I agree, and I have always hated that aspect of social media. No FB for me. I was on Instagram for a couple of years, but I started to feel like I couldn't keep up. One day I noticed I was like a chicken, always having to peck peck peck at my phone. So I just stopped. Haven't been on IG for a few months now, and quite honestly I know I am not missing anything important.
If you don't read the news, you are uninformed. If you read the news, you are misinformed.
There is definitely a market for this though. I almost bought a Pi3 for this purpose, but then saw that you can compile retropie on Linux, so I did so on my machine. Now I have it up and running, and it's mostly straight-forward... lots of config files if you need to tweak something. But when something doesn't go right, it's not so easy to troubleshoot. e.g. Vector MAME games weren't playing. Got that figured by using a different emulator, but now on Star Wars I can't get it to insert coins. Looks like others had the problem but none of those solutions worked for me. The whole mix of Pie/Retroarch/Emulationstation took a little while to understand... and it's still not crystal clear when and where to change what if needed.
It would be kind of nice to just be able to buy something for a reasonable price off the shelf, especially if you have no clue about Linux.
I have a BLU Life One X, and it is pretty thin. When I first got it, someone at work said "can you shave with that thing?" I have long wondered why makers don't add a few more mm and make all that extra space battery. More battery life is probably the ONE feature that everyone can agree on. I mean, they had to invent cases that acted as supplemental batteries for crying out loud.
So.... if YOU are offended by something, the response to whatever offends you is "love it or leave it"? But if someone else is offended by something, you think they are being overly sensitive and they should "love it or leave it"? You are aware of what hypocritical means, yes?
There is no law that states that you must stand up for the anthem. Don't like freedom of expression? It's a founding belief of our country, love it or leave it. That's the thing about that stupid statement, it applies to you too. What is so funny about those people who talk about crybaby, snowflakes who got participation trophies (and other asinine phrases) - they are the people who bitch and moan the most. What do you mean I can't have a fully automatic rifle, that tramples on my 2nd amendment rights!!! Wahhhh Wahhhh. It's illegal. Love it or leave it. The government raised my taxes again!!! Vote next time. Love it or leave it. Marriage is between a man and a woman, the bible says so!!! It's the law.. love it or leave it.
Just say "love it or leave it" to yourself every single time you disagree with anything, and you'll start to realize how stupid it sounds.
Yes, you pretty much summed it up.... the way money moved around internally based on projects/business need/unknown forces was staggering. It was a machine, and I don't really know who was driving it.
I am at a different company now, and my team is all non-visa employees. I am hiring and using the company recruiter, who basically posts the jobs, fields resumes, and seeks out local people on linkedin. We actually don't want to have to deal with hiring people on visas, but that seems to be the majority of people who apply.
Not exactly. 1. it wasn't my decision, I was working within the system of the machine 2. we had some of these flexible contract workers there for many many years. That is the thing.. their jobs were actually more secure than some employees, because they worked for the consulting agencies. And the agreements were that we couldn't hire them as employees. (that's how those agencies survive)
For the last 4 years I have been eating primal/paleo. I lost 15 pounds in the first month, and it has stayed off. I went from 175 to 160. It was not hard. It was not grueling. I did not kill myself with workouts. It is basic body chemistry - to massively simplify it, by regulating your hormones - mainly insulin - you stabilize your body's need to store fat. I can and often do go 24 hours without eating with no ill effects at all. If your body knows how to burn fat (instead of blood sugar) when you need it, this is a trivial and simple thing. It doesn't take will power - it takes knowing what to eat so that your body learns how to regulate these hormones. The cravings for those things disappear because you break the chemical addiction that your body has to them. That is not a metaphor, that addiction is real.
Watch the talk by Dr. Peter Attia on Vimeo about our "dietary guidelines". It's a good start. Then read the books "The Primal Blueprint" and "Why We Get Fat: And What To Do About It"... throw in "Grain Brain" while you're at it.
I will not go into a diatribe, but I was never really 'overweight'. By essentially cutting out grains, many other carbs, and inflammatory foods my life has changed for the better. I will be turning 47 soon, and feel fantastic.
From my experience, you have to put someone on a performance improvement plan before they can be fired. You have to have a paper trail showing what steps were taken to try to improve performance. If they can't improve after X amount of time, then you have the green light to fire them.
