I live in Phoenix (actually Tempe, right next door). I've lived here since 2000, so I think I know something about it.
This town is a dump. The idea that hordes of techies and young people are going to want to move here to suffer through 115-degree weather is just idiotic. There is no culture here, very few decent places to eat, and the place is full of meth-heads and illegals. It's been rated by several places as the worst city in America to drive in, mainly because it's so chaotic and because there's no consistent driving style (the frequent road-rage shootings don't help). The local economy is shit, and violent home invasions are common. There is some tech industry, both in the north of the metro area and the southeast part, with Intel and Microchip having substation presences, along with some shitty defense contractors like General Dynamics where engineers go to die. The weather is horrible; it wasn't that bad 12 years ago, but it's gotten hotter, and stays hotter for longer now. You can't bicycle here (one of my favorite outdoor activities) because of the heat most of the year, and also because of the dangerous speeding drivers and lack of safe bike paths. And there's really nothing to do here except for walking around the mall. Even worse, they're trying to phase out the indoor air-conditioned malls in favor of these stupid outdoor malls; who the hell wants to walk around in 115 degree heat to shop? They're nice for about 3 months in the winter, and that's it. They used to have Mill Avenue in Tempe that was kinda fun to walk along, which used to have a bunch of quirky little independent shops, but the Tempe government drove all those out of business to make room for a bunch of mall stores and high-rises, which of course went south when the economy crashed, so most of the place is boarded up now.
This place sucks, and I can't wait to move out in a couple of months. If a bunch of startups do move here, it's going to be short-lived because cool, hip, young employees aren't going to stick around this cesspool for long.
Hey, I didn't create the situation, I'm just reporting it as I see it. Personally, I think it's pretty pathetic for anyone to complain about PDAs; if you (generic, 3rd person) really think people are kissing each other to show off and make you feel bad, then you obviously have some kind of "it's all about me" complex. Unfortunately, from what I hear about some workplaces with lots of women, namely legal offices, there are a lot of people (all women) there like that. Among all the engineers I've worked with over the years, I don't think most of them would give a rat's ass about seeing a PDA, except maybe the Muslim ones.
Interesting, I didn't think there'd be a definition that related specifically to international affairs, as the term can be used for a lot of things, including auto suspensions.
You're being pedantic. I never said they were sovereign; obviously they are not. But the ARE semi-independent. If you disagree, then you must be using a different definition of "semi-independent" than I am. To me, having a country where you're allowed to walk around with a gun on you hip in one place, but would cause a public panic and go to jail in a neighboring district, meets the definition of "semi-independent". I challenge you to find an "official" definition of "semi-independent".
Sorry, but this is pretty silly. The US does still consist of semi-independent states. No, they're not as independent as they were under the Articles of Confederation, or as independent as they were pre-Civil War. They're not as independent as the nations that comprise the EU either, from what I can tell. However, they are a lot more independent than, say, the states that form modern Germany.
There's a lot of legal things that differ drastically between different US states. Gun laws, for instance, are very different; in Arizona you can have just about anything, and you can carry it around (concealed or not) in public all you want, while next door in California there's tons of restrictions on things like magazine size, and in Hawaii it's very hard to own one and nearly impossible to carry it outside your house. Marriage laws are also extremely different; some states will recognize gay marriage, others refuse to. Some states have "community property" laws, so that spouses have a claim to half of anything they gained during their marriage, whereas other states don't. Some states are "right to work" states where either employer or employee can terminate employment at any time, with no notice, for any cause at all (except discrimination against protected classes and some other exceptions), whereas in other states it's not so easy to fire an employee.
I heard Lars went in by himself and messed with the mixing. Also, the bass is very hard to hear on all first four of their albums, not just AJFA; I think it's because Lars wanted his drums to be heard over everything.
Very few people have both the ear and the hardware to tell the difference between 128kbs MP3 and CD. It's even worse these days with everyone using earbuds.
It's too bad they didn't release the entire AJFA album on Guitar Hero; last I heard, it was only two tracks, so the rest still sounds like crap. Stupid Lars.
They should release the entire first four Metallica albums on GH so the fans can remaster it with the bass audible.
