Ballmer has all of the slimy of Bill Gates without any of the flair or vision. Not that BillG had technological vision of any kind, but he did have business vision, empire vision. Ballmer is just reacting. Since he took the reigns, he's just been playing a game of "Me too! Me too!" and "You're all stupid! You're all stupid!" and both (sadly enough) at the same time.
This guy ought to be running some no-name plumbing parts and accessories company in the south slowly into the ground. Instead, he is running a major tech firm into the ground with more efficiency than could be managed by putting the average NYC sanitation work in charge. Ballmer is the very definition of the PHB.
"there will be shed loads of really amateur, plastic, butt ugly tablets from OEMs running an OS that is two years behind Apple, has a fraction of the software, is too underdeveloped for serious tablet-mode use, and is unsupported within 18 months, at which time Microsoft will be hyping something else that shares all of the same properties without being software, hardware, or API compatible at all.
RIAA, MPAA, ASCAP, DMCA, DHS, USCIS, PATRIOT, etc.
Any time you begin to enter a culture of control and conservatism (not just a machinery of, but a culture of, in which agency, originality, and deviation are considered morally/ethically wrong), you'll find that people begin to frown on creativity. Innovation is nothing more than deviance with a positive outcome. In an value system that places a premium on nondeviance and sees it as a primary measure of status on the one hand, and that normalizes or obscures awareness of the importance of others' deviance/innovation on the other (read: political and market-oriented historical revisionism the change in our understand of knowledge to that of a commodity to be manufactured), there will be no innovation.
Basically, intellectual property is killing innovation. 9/11 and the war on terror are killing innovation. Big capital is killing innovation.
Where you have a field of perfectly efficient and predictable consumers, you have zero innovation and creativity quotient. By definition.
I now have an iPhone 4. Before that, I was a 3GS user. Before that, Palm Centro, Treo 680, and Treo 650.
All I can say is that I have absolutely no complaints. Phone gives better audio quality and apparently better signal strength than my 3GS, which also rarely dropped calls and generally had little trouble accessing the 'net even though I live in NYC and supposedly ought not to have even been able to place a call, period.
I haven't had any issues with the proximity sensor, any issues with signal loss/degredation, etc. No yellow spots, beautiful screen. The device works better than just about any other electronics device (save the 3GS) that I've bought in the last few years. It seems to me that people hold Apple to impossibly high standards compared to other electronics vendors. Few devices or even major computer items (printers, laptops, monitors) I've bought over the last few years have been defect free. Every single one of them has had issues. Many I've exchanged several times trying to get a "good one" (for example, Kensington Expert Mouse with misaligned laser so that motion isn't properly detected, or AOC LCD monitor with control panel buttons that don't register presses).
People only get into "OMIGODSCANDAL" mode when it's Apple for some reason.
I'm happy to say that the two Apple devices I've bought (iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4) have satisfied me enough that I'm seriously thinking of getting an iPad (despite previously thinking I wouldn't) and making my next computer a Mac rather than a Thinkpad.
held accountable for "violating" the same laws when they record citizens behavior without their consent for use as evidence. But somehow when it's a cop being taped, it's an illegal "unconsented" recording and people are going to jail.
This will be fair when those doing surveillance recording for law enforcement can also be sent to prison for recording in public places without individual consent. Until then, it's one more example of the way in which cops are increasingly generally subpar people, recruited from the less educated and less successful demographics of society, eager to hold a gun, and drawn to the profession precisely because they feel powerless in other areas of their life as a result of their general lack of merit, and thus need to abuse citizens in order to compensate for this lack.
I am one of the "note takers," essentially a professional one. I don't use color. I don't WANT color. Color destroys readability.
Right now I use a LiveScribe Pulse pen.
1) No immediate feedback. 2) Clumsy applications. 3) Limited memory. 4) Must be synchronized to a PC. 5) No close handwriting recognition integration. 6) VERY limited user interface.
