That doesn't prove anything, it only proves that one well-known band is able to make a lot of money by asking for donations. Radiohead is far more well-known and popular than some ssh app for Blackberries. Heck, Blackberries themselves are going out of style pretty quickly, and among BB users, how many do you think want an ssh app? Secondly, it's different markets. The people that listen to RH music aren't necessarily representative of the population in general. How successful would some country artist be if they did the same thing? Or someone like Britney Spears? Or some totally unknown band, or a local band? It's cool that RH had such success, but without that model being tried by more musicians, and in other markets too (movies, books, software), you can't draw any conclusions from it.
I don't know about your app in particular, but for open-source applications, one way to make money is to get people to pay you for improvements. Get something out there that becomes popular, and then put up a section on your website where people can make feature requests. List the feature requests that have been made, let people vote on them. Then put in a way to get people to donate for these improvements, maybe with a "donation meter" the way many charities do. Set a price on each feature (based on how long it'll take you to implement it) and show how much has been donated towards that feature. When you get enough money, release the feature.
Yep, they frequently have the sound turned up way too loud.
Then add in screaming kids, sticky floors, crappy seats that don't let you get closer to your date, horrifically overpriced and crappy food/drinks, and insane ticket prices (you can buy a Blu-Ray for less than a single ticket), and you have to wonder why anyone even bothers with the theater any more. I will note however, that the budget cinemas ("dollar theaters", though the one here is $3 I think) are a much better deal, since the price is so much lower.
I was pretty disappointed by the Star Trek reboot to be honest. The "red matter" BS, the villain was pretty ridiculous, the plot didn't make that much sense (somehow the villain comes from the future with this advanced mining ship, but then the Klingons are able to grab him and keep him in prison, but then somehow he escapes and gets his old ship back? WTF?), destroying Vulcan (using that stupid "red matter"), etc. Even the bit about Chekov not being able to talk to the computer was silly; they haven't improved voice-recognition algorithms by that time to deal with some people's accents? Or just let him speak in his native language?
Interesting. That sure sounds like a lot of trouble for terraforming however, esp. that planetary-size Fresnel lens (since Mars isn't that close to the Sun); wouldn't it be easier to terraform Venus if you're going to go to all that effort? Venus is closer to the sun (no Fresnel lens needed, though you may need a way to reduce the amount of sunlight hitting the surface), and it has nearly earth-level gravity, instead of a puny 1/3g. You just have to figure out how to deal with the atmosphere, but there's been ideas thrown around for that, including seeding the atmosphere with microbes and letting them deal with it.
An important distinction is that KSR also had at that point in the books a significant terraforming project on Mars which had put approximately 200-300 millibars of pressure into the Martian atmosphere. It wasn't perfect, but it was survivable.
How did he propose to do this? I thought getting Mars to hold a significant atmosphere wasn't really likely because 1) it doesn't have that much gravity (1/3g), and 2) it doesn't have a magnetic field to protect against solar winds. And without a liquid iron core, it can't be made to have a magnetic field.
They had a scene like this in 2001: A Space Odyssey too; Bowman had to go from his small ship to an airlock on the Discovery without a suit. The whole process only took a few seconds though. I think the biggest problem is that the small blood vessels on your eyeballs will burst, but they'll heal.
100mph winds aren't a big deal when the atmospheric pressure is ~1/100 of that on Earth (except, of course, for the dust issue). It's not like it's going to blow you over or anything.
Not feasible. Sure, the goal should be to build a giant bubble or dome for them to live in, but 1) there's going to be some time until they get that thing built and ready to inhabit, and you'll need construction workers walking around outside to get it built, and 2) the Mars base isn't going to be a place for people to just stay inside all day long and telecommute, they're going to need to go out in the field at some point to do work, whether it's checking out sites for geology studies or figuring out where they're going to build a new wing for the Mars base and doing the construction work for that.
None of that excuses firing on people who are no longer fighting back, and are trying to leave the scene to get medical help (because you've just shot them).
Furthermore (and I think this is pretty important), none of what you say is remotely relevant. The soldiers in question were not infantry, they were helicopter pilots. They don't have to worry about being up all day and night for three days, and certainly don't have to worry about being in mud, dealing with booby traps, or being shot at by 14-year-olds (Apache gunships are heavily armored, with depleted uranium armor protecting the pilots). Basically, for these assholes, it's not much different from safely playing a video game. They just fly around and shoot at stuff with very little danger to themselves.
Finally, none of this excuses the fact that the US forces have no legitimate enemy there. The Iraqi people did nothing to threaten the US, except try to start selling their oil in Euros instead of Dollars. If you can't fight a war professionally, don't go over there.
