You need to get yourself a new microwave, because there's something wrong with yours. 50W is a huge drain; just think of a 50W lightbulb being left on, and how much heat that generates.
I just tested my year-old Panasonic microwave: it uses 2W in standby. Interestingly, it uses 22VA, because the power factor is a horrid 0.12, but still the true power is only 2W which is pretty small, and probably normal for an appliance like that.
In the case of the Tesla, people are buying it, in part, for those extras. Sure, they might be able to market a bare bones model of the Tesla but it won't sell well because the price and reliability won't be lowered by enough to make it worthwhile to take the bare bones model over the luxury model.
Exactly. Think about it: who the hell is going to pay $90-100k for an electric car that has all the creature comforts of a $12k econobox? Sure, you might save $5-10k by leaving out those things on the Tesla, but you're not going to get any buyers; someone who shells out nearly 6 figures for a car wants it to be a nice car that rivals high-end Mercedes and BMW models. This is one of the problems with the Chevy Volt: it's fairly expensive (even after the tax incentives and rebates), but the build quality and interior design is reportedly more like a $15-20k model, not a $30-35k model. Chevy probably didn't cheap out intentionally; the hybrid powertrain is expensive, and they tried to come up with a vehicle that wasn't completely unprofitable while still being affordable by middle-class people. Tesla intentionally avoided this problem by specifically targeting very high-end buyers, and ignoring people who can't afford a car over $50k, with the plan being to eventually bring the costs down to where they can make competitive vehicles in progressively lower price brackets, but financing everything right now by catering only to rich buyers.
Only on Slashdot do you have some moron saying he wants a vehicle with a state-of-the-art electric powertrain but with a mechanical speedometer and an AM/FM radio. If Tesla really made such a vehicle, would this moron put his money where his mouth is and buy one? Didn't think so. Holy shit, cars (even econocars) haven't had mechanical speedometers since the 80s.
You've got to be kidding. You think all the people who are dishwashers and ditch diggers chose those jobs out of interest? Or even engineers? There's lots of people working as professionals that do it for the money, and would rather do something else like writing or art or whatever, but they picked their profession because it offered a good combination of interest (in case you didn't realize, people can be interested in multiple different things), working environment, pay/compensation, etc.
As for hating going to work, lots of people go into a career thinking it'll be fun and interesting, and end up hating it because of the corporate politics, work environment, etc. You talk like a college student who has never worked in the real world before.
How on earth does that show social inequality? That doesn't even make sense. Women in the USA have to make money to survive just like just about every country. In a country with social equality, women can work in the same jobs as men without being harassed or abused. But in countries with social inequality, women who try to work in "men's jobs" are discouraged from it, and if they do go into those jobs are the victims of discrimination and harassment. Reports of harassment and abuse are rife in Western countries from women who attempt to go into many engineering and IT jobs, however Indian and Chinese women don't seem to have these problems, and aren't discouraged (as American women are) from even going into these professions in college.
Your assertions make zero sense; if women really are less interested, then what exactly are American women doing for money? Marrying men who make more money than themselves is not an indicator of social equality, it's an indicator of social inequality. Every report shows that American women make less than American men, so if there were real social equality, more women would be entering professions that make more money if those professions were open to them and didn't carry a social stigma or risk of harassment.
Now, it might be some sort of culturally imbued sexism. The sort that diverts men from being grade-school teachers and women from being truckers.
That's exactly what the problem is. In all my years of engineering school and work, most of the female engineers (or engineering students) I've met were not American, they were Indian and Chinese. Apparently, their cultures do not divert women from these jobs the way Western or American culture does.
See, it doesn't matter that millions of years of evolution have resulted in some significant differences between males and females
That's bullshit (or more accurately, your insinuation that women are somehow evolutionarily less apt for engineering).
Over in China and India, there's tons of females in the sciences and engineering. When I worked at some larger semiconductor companies, there were quite a few female engineers, but they tended to be mostly Indian and some Chinese. I saw the same when I was in college; most of the women (esp. in grad school) were Indian and Chinese.