I would LOVE to be using a tablet of some kind so that I can actually see what I'm doing. So why am I using an ink-based pen? Because there is NO alternative for taking many hours worth of handwritten notes on battery power with very low weight right now. Back in the day there was the Newton 2x00 and it was, so far as I'm concerned, the Greatest Device Ever Created for my purposes and I would still be using it (I have three, two were backups) if not for the fact that the NCU (sync software) wasn't updated beyond Windows 95 / Mac OS 8 compatibility, so synchronizing is now impossible.
For a good 10 years I've been crossing my fingers hoping against hope that someone would come up with a Newton-like replacement: similar form factor, similar display, similar high-resolution stylus-based digitizer, etc. This looks damned close in terms of size and input method.
Greyscale screen, stylus input, reading/writing emphasis, perfect size (about the same as the original Apple Newton, only thinner), fast refresh, AWESOME.
If it's as nice as it looks, this may be my ideal reading/writing device, depending on included apps and connectivity. Much more interesting to me as a dedicated reader/writer than the iPad, which has the wrong sort of display, no stylus input, and is slightly the wrong shape (more like a 4:3 display, less like a flip notebook).
Speaking as an iPhone user that has considered Android and as a longtime Linux user that has considered Windows/MacOS, a big part of the value is in the assemblage of applications/widgets/etc. that the user has collected.
This is not the same thing as a "learning curve," and it is not about the value of the applications/apps. It's a matter of the investment of time and configuration required to "transition" to another platform and duplicate the work environment that you've constructed. For example, on the iPhone I have about 100 apps, about 30 of which I constantly use. Not all of them have 1:1 equivalents on Android, but by collecting a few dozen Android apps I could probably duplicate the total set of functions that I get from my collection of iPhone apps.
But in terms of time spent downloading, configuring, linking, etc., it's just too much time. There is a definite cost in time imposed on platform switching that isn't a matter of learning curves, but rather a matter of simple labor. I figure it would take me 5-8 hours of purchasing/reinstalling apps, opening/configuring accounts, arranging icons, etc. to get Android up and running for myself. That's an extra $250-$400 of time, not to mention the drudgery/pain-in-the-ass factor, which is not to be underestimated as a significant discouragement.
It's when you add it all together (app costs + learning curve costs + time reinstalling/reconfiguring/re-assembling costs + drudgery/pain-in-ass costs) that you get a real calculation about platform lock-in, and often the learning curve and app costs are smaller than the other two in real, day-to-day life.
I learned C on a Sun 3/50 running SunOS loaded from DC6150 tapes. I installed Linux for the first time in '93 and still have boxes of floppies containing every Slackware release up to 4.0.
I started using KDE with beta3, before 1.0, and didn't stop until 3.5.
Don't give me this "go back go Windows" shit.
Saying "it works for me, therefore there are no bugs" is precisely the sort of half-ass response that has been holding Linux adoption back for a decade.
Look around you. Every time there is a KDE4 story, there are posts here complaining about it.
Filing bug reports is fine, but some of us have real work to do, and draw the line at filing more than one or two bug reports a month. More than that = switch to another platform.
Funny that GNOME seems to be able to manage multiple monitors in a predictable fashion, while on KDE4 every other reboot, dock, or undock leads to the loss of desktop state in one way or another, requiring reconfiguration or just a total removal of KDE dotfiles and starting over from scratch (which can be much faster).
KDE4 chased away a lot of longtime KDE users. They're not coming back so long as GNOME works better. Call us names if you want. I don't care, I have no vested interest in using KDE. I also have no vested interest in using GNOME and it looks like I will be switching to XFCE with the GNOME 3.0 release because it's looking not-so-good. My time is too valuable to spend it "trying to make XYZ work," whether XYZ is KDE, GNOME, or anything else.
If it isn't bulletproof obvious at the first go, it's a fail. This isn't 1995 any longer. This is 2010, and there are plenty of examples of spectacular and spectacularly usable user interfaces around that require zero maintenance or "figuring out" by their users.