All of this is because of legal reasons, so that you have ammunition if they decide to sue the company. As with most things that seems stupid, lawyers (or the fear of them) are usually to blame.
I worked for about 9 years in one of the big banks, managing software testing teams. We uses infosys and TCS quite a lot, about 75% of my teams were from there - either offshore (India), nearshore (Mexico), or onshore (US).
One of the reasons we used them was because they were flexible. Our teams were dependent on what projects got funded and got put on our roadmap. So we could have a project that needed to be staffed up in a month, test for 3 or 4 months, then either dissipate or roll onto another project. They usually had good testers 'on the bench' to work on projects like that.
Over the course of my time there, I had anywhere from 18 to 50 people on my team. The flexibility was very necessary. It was much harder to make the case to hire full-time people because of the nature of how we handled projects. If we needed someone to be onshore, they got us someone onshore even if they had to move them here. Even though they took care of all of that overhead, a lot of my time was spent doing resource management.
Fast forward to today, and I have gotten out of the large corporate world. I have a small team of five and am hiring two more employees. Of the 17 resumes I have reviewed over the last few months, only a couple were not on some kind of work visa. Only 2 were men. I can't really explain it, I just know what resumes I have seen and information from the recruiter. Would I hire anyone not on a visa program? Absolutely! If they would apply and be qualified, I would love to hire them. But my perception is based on the reality of what I am seeing, and that is that the visa program is fine or actually needs more support. (but I also understand this is my situation and not everyone's)
I'm an old KDE user, but switched over to XFCE years ago. I've tried Cinnamon and Mate, but none of them work for me like XFCE, particularly on Mint. Usability, configurability, and no-nonsense are what I like and what I find to be the most productive. I really don't mind that there are these experiments with DEs, maybe some of them will stick and some won't. As long as I can make it simple and effective, there's enough room for more than one.
I can tell you it is great. Here is my list of whys (I know some may be covered by other apps):
- I have several friends 2000 miles away. We have had a group chat open for almost 2 years now. We share pics, videos, and life updates. I am not on FB, and this is just more personal. We meet up once or twice a year, and it makes it easy to coordinate things - my wife and I have a group chat with our daughter... no need to remember to send multiple messages - WA can handle bigger photos / videos / documents. I once shared a 30MB pdf with a friend on it. My SMS app chokes out on anything over 3MB or so. - You can leave voice messages, which is kind of fun - It works! I don't know how many times I have missed texts, either incoming or outgoing. No idea if it is my phone, my carrier, being on wifi, planet alignment, or what. But WA is rock solid reliable - nice and quick search feature from within a chat - customized alerts per chat - it does have a pretty cool set of emojis
It has had its share of bugs, and i don't know WHY it can't show in the icon that there are new messages, and it is owned by FB (which really bugs me), but overall I don't see anything that compares to it out there.
4) after it has all been resolved, and things are back to normal, those people who were on vacation return to work and start it all over again by doing a 'reply all' asking to be removed from the list.
However, I have used WhatsApp for a few years now. As I understand it, it is used a lot in other countries too. I have used Instagram for a couple of years now as well. Now that FB owns them, I guess they know a lot more about me than I want. While I don't use my real name on either... i am sure the dots can be connected.
If you don't use either of those, it is probably a matter of time before they acquire something that you do use.
Unless support wasn't part of the deal that was signed, then it clearly is Microsoft's fault. And the NFL's. They are the ones who agreed to the deal. And these three words: User Acceptance Testing
I have a feeling this was technical people saying "it should work" and sales people saying "it's flawless" and the NFL saying "this will be great" and people getting bonuses and high-fiving each other.... and NOBODY actually trying it out in a real setting ahead of time.
* its software is free as in beer (this is what made me try out linux)
For almost all practical purposes so is Windows and you can get all the good Linux software on Windows and Mac too.
NO, it is not. Mac OS is not either. Free as in beer means free as in beer - no cost. You cannot LEGALLY get Windows for free. Which leads to the OTHER free, which is free as in freedom - which clearly the other two are not either. You can get all the good Linux software on Windows and Mac? Hold that thought.
* its software is free as in software (this is what made me stay on linux for so long)
Like it or not, users in the vast majority don't care about that and it won't draw them to Linux. As far as the software is concerned that same free software like Blender, Gimp and LibreOffice are available on Windows and Mac too. No exclusivity to Linux.
Again... hold that thought.