It's not that women aren't interested in engineering or capable of it. It's that American women aren't interested in it (though other western cultures don't seem to be much better). Apparently, Indian and Chinese cultures don't have the same sexist attitudes towards women that Western (and particularly American) cultures do.
People who realize that the reasons for that are social inequality, and such inequalities ought to be addressed.
Ok, that sounds all well and good, except for one important thing: why is it that no one is complaining about the lack of men in elementary teaching roles, or nursing, or day care jobs, or other traditionally-female roles? There's no one complaining about that, or trying to get more men into those positions; in fact, men are shunned from positions involving children (esp. small children) because our society is so paranoid about child molesters.
Interesting that you bring up Haiti. They occupy the same island as the Dominican Republic; while Haiti has been a disaster for a very long time, the DR has always been totally different (just look at a satellite photo showing the deforestation on the Haitian side, while the Dominican side is lush and green). Now, if you go look at the people there (which you obviously haven't, because you're a dumb troll who lives in a trailer), you'll see that they're all black! The main difference between them is that the Haitians speak French, while the Dominicans speak Spanish. Also, many of those places in Africa that are fucked up are former French colonies. So maybe that's your common denominator there.
While we're talking non-sequiturs, the Falkland Islands ownership dispute continues
All the people living in the Falkland Islands want to remain part of the UK. The only "dispute" is from some other country, which claims to own that land because that country owned that land 2 centuries ago. However, Argentina itself was stolen by European invaders not long before then, so if the Argentines were really concerned about historical claims, they'd all pack up and move back to Spain and leave Argentina to only full-blooded aboriginal people, since that was their land before.
Modern contemporary Christianity does not. If there is some Christian group doing it somewhere it is wrong
No, there's no such thing as "doing it wrong" when it comes to a culture or religion. Everyone is doing it "right", from their own point-of-view.
If you want to talk in general terms about a religion (or culture), you can only do so by looking at what the majority, or a significant minority, or that group of people does.
In the case of Muslims, a very large number of them promote Sharia Law, especially in countries they emigrate to. It may or may not be a majority, but it certainly is a significant minority at the least, judging by how many of them turn out for public protests on the matter. This also goes for other abhorrent practices, such as honor killing.
With Christians, however, I honestly can't think of any sects these days that advocate similar rules as Islam for apostasy. Sure, 500+ years ago in some places, denying Christianity would probably get you burned at the stake, but that's old history, and what was the norm centuries ago is not relevant to today or what groups of people today are guilty of. Christians may have their faults (most especially the wacky evangelical ones in America), but this isn't one of them. But it's not because any of them are doing things "right" or "wrong", it's because the general behavior of Christians does not show any such mindset towards apostasy in the modern day. If, however, half of all Christians suddenly latched onto the idea that apostasy should be punishable by death, then this would be different, and it wouldn't be because they're "doing it wrong", because if they decide their religion requires that (idiotic) rule, then that makes it "right". A religion is, after all, whatever its adherents say that it is. There's no impartial arbiter who can say what is and isn't "correct" for a religion, otherwise we wouldn't have all these different sects constantly disagreeing about various points of theology.
Anyway, I'm not saying that there isn't a better option, just that we haven't come across anything that sticks yet,
I definitely agree with this, as I said before when I said that no one's come up with a sensible replacement for it yet. You correctly pointed out the problem with my platter icon idea: it looks too much like an optical disk. The other poster here had the right idea: when you save to disk, you're really saving a "snapshot" (and even in the floppy days, you didn't want to actually save it to a floppy most of the time). So what we need is an icon that represents a snapshot. What that would be, however, I have no idea. If you use a camera icon, people will think it has something to do with taking a photo, for instance.
That sounds like it would just look like it either means "burn to disc" or "download to something", neither of which would make sense as saving.