MP3s, at a sufficiently high bitrate, are indistiguishable from CDs. They were doing this loudness war crap well before iTunes came along; it started back in the 90s. The real reason is they wanted songs to sound louder on the radio. It's just like how TV commercials are louder, so that people will pay more attention to them; songs on the radio are really advertisements for those songs, so they got the bright idea to compress the music to boost the apparent loudness to make their song sound louder than the other songs. Of course, they all started doing it pretty soon.
The same thing happened with a couple of Metallica songs from "...And Justice For All"; stupid Lars messed up the original mix so that Jason Newsted's bass couldn't be heard, but the Guitar Hero version had the bass much higher in the mix, so some fans remixed the songs and released them as "...And Justice for Jason".
I really don't think I know what you're getting at as far as the number of steps involved.
If you're complaining about the multi-part K-menu, this is easily fixed: just revert to the KDE3-style menu. It's easy: all you have to do is right-click on the K-menu icon, select "Switch to Classic Menu Style", and you now have your KDE3 menu back.
As for as a "noisy background", no one's forcing you to put any "plasmoids" on your desktop. You can remove them all easily, and just make it blank. And it's pretty easy to disable all animations too.
I don't think I'd call it the "American model", because in my ~15 years and 6 companies, I've never seen this used before. It might be uniquely American in that some particular American companies employ it, but that doesn't make it typical over here, just like the Amish religion is uniquely American, but is just a very small sect and not even close to representing Americans at large.
Maybe I'm just lucky though. The closest I've seen is when I worked at Intel, where they "rank and rate" all employees every year, however the key difference here was that the ranking was done over the entire department, not individual teams, so if your whole team really was kick-ass, then all the team members could be ranked highly and get big raises (while some other lackluster team might all rank in the bottom 30% and get "IR" (improvement required) ratings). The likelihood of any given team all solid performers is fairly high, but when comparing a couple hundred or more people in a whole department, surely there's going to be some poor performers in there somewhere, so this approach makes more sense, plus it probably keeps team members from turning on each other, because if they help each other out, the whole team will do really well in the rankings, and some other team will get the shaft.
I have heard of some companies having a de facto process where "deadwood" team members are basically shuffled off to other teams, with other deadwood members, to basically isolate them; then, this makes it much easier to get rid of them by laying off the entire team at once by claiming their team isn't needed any more in a re-org, so you don't have to individually terminate anyone.
You make your department look good by making others look bad. The end game isn't pretty.
That sounds a lot like companies where teams have to be ranked from low to high, with the bottom ~30% given bad reviews and no raises; this ends up making employees refuse to help each other, and instead try to sabotage each other.
The answer to most of your questions is that all those lines are actually executable on the command line; they're not compiled like C. So they have to be just like regular bash commands (which are use bourne shell syntax, which goes very far back). Don't like it? Use a different script language. Even perl would work here, but bash is generally faster for small jobs.
Yep, wading through 100 pages of configuration options can be a bit of a pain, but it's only something you do once in most cases. Once you've set it the way you like, you never go back to all those configuration options; you just leave it that way and you're happy.
First, the directory hierarchy would need to be redone so that you can install and run multiple versions of different libraries at the same time. The Nix package manager tries to do this, though I'm not sure how well it succeeds.
This has been the case for ages, really since the very beginning. Go look at/usr/lib; all the libraries are versioned, and there's symlinks pointing to the latest version, but if a package needs an older version, it can specifically link to it if it's present.
Second, current Linux package managers have no ties to the dependency management systems that have been created around different languages.
apt-get does handle dependencies, and has for ages. zypper and others do the same.
How exactly is KDE4 unusable? Yes, the early versions really were unusable, but the recent versions (anything after 4.6) have been pretty decent. 4.8 is looking pretty good in fact.
Gnome is so awful I sometimes wonder whether Microsoft isn't funding it.
It's a fun conspiracy theory, but I don't think it's true, because Red Hat of all companies really is funding it and employing a bunch of their primary developers. So this really seems to be a good case for Napoleon's old adage, "never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity".
What Linux needs is a rewrite of dpkg, just like Torvalds did when he wrote git and replaced subversion.
Sounds like what we need is to convince Torvalds to rewrite dpkg. After all, he made the kernel, and now it's taken over everything; then he made git, and that's one of the most popular revision control systems now used (probably the most popular in OSS), so now he just needs to go for a hat trick and make a successor to dpkg/rpm.