* it has working package management. updating software is no nightmare. Windows has to force its customers to update it, because its a nightmare.
yep! But remember Windows has Chocolatey and Mac has Homebrew, this covers many of the free software options and for proprietary software you most often need to go through their updaters whether you're on Windows, Mac or Linux anyway.
It's great that it does what you need but you have to remember that above anything else a computer is a tool to run the programs a user needs and while Windows and Mac run pretty much anything Linux does the same cannot be said the other way around and most standard applications in industry support Windows & Mac but not Linux. It might be more secure and/or more stable and free of charge and open source but none of those things matter if it doesn't run the applications I need.
So it's a chicken and egg problem, if you want people to use it they need their applications to support it and to do that you need users. So what you need to offer is some disruptive innovation, some great feature that draws people to Linux, something so good that they would be willing to temporarily forgo the lack of applications and work through the kludge of dual-booting or VMs until their programs supported Linux as a first class citizen. But for the entire life of the hundreds of Linux desktop distributions none has ever offered the user such a feature(s).
Now you can pretend this isn't true, mod it down and fantasize about how desktop Linux is simple held back by a big conspiracy perpetrated by Microsoft and Apple but the fact is it has succeeded incredibly in pretty much all other markets including those in which Microsoft and Apple participate - and it dominates! Server? Dominates! Embedded? Dominates! Mobile? Dominates! Desktop? Utter failure!
So you say Linux dominates in server, embedded, and mobile. So remember what the question was - why do you use linux? The three word answer could very well be "Server, Embedded, Mobile".
And if you don't like the linux desktop because you like or use something that isn't supported on it, that is ok too. I don't think that is an utter failure, however. That is more up to the applications than the OS. There is nothing the OS is doing to prevent them from creating a version for linux. Which brings me all the way back to where I said to hold that thought. Do you know WHY apps that are on linux are also on Windows and Mac? Because of the openness, the other freedom mentioned above. It's not ABOUT exclusivity. It's not about cornering market share, or keeping secrets, or patents, or obscurity, or profits, or lock-out, or lock-in, or backroom deals, or crushing the competition.
I use it, and have used it exclusively outside of my job, since 1998. No dual boot, no VM. It does everything I want. I can't say it hasn't been frustrating at times, but I have never ONCE considered going to windows or mac. It meshes we
I think it is interesting to see and note. It's data. More data gives you more things to compare. We aren't exactly comparing like for like here. The US is huge. Yet it is compared to European countries, some of which are tiny. Look, we're different. So that we work more is just a data point, and judgement shouldn't be passed down on that data alone. The type of work is relevant as well.
Moreover, how do other places like Japan or China or Australia compare? We likely won't have comparable data, so it makes coming to conclusions more tricky.
I get that this is a simple generalized comparison. Jumping to conclusions based on it is quite irresponsible, IMO.
I agree. Although for me the downfall wasn't going 'pretty', it was in instability. For almost a year I struggled with a bug where something would cause dbus to inexplicably eat 100% of the CPU and the only way to get out of it was to reboot. I could just restart KDE, but then it would come back. I had my machine on 24/7, and about once a week I would wake up to the cpu having been pegged all night. Sometimes it would happen while I was using it. It was maddening. I posted and searched, and nobody had an answer. I was running Kubuntu at the time, so I tried other things. I fell in love with the simplicity of XFCE and haven't looked back.
OK, I did look back once, but for me the magic was gone. It was like I went to a bar to meet an ex-girlfriend. I could recall past memories, but it was uncomfortable. She never really supported me, we always had to do things her way. I realized we had just grown apart. I was happy for her, but I too was happier now.
All 3 of my kids (ages 7-11) have a computer. They were all hand-me-downs from friends/family who decided to upgrade. One is an i5, one is a decent dual-core, and the other is I think an i3 laptop. My wife has an i3 laptop. They all run Win7, and run just fine for homework, Minecraft, HumbleBundle games, etc. I have an older intel quad-core that I built probably 6 years ago that runs Mint18XFCE. I have a couple of other older systems that I have been trying to sell for really cheap that nobody wants.
Unless you have specific applications or needs (like gaming), you don't need to upgrade. I run XFCE, which I run because I like it not due to needing 'minimal resources'. There are times I would like some more horsepower (like when ripping/converting DVDs to mp4 for our media server) but for the most part it just runs great. I never get over 1/2 memory use, I have plenty of storage. I even run mine as a media server, it's on 24/7.
