The Moon, Ceres, Titan, Callisto, all are easier to land and take-off from than Mars, and since you can land and take-off with much less fuel there's a lot more useful payload capacity to work with
They're also even farther away than Mars is (except the Moon obviously). This is a big problem with any human mission: who wants to sit in a little tin can for 2 years? We've already seen that zero-g is really really bad for human health in the long term. You can get around that by building a ship with artificial gravity (through rotation), but that requires building a big-ass ship; we can't even do that yet, we can barely make a little space station in LEO out of modules. Don't forget the problem of radiation shielding: having humans out beyond the Van Allen belts for that long is going to expose them to a lot of hard radiation.
We really should be sending a lot more humans to the Moon to try to build up infrastructure there before we even think about sending humans to places like Callisto. If we can mine resources and building materials on the Moon or from asteroids, and get good at building ships in zero-g shipyards, then we'll be positioned to send humans for much longer-duration missions. Remember the Discovery in 2001? That's the kind of ship you need for those missions, and you can't build that kind of ship on Earth.
There's a problem with this comparison. When explorers traveled to the New World, it wasn't that hard to live there (temperate climate, plenty of animals to hunt for food). And the economic reasons were pretty obvious: there were bountiful natural resources to be had, including gold, silver, all kinds of new plants (chocolate became a huge thing in Europe after it was brought back from Central America), etc. Gold of course was one of the biggest drivers, and they did indeed bring a lot of gold back; some of it still sits on the seafloor because their ships sunk. Later, colonization became a big draw, and for good reason: Europe was crowded, and there was plenty of open space in the New World (though you might have to shoot some Natives...). And as I said before, there was a temperate climate (except maybe the northeast), with lots of vegetation, and lots of areas excellent for farming (including the entire southeast), so it was a pretty good place to live.
What exactly is the economic case for traveling to Mars? There really isn't one that I've heard of. All the worlds in our solar system are uninhabitable by humans without extreme life-support measures (sealed habitats of some kind); they're not temperate, they usually don't have atmospheres, or if they do they're useless (Mars) or toxic (Venus), they certainly don't have any native life (maybe we'll find some microbes one day, but it's doubtful), they're too far from or too close to the Sun (Mars is cold; anything past Mars is frigid; Venus and Mercury are hellishly hot), so that leaves only one possible use that I can think of: mineral mining. But considering the distance and expense, is that really worth it?
If you want valuable minerals, it's far more likely that you'll have an easier time, and far more profit, by mining near-Earth asteroids (and later, farther away ones using robotics), and maybe the Moon. There's tons of asteroids whizzing by the Earth constantly, and by most accounts they have far purer ores than normally found on a planetary body. Sending a robotic mission to prospect and capture an asteroid can be done in far less time than sending a ship to Mars.
Now if your goal is colonization, first there's no profit in that at all. Also, all the things I mentioned above still apply there: these places are uninhabitable, unless you want to live underground or something. If you really want to spend money on having humans establish a permanent presence elsewhere, the Moon is a much more logical choice: it's very close by (astronomically speaking; it's only 3 days away instead of months or years). Shipping supplies back and forth, or evacuating someone for a medical emergency, would be far simpler and faster. However, there's the problem with the low (1/6 g) gravity which has unknown long-term health effects on humans, but Mars isn't much better there (1/3 g).
If off-world manufacturing (low-g or zero-g) turns out to be advantageous, the Moon is a better place for that: it's nearby, and its gravity is lower than Mars'. If you need zero-g manufacturing, there's Lagrangian points here in the Earth-Moon system; no need to travel far for that.
Honestly, until we find some kind of valuable mineral on Mars that we can't get in quantity here on Earth (without significant environmental problems), or on the Moon or from asteroids, the only good reason I can see for a serious human presence on Mars is tourism. But that's a heck of a long way to travel for a vacation; you'll need at least 18-24 months just for the travel time each way.
I'm all for more offworld exploration, but all this "Let's go straight to Mars!!" talk is really annoying me, because it's completely impractical and puts the cart before the horse. We haven't done much more than just whack some golf balls on the Moon; we're not ready for sending humans that far, especially when there's no really compelling reason to do so, and there's important work to be done closer to home to improve our offworld abilities (namely: exploring the Moon more, establishing bases there, mining asteroids). I still haven't seen any good reasons for this line of thought. It wasn't even very long ago that we discovered water ice on the Moon.
