Second, this doesn't sound like anything that's really about GUI, it's just prettying stuff up - much like the concept of "skins."
The Apple reference... oh sigh.
Tailgating to the extreme of less than one car length at highway speeds? Weaving in and out of traffic? Generally over-aggressive behaviour? Overloaded trucks flying down the fast lane? Dweebs on electric bikes going 20 clicks UNDER the speed limit? Naaah - that's too much like work.
In a nutshell, each of them had some serious missing feature that drove me away.
All in all it seemed to me that each of the e-readers seemed primitive compared to my Nexus S.
The great weakness with this is that the value of sheet music is in the edition. Just as books benefit from a good editor, so does music.
My girlfriend has a music degree, and is an accomplished teacher of piano. She pulls her hair out whenever a student shows up with something downloaded from the Internet, or even worse, one of those oddball cheap Chinese editions. How the music is edited really does affect how it is played.
Aside from that, it's weird that the music listings aren't by composer. Do these folks not know how many "String Quartets in C major" have been written?
Office To Become Fully Open XML Compliant (allegedly)
There, fixed that for you.
I'll believe it when I see it.
I don't do gaming beyond solitaire, but I'm assuming that the biggest obstacle to getting serious games happening on Linux is video drivers and related stuff. This based on seemingly endless forum posts grumbling about how badly video makers support Linux.
Seems to me that if Valve is serious about this we could see a big push to build good, solid, fully featured Linux drivers for most common (gaming-capable) video cards. That presumable would mean drivers aimed specifically at Ubuntu, but still should be overall a very good thing.
Ubuntu was the first distro (after regular attempts over many years) that actually just installed and ran on my PC with no mucking about. I've since moved on to Mint, but the point is that I haven't looked back. With Libre Office and a few other essentials reaching maturity there is now literally one program that still forces me to boot back to Windows.
I think that Valve could bring along a big chunk of the gaming community - how about a downloadable Valve specific Ubuntu variant that would just install and work, and give new users a base to install and run games?
Quickbooks is the one thing that keeps Windows on my machine, and is the only reason I ever boot into it.
I tried hard to beat WINE into running it, but alas no luck - at least the version I run.
I looked at what's out there in Linux accounting software, and either it was really obscure, apparently abandoned, or aimed at mega-corps, not small and home businesses. Plus none of it offered an easy way to handle Canadian tax frameworks.
And of course we wanted an accounting package that our accountant would accept at year end. That means one of Quickbooks or Simply Accounting.
Gnucash is most assuredly not a replacement for Quickbooks, if for no other reason that ta some point you need to interface with a real accountant, and Handing over your files from Quickbooks or Simply Accounting makes that MUCH easier.
New Zealand and rights holders reckon it halved the number of infringements in the first month.
Or just as likely, the heaviest downloaders just found better ways to fly under the radar. If "success" is measured by a drop from eighty percent to forty percent of users "stealing" content, I'd say it's time for the Industry to admit total defeat.
Leaving aside that two of your choices are both Bell, from this I can assume that in Montreal you already have amazing options in choosing your mix of channels and pay low low prices?
Or perhaps do you pay the same price as everywhere else - that somehow creeps towards $100 a month for most households?
The Canadian CableCos are about as "competitive" as the Cel companies. Then again, they're usually both.
The likelihood of any ordinary consumer seeing any saving from this is more or less zero. You now have two choices:
a) Accept bundles of channels that include all sorts of crap you don't want.
b) Pay through the nose to choose a smaller number of channels, the result being that your monthly bill doesn't change.
I'll stick with c) do neither.
"The 'goodness' and cost-effectiveness of the job will be whether it a) reduces the ratepayer's bills, and/or b) increases utility profits (not sure of the regulatory structure out there), and/or c) increases the reliability of the grid.
I'm pretty damned sure it'll be:
a) No way in hell.
b) Goes without saying
c) Highly unlikely.
"The plant is estimated to cost $350 million-plus, and will create about 20 to 25 permanent jobs."
Seriously, is there any conceivable business case for this? Aside from "My buddies in the legislature are going to give me several truckloads of cash, tax incentives, and a guarantee to buy the "new" power I generate at a premium price?"
But hey, $14 million per person seems a reasonable amount to spend to "create a job."
Reality Check - however much we may love our various e-mail tools (I'm a g-mail man myself, 'cause it works well with my Linux box and my Android phone) Joe Average user is in a different camp.
They don't want to change e-mail clients every year or two. I'd love to know how many Outlook Express installs are still out there. For many, many people it has been Good Enough for - ten years? Especially for the millions still using Windows XP.
I recently moved my Girlfriend from OE to Windows Live Mail (that is, the desktop version of Windows Live E-mail, not the web version) and have to say that it was not an easy transition. After that experience I'd think long and hard before moving to another MS client.
(Always found Outlook more irritating than useful, but that's my taste. Fondly remember Pegasus Mail when it was the pinnacle of e-mail clients.)
Ah. Serves me right for ignoring just because it's missing a vowel.
Wow. With a domain name like that how can they lose?
At the end of the day I seem to keep returning to Facebook (family) Twitter (news and stuff that matters), and to a lesser extent Slashdot and a handful of RSS feeds.
LinkedIn? Digg? Pictionary.. uh, I mean Pinterest? Flattr? Etc Etc Etc?
Or maybe I'm just waiting for the Next Big Thing. Which will likely require 3D glasses.
It appears that the change password page is Slashdotted - I can't get more than one character into the form before it freezes up.
Good thing it's still using the old password that I used for forums before the great LinkedIn password crisis!
"July is always one of the hottest months in the U.S., but this year the heat got an early start."
Was it really only six months ago that Timothy posted the question "January is always one of the coldest months in the U.S., but this year the cold got an early start."?