Creative Labs stuff has long been known not to work well with Linux. Stick with Intel HD audio, anything real Realtek, etc., and your audio will work fine. Creative is the worst for Linux support.
I got that uneasy feeling that people behind the Linux Desktop are adapting the stance of blaming others for whatever they have failed
There's nothing really wrong with that, because MS really did pull a lot of monopolistic moves to try to stop Linux before it gained too much momentum. However, there's been numerous failures inside the community to, not only in dealing with these challenges but with other things too. I felt the second article was pretty fair in this regard, in assessing both the internal and external difficulties.
No, I am not saying that the Linux Desktop people haven't put in much work into making Linux Desktop a reality - they have - or else we wouldn't have so many choices like we have today, from KDE to GNOME to Enlightenment to many others
Yes, but unfortunately all this fragmentation didn't really help the cause any. People looking for an alternative to Apple or Windows aren't going to be interested in some obscure WM.
If we really want Linux Desktop to be used by more people, we must explore ways to make the UI truly intuitive, and that by itself, has been a constant challenge for the Linux Desktop people In fact, we don't need to look further than "Unity / Gnome 3" to find what's WRONG with Linux Desktop
I disagree. For one thing, what's "intuitive"? For the most part, UIs are learned, especially for PCs where so much is possible (this is less true with mobile phones, where the possibilities are far more constrained). Unity and Gnome3 are definitely a big problem with Linux on the desktop, but they show a big failing in the community; some egotistical developers decide they know the One True Way, and are going to push their vision of how a UI should be on everyone. But they forgot a few important things: 1) the technical users that already use Linux and are its cheerleaders mostly hate these non-configurable UIs that seem more designed for touchscreens than anything else, and 2) the non-technical users they're aiming for aren't going to try out Linux without a technical user (e.g. family member) to push them into it, and 3) if they're trying to get people to switch from Windows or Mac, they're not going to succeed by having a UI that's totally different from what they're used to. KDE is probably the best DE for trying to woo converts, because anyone who can use Windows can easily learn KDE since it's pretty similar, but then instead of this being prominently featured by Linux distros, it's given 2nd-class citizen status while the mainstream distros push Unity and Gnome3 and pissing off users.
It seems to me that if we want to assign blame, it's best assigned to the distros more than anyone else, because they're the ones who are supposed to be promoting it, and gathering the correct components and assembling them into a coherent system that works well, and they don't seem to do a very good job of that at all. For instance, every time one of the big DE projects releases some under-tested ultra-buggy POS release, they just take it and make it the new default and make it difficult or impossible to stay with the old version (KDE 3.5->KDE 4.0, Gnome2->Gnome3). The second level of blame goes to the DE development teams; KDE for totally screwing up all their positive momentum with the disastrous 4.0 release, and Gnome for being egotistical pricks and pushing a new version that removed all kinds of features and insisting that everyone else is wrong and they're UI experts who should not be questioned.
What's really sad is that most of the technical underpinnings of Linux are really, really good. The driver situation is mostly sorted out, with Linux supporting more hardware out-of-the-box than anything else; just plug it in and it "just works". They've even mostly fixed the situation with WiFi cards; I haven't heard of any problems here for a while. The exception of course is video drivers, but binary drivers are available for Nvidia and AMD, and here again we seem to have a distro failure in not making it dead easy to u
Do I remember every little detail? Of course not. But I still remember the general gist of things; I know that the Krebs Cycle is something to do with biology even though I haven't had a bio class since high school over 2 decades ago. I know who Shakespeare is though I haven't read any since then. I know what a geometric proof is even though I haven't looked at those since the late 80s.
That fact that you know that cars use internal combustion puts you far, far ahead of someone who doesn't even grasp that stars are suns. And I think even a dimwit understands that machines need oil to lubricate them; that's why WD-40 is able to sell so much (despite the fact that it sucks for lubricating; people know that their door hinges and such need lubricating oil, they just don't know that WD-40 lies to them with their marketing and sucks for that). The world is complex, but it isn't that complex. If you can't understand these things at a high level, then you're a moron, plain and simple.
Intel GPUs don't "suck", they're just not as high-performance as the others. They're perfectly adequate for most uses, and getting better all the time.
This is like saying a Toyota Camry sucks; no, it's not a Ferrari, but it's highly reliable and performs perfectly adequately for most drivers.
Dinosaurs likely weren't reptiles at all, and were actually ancestors of birds. They might very well have been warm-blooded. However, this should make them taste even more like chicken, since chickens are birds. Although they probably taste more like turkey.