If you think about it, "download" and "save" are really the same thing. The only difference is that "download" usually refers to copying something from the internet somewhere and saving to local NV storage, whereas "save" (as seen, for instance, in an office program) usually means to copy from memory to local NV storage.
The number of people that have even the vaguest idea of what the inside of a hard disk looks like is probably significantly smaller than the number that knows that floppy=save.
I have no way to prove this, but I seriously doubt this. I think that if you polled everyone under the age of 25 who uses computers, you'd find they're more familiar with what a hard drive looks like than what a floppy disk looks like, because they probably barely remember floppies. Change that to under-20 and it'll be even more striking.
You know what else is obsolete? Roman numerals, and yet their use on clock faces hasn't been particularly problematic for anybody in the centuries since the system got replaced with something more sane.
People only understand clocks with them because they know what the positions mean, not because they understand the numerals. Try asking them to convert something like MCMLXXXVI; they probably won't be able to do it. Besides, I rarely see clocks with Roman numerals these days.
Steering wheels on cars could probably be replaced with something better, too, but attempts to do so have never caught on.
No, they can't, because nothing better has been invented. Some morons have suggested joysticks, but they clearly know nothing about basic mechanics, as joysticks have far less resolution than a steering wheel. Besides, steering wheels are not the original way of steering a car; the earliest models had tillers, which were indeed pretty stupid (though mechanically simple) and were later replaced with steering wheels. There were even a lot of people pissed about that, and who hated the change to steering wheels. Finally, if you want to see the cutting edge of driving technology, you have to look no further than F1 racing; all the latest stuff gets tried out there first, such as DSG transmissions. They're still using steering wheels (though rather small ones). If there were something better, they would have tried it there first.
Sometimes, it's better to stick with a well-understood metaphor, rather than try to change it just because it's not modern enough for your tastes.
No, metaphors are only useful if the users using them understand them and can relate to them. Some things don't need to change much over the years, other things become obsolete and really shouldn't be used as newer users don't understand them and don't relate to them. There were a lot of attempts years ago to make computer desktops look a lot like old-fashioned desktops, with things like virtual rolodexes; these didn't go over too well because the younger users couldn't relate to any of this stuff and didn't actually want their computer looking like some businessperson's desktop from decades in the past. The floppy disk is similarly long past its prime; the only reason the icon persists is because no one's come up with a sensible replacement for it yet.
I.e., it would get rid of the compositing stuff, Plasma stuff, animation stuff - a plain desktop as folder, plus panels
Removing compositing would make it slower on most systems, since you'd have to do everything on the CPU instead of offloading it to the GPU. You can already disable animation and other stuff pretty easily. But you're right, they could use a few buttons to select certain feature sets (one for minimalist desktop, one for everything-and-the-kitchen-sink, one for Windows XP/7-like UI, one for MacOS-like UI, etc.). I'd suggest submitting a feature request.
First off, there's really only one Linux kernel version that distros are using. Except for some weird embedded stuff, no one sticks with older or odd branches of the Linux kernel, and they generally use the latest thing available. The only differences between distros would be because they don't all release releases at the exact same time.
Secondly, there may be "thousands" of distros, but only a handful that actually have a lot of users and get a lot of mindshare and support: Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, Mint (with a few different variants), Debian, OpenSUSE, and that's about it. There's also Arch, Gentoo, and Slackware, which have much lower adoption, and a bunch of obscure or special-use distros (such as DD-WRT, which is only for routers, or Knoppix which is only a liveCD/DVD distro and mainly used as a rescue system). The vast majority of Linux desktop users probably only use 3-5 distros. And some of these are actually derived from other distros (Mint is the poster child of this), with very few actual changes of their own....which brings us to package managers: with only a handful of serious distros, that means there's only a handful of package managers that get much use, and in reality it's only two, dep/apt and rpm/yum.
So in reality, things don't look much different between the Linux and BSD worlds, and in fact, Linux looks more standardized than BSD since it only has one active kernel.
This is rare and will continue to be rare unless there is a perceived stable, standardizzed desktop offering.