The Linux desktop world is starting to feel like a place where TWM is once again top-of-the-heap.
Unpredictable results when moving from two displays to one and back to two again (i.e. ejecting from a dock with a second display). Constant reconfiguration of the panel and displays every time I log in. Sometimes no panel appears. Sometimes multiples on a single screen. Now you log in with one screen and it thinks you have two and the panels are on the "other" one (that isn't connected) and this desktop is simply bare, so that you have to start a Konsole, reconfigure everything all over again.
No thanks. "KDE4 is configurable" is fine. "KDE4 requires complete reconfiguration every time you dock or log in" is not so fine.
I can't get it working with dual monitors in the way that I would like. For all the claims about GNOME being less configurable than KDE, KDE4 appears to me to be significantly less configurable than GNOME. I can't quickly/easily:
1. Get a setup that automatically detects one or two monitor mode 2. Get a setup that shows me one plasma bar per screen automatically in two monitor mode 3. Find any professional-looking widget themes (no transparency, eye candy, raytracing, etc.) 4. Find any professional-looking icon themes (simple graphic design, not photorealism, not crazy high contrast, and not stylized unicolors)
Basically it seems that KDE4 has focused on flash and features and completely given up on usability. I downloaded and compiled KDE beginning with 1.0, and scoffed when GNOME 1.0 was released (it was an unstable disaster, for anyone that remembers back that far). I was a die-hard KDE user all the way through 3.x. But now the tables have turned, and though I keep KDE installed and updating on my F12 system, every time I log back into KDE4 intending to "really give it a shot this time," I find myself logging out in disgust a few minutes later feeling like I've wasted my time (and the KDE developers have wasted theirs).
I just want a graphically unremarkable, stays-out-of-my-way business desktop without any "innovation" in it. I want stability, predictability, and enough flexibility to get the desktop working my way, rather than having to adjust my work habits to correspond to the desktop way.
more a kooky religion than anything else. In the mid 2000's I ended up being closely associated for career reasons with several people inside PETA, a couple of coordinators and some field workers, and had a chance to lunch with them a few times.
Their "ethical" position as we talked was that all pets must die and pet ownership ended, because it is inherently a form of suffering to lead the "unnatural" life of a pet. Furthermore, they carried this largely to humans; they made snide comments about people around us with children and often linked having children to the creation of suffering, since to live is to suffer (and therefore to create a human is to cause them suffering). They agreed that they could never take part in such an unethical thing.
Anytime you get into "all of humanity ought to die out because all humans do is suffer; oh, how glorious a world without humans and thus human suffering would finally be," you're deeply into cult territory, which matches up well with PETA's tendency to impose pressure on employees to end contact with intentionally non-vegan/non-vegetarian friends and family members.
and still can't stand PETA. "Buffoons" is the best way I've heard them described. Lavish expenses while they euthanize pets brought to them with the expectation of care. Financial support and a personnel revolving door with the ELF/ALF/HSUS crowd. Ridiculous campaigns that will only appeal to young children which seems appropriate to them since they often leaflet K-6 institutions and events with graphic material.
For every friend they make and funnel into a life of sad social marginality and constant maudlinity, they make a dozen enemies that after having contact with PETA will never, ever consider going vegetarian or vegan for any reason whatsoever.
I think there was some really odd proportioning going on as well. I didn't do any measuring, but it seems to me that the relative height of the pelvis in proportion to other bones is exaggerated, and the angles of some of the joints are wrong/uncommon for joints that don't actually move on the axis in question, making them all seem basically like they were suffering from various kinds of genetic abnormalities or aberrations. I don't know if this is the ultimate political intent (people think that disabled people are ugly) or what, but certainly these bodies aren't proportioned (not shaped, but proportioned) or geometrically similar to any I've personally seen in real life.
In short: they all look weird, and it's not just because they're avatars, it's because they're weird avatars.