Yes, he misspoke. The animals that thrive are the ones who've figured out how to get along well with humans, and not become a target for them. The ones that are going extinct are the ones that not only haven't figured out how to get along with humans, but get in their way or compete with them. So pigeons are thriving because they're not afraid of humans at all, live in urban areas with them, and eat trash, while wolves get 'kicked in the teeth' because they hunt humans' livestock animals and hurt their profits, and spotted owls get the short stick because they occupy a habitat that humans want to chop down for timber.
Alternatively, we can accept that a lot of people don't think overmuch about things that don't directly affect them
I'm sorry, I don't agree. Knowing that stars are suns just like our own is basic elementary education, unless perhaps your friends are all in their 90s or something. This is something you should have learned in grade school. Now, knowing this one fact isn't exactly important for daily life, but it shows that you're apparently uneducated; if you don't know that bit of elementary education, then what else do you not know, which anyone with a high school diploma would take for granted?
I have a general grasp on what makes my car go, but really it's faith: I push this pedal, it goes forward. I push this one, it stops.
If that's all you know about your car, and don't even know what an engine is, then you have no business driving. There's a reason aircraft pilots have to learn about aerodynamics and how aircraft engines work (though not to the extent that aircraft mechanics do of course), and this is all basic knowledge to a car owner too. If you don't know how to check air on tires and fill them, how to check your engine oil and what the gauges mean, why you shouldn't continue to drive if your temperature gauge is maxed out, etc., then you have no business driving.
Defending this appalling lack of basic education isn't doing anyone any favors, it's just encouraging the dumbing-down of society.
1) If they get a single cabal running them all, that probably won't be a problem any more.
2) more brutal methods could be used for containing Afghanistan, if it's really that important anyway. Once they have a single, evil empire set up, they won't have to worry much about public opinion or human rights.
Obviously, this line of reasoning isn't entirely serious, but I think the idea is that the main (nuclear) powers would join together into some kind of imperial alliance or union. Then, combined, their militaries could easily crush all the dissenters. So if the USA, Russia, and China all joined together into the new USSAC Empire, they'd be able to rule over everyone else, and there's not much the other nations would be able to do about it.
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That doesn't prove anything, it only proves that one well-known band is able to make a lot of money by asking for donations. Radiohead is far more well-known and popular than some ssh app for Blackberries. Heck, Blackberries themselves are going out of style pretty quickly, and among BB users, how many do you think want an ssh app? Secondly, it's different markets. The people that listen to RH music aren't necessarily representative of the population in general. How successful would some country artist be if they did the same thing? Or someone like Britney Spears? Or some totally unknown band, or a local band? It's cool that RH had such success, but without that model being tried by more musicians, and in other markets too (movies, books, software), you can't draw any conclusions from it.
I don't know about your app in particular, but for open-source applications, one way to make money is to get people to pay you for improvements. Get something out there that becomes popular, and then put up a section on your website where people can make feature requests. List the feature requests that have been made, let people vote on them. Then put in a way to get people to donate for these improvements, maybe with a "donation meter" the way many charities do. Set a price on each feature (based on how long it'll take you to implement it) and show how much has been donated towards that feature. When you get enough money, release the feature.
Yep, they frequently have the sound turned up way too loud.
Then add in screaming kids, sticky floors, crappy seats that don't let you get closer to your date, horrifically overpriced and crappy food/drinks, and insane ticket prices (you can buy a Blu-Ray for less than a single ticket), and you have to wonder why anyone even bothers with the theater any more. I will note however, that the budget cinemas ("dollar theaters", though the one here is $3 I think) are a much better deal, since the price is so much lower.
I was pretty disappointed by the Star Trek reboot to be honest. The "red matter" BS, the villain was pretty ridiculous, the plot didn't make that much sense (somehow the villain comes from the future with this advanced mining ship, but then the Klingons are able to grab him and keep him in prison, but then somehow he escapes and gets his old ship back? WTF?), destroying Vulcan (using that stupid "red matter"), etc. Even the bit about Chekov not being able to talk to the computer was silly; they haven't improved voice-recognition algorithms by that time to deal with some people's accents? Or just let him speak in his native language?
Why would they confiscate your phone and computer at the border? Was this the US border?
Interesting. That sure sounds like a lot of trouble for terraforming however, esp. that planetary-size Fresnel lens (since Mars isn't that close to the Sun); wouldn't it be easier to terraform Venus if you're going to go to all that effort? Venus is closer to the sun (no Fresnel lens needed, though you may need a way to reduce the amount of sunlight hitting the surface), and it has nearly earth-level gravity, instead of a puny 1/3g. You just have to figure out how to deal with the atmosphere, but there's been ideas thrown around for that, including seeding the atmosphere with microbes and letting them deal with it.