You mean like Microsoft's new "standardized" desktop offering, which is a complete sea change from their previous version?
With Linux, you don't have that problem. No one can force you to adopt a crappy new desktop offering when you're a Linux user; you always have the ability to keep using what you're using now, or change distros to one that suits you better. Users happy with Gnome2 are not forced to move to Gnome3; they're free to switch to distros using MATE (or Cinnamon) if they prefer those. That's something you can't do with Apple or Microsoft.
What iconography would you suggest replace the floppy disk for save?
How about an image of a silver platter with an arrow pointing downwards at it? Now obviously, this is already starting to be obsolete with the rise of SSDs, but it's better than an image of a storage medium that no one's used in over a decade. Heck, even when people still used floppies in the 90s, they generally saved stuff to their hard drive, not to floppies, so the icon didn't even make that much sense back then.
The actual implementation, IMO, was never actually perfected (as in "perfect"), but gnome 2 and kde 3 came the closest, before they both went off the deep end (when they were taken over by younger, more "visionary" maintainers).
What the heck are you talking about? KDE4 is no different from KDE3 as far as the metaphor that it tries to implement, except that it adds some extra (optional) features such as "Activities" and indexing. KDE4 uses a totally different codebase, yes, but it still works pretty much the same as KDE3 as far as the UI goes. You can criticize KDE4 all you want for their botched execution and roll-out of the early releases (they were feature-incomplete for a while, and very buggy, but that was years ago), but there's nothing substantially different about the UI as compared to older KDE releases, unlike Gnome3.
Maybe, but I'm not talking about rank-and-file employees, I'm talking about the top executives in any organization, a very, very small number of people compared to the total number of people in the organization. MS has tens of thousands of employees, but only a handful of executives, a minuscule percentage, far lower than the 1-5% of the general population estimated to be sociopathic by various studies.
Stupid people are easily conned and led. That doesn't make them sociopaths, only gullible and stupid (and also probably lazy, apathetic, etc., all common human failings).
It's probably because most large corporations are run by sociopaths. Sociopaths, because they have no empathy or conscience, are more easily able to rise to the top of power structures (if they're smart; the stupid ones become criminals and go to prison), so most of our political and corporate leaders are sociopaths. And since they have no conscience, they don't give a shit about anyone else except maybe immediate family, and happily use their power to try to fuck over everyone else for their own gain.
I never said Spain was an advanced, industrialized nation. Spain had a friggin' dictator until a just few decades ago. Even Mexico has a better track record than that!
Spain sounds a lot like Mexico as far as qualifications, BTW. In Mexico, you don't need an engineering degree to be an "engineer", you just get the job (because of nepotism/cronyism), and work under some more experienced person for a while. From what I hear, all the professional jobs are like this (and this isn't just in the government, this is private industry). No wonder Mexico has never produced much of value. Cronyism is a recipe for failure. Too bad America seems to be devolving to this too, at least as far as the government is concerned.
And as far as infrastructure rotting, it sounds like you're on par with America there. Our infrastructure is crumbling too, though it's largely because we'd rather spend all our money on military misadventure (along with government healthcare websites set up by overpaid cronies).
Are you sure about that? Other automakers have been talking for over a decade now about switching to a higher-voltage bus, because there's so many accessories in cars these days, and some of them use a lot of power (electric power steering for one). The Tesla is worse: it not only has EPS, but electric HVAC, in addition to things like window motors. A higher-voltage (42V) would allow the use of narrower-gauge wiring, saving vehicle weight. Normal cars haven't gone this way for various reasons, but the Tesla could do it easily since they already have a high-voltage battery pack, and converting to 42V wouldn't be any harder than converting to 14.4V. The main reason they probably wouldn't is because they can use off-the-shelf parts by sticking with 12V stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
You need to get yourself a new microwave, because there's something wrong with yours. 50W is a huge drain; just think of a 50W lightbulb being left on, and how much heat that generates.