1) Highlighting is a cognitive tool; when I highlight I am reading it for a second time and seeing the text "altered" as I read over it. It makes it easier to recall later on.
2) When I come back to the text, I know that I can safely ignore all of the non-highlighted bits. It reduces the effective size of the book by 50-70 percent, making skimming much more rapid and easy when I come back.
opt-in actually own the device in question. Of course they can't be trusted to tell the truth because they are automatons and astroturfers whose brains were replaced by Amazon.com in 1984, apparently.
Most importantly, hardware that you own doesn't "phone home" unless you specifically configure it to do so.
They have made this configuration radically simple to carry out. Just turn the wireless off, leave it off, and use your USB port to transfer your data.
And for the tinfoil hatters who say "How do you know it's really off? How do you know the switch is actually connected to anything?" and so on... Well, how do you know there's no microphone, GSM transmitter, and SIM card buried in your kitchen stove secretly sending all of your conversations to Whirlpool?
WRT Kindle. This device was crucified on/. from the beginning and now Geeks assume that it eats little Geek children automatically with no opt-out.
Kindle:
1. Can be loaded with any books you want in the supported formats, including free books and homemade books.
2. Using Calibre (free software), you can convert just about anything to a Kindle-compatible format.
3. You can just plug the damned thing into your USB port, even in Linux, to transfer files. It acts as a FAT32 USB filesystem. MUCH more user-friendly than the very proprietary Sony readers.
4. You can switch wireless off and never, ever use if it you dislike the thought of connectivity.
5. There ARE VERY USEFUL features of connectivity, though. For example, in addition to a Kindle, I have the Kindle apps for iPhone and PC. Because all are connected, they all have the same books on them, and they all synchronize notes, bookmarks, and "current page" automatically. I can go from device to device to device transparently. Of course, this only works for books bought through Amazon, but that ought to make the privacy advocates happy.
6. All Amazon formats have been hacked, so if it makes you more comfortable, you can buy books on Amazon, decrypt and resave them under a new name, and then even if someday somehow Amazon decides to delete books from Kindles, it won't get yours.
7. The feature being talked about in this/. story is opt-in and documented, which is the correct policy that most/. users say they want.
Honestly, it's like Apple stories on/. You could have a story that says "Amazon.com gives billions to charity" or "Apple invests billions in rainforest preservation" and people would scream "MY GOD STOP THEIR TOTAL PLAN FOR EVIL WORLD DOMINATION NOW THEY ARE STEALING YOUR SOUL AND YOU WILL BE SORRY!"
innovation, which is in fact nothing more than doing the "wrong" thing at the "wrong" time in a way that soon comes to be lauded as "right" in retrospect.
Problem is, despite periods of intense searching, I find nothing I would like to change the Firefox theme to. In fact, nothing that is even acceptable. Chrome may offer only one option, but that option is better than anything I can find in the entire Firefox ecosystem.
Chrome has the best UI amongst all browsers, hands down. I adopted Chromium months ago and then went to Chrome, and despite minor incompatibilities now and then (mostly rendering issues), I can't leave it. I tried to switch back to Firefox for a while, but after a week or so I came back to Chrome, primarily on the strength of the UI.
Nobody else seems able to come up with a UI that is:
- Businesslike and no-nonsense - Small and out of the way - Free of rendering artifacts and glitches
The default Firefox theme is just huge. Any replacement themes are buggy, loud, amateurish, and often glitchy. The "personalities" or whatever they are (you know, my web browser is now my wallpaper) are just ridiculous. There is a chrome UI for firefox, but it's not as fast and doesn't actually have all of the great behaviors of the Chrome UI, just a basic appearance.
Slashdot Mirror
Ballmer has all of the slimy of Bill Gates without any of the flair or vision. Not that BillG had technological vision of any kind, but he did have business vision, empire vision. Ballmer is just reacting. Since he took the reigns, he's just been playing a game of "Me too! Me too!" and "You're all stupid! You're all stupid!" and both (sadly enough) at the same time.