That may be, but are you sure the Javascript is interpreted (or fed to a JIT compiler) when that happens, or is the whole thing compiled beforehand? Theoretically, there's nothing prevent Javascript, in a use case like this, from being compiled beforehand, and JS simply used because it's convenient and well-suited to UI programming. It isn't done with web sites because every web site can have different Javascript, so obviously that can't be compiled beforehand (you only get to download it when you visit that site); but with a UI, that's not going to change from the time you install the system on your computer, so it would make perfect sense for the distro to compile all that stuff when they do the build.
Oh please. "Crappy" is an opinion, nothing more; everyone says the exact same thing about every other language, whether it's C++, C#, Java, C, Python, Perl, VB, PHP, etc. They don't like C++ because it's too complex; they don't like Java because it's too verbose and doesn't have pointers, they don't like C because it's too low-level, they don't like Python because it doesn't have braces and uses whitespace, they don't like C-syntax languages because they do have braces and don't use whitespace, they don't like Perl because there's too many ways of doing the same thing, they don't like other languages because there aren't a million ways to do the same thing, etc. Javascript is an interesting language because it has some aspects of functional programming, which you don't see in most other mainstream languages. The main problem with it, for applications, is probably that it's limited in capabilities (namely I/O) because those aren't needed for something running inside a web browser, but those could be added on.
Of course the performance isn't great; what do you expect from something you download in source form from a website and then compile on the spot before running? At least it isn't all interpreted like it used to be 10 years ago.
That's interesting, that's not what I've seen with my peers. However, I will say that of the people in my age group that do have cable (which seems to be most), there are I believe two common threads: kids, and sports. If they have kids, and/or are sports addicts, then they feel they must have cable, either because live sports are oh-so important and you can't get that on the internet (that I'm aware of), or because their little kids will pitch a fit if they don't have Disney Channel and all their little friends have it.
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I live in Phoenix (actually Tempe, right next door). I've lived here since 2000, so I think I know something about it.
This town is a dump. The idea that hordes of techies and young people are going to want to move here to suffer through 115-degree weather is just idiotic. There is no culture here, very few decent places to eat, and the place is full of meth-heads and illegals. It's been rated by several places as the worst city in America to drive in, mainly because it's so chaotic and because there's no consistent driving style (the frequent road-rage shootings don't help). The local economy is shit, and violent home invasions are common. There is some tech industry, both in the north of the metro area and the southeast part, with Intel and Microchip having substation presences, along with some shitty defense contractors like General Dynamics where engineers go to die. The weather is horrible; it wasn't that bad 12 years ago, but it's gotten hotter, and stays hotter for longer now. You can't bicycle here (one of my favorite outdoor activities) because of the heat most of the year, and also because of the dangerous speeding drivers and lack of safe bike paths. And there's really nothing to do here except for walking around the mall. Even worse, they're trying to phase out the indoor air-conditioned malls in favor of these stupid outdoor malls; who the hell wants to walk around in 115 degree heat to shop? They're nice for about 3 months in the winter, and that's it. They used to have Mill Avenue in Tempe that was kinda fun to walk along, which used to have a bunch of quirky little independent shops, but the Tempe government drove all those out of business to make room for a bunch of mall stores and high-rises, which of course went south when the economy crashed, so most of the place is boarded up now.
This place sucks, and I can't wait to move out in a couple of months. If a bunch of startups do move here, it's going to be short-lived because cool, hip, young employees aren't going to stick around this cesspool for long.
Hey, I didn't create the situation, I'm just reporting it as I see it. Personally, I think it's pretty pathetic for anyone to complain about PDAs; if you (generic, 3rd person) really think people are kissing each other to show off and make you feel bad, then you obviously have some kind of "it's all about me" complex. Unfortunately, from what I hear about some workplaces with lots of women, namely legal offices, there are a lot of people (all women) there like that. Among all the engineers I've worked with over the years, I don't think most of them would give a rat's ass about seeing a PDA, except maybe the Muslim ones.
Interesting, I didn't think there'd be a definition that related specifically to international affairs, as the term can be used for a lot of things, including auto suspensions.