I just tested my year-old Panasonic microwave: it uses 2W in standby. Interestingly, it uses 22VA, because the power factor is a horrid 0.12, but still the true power is only 2W which is pretty small, and probably normal for an appliance like that.
In the case of the Tesla, people are buying it, in part, for those extras. Sure, they might be able to market a bare bones model of the Tesla but it won't sell well because the price and reliability won't be lowered by enough to make it worthwhile to take the bare bones model over the luxury model.
Exactly. Think about it: who the hell is going to pay $90-100k for an electric car that has all the creature comforts of a $12k econobox? Sure, you might save $5-10k by leaving out those things on the Tesla, but you're not going to get any buyers; someone who shells out nearly 6 figures for a car wants it to be a nice car that rivals high-end Mercedes and BMW models. This is one of the problems with the Chevy Volt: it's fairly expensive (even after the tax incentives and rebates), but the build quality and interior design is reportedly more like a $15-20k model, not a $30-35k model. Chevy probably didn't cheap out intentionally; the hybrid powertrain is expensive, and they tried to come up with a vehicle that wasn't completely unprofitable while still being affordable by middle-class people. Tesla intentionally avoided this problem by specifically targeting very high-end buyers, and ignoring people who can't afford a car over $50k, with the plan being to eventually bring the costs down to where they can make competitive vehicles in progressively lower price brackets, but financing everything right now by catering only to rich buyers.
Only on Slashdot do you have some moron saying he wants a vehicle with a state-of-the-art electric powertrain but with a mechanical speedometer and an AM/FM radio. If Tesla really made such a vehicle, would this moron put his money where his mouth is and buy one? Didn't think so. Holy shit, cars (even econocars) haven't had mechanical speedometers since the 80s.
You've got to be kidding. You think all the people who are dishwashers and ditch diggers chose those jobs out of interest? Or even engineers? There's lots of people working as professionals that do it for the money, and would rather do something else like writing or art or whatever, but they picked their profession because it offered a good combination of interest (in case you didn't realize, people can be interested in multiple different things), working environment, pay/compensation, etc.
As for hating going to work, lots of people go into a career thinking it'll be fun and interesting, and end up hating it because of the corporate politics, work environment, etc. You talk like a college student who has never worked in the real world before.
How on earth does that show social inequality? That doesn't even make sense. Women in the USA have to make money to survive just like just about every country. In a country with social equality, women can work in the same jobs as men without being harassed or abused. But in countries with social inequality, women who try to work in "men's jobs" are discouraged from it, and if they do go into those jobs are the victims of discrimination and harassment. Reports of harassment and abuse are rife in Western countries from women who attempt to go into many engineering and IT jobs, however Indian and Chinese women don't seem to have these problems, and aren't discouraged (as American women are) from even going into these professions in college.
Your assertions make zero sense; if women really are less interested, then what exactly are American women doing for money? Marrying men who make more money than themselves is not an indicator of social equality, it's an indicator of social inequality. Every report shows that American women make less than American men, so if there were real social equality, more women would be entering professions that make more money if those professions were open to them and didn't carry a social stigma or risk of harassment.
And it shows, though I'm not sure that 'gets by' would be my wording of choice.
They're doing a lot better than Slashdot, especially when you look at Slashdot's horrid new redesign.
Now, it might be some sort of culturally imbued sexism. The sort that diverts men from being grade-school teachers and women from being truckers.
That's exactly what the problem is. In all my years of engineering school and work, most of the female engineers (or engineering students) I've met were not American, they were Indian and Chinese. Apparently, their cultures do not divert women from these jobs the way Western or American culture does.
See, it doesn't matter that millions of years of evolution have resulted in some significant differences between males and females
That's bullshit (or more accurately, your insinuation that women are somehow evolutionarily less apt for engineering).
Over in China and India, there's tons of females in the sciences and engineering. When I worked at some larger semiconductor companies, there were quite a few female engineers, but they tended to be mostly Indian and some Chinese. I saw the same when I was in college; most of the women (esp. in grad school) were Indian and Chinese.