This guy ought to be running some no-name plumbing parts and accessories company in the south slowly into the ground. Instead, he is running a major tech firm into the ground with more efficiency than could be managed by putting the average NYC sanitation work in charge. Ballmer is the very definition of the PHB.
"there will be shed loads of really amateur, plastic, butt ugly tablets from OEMs running an OS that is two years behind Apple, has a fraction of the software, is too underdeveloped for serious tablet-mode use, and is unsupported within 18 months, at which time Microsoft will be hyping something else that shares all of the same properties without being software, hardware, or API compatible at all.
RIAA, MPAA, ASCAP, DMCA, DHS, USCIS, PATRIOT, etc.
Any time you begin to enter a culture of control and conservatism (not just a machinery of, but a culture of, in which agency, originality, and deviation are considered morally/ethically wrong), you'll find that people begin to frown on creativity. Innovation is nothing more than deviance with a positive outcome. In an value system that places a premium on nondeviance and sees it as a primary measure of status on the one hand, and that normalizes or obscures awareness of the importance of others' deviance/innovation on the other (read: political and market-oriented historical revisionism the change in our understand of knowledge to that of a commodity to be manufactured), there will be no innovation.
Basically, intellectual property is killing innovation. 9/11 and the war on terror are killing innovation. Big capital is killing innovation.
Where you have a field of perfectly efficient and predictable consumers, you have zero innovation and creativity quotient. By definition.
I now have an iPhone 4. Before that, I was a 3GS user. Before that, Palm Centro, Treo 680, and Treo 650.
All I can say is that I have absolutely no complaints. Phone gives better audio quality and apparently better signal strength than my 3GS, which also rarely dropped calls and generally had little trouble accessing the 'net even though I live in NYC and supposedly ought not to have even been able to place a call, period.
I haven't had any issues with the proximity sensor, any issues with signal loss/degredation, etc. No yellow spots, beautiful screen. The device works better than just about any other electronics device (save the 3GS) that I've bought in the last few years. It seems to me that people hold Apple to impossibly high standards compared to other electronics vendors. Few devices or even major computer items (printers, laptops, monitors) I've bought over the last few years have been defect free. Every single one of them has had issues. Many I've exchanged several times trying to get a "good one" (for example, Kensington Expert Mouse with misaligned laser so that motion isn't properly detected, or AOC LCD monitor with control panel buttons that don't register presses).
People only get into "OMIGODSCANDAL" mode when it's Apple for some reason.
I'm happy to say that the two Apple devices I've bought (iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4) have satisfied me enough that I'm seriously thinking of getting an iPad (despite previously thinking I wouldn't) and making my next computer a Mac rather than a Thinkpad.
held accountable for "violating" the same laws when they record citizens behavior without their consent for use as evidence. But somehow when it's a cop being taped, it's an illegal "unconsented" recording and people are going to jail.
This will be fair when those doing surveillance recording for law enforcement can also be sent to prison for recording in public places without individual consent. Until then, it's one more example of the way in which cops are increasingly generally subpar people, recruited from the less educated and less successful demographics of society, eager to hold a gun, and drawn to the profession precisely because they feel powerless in other areas of their life as a result of their general lack of merit, and thus need to abuse citizens in order to compensate for this lack.
I am one of the "note takers," essentially a professional one. I don't use color. I don't WANT color. Color destroys readability.
Right now I use a LiveScribe Pulse pen.
1) No immediate feedback.
2) Clumsy applications.
3) Limited memory.
4) Must be synchronized to a PC.
5) No close handwriting recognition integration.
6) VERY limited user interface.