You're being pedantic. I never said they were sovereign; obviously they are not. But the ARE semi-independent. If you disagree, then you must be using a different definition of "semi-independent" than I am. To me, having a country where you're allowed to walk around with a gun on you hip in one place, but would cause a public panic and go to jail in a neighboring district, meets the definition of "semi-independent". I challenge you to find an "official" definition of "semi-independent".
Sorry, but this is pretty silly. The US does still consist of semi-independent states. No, they're not as independent as they were under the Articles of Confederation, or as independent as they were pre-Civil War. They're not as independent as the nations that comprise the EU either, from what I can tell. However, they are a lot more independent than, say, the states that form modern Germany.
There's a lot of legal things that differ drastically between different US states. Gun laws, for instance, are very different; in Arizona you can have just about anything, and you can carry it around (concealed or not) in public all you want, while next door in California there's tons of restrictions on things like magazine size, and in Hawaii it's very hard to own one and nearly impossible to carry it outside your house. Marriage laws are also extremely different; some states will recognize gay marriage, others refuse to. Some states have "community property" laws, so that spouses have a claim to half of anything they gained during their marriage, whereas other states don't. Some states are "right to work" states where either employer or employee can terminate employment at any time, with no notice, for any cause at all (except discrimination against protected classes and some other exceptions), whereas in other states it's not so easy to fire an employee.
I heard Lars went in by himself and messed with the mixing. Also, the bass is very hard to hear on all first four of their albums, not just AJFA; I think it's because Lars wanted his drums to be heard over everything.
Very few people have both the ear and the hardware to tell the difference between 128kbs MP3 and CD. It's even worse these days with everyone using earbuds.
It's too bad they didn't release the entire AJFA album on Guitar Hero; last I heard, it was only two tracks, so the rest still sounds like crap. Stupid Lars.
They should release the entire first four Metallica albums on GH so the fans can remaster it with the bass audible.
MP3s, at a sufficiently high bitrate, are indistiguishable from CDs. They were doing this loudness war crap well before iTunes came along; it started back in the 90s. The real reason is they wanted songs to sound louder on the radio. It's just like how TV commercials are louder, so that people will pay more attention to them; songs on the radio are really advertisements for those songs, so they got the bright idea to compress the music to boost the apparent loudness to make their song sound louder than the other songs. Of course, they all started doing it pretty soon.
The same thing happened with a couple of Metallica songs from "...And Justice For All"; stupid Lars messed up the original mix so that Jason Newsted's bass couldn't be heard, but the Guitar Hero version had the bass much higher in the mix, so some fans remixed the songs and released them as "...And Justice for Jason".
I really don't think I know what you're getting at as far as the number of steps involved.
If you're complaining about the multi-part K-menu, this is easily fixed: just revert to the KDE3-style menu. It's easy: all you have to do is right-click on the K-menu icon, select "Switch to Classic Menu Style", and you now have your KDE3 menu back.
As for as a "noisy background", no one's forcing you to put any "plasmoids" on your desktop. You can remove them all easily, and just make it blank. And it's pretty easy to disable all animations too.
I don't think I'd call it the "American model", because in my ~15 years and 6 companies, I've never seen this used before. It might be uniquely American in that some particular American companies employ it, but that doesn't make it typical over here, just like the Amish religion is uniquely American, but is just a very small sect and not even close to representing Americans at large.
Maybe I'm just lucky though. The closest I've seen is when I worked at Intel, where they "rank and rate" all employees every year, however the key difference here was that the ranking was done over the entire department, not individual teams, so if your whole team really was kick-ass, then all the team members could be ranked highly and get big raises (while some other lackluster team might all rank in the bottom 30% and get "IR" (improvement required) ratings). The likelihood of any given team all solid performers is fairly high, but when comparing a couple hundred or more people in a whole department, surely there's going to be some poor performers in there somewhere, so this approach makes more sense, plus it probably keeps team members from turning on each other, because if they help each other out, the whole team will do really well in the rankings, and some other team will get the shaft.
I have heard of some companies having a de facto process where "deadwood" team members are basically shuffled off to other teams, with other deadwood members, to basically isolate them; then, this makes it much easier to get rid of them by laying off the entire team at once by claiming their team isn't needed any more in a re-org, so you don't have to individually terminate anyone.