It's not that women aren't interested in engineering or capable of it. It's that American women aren't interested in it (though other western cultures don't seem to be much better). Apparently, Indian and Chinese cultures don't have the same sexist attitudes towards women that Western (and particularly American) cultures do.
People who realize that the reasons for that are social inequality, and such inequalities ought to be addressed.
Ok, that sounds all well and good, except for one important thing: why is it that no one is complaining about the lack of men in elementary teaching roles, or nursing, or day care jobs, or other traditionally-female roles? There's no one complaining about that, or trying to get more men into those positions; in fact, men are shunned from positions involving children (esp. small children) because our society is so paranoid about child molesters.
Interesting that you bring up Haiti. They occupy the same island as the Dominican Republic; while Haiti has been a disaster for a very long time, the DR has always been totally different (just look at a satellite photo showing the deforestation on the Haitian side, while the Dominican side is lush and green). Now, if you go look at the people there (which you obviously haven't, because you're a dumb troll who lives in a trailer), you'll see that they're all black! The main difference between them is that the Haitians speak French, while the Dominicans speak Spanish. Also, many of those places in Africa that are fucked up are former French colonies. So maybe that's your common denominator there.
Our secular legal systems are based on Roman law, not Christianity.
While we're talking non-sequiturs, the Falkland Islands ownership dispute continues
All the people living in the Falkland Islands want to remain part of the UK. The only "dispute" is from some other country, which claims to own that land because that country owned that land 2 centuries ago. However, Argentina itself was stolen by European invaders not long before then, so if the Argentines were really concerned about historical claims, they'd all pack up and move back to Spain and leave Argentina to only full-blooded aboriginal people, since that was their land before.
Modern contemporary Christianity does not. If there is some Christian group doing it somewhere it is wrong
No, there's no such thing as "doing it wrong" when it comes to a culture or religion. Everyone is doing it "right", from their own point-of-view.
If you want to talk in general terms about a religion (or culture), you can only do so by looking at what the majority, or a significant minority, or that group of people does.
In the case of Muslims, a very large number of them promote Sharia Law, especially in countries they emigrate to. It may or may not be a majority, but it certainly is a significant minority at the least, judging by how many of them turn out for public protests on the matter. This also goes for other abhorrent practices, such as honor killing.
With Christians, however, I honestly can't think of any sects these days that advocate similar rules as Islam for apostasy. Sure, 500+ years ago in some places, denying Christianity would probably get you burned at the stake, but that's old history, and what was the norm centuries ago is not relevant to today or what groups of people today are guilty of. Christians may have their faults (most especially the wacky evangelical ones in America), but this isn't one of them. But it's not because any of them are doing things "right" or "wrong", it's because the general behavior of Christians does not show any such mindset towards apostasy in the modern day. If, however, half of all Christians suddenly latched onto the idea that apostasy should be punishable by death, then this would be different, and it wouldn't be because they're "doing it wrong", because if they decide their religion requires that (idiotic) rule, then that makes it "right". A religion is, after all, whatever its adherents say that it is. There's no impartial arbiter who can say what is and isn't "correct" for a religion, otherwise we wouldn't have all these different sects constantly disagreeing about various points of theology.
Anyway, I'm not saying that there isn't a better option, just that we haven't come across anything that sticks yet,
I definitely agree with this, as I said before when I said that no one's come up with a sensible replacement for it yet. You correctly pointed out the problem with my platter icon idea: it looks too much like an optical disk. The other poster here had the right idea: when you save to disk, you're really saving a "snapshot" (and even in the floppy days, you didn't want to actually save it to a floppy most of the time). So what we need is an icon that represents a snapshot. What that would be, however, I have no idea. If you use a camera icon, people will think it has something to do with taking a photo, for instance.
That sounds like it would just look like it either means "burn to disc" or "download to something", neither of which would make sense as saving.