You're a fucking moron. Gas-powered cars catch on fire all the time; they just don't make the news because it's so common. What have you done that's so noteworthy, anyway?
The Martian atmosphere has 1/200 the pressure of Earth's: in other words, it's barely even there, and really not enough to be useful for much.
Mars is an interesting place geologically, but it's also a 6-18 month journey from Earth IIRC, which is far, far beyond anything we've ever attempted with manned missions. It's not a trip you can just go on, drive around in some rovers, take photos, and come back home; you need to establish a permanent settlement there of some kind. We've never done that anywhere offworld. The logical course of action is to build a base on the Moon first, so we can get some experience with building settlements on other worlds. The Moon is only 3 days away, and we've been there before with 50-year-old technology, so it's entirely feasible to do a lot more there now. There's still plenty of scientific work to do there, including looking for useful mineral deposits and other natural resources, to see if an economic case can be made for a more permanent human presence there.
Jumping straight to Mars (or worse, Titan) is putting the cart before the horse.
Only an Apple zealot would think it's acceptable to spend $800 for a phone that you have to take your gloves off to use. Meanwhile, the rest of us all have phones that work just fine with touchscreen-compatible gloves.
That's because you use your GPS sensor to get your altitude from the GPS satellites. The barometric sensor gives you faster updates, so you can see if you're going up and down stairs. The ambient barometric pressure is not going to change in the 10s it takes to walk up some stairs.
I don't know about other phones, but my Galaxy S5 has a fingerprint sensor, and it allows you to register multiple fingerprints with it. So you could let your wife register her fingerprint with your phone so she can unlock it herself while you're driving.
That won't help too much with the police thing though. But you could use a different finger, and swipe it a different way or something, so that you can feign ignorance when the police try to make you unlock it for them: "look, I'm swiping my fingerprint, and it doesn't work! I don't know what the problem is! (repeat for all 10 fingers)" I don't use mine for unlocking, but I ended up registering my fingerprint sideways, because my Otterbox case prevents me from swiping the sensor in the normal direction.
Not a problem. You don't have to restrict yourself to an old-fashioned cellphone if you don't want; there's lots of great Android phones which you can use with various winter gloves made for touchscreen use (not fingerless gloves either). I recommend the Samsung Galaxy S4 and S5 personally; they're really inexpensive these days. But there's many, many other phones that also work. Just not the latest iPhone, so avoid that piece of crap.
How was Apple able to patent that? That's a fundamental feature of EAP and has been standard in enterprise WiFi for probably longer than Apple has made phones.
I don't have a good explanation, just my own extremely biased view.
First, people are sheep, and RHAT is the 800lb gorilla of FOSS, especially in the US, so a lot of people just seem to go with them. RHAT is a US company, so they seem to be more popular in that country, along with their distro Fedora. Fedora features Gnome3, so people just use that.
Also, from what I've read, when you suggest that people switch to KDE, they have two main excuses here: 1) KDE4.0 was a disaster, so they'll never go back, or 2) KDE has too many choices, and they want something they don't have to configure. Gnome3 doesn't have any configuration, so this mindset works well with people like that. (Yes, you'd think those people would be Apple fans, but apparently that mentality is very prevalent in the FOSS world these days too.) If there's something they want to change, they just download a tweak, even though these break every time Gnome gets updated, but they don't seem to mind that. Also, there's 3) they think KDE is ugly for some reason.
No, none of it really makes any sense to me either. I wish I could give you a better explanation, but I suspect there's a lot of psychology involved.
Finally, the thing about C++ being significantly slower than C isn't really true these days any more. C still has a place for low-level coding where you need more determinism, but you can do this with C++ too by disabling some features (namely exceptions) and restricting yourself to a subset of the language, as is done with avionics (yes, safety-critical avionics code is written in C++ these days).
MATE is a fork of Gnome2, which uses Gtk2, so it makes sense that they'd want to move to a newer and still-maintained toolkit. However it may or may not happen; Gtk3 is notorious for bad maintenance, as it's developed and maintained by the Gnome3 devs, and basically they do whatever they want with it, without any regard whatsoever for other projects using it, backwards compatibility, or anything. LXDE ended up converting from Gtk to Qt for this and other reasons. These days, Qt is really the smart choice; it's well-maintained, it does a lot more than just graphics, it's well-designed and easy to develop with, and it's faster than Gtk too despite being C++-based.