I would LOVE to be using a tablet of some kind so that I can actually see what I'm doing. So why am I using an ink-based pen? Because there is NO alternative for taking many hours worth of handwritten notes on battery power with very low weight right now. Back in the day there was the Newton 2x00 and it was, so far as I'm concerned, the Greatest Device Ever Created for my purposes and I would still be using it (I have three, two were backups) if not for the fact that the NCU (sync software) wasn't updated beyond Windows 95 / Mac OS 8 compatibility, so synchronizing is now impossible.
For a good 10 years I've been crossing my fingers hoping against hope that someone would come up with a Newton-like replacement: similar form factor, similar display, similar high-resolution stylus-based digitizer, etc. This looks damned close in terms of size and input method.
Greyscale screen, stylus input, reading/writing emphasis, perfect size (about the same as the original Apple Newton, only thinner), fast refresh, AWESOME.
If it's as nice as it looks, this may be my ideal reading/writing device, depending on included apps and connectivity. Much more interesting to me as a dedicated reader/writer than the iPad, which has the wrong sort of display, no stylus input, and is slightly the wrong shape (more like a 4:3 display, less like a flip notebook).
Speaking as an iPhone user that has considered Android and as a longtime Linux user that has considered Windows/MacOS, a big part of the value is in the assemblage of applications/widgets/etc. that the user has collected.
This is not the same thing as a "learning curve," and it is not about the value of the applications/apps. It's a matter of the investment of time and configuration required to "transition" to another platform and duplicate the work environment that you've constructed. For example, on the iPhone I have about 100 apps, about 30 of which I constantly use. Not all of them have 1:1 equivalents on Android, but by collecting a few dozen Android apps I could probably duplicate the total set of functions that I get from my collection of iPhone apps.
But in terms of time spent downloading, configuring, linking, etc., it's just too much time. There is a definite cost in time imposed on platform switching that isn't a matter of learning curves, but rather a matter of simple labor. I figure it would take me 5-8 hours of purchasing/reinstalling apps, opening/configuring accounts, arranging icons, etc. to get Android up and running for myself. That's an extra $250-$400 of time, not to mention the drudgery/pain-in-the-ass factor, which is not to be underestimated as a significant discouragement.
It's when you add it all together (app costs + learning curve costs + time reinstalling/reconfiguring/re-assembling costs + drudgery/pain-in-ass costs) that you get a real calculation about platform lock-in, and often the learning curve and app costs are smaller than the other two in real, day-to-day life.
There's an old saying for this:
"If it ain't [too] broke, don't fix it."
I learned C on a Sun 3/50 running SunOS loaded from DC6150 tapes. I installed Linux for the first time in '93 and still have boxes of floppies containing every Slackware release up to 4.0.
I started using KDE with beta3, before 1.0, and didn't stop until 3.5.
Don't give me this "go back go Windows" shit.
Saying "it works for me, therefore there are no bugs" is precisely the sort of half-ass response that has been holding Linux adoption back for a decade.
Look around you. Every time there is a KDE4 story, there are posts here complaining about it.
Filing bug reports is fine, but some of us have real work to do, and draw the line at filing more than one or two bug reports a month. More than that = switch to another platform.
Funny that GNOME seems to be able to manage multiple monitors in a predictable fashion, while on KDE4 every other reboot, dock, or undock leads to the loss of desktop state in one way or another, requiring reconfiguration or just a total removal of KDE dotfiles and starting over from scratch (which can be much faster).
KDE4 chased away a lot of longtime KDE users. They're not coming back so long as GNOME works better. Call us names if you want. I don't care, I have no vested interest in using KDE. I also have no vested interest in using GNOME and it looks like I will be switching to XFCE with the GNOME 3.0 release because it's looking not-so-good. My time is too valuable to spend it "trying to make XYZ work," whether XYZ is KDE, GNOME, or anything else.
If it isn't bulletproof obvious at the first go, it's a fail. This isn't 1995 any longer. This is 2010, and there are plenty of examples of spectacular and spectacularly usable user interfaces around that require zero maintenance or "figuring out" by their users.
The Linux desktop world is starting to feel like a place where TWM is once again top-of-the-heap.
or don't stick.