If you think about it, "download" and "save" are really the same thing. The only difference is that "download" usually refers to copying something from the internet somewhere and saving to local NV storage, whereas "save" (as seen, for instance, in an office program) usually means to copy from memory to local NV storage.
The number of people that have even the vaguest idea of what the inside of a hard disk looks like is probably significantly smaller than the number that knows that floppy=save.
I have no way to prove this, but I seriously doubt this. I think that if you polled everyone under the age of 25 who uses computers, you'd find they're more familiar with what a hard drive looks like than what a floppy disk looks like, because they probably barely remember floppies. Change that to under-20 and it'll be even more striking.
You know what else is obsolete? Roman numerals, and yet their use on clock faces hasn't been particularly problematic for anybody in the centuries since the system got replaced with something more sane.
People only understand clocks with them because they know what the positions mean, not because they understand the numerals. Try asking them to convert something like MCMLXXXVI; they probably won't be able to do it. Besides, I rarely see clocks with Roman numerals these days.
Steering wheels on cars could probably be replaced with something better, too, but attempts to do so have never caught on.
No, they can't, because nothing better has been invented. Some morons have suggested joysticks, but they clearly know nothing about basic mechanics, as joysticks have far less resolution than a steering wheel. Besides, steering wheels are not the original way of steering a car; the earliest models had tillers, which were indeed pretty stupid (though mechanically simple) and were later replaced with steering wheels. There were even a lot of people pissed about that, and who hated the change to steering wheels. Finally, if you want to see the cutting edge of driving technology, you have to look no further than F1 racing; all the latest stuff gets tried out there first, such as DSG transmissions. They're still using steering wheels (though rather small ones). If there were something better, they would have tried it there first.
Sometimes, it's better to stick with a well-understood metaphor, rather than try to change it just because it's not modern enough for your tastes.
No, metaphors are only useful if the users using them understand them and can relate to them. Some things don't need to change much over the years, other things become obsolete and really shouldn't be used as newer users don't understand them and don't relate to them. There were a lot of attempts years ago to make computer desktops look a lot like old-fashioned desktops, with things like virtual rolodexes; these didn't go over too well because the younger users couldn't relate to any of this stuff and didn't actually want their computer looking like some businessperson's desktop from decades in the past. The floppy disk is similarly long past its prime; the only reason the icon persists is because no one's come up with a sensible replacement for it yet.
I.e., it would get rid of the compositing stuff, Plasma stuff, animation stuff - a plain desktop as folder, plus panels
Removing compositing would make it slower on most systems, since you'd have to do everything on the CPU instead of offloading it to the GPU. You can already disable animation and other stuff pretty easily. But you're right, they could use a few buttons to select certain feature sets (one for minimalist desktop, one for everything-and-the-kitchen-sink, one for Windows XP/7-like UI, one for MacOS-like UI, etc.). I'd suggest submitting a feature request.
Oh please.
First off, there's really only one Linux kernel version that distros are using. Except for some weird embedded stuff, no one sticks with older or odd branches of the Linux kernel, and they generally use the latest thing available. The only differences between distros would be because they don't all release releases at the exact same time.
Secondly, there may be "thousands" of distros, but only a handful that actually have a lot of users and get a lot of mindshare and support: Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, Mint (with a few different variants), Debian, OpenSUSE, and that's about it. There's also Arch, Gentoo, and Slackware, which have much lower adoption, and a bunch of obscure or special-use distros (such as DD-WRT, which is only for routers, or Knoppix which is only a liveCD/DVD distro and mainly used as a rescue system). The vast majority of Linux desktop users probably only use 3-5 distros. And some of these are actually derived from other distros (Mint is the poster child of this), with very few actual changes of their own. ...which brings us to package managers: with only a handful of serious distros, that means there's only a handful of package managers that get much use, and in reality it's only two, dep/apt and rpm/yum.
So in reality, things don't look much different between the Linux and BSD worlds, and in fact, Linux looks more standardized than BSD since it only has one active kernel.