I have heard of some laptops having BIOS locks on WiFi cards, so that only certain ones (from the laptop maker of course, for more $$$) will work. What kind of laptop was this; was it a consumer model or a business model? I try to always buy business-class equipment for this reason; they don't seem to do this stuff nearly as much.
Yeah, but still, how many people actually would buy a Linux PC like this, and then just leave on whatever version of Linux was pre-loaded, instead of loading their own? Maybe in some hypothetical future where regular non-techie people are buying Linux PCs and using Linux, and Linux has a significant marketshare, but in today's world I just don't see it.
Appreciating all of that and being a fan of Mir or the Unity desktop are two entirely different things. Just use a derivative like Xubuntu or Kubuntu instead.
Unless things have changed, WiFi on a decent laptop is usually implemented as a removable miniPCIe card. You can get any card you want on Ebay for $20 or less; I usually use some Intel card, I forget the model number now.
Of course, I'm the kind of person who buys a business-class (Latitude) laptop on Ebay that's a few years old, off-lease, and installs his own OS on it. I never have trouble getting the hardware to work on Dell Latitudes, except maybe video stuff if I'm doing stuff like using a docking station with multiple monitors. It'd be really nice if Nvidia would open-source part of their driver and merge it with Nouveau. They can keep the "secret sauce" 3D stuff that has IP issues closed, I just want the parts that deal with the kernel interfaces and mode-setting open so it can be integrated better with modern Linux distros. They could keep their closed fancy part as an optional loadable module for Nouveau.
Personally, I don't care. Why would I use the stock Ubuntu (or any distro really) image that comes pre-loaded on a computer anyway? If I were to buy one of these computers, the first thing I'd do with it is wipe out the HD and install my own preferred Linux distro image on it, just like I already do when I get a computer that has Windows on it. (Actually, with Windows I'll usually relegate it to a small partition just in case I need it to run some stupid Windows-only software. There'd be no need for that with Ubuntu; I'll just wipe it and install Mint.)
The shovelware is all crapware; on a Linux system, there's just no need for any of it.
They could pre-install it, but it'd be rather pointless because there's much better free stuff available in a standard Linux distro.
What companies like Dell could do is make a special Ubuntu version with the crapware running on WINE, and its Free counterparts not installed by default, so that they can get money from the shovelware vendors, and simultaneously not have to pay Microsoft any license fees for Windows. Then they could offer these laptops at a significant discount compared to the regular Win10 versions and still profit. But this idea is questionable: would the shovelware vendors actually pay to have their crapware pre-installed on an Ubuntu system, the way they do with a Windows one? If they don't, or they don't pay nearly as much, then the scheme doesn't work.
Basically the way the whole system works right now is that you pay a bunch (probably $100) for a Windows license on a laptop you buy, but then you get a bigger discount because the shovelware vendors pay Dell the put their crapware on, and this more than makes up for the Windows license fee. Dell passes some of this savings on to the customer (because the other laptop vendors are doing the same thing, and trying to keep prices as low as possible as it's a tight market). The shovelware vendors do this because there's a chance with every customer that they're going to "upgrade" to the full version of the software, and they'll get a big fee from that. So when they pre-load Ubuntu instead, you save the Windows fee, but then you don't get to take advantage of all the shovelware subsidies, so the price is higher (plus the sales volume for Ubuntu is much smaller, so Dell probably charges extra for that). If the shovelware vendors don't think they're going to get many Ubuntu/WINE customers signing up for their crapware, then they're not going to offer these subsidies to Dell for preloading.
It's telecoms in general, not just HSI. The cellular companies are horrible, and so are the ISPs (phone companies like Verizon with DSL or GPON/FiOS, and also cablecos like Comcrap with DOCSIS).
Our prices are ridiculous, our service levels are atrocious, and there's no good government regulation keeping these companies in line. ALL of the developed nations (except probably Canada) are much better, along with many of the not-so-developed ones. Romania, for instance, has far better telecom service than the US does.
Exactly. Of course, none of us actually know the answer to that without a time machine, but personally I think the answer is likely yes. I'd rather it be no, in fact I'd rather see the company falter badly, but from what I've seen of the market and Apple buyers, I just don't think that's going to happen, just like I would have loved to have seen Microsoft go out of business because of Windows 10, but instead they're doing just fine despite many customers being totally pissed about their shenanigans there. With the amount of lock-in these companies have, I think it's going to take a lot more than the current user-hostile moves to cause these companies to suffer any real loss in business.