Unpredictable results when moving from two displays to one and back to two again (i.e. ejecting from a dock with a second display). Constant reconfiguration of the panel and displays every time I log in. Sometimes no panel appears. Sometimes multiples on a single screen. Now you log in with one screen and it thinks you have two and the panels are on the "other" one (that isn't connected) and this desktop is simply bare, so that you have to start a Konsole, reconfigure everything all over again.
No thanks. "KDE4 is configurable" is fine. "KDE4 requires complete reconfiguration every time you dock or log in" is not so fine.
I can't get it working with dual monitors in the way that I would like. For all the claims about GNOME being less configurable than KDE, KDE4 appears to me to be significantly less configurable than GNOME. I can't quickly/easily:
1. Get a setup that automatically detects one or two monitor mode
2. Get a setup that shows me one plasma bar per screen automatically in two monitor mode
3. Find any professional-looking widget themes (no transparency, eye candy, raytracing, etc.)
4. Find any professional-looking icon themes (simple graphic design, not photorealism, not crazy high contrast, and not stylized unicolors)
Basically it seems that KDE4 has focused on flash and features and completely given up on usability. I downloaded and compiled KDE beginning with 1.0, and scoffed when GNOME 1.0 was released (it was an unstable disaster, for anyone that remembers back that far). I was a die-hard KDE user all the way through 3.x. But now the tables have turned, and though I keep KDE installed and updating on my F12 system, every time I log back into KDE4 intending to "really give it a shot this time," I find myself logging out in disgust a few minutes later feeling like I've wasted my time (and the KDE developers have wasted theirs).
I just want a graphically unremarkable, stays-out-of-my-way business desktop without any "innovation" in it. I want stability, predictability, and enough flexibility to get the desktop working my way, rather than having to adjust my work habits to correspond to the desktop way.
The multi-display support in KDE 4.x is almost nonexistent. Needs to be fixed before I can even give KDE releases a periodic test drive.
more a kooky religion than anything else. In the mid 2000's I ended up being closely associated for career reasons with several people inside PETA, a couple of coordinators and some field workers, and had a chance to lunch with them a few times.
Their "ethical" position as we talked was that all pets must die and pet ownership ended, because it is inherently a form of suffering to lead the "unnatural" life of a pet. Furthermore, they carried this largely to humans; they made snide comments about people around us with children and often linked having children to the creation of suffering, since to live is to suffer (and therefore to create a human is to cause them suffering). They agreed that they could never take part in such an unethical thing.
Anytime you get into "all of humanity ought to die out because all humans do is suffer; oh, how glorious a world without humans and thus human suffering would finally be," you're deeply into cult territory, which matches up well with PETA's tendency to impose pressure on employees to end contact with intentionally non-vegan/non-vegetarian friends and family members.
and still can't stand PETA. "Buffoons" is the best way I've heard them described. Lavish expenses while they euthanize pets brought to them with the expectation of care. Financial support and a personnel revolving door with the ELF/ALF/HSUS crowd. Ridiculous campaigns that will only appeal to young children which seems appropriate to them since they often leaflet K-6 institutions and events with graphic material.
For every friend they make and funnel into a life of sad social marginality and constant maudlinity, they make a dozen enemies that after having contact with PETA will never, ever consider going vegetarian or vegan for any reason whatsoever.
and it's absolutely great.
I think there was some really odd proportioning going on as well. I didn't do any measuring, but it seems to me that the relative height of the pelvis in proportion to other bones is exaggerated, and the angles of some of the joints are wrong/uncommon for joints that don't actually move on the axis in question, making them all seem basically like they were suffering from various kinds of genetic abnormalities or aberrations. I don't know if this is the ultimate political intent (people think that disabled people are ugly) or what, but certainly these bodies aren't proportioned (not shaped, but proportioned) or geometrically similar to any I've personally seen in real life.