You make your department look good by making others look bad. The end game isn't pretty.
That sounds a lot like companies where teams have to be ranked from low to high, with the bottom ~30% given bad reviews and no raises; this ends up making employees refuse to help each other, and instead try to sabotage each other.
The answer to most of your questions is that all those lines are actually executable on the command line; they're not compiled like C. So they have to be just like regular bash commands (which are use bourne shell syntax, which goes very far back). Don't like it? Use a different script language. Even perl would work here, but bash is generally faster for small jobs.
Sorry, I don't have much choice in who my cow-orkers are.
Yep, wading through 100 pages of configuration options can be a bit of a pain, but it's only something you do once in most cases. Once you've set it the way you like, you never go back to all those configuration options; you just leave it that way and you're happy.
First, the directory hierarchy would need to be redone so that you can install and run multiple versions of different libraries at the same time. The Nix package manager tries to do this, though I'm not sure how well it succeeds.
This has been the case for ages, really since the very beginning. Go look at /usr/lib; all the libraries are versioned, and there's symlinks pointing to the latest version, but if a package needs an older version, it can specifically link to it if it's present.
Second, current Linux package managers have no ties to the dependency management systems that have been created around different languages.
apt-get does handle dependencies, and has for ages. zypper and others do the same.
How exactly is KDE4 unusable? Yes, the early versions really were unusable, but the recent versions (anything after 4.6) have been pretty decent. 4.8 is looking pretty good in fact.
Gnome is so awful I sometimes wonder whether Microsoft isn't funding it.
It's a fun conspiracy theory, but I don't think it's true, because Red Hat of all companies really is funding it and employing a bunch of their primary developers. So this really seems to be a good case for Napoleon's old adage, "never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity".
What Linux needs is a rewrite of dpkg, just like Torvalds did when he wrote git and replaced subversion.
Sounds like what we need is to convince Torvalds to rewrite dpkg. After all, he made the kernel, and now it's taken over everything; then he made git, and that's one of the most popular revision control systems now used (probably the most popular in OSS), so now he just needs to go for a hat trick and make a successor to dpkg/rpm.
That may be, but are you sure the Javascript is interpreted (or fed to a JIT compiler) when that happens, or is the whole thing compiled beforehand? Theoretically, there's nothing prevent Javascript, in a use case like this, from being compiled beforehand, and JS simply used because it's convenient and well-suited to UI programming. It isn't done with web sites because every web site can have different Javascript, so obviously that can't be compiled beforehand (you only get to download it when you visit that site); but with a UI, that's not going to change from the time you install the system on your computer, so it would make perfect sense for the distro to compile all that stuff when they do the build.
I never said older people can't be up-to-date with technology, only that it wasn't as common as with younger people.
Lonely men complaining aren't going to garner much sympathy. Lonely women pitching a fit can, but somehow I don't see that happening as much.
Oh please. "Crappy" is an opinion, nothing more; everyone says the exact same thing about every other language, whether it's C++, C#, Java, C, Python, Perl, VB, PHP, etc. They don't like C++ because it's too complex; they don't like Java because it's too verbose and doesn't have pointers, they don't like C because it's too low-level, they don't like Python because it doesn't have braces and uses whitespace, they don't like C-syntax languages because they do have braces and don't use whitespace, they don't like Perl because there's too many ways of doing the same thing, they don't like other languages because there aren't a million ways to do the same thing, etc. Javascript is an interesting language because it has some aspects of functional programming, which you don't see in most other mainstream languages. The main problem with it, for applications, is probably that it's limited in capabilities (namely I/O) because those aren't needed for something running inside a web browser, but those could be added on.
Of course the performance isn't great; what do you expect from something you download in source form from a website and then compile on the spot before running? At least it isn't all interpreted like it used to be 10 years ago.
That's interesting, that's not what I've seen with my peers. However, I will say that of the people in my age group that do have cable (which seems to be most), there are I believe two common threads: kids, and sports. If they have kids, and/or are sports addicts, then they feel they must have cable, either because live sports are oh-so important and you can't get that on the internet (that I'm aware of), or because their little kids will pitch a fit if they don't have Disney Channel and all their little friends have it.