Maybe. I'm not so sure. One big difference with those other two is that those two catered to businesses, exclusively in the case of DEC. Blackberry's whole raison d'etre was mobile enterprise email. It was secure, which was why the US government loved them so much. But they missed the boat with Android/iOS smartphones and their apps, and became mostly obsolete. They tried to get into the consumer space but didn't get far there. DEC made minicomputers for big businesses. Businesses just aren't like consumers; they don't care much about fashion, but they are very averse to going with trendy new vendors: "no one got fired for buying XYZ" (IBM, DEC, Microsoft, etc.). Once something proves itself in the enterprise space (even if it's crap) and gets entrenched, it's pretty hard to unseat, but when it does finally become obsolete, or the alternatives are just so much better/cheaper that businesses can't ignore them any more and keep buying from the overpriced vendors, then that company is dead. That's what happened to IBM and DEC, and more recently Blackberry. It might happen to Microsoft, but I doubt it'll be any time soon, though Linux has certainly made big inroads in the server space. Apple just isn't like this: they're a fashion accessory for consumers with too much money to spend and no sense of frugality or value. And they don't cater to businesses at all really; there's a few weird little companies that use MacBooks, but they're rare, and they don't make servers, enterprise-grade software, etc. Of course, you can say that consumers are fickle, but there's a bunch of fashion clothing companies that have been around for ages: Ralph Lauren, DKNY, Armani, etc., and don't seem to have any trouble continuing to command premium prices for their stuff. As long as Apple doesn't get too far behind in technology and features, and continues to put themselves out there as the "premium brand", I can see them going on like this for a long time.
That said, you can buy a USB-C adapter for headphones, they're about a dollar and are universal. The new Macbook Pros will likely have USB-C.
Well hopefully those new MBPs will include a software restriction preventing audio from being routed to an unapproved USBc adapter like that, and only allow it to be routed to Apple-approved wireless or wired headphones.
What's wrong with that picture? It looks ridiculous to me, but I'm not an Apple customer. Obviously, Apple customers love it; they happily buy this stuff, and then post pictures of it. If they weren't in favor of that mess of cables and gadgets, they wouldn't have bought it.
Well, that "smart move" has caused this not-so-smart customer to become a non-customer and go to buying used mac pro's off of EBay. Several of them. I'd have been perfectly happy to buy more from Apple, 15-20k worth
So you happily pump up the resale price of Apple equipment, and help Apple buyers justify their expenditures on brand-new equipment. Buying used doesn't take away from a company's profit margin in many cases, it helps them keep prices high, though it's obviously rather indirect and hard to quantify.
but I am not perfectly happy to scatter hard drives and whatnot insecurely and inconveniently all over my desk, because that turns my desk into crapland, and I won't tolerate that, because, you know, I'm "not smart."
But apparently you're happy to scatter hard drives around as long as you can get the Mac Pro at a used price off Ebay... (unless I'm missing something here)
And you and like-minded people refusing to buy new Apple Mac Pros has had exactly what effect on their profitability? According to their financials, likely nothing; they're doing great financially.
So smart, that I got rid of my iPhone, and my SO is ditching hers next time around, as she's become a bit jealous of my not-so-smart phone that has all these foolish features: sideloading, open development, radio, wireless charging, analog jack, memory expansion cards... yeah, we're so not-smart.
This discussion isn't about the customers being smart, it's about Apple being smart. Did you miss that? According to all available information, they *are* acting in a smart manner. If that causes them to lose a small number of customers, that's OK if the revenue gain from existing and new customers more than makes up for it. This is basic business.
If you like things like analog jacks and memory expansion slots, and don't like being told by your vendor that you don't need these things, then maybe you should look at another vendor. But Apple seems to have no trouble selling every iPhone it can make even when deleting those features, so it seems most of its customers either don't care about them, or stop caring about them after being told by Apple that they don't need them.
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That's interesting, but it's still not much of a reason to go there. You don't need rocket fuel on Mars, except for the return trip.