In short: they all look weird, and it's not just because they're avatars, it's because they're weird avatars.
in some academic books. Two purposes:
1) Highlighting is a cognitive tool; when I highlight I am reading it for a second time and seeing the text "altered" as I read over it. It makes it easier to recall later on.
2) When I come back to the text, I know that I can safely ignore all of the non-highlighted bits. It reduces the effective size of the book by 50-70 percent, making skimming much more rapid and easy when I come back.
Just log into Amazon.com and turn Whispernet synchronization on and/or off for all of your devices at once.
opt-in actually own the device in question. Of course they can't be trusted to tell the truth because they are automatons and astroturfers whose brains were replaced by Amazon.com in 1984, apparently.
Sheesh.
Most importantly, hardware that you own doesn't "phone home" unless you specifically configure it to do so.
They have made this configuration radically simple to carry out. Just turn the wireless off, leave it off, and use your USB port to transfer your data.
And for the tinfoil hatters who say "How do you know it's really off? How do you know the switch is actually connected to anything?" and so on... Well, how do you know there's no microphone, GSM transmitter, and SIM card buried in your kitchen stove secretly sending all of your conversations to Whirlpool?
WRT Kindle. This device was crucified on /. from the beginning and now Geeks assume that it eats little Geek children automatically with no opt-out.
Kindle:
1. Can be loaded with any books you want in the supported formats, including free books and homemade books.
2. Using Calibre (free software), you can convert just about anything to a Kindle-compatible format.
3. You can just plug the damned thing into your USB port, even in Linux, to transfer files. It acts as a FAT32 USB filesystem. MUCH more user-friendly than the very proprietary Sony readers.
4. You can switch wireless off and never, ever use if it you dislike the thought of connectivity.
5. There ARE VERY USEFUL features of connectivity, though. For example, in addition to a Kindle, I have the Kindle apps for iPhone and PC. Because all are connected, they all have the same books on them, and they all synchronize notes, bookmarks, and "current page" automatically. I can go from device to device to device transparently. Of course, this only works for books bought through Amazon, but that ought to make the privacy advocates happy.
6. All Amazon formats have been hacked, so if it makes you more comfortable, you can buy books on Amazon, decrypt and resave them under a new name, and then even if someday somehow Amazon decides to delete books from Kindles, it won't get yours.
7. The feature being talked about in this /. story is opt-in and documented, which is the correct policy that most /. users say they want.
Honestly, it's like Apple stories on /. You could have a story that says "Amazon.com gives billions to charity" or "Apple invests billions in rainforest preservation" and people would scream "MY GOD STOP THEIR TOTAL PLAN FOR EVIL WORLD DOMINATION NOW THEY ARE STEALING YOUR SOUL AND YOU WILL BE SORRY!"
innovation, which is in fact nothing more than doing the "wrong" thing at the "wrong" time in a way that soon comes to be lauded as "right" in retrospect.
No wonder it takes so long to get cases heard these days!
Problem is, despite periods of intense searching, I find nothing I would like to change the Firefox theme to. In fact, nothing that is even acceptable. Chrome may offer only one option, but that option is better than anything I can find in the entire Firefox ecosystem.
Chrome has the best UI amongst all browsers, hands down. I adopted Chromium months ago and then went to Chrome, and despite minor incompatibilities now and then (mostly rendering issues), I can't leave it. I tried to switch back to Firefox for a while, but after a week or so I came back to Chrome, primarily on the strength of the UI.
Nobody else seems able to come up with a UI that is:
- Businesslike and no-nonsense
- Small and out of the way
- Free of rendering artifacts and glitches
The default Firefox theme is just huge. Any replacement themes are buggy, loud, amateurish, and often glitchy. The "personalities" or whatever they are (you know, my web browser is now my wallpaper) are just ridiculous. There is a chrome UI for firefox, but it's not as fast and doesn't actually have all of the great behaviors of the Chrome UI, just a basic appearance.
Everybody else ought to take a page from Chrome!