An important distinction is that KSR also had at that point in the books a significant terraforming project on Mars which had put approximately 200-300 millibars of pressure into the Martian atmosphere. It wasn't perfect, but it was survivable.
How did he propose to do this? I thought getting Mars to hold a significant atmosphere wasn't really likely because 1) it doesn't have that much gravity (1/3g), and 2) it doesn't have a magnetic field to protect against solar winds. And without a liquid iron core, it can't be made to have a magnetic field.
Sounds like a typical American.
They had a scene like this in 2001: A Space Odyssey too; Bowman had to go from his small ship to an airlock on the Discovery without a suit. The whole process only took a few seconds though. I think the biggest problem is that the small blood vessels on your eyeballs will burst, but they'll heal.
100mph winds aren't a big deal when the atmospheric pressure is ~1/100 of that on Earth (except, of course, for the dust issue). It's not like it's going to blow you over or anything.
Yes, but there's more Nazis living on the far side of the Moon who still know how to do everything.
Not feasible. Sure, the goal should be to build a giant bubble or dome for them to live in, but 1) there's going to be some time until they get that thing built and ready to inhabit, and you'll need construction workers walking around outside to get it built, and 2) the Mars base isn't going to be a place for people to just stay inside all day long and telecommute, they're going to need to go out in the field at some point to do work, whether it's checking out sites for geology studies or figuring out where they're going to build a new wing for the Mars base and doing the construction work for that.
None of that excuses firing on people who are no longer fighting back, and are trying to leave the scene to get medical help (because you've just shot them).
Furthermore (and I think this is pretty important), none of what you say is remotely relevant. The soldiers in question were not infantry, they were helicopter pilots. They don't have to worry about being up all day and night for three days, and certainly don't have to worry about being in mud, dealing with booby traps, or being shot at by 14-year-olds (Apache gunships are heavily armored, with depleted uranium armor protecting the pilots). Basically, for these assholes, it's not much different from safely playing a video game. They just fly around and shoot at stuff with very little danger to themselves.
Finally, none of this excuses the fact that the US forces have no legitimate enemy there. The Iraqi people did nothing to threaten the US, except try to start selling their oil in Euros instead of Dollars. If you can't fight a war professionally, don't go over there.
Yep, Mint has been working great for me too on laptops.
Creative Labs stuff has long been known not to work well with Linux. Stick with Intel HD audio, anything real Realtek, etc., and your audio will work fine. Creative is the worst for Linux support.
I got that uneasy feeling that people behind the Linux Desktop are adapting the stance of blaming others for whatever they have failed
There's nothing really wrong with that, because MS really did pull a lot of monopolistic moves to try to stop Linux before it gained too much momentum. However, there's been numerous failures inside the community to, not only in dealing with these challenges but with other things too. I felt the second article was pretty fair in this regard, in assessing both the internal and external difficulties.
No, I am not saying that the Linux Desktop people haven't put in much work into making Linux Desktop a reality - they have - or else we wouldn't have so many choices like we have today, from KDE to GNOME to Enlightenment to many others
Yes, but unfortunately all this fragmentation didn't really help the cause any. People looking for an alternative to Apple or Windows aren't going to be interested in some obscure WM.
If we really want Linux Desktop to be used by more people, we must explore ways to make the UI truly intuitive, and that by itself, has been a constant challenge for the Linux Desktop people
In fact, we don't need to look further than "Unity / Gnome 3" to find what's WRONG with Linux Desktop
I disagree. For one thing, what's "intuitive"? For the most part, UIs are learned, especially for PCs where so much is possible (this is less true with mobile phones, where the possibilities are far more constrained). Unity and Gnome3 are definitely a big problem with Linux on the desktop, but they show a big failing in the community; some egotistical developers decide they know the One True Way, and are going to push their vision of how a UI should be on everyone. But they forgot a few important things: 1) the technical users that already use Linux and are its cheerleaders mostly hate these non-configurable UIs that seem more designed for touchscreens than anything else, and 2) the non-technical users they're aiming for aren't going to try out Linux without a technical user (e.g. family member) to push them into it, and 3) if they're trying to get people to switch from Windows or Mac, they're not going to succeed by having a UI that's totally different from what they're used to. KDE is probably the best DE for trying to woo converts, because anyone who can use Windows can easily learn KDE since it's pretty similar, but then instead of this being prominently featured by Linux distros, it's given 2nd-class citizen status while the mainstream distros push Unity and Gnome3 and pissing off users.