The Moon, Ceres, Titan, Callisto, all are easier to land and take-off from than Mars, and since you can land and take-off with much less fuel there's a lot more useful payload capacity to work with
They're also even farther away than Mars is (except the Moon obviously). This is a big problem with any human mission: who wants to sit in a little tin can for 2 years? We've already seen that zero-g is really really bad for human health in the long term. You can get around that by building a ship with artificial gravity (through rotation), but that requires building a big-ass ship; we can't even do that yet, we can barely make a little space station in LEO out of modules. Don't forget the problem of radiation shielding: having humans out beyond the Van Allen belts for that long is going to expose them to a lot of hard radiation.
We really should be sending a lot more humans to the Moon to try to build up infrastructure there before we even think about sending humans to places like Callisto. If we can mine resources and building materials on the Moon or from asteroids, and get good at building ships in zero-g shipyards, then we'll be positioned to send humans for much longer-duration missions. Remember the Discovery in 2001? That's the kind of ship you need for those missions, and you can't build that kind of ship on Earth.
There's a problem with this comparison. When explorers traveled to the New World, it wasn't that hard to live there (temperate climate, plenty of animals to hunt for food). And the economic reasons were pretty obvious: there were bountiful natural resources to be had, including gold, silver, all kinds of new plants (chocolate became a huge thing in Europe after it was brought back from Central America), etc. Gold of course was one of the biggest drivers, and they did indeed bring a lot of gold back; some of it still sits on the seafloor because their ships sunk. Later, colonization became a big draw, and for good reason: Europe was crowded, and there was plenty of open space in the New World (though you might have to shoot some Natives...). And as I said before, there was a temperate climate (except maybe the northeast), with lots of vegetation, and lots of areas excellent for farming (including the entire southeast), so it was a pretty good place to live.
What exactly is the economic case for traveling to Mars? There really isn't one that I've heard of. All the worlds in our solar system are uninhabitable by humans without extreme life-support measures (sealed habitats of some kind); they're not temperate, they usually don't have atmospheres, or if they do they're useless (Mars) or toxic (Venus), they certainly don't have any native life (maybe we'll find some microbes one day, but it's doubtful), they're too far from or too close to the Sun (Mars is cold; anything past Mars is frigid; Venus and Mercury are hellishly hot), so that leaves only one possible use that I can think of: mineral mining. But considering the distance and expense, is that really worth it?
If you want valuable minerals, it's far more likely that you'll have an easier time, and far more profit, by mining near-Earth asteroids (and later, farther away ones using robotics), and maybe the Moon. There's tons of asteroids whizzing by the Earth constantly, and by most accounts they have far purer ores than normally found on a planetary body. Sending a robotic mission to prospect and capture an asteroid can be done in far less time than sending a ship to Mars.
Now if your goal is colonization, first there's no profit in that at all. Also, all the things I mentioned above still apply there: these places are uninhabitable, unless you want to live underground or something. If you really want to spend money on having humans establish a permanent presence elsewhere, the Moon is a much more logical choice: it's very close by (astronomically speaking; it's only 3 days away instead of months or years). Shipping supplies back and forth, or evacuating someone for a medical emergency, would be far simpler and faster. However, there's the problem with the low (1/6 g) gravity which has unknown long-term health effects on humans, but Mars isn't much better there (1/3 g).
If off-world manufacturing (low-g or zero-g) turns out to be advantageous, the Moon is a better place for that: it's nearby, and its gravity is lower than Mars'. If you need zero-g manufacturing, there's Lagrangian points here in the Earth-Moon system; no need to travel far for that.
Honestly, until we find some kind of valuable mineral on Mars that we can't get in quantity here on Earth (without significant environmental problems), or on the Moon or from asteroids, the only good reason I can see for a serious human presence on Mars is tourism. But that's a heck of a long way to travel for a vacation; you'll need at least 18-24 months just for the travel time each way.
I'm all for more offworld exploration, but all this "Let's go straight to Mars!!" talk is really annoying me, because it's completely impractical and puts the cart before the horse. We haven't done much more than just whack some golf balls on the Moon; we're not ready for sending humans that far, especially when there's no really compelling reason to do so, and there's important work to be done closer to home to improve our offworld abilities (namely: exploring the Moon more, establishing bases there, mining asteroids). I still haven't seen any good reasons for this line of thought. It wasn't even very long ago that we discovered water ice on the Moon.
You're a fucking moron. Gas-powered cars catch on fire all the time; they just don't make the news because it's so common. What have you done that's so noteworthy, anyway?
The Martian atmosphere has 1/200 the pressure of Earth's: in other words, it's barely even there, and really not enough to be useful for much.