This is rare and will continue to be rare unless there is a perceived stable, standardizzed desktop offering.
You mean like Microsoft's new "standardized" desktop offering, which is a complete sea change from their previous version?
With Linux, you don't have that problem. No one can force you to adopt a crappy new desktop offering when you're a Linux user; you always have the ability to keep using what you're using now, or change distros to one that suits you better. Users happy with Gnome2 are not forced to move to Gnome3; they're free to switch to distros using MATE (or Cinnamon) if they prefer those. That's something you can't do with Apple or Microsoft.
What iconography would you suggest replace the floppy disk for save?
How about an image of a silver platter with an arrow pointing downwards at it? Now obviously, this is already starting to be obsolete with the rise of SSDs, but it's better than an image of a storage medium that no one's used in over a decade. Heck, even when people still used floppies in the 90s, they generally saved stuff to their hard drive, not to floppies, so the icon didn't even make that much sense back then.
The actual implementation, IMO, was never actually perfected (as in "perfect"), but gnome 2 and kde 3 came the closest, before they both went off the deep end (when they were taken over by younger, more "visionary" maintainers).
What the heck are you talking about? KDE4 is no different from KDE3 as far as the metaphor that it tries to implement, except that it adds some extra (optional) features such as "Activities" and indexing. KDE4 uses a totally different codebase, yes, but it still works pretty much the same as KDE3 as far as the UI goes. You can criticize KDE4 all you want for their botched execution and roll-out of the early releases (they were feature-incomplete for a while, and very buggy, but that was years ago), but there's nothing substantially different about the UI as compared to older KDE releases, unlike Gnome3.
Maybe, but I'm not talking about rank-and-file employees, I'm talking about the top executives in any organization, a very, very small number of people compared to the total number of people in the organization. MS has tens of thousands of employees, but only a handful of executives, a minuscule percentage, far lower than the 1-5% of the general population estimated to be sociopathic by various studies.
Stupid people are easily conned and led. That doesn't make them sociopaths, only gullible and stupid (and also probably lazy, apathetic, etc., all common human failings).
It's probably because most large corporations are run by sociopaths. Sociopaths, because they have no empathy or conscience, are more easily able to rise to the top of power structures (if they're smart; the stupid ones become criminals and go to prison), so most of our political and corporate leaders are sociopaths. And since they have no conscience, they don't give a shit about anyone else except maybe immediate family, and happily use their power to try to fuck over everyone else for their own gain.
I never said Spain was an advanced, industrialized nation. Spain had a friggin' dictator until a just few decades ago. Even Mexico has a better track record than that!
Spain sounds a lot like Mexico as far as qualifications, BTW. In Mexico, you don't need an engineering degree to be an "engineer", you just get the job (because of nepotism/cronyism), and work under some more experienced person for a while. From what I hear, all the professional jobs are like this (and this isn't just in the government, this is private industry). No wonder Mexico has never produced much of value. Cronyism is a recipe for failure. Too bad America seems to be devolving to this too, at least as far as the government is concerned.
And as far as infrastructure rotting, it sounds like you're on par with America there. Our infrastructure is crumbling too, though it's largely because we'd rather spend all our money on military misadventure (along with government healthcare websites set up by overpaid cronies).
The City of Munich government, apparently.
Are you sure about that? Other automakers have been talking for over a decade now about switching to a higher-voltage bus, because there's so many accessories in cars these days, and some of them use a lot of power (electric power steering for one). The Tesla is worse: it not only has EPS, but electric HVAC, in addition to things like window motors. A higher-voltage (42V) would allow the use of narrower-gauge wiring, saving vehicle weight. Normal cars haven't gone this way for various reasons, but the Tesla could do it easily since they already have a high-voltage battery pack, and converting to 42V wouldn't be any harder than converting to 14.4V. The main reason they probably wouldn't is because they can use off-the-shelf parts by sticking with 12V stuff.