It seems to me that if we want to assign blame, it's best assigned to the distros more than anyone else, because they're the ones who are supposed to be promoting it, and gathering the correct components and assembling them into a coherent system that works well, and they don't seem to do a very good job of that at all. For instance, every time one of the big DE projects releases some under-tested ultra-buggy POS release, they just take it and make it the new default and make it difficult or impossible to stay with the old version (KDE 3.5->KDE 4.0, Gnome2->Gnome3). The second level of blame goes to the DE development teams; KDE for totally screwing up all their positive momentum with the disastrous 4.0 release, and Gnome for being egotistical pricks and pushing a new version that removed all kinds of features and insisting that everyone else is wrong and they're UI experts who should not be questioned.
What's really sad is that most of the technical underpinnings of Linux are really, really good. The driver situation is mostly sorted out, with Linux supporting more hardware out-of-the-box than anything else; just plug it in and it "just works". They've even mostly fixed the situation with WiFi cards; I haven't heard of any problems here for a while. The exception of course is video drivers, but binary drivers are available for Nvidia and AMD, and here again we seem to have a distro failure in not making it dead easy to u
Do I remember every little detail? Of course not. But I still remember the general gist of things; I know that the Krebs Cycle is something to do with biology even though I haven't had a bio class since high school over 2 decades ago. I know who Shakespeare is though I haven't read any since then. I know what a geometric proof is even though I haven't looked at those since the late 80s.
That fact that you know that cars use internal combustion puts you far, far ahead of someone who doesn't even grasp that stars are suns. And I think even a dimwit understands that machines need oil to lubricate them; that's why WD-40 is able to sell so much (despite the fact that it sucks for lubricating; people know that their door hinges and such need lubricating oil, they just don't know that WD-40 lies to them with their marketing and sucks for that). The world is complex, but it isn't that complex. If you can't understand these things at a high level, then you're a moron, plain and simple.
I'm really curious how they manage to stay in business like that.
Intel GPUs don't "suck", they're just not as high-performance as the others. They're perfectly adequate for most uses, and getting better all the time.
This is like saying a Toyota Camry sucks; no, it's not a Ferrari, but it's highly reliable and performs perfectly adequately for most drivers.
Dinosaurs likely weren't reptiles at all, and were actually ancestors of birds. They might very well have been warm-blooded. However, this should make them taste even more like chicken, since chickens are birds. Although they probably taste more like turkey.
Yes, he misspoke. The animals that thrive are the ones who've figured out how to get along well with humans, and not become a target for them. The ones that are going extinct are the ones that not only haven't figured out how to get along with humans, but get in their way or compete with them. So pigeons are thriving because they're not afraid of humans at all, live in urban areas with them, and eat trash, while wolves get 'kicked in the teeth' because they hunt humans' livestock animals and hurt their profits, and spotted owls get the short stick because they occupy a habitat that humans want to chop down for timber.
Alternatively, we can accept that a lot of people don't think overmuch about things that don't directly affect them
I'm sorry, I don't agree. Knowing that stars are suns just like our own is basic elementary education, unless perhaps your friends are all in their 90s or something. This is something you should have learned in grade school. Now, knowing this one fact isn't exactly important for daily life, but it shows that you're apparently uneducated; if you don't know that bit of elementary education, then what else do you not know, which anyone with a high school diploma would take for granted?
I have a general grasp on what makes my car go, but really it's faith: I push this pedal, it goes forward. I push this one, it stops.
If that's all you know about your car, and don't even know what an engine is, then you have no business driving. There's a reason aircraft pilots have to learn about aerodynamics and how aircraft engines work (though not to the extent that aircraft mechanics do of course), and this is all basic knowledge to a car owner too. If you don't know how to check air on tires and fill them, how to check your engine oil and what the gauges mean, why you shouldn't continue to drive if your temperature gauge is maxed out, etc., then you have no business driving.
Defending this appalling lack of basic education isn't doing anyone any favors, it's just encouraging the dumbing-down of society.
The US is still worrying a little about these things, but not much.
1) If they get a single cabal running them all, that probably won't be a problem any more.
2) more brutal methods could be used for containing Afghanistan, if it's really that important anyway. Once they have a single, evil empire set up, they won't have to worry much about public opinion or human rights.
Obviously, this line of reasoning isn't entirely serious, but I think the idea is that the main (nuclear) powers would join together into some kind of imperial alliance or union. Then, combined, their militaries could easily crush all the dissenters. So if the USA, Russia, and China all joined together into the new USSAC Empire, they'd be able to rule over everyone else, and there's not much the other nations would be able to do about it.