Mars is an interesting place geologically, but it's also a 6-18 month journey from Earth IIRC, which is far, far beyond anything we've ever attempted with manned missions. It's not a trip you can just go on, drive around in some rovers, take photos, and come back home; you need to establish a permanent settlement there of some kind. We've never done that anywhere offworld. The logical course of action is to build a base on the Moon first, so we can get some experience with building settlements on other worlds. The Moon is only 3 days away, and we've been there before with 50-year-old technology, so it's entirely feasible to do a lot more there now. There's still plenty of scientific work to do there, including looking for useful mineral deposits and other natural resources, to see if an economic case can be made for a more permanent human presence there.
Jumping straight to Mars (or worse, Titan) is putting the cart before the horse.
On any decent phone, you can use touchscreen-compatible gloves to use it.
It's only on the iPhone7 now that apparently you can't unlock the phone without taking your (touchscreen-compatible) glove off.
Only an Apple zealot would think it's acceptable to spend $800 for a phone that you have to take your gloves off to use. Meanwhile, the rest of us all have phones that work just fine with touchscreen-compatible gloves.
That's because you use your GPS sensor to get your altitude from the GPS satellites. The barometric sensor gives you faster updates, so you can see if you're going up and down stairs. The ambient barometric pressure is not going to change in the 10s it takes to walk up some stairs.
I don't know about other phones, but my Galaxy S5 has a fingerprint sensor, and it allows you to register multiple fingerprints with it. So you could let your wife register her fingerprint with your phone so she can unlock it herself while you're driving.
That won't help too much with the police thing though. But you could use a different finger, and swipe it a different way or something, so that you can feign ignorance when the police try to make you unlock it for them: "look, I'm swiping my fingerprint, and it doesn't work! I don't know what the problem is! (repeat for all 10 fingers)" I don't use mine for unlocking, but I ended up registering my fingerprint sideways, because my Otterbox case prevents me from swiping the sensor in the normal direction.
Not a problem. You don't have to restrict yourself to an old-fashioned cellphone if you don't want; there's lots of great Android phones which you can use with various winter gloves made for touchscreen use (not fingerless gloves either). I recommend the Samsung Galaxy S4 and S5 personally; they're really inexpensive these days. But there's many, many other phones that also work. Just not the latest iPhone, so avoid that piece of crap.
How was Apple able to patent that? That's a fundamental feature of EAP and has been standard in enterprise WiFi for probably longer than Apple has made phones.
I don't have a good explanation, just my own extremely biased view.
First, people are sheep, and RHAT is the 800lb gorilla of FOSS, especially in the US, so a lot of people just seem to go with them. RHAT is a US company, so they seem to be more popular in that country, along with their distro Fedora. Fedora features Gnome3, so people just use that.
Also, from what I've read, when you suggest that people switch to KDE, they have two main excuses here: 1) KDE4.0 was a disaster, so they'll never go back, or 2) KDE has too many choices, and they want something they don't have to configure. Gnome3 doesn't have any configuration, so this mindset works well with people like that. (Yes, you'd think those people would be Apple fans, but apparently that mentality is very prevalent in the FOSS world these days too.) If there's something they want to change, they just download a tweak, even though these break every time Gnome gets updated, but they don't seem to mind that. Also, there's 3) they think KDE is ugly for some reason.
No, none of it really makes any sense to me either. I wish I could give you a better explanation, but I suspect there's a lot of psychology involved.
Finally, the thing about C++ being significantly slower than C isn't really true these days any more. C still has a place for low-level coding where you need more determinism, but you can do this with C++ too by disabling some features (namely exceptions) and restricting yourself to a subset of the language, as is done with avionics (yes, safety-critical avionics code is written in C++ these days).
MATE and Xfce are moving to GTK3, however slowly.
MATE is a fork of Gnome2, which uses Gtk2, so it makes sense that they'd want to move to a newer and still-maintained toolkit. However it may or may not happen; Gtk3 is notorious for bad maintenance, as it's developed and maintained by the Gnome3 devs, and basically they do whatever they want with it, without any regard whatsoever for other projects using it, backwards compatibility, or anything. LXDE ended up converting from Gtk to Qt for this and other reasons. These days, Qt is really the smart choice; it's well-maintained, it does a lot more than just graphics, it's well-designed and easy to develop with, and it's faster than Gtk too despite being C++-based.
I have heard of some laptops having BIOS locks on WiFi cards, so that only certain ones (from the laptop maker of course, for more $$$) will work. What kind of laptop was this; was it a consumer model or a business model? I try to always buy business-class equipment for this reason; they don't seem to do this stuff nearly as much.
Yeah, but still, how many people actually would buy a Linux PC like this, and then just leave on whatever version of Linux was pre-loaded, instead of loading their own? Maybe in some hypothetical future where regular non-techie people are buying Linux PCs and using Linux, and Linux has a significant marketshare, but in today's world I just don't see it.
Almost no one is following with GNOME 3; instead, they abandoned it and created MATE and Cinnamon and Unity, or they switched to Xfce or LXDE or KDE.
Fedora/RH seems to do some useful infrastructural stuff, but DEs they're terrible at. Why they keep pushing GNOME is a mystery; it's a terrible DE.
Appreciating all of that and being a fan of Mir or the Unity desktop are two entirely different things. Just use a derivative like Xubuntu or Kubuntu instead.
Or one of the many flavors of Mint.
Unless things have changed, WiFi on a decent laptop is usually implemented as a removable miniPCIe card. You can get any card you want on Ebay for $20 or less; I usually use some Intel card, I forget the model number now.
Of course, I'm the kind of person who buys a business-class (Latitude) laptop on Ebay that's a few years old, off-lease, and installs his own OS on it. I never have trouble getting the hardware to work on Dell Latitudes, except maybe video stuff if I'm doing stuff like using a docking station with multiple monitors. It'd be really nice if Nvidia would open-source part of their driver and merge it with Nouveau. They can keep the "secret sauce" 3D stuff that has IP issues closed, I just want the parts that deal with the kernel interfaces and mode-setting open so it can be integrated better with modern Linux distros. They could keep their closed fancy part as an optional loadable module for Nouveau.
Personally, I don't care. Why would I use the stock Ubuntu (or any distro really) image that comes pre-loaded on a computer anyway? If I were to buy one of these computers, the first thing I'd do with it is wipe out the HD and install my own preferred Linux distro image on it, just like I already do when I get a computer that has Windows on it. (Actually, with Windows I'll usually relegate it to a small partition just in case I need it to run some stupid Windows-only software. There'd be no need for that with Ubuntu; I'll just wipe it and install Mint.)
The shovelware is all crapware; on a Linux system, there's just no need for any of it.
They could pre-install it, but it'd be rather pointless because there's much better free stuff available in a standard Linux distro.
What companies like Dell could do is make a special Ubuntu version with the crapware running on WINE, and its Free counterparts not installed by default, so that they can get money from the shovelware vendors, and simultaneously not have to pay Microsoft any license fees for Windows. Then they could offer these laptops at a significant discount compared to the regular Win10 versions and still profit. But this idea is questionable: would the shovelware vendors actually pay to have their crapware pre-installed on an Ubuntu system, the way they do with a Windows one? If they don't, or they don't pay nearly as much, then the scheme doesn't work.
Basically the way the whole system works right now is that you pay a bunch (probably $100) for a Windows license on a laptop you buy, but then you get a bigger discount because the shovelware vendors pay Dell the put their crapware on, and this more than makes up for the Windows license fee. Dell passes some of this savings on to the customer (because the other laptop vendors are doing the same thing, and trying to keep prices as low as possible as it's a tight market). The shovelware vendors do this because there's a chance with every customer that they're going to "upgrade" to the full version of the software, and they'll get a big fee from that. So when they pre-load Ubuntu instead, you save the Windows fee, but then you don't get to take advantage of all the shovelware subsidies, so the price is higher (plus the sales volume for Ubuntu is much smaller, so Dell probably charges extra for that). If the shovelware vendors don't think they're going to get many Ubuntu/WINE customers signing up for their crapware, then they're not going to offer these subsidies to Dell for preloading.
It's telecoms in general, not just HSI. The cellular companies are horrible, and so are the ISPs (phone companies like Verizon with DSL or GPON/FiOS, and also cablecos like Comcrap with DOCSIS).
Our prices are ridiculous, our service levels are atrocious, and there's no good government regulation keeping these companies in line. ALL of the developed nations (except probably Canada) are much better, along with many of the not-so-developed ones. Romania, for instance, has far better telecom service than the US does.
Exactly. Of course, none of us actually know the answer to that without a time machine, but personally I think the answer is likely yes. I'd rather it be no, in fact I'd rather see the company falter badly, but from what I've seen of the market and Apple buyers, I just don't think that's going to happen, just like I would have loved to have seen Microsoft go out of business because of Windows 10, but instead they're doing just fine despite many customers being totally pissed about their shenanigans there. With the amount of lock-in these companies have, I think it's going to take a lot more than the current user-hostile moves to cause these companies to suffer any real loss in business.
Maybe. I'm not so sure. One big difference with those other two is that those two catered to businesses, exclusively in the case of DEC. Blackberry's whole raison d'etre was mobile enterprise email. It was secure, which was why the US government loved them so much. But they missed the boat with Android/iOS smartphones and their apps, and became mostly obsolete. They tried to get into the consumer space but didn't get far there. DEC made minicomputers for big businesses. Businesses just aren't like consumers; they don't care much about fashion, but they are very averse to going with trendy new vendors: "no one got fired for buying XYZ" (IBM, DEC, Microsoft, etc.). Once something proves itself in the enterprise space (even if it's crap) and gets entrenched, it's pretty hard to unseat, but when it does finally become obsolete, or the alternatives are just so much better/cheaper that businesses can't ignore them any more and keep buying from the overpriced vendors, then that company is dead. That's what happened to IBM and DEC, and more recently Blackberry. It might happen to Microsoft, but I doubt it'll be any time soon, though Linux has certainly made big inroads in the server space. Apple just isn't like this: they're a fashion accessory for consumers with too much money to spend and no sense of frugality or value. And they don't cater to businesses at all really; there's a few weird little companies that use MacBooks, but they're rare, and they don't make servers, enterprise-grade software, etc. Of course, you can say that consumers are fickle, but there's a bunch of fashion clothing companies that have been around for ages: Ralph Lauren, DKNY, Armani, etc., and don't seem to have any trouble continuing to command premium prices for their stuff. As long as Apple doesn't get too far behind in technology and features, and continues to put themselves out there as the "premium brand", I can see them going on like this for a long time.
That said, you can buy a USB-C adapter for headphones, they're about a dollar and are universal. The new Macbook Pros will likely have USB-C.
Well hopefully those new MBPs will include a software restriction preventing audio from being routed to an unapproved USBc adapter like that, and only allow it to be routed to Apple-approved wireless or wired headphones.
Is it, now?
What's wrong with that picture? It looks ridiculous to me, but I'm not an Apple customer. Obviously, Apple customers love it; they happily buy this stuff, and then post pictures of it. If they weren't in favor of that mess of cables and gadgets, they wouldn't have bought it.
Well, that "smart move" has caused this not-so-smart customer to become a non-customer and go to buying used mac pro's off of EBay. Several of them. I'd have been perfectly happy to buy more from Apple, 15-20k worth
So you happily pump up the resale price of Apple equipment, and help Apple buyers justify their expenditures on brand-new equipment. Buying used doesn't take away from a company's profit margin in many cases, it helps them keep prices high, though it's obviously rather indirect and hard to quantify.
but I am not perfectly happy to scatter hard drives and whatnot insecurely and inconveniently all over my desk, because that turns my desk into crapland, and I won't tolerate that, because, you know, I'm "not smart."
But apparently you're happy to scatter hard drives around as long as you can get the Mac Pro at a used price off Ebay... (unless I'm missing something here)
And you and like-minded people refusing to buy new Apple Mac Pros has had exactly what effect on their profitability? According to their financials, likely nothing; they're doing great financially.
So smart, that I got rid of my iPhone, and my SO is ditching hers next time around, as she's become a bit jealous of my not-so-smart phone that has all these foolish features: sideloading, open development, radio, wireless charging, analog jack, memory expansion cards... yeah, we're so not-smart.
This discussion isn't about the customers being smart, it's about Apple being smart. Did you miss that? According to all available information, they *are* acting in a smart manner. If that causes them to lose a small number of customers, that's OK if the revenue gain from existing and new customers more than makes up for it. This is basic business.
If you like things like analog jacks and memory expansion slots, and don't like being told by your vendor that you don't need these things, then maybe you should look at another vendor. But Apple seems to have no trouble selling every iPhone it can make even when deleting those features, so it seems most of its customers either don't care about them, or stop caring about them after being told by Apple that they don't need them.