I don't see tablets or phones (or even laptops) taking the place of my home computer any time soon. It's funny because at work I have a new i7 vPro laptop running Win10, and with all the corporate junk on it for scanning and stuff, it runs about as fast as any other work computer I have had. Still with freezes, crashes, etc. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Well, tell me this - what good will it do you to worry about it? Or even discuss it?
You aren't going to change how a company runs. I am not even saying that there was an issue there or not. I am just saying that performance management systems are inherently broken, especially at large companies. I think i am actually a very good manager, because I don't rely on one-size-fits-all antiquated systems to determine how people are performing. I have been around enough large companies to know that there are loopholes in everything. I have also given up on trying to change those things. It is a waste of time. That is why I got out of the large corporate world. I have worked at two companies that had over 200k employees. No more of that for me.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, and I have always hated that aspect of social media. No FB for me. I was on Instagram for a couple of years, but I started to feel like I couldn't keep up. One day I noticed I was like a chicken, always having to peck peck peck at my phone. So I just stopped. Haven't been on IG for a few months now, and quite honestly I know I am not missing anything important.
If you don't read the news, you are uninformed.
If you read the news, you are misinformed.
There is definitely a market for this though.
I almost bought a Pi3 for this purpose, but then saw that you can compile retropie on Linux, so I did so on my machine.
Now I have it up and running, and it's mostly straight-forward... lots of config files if you need to tweak something. But when something doesn't go right, it's not so easy to troubleshoot. e.g. Vector MAME games weren't playing. Got that figured by using a different emulator, but now on Star Wars I can't get it to insert coins. Looks like others had the problem but none of those solutions worked for me. The whole mix of Pie/Retroarch/Emulationstation took a little while to understand... and it's still not crystal clear when and where to change what if needed.
It would be kind of nice to just be able to buy something for a reasonable price off the shelf, especially if you have no clue about Linux.
I have a BLU Life One X, and it is pretty thin. When I first got it, someone at work said "can you shave with that thing?" I have long wondered why makers don't add a few more mm and make all that extra space battery. More battery life is probably the ONE feature that everyone can agree on. I mean, they had to invent cases that acted as supplemental batteries for crying out loud.
So.... if YOU are offended by something, the response to whatever offends you is "love it or leave it"? But if someone else is offended by something, you think they are being overly sensitive and they should "love it or leave it"? You are aware of what hypocritical means, yes?
There is no law that states that you must stand up for the anthem. Don't like freedom of expression? It's a founding belief of our country, love it or leave it.
That's the thing about that stupid statement, it applies to you too. What is so funny about those people who talk about crybaby, snowflakes who got participation trophies (and other asinine phrases) - they are the people who bitch and moan the most. What do you mean I can't have a fully automatic rifle, that tramples on my 2nd amendment rights!!! Wahhhh Wahhhh. It's illegal. Love it or leave it. The government raised my taxes again!!! Vote next time. Love it or leave it. Marriage is between a man and a woman, the bible says so!!! It's the law.. love it or leave it.
Just say "love it or leave it" to yourself every single time you disagree with anything, and you'll start to realize how stupid it sounds.
Yes, you pretty much summed it up.... the way money moved around internally based on projects/business need/unknown forces was staggering. It was a machine, and I don't really know who was driving it.
I am at a different company now, and my team is all non-visa employees. I am hiring and using the company recruiter, who basically posts the jobs, fields resumes, and seeks out local people on linkedin. We actually don't want to have to deal with hiring people on visas, but that seems to be the majority of people who apply.
Not exactly.
1. it wasn't my decision, I was working within the system of the machine
2. we had some of these flexible contract workers there for many many years. That is the thing.. their jobs were actually more secure than some employees, because they worked for the consulting agencies. And the agreements were that we couldn't hire them as employees. (that's how those agencies survive)
For the last 4 years I have been eating primal/paleo. I lost 15 pounds in the first month, and it has stayed off. I went from 175 to 160. It was not hard. It was not grueling. I did not kill myself with workouts. It is basic body chemistry - to massively simplify it, by regulating your hormones - mainly insulin - you stabilize your body's need to store fat. I can and often do go 24 hours without eating with no ill effects at all. If your body knows how to burn fat (instead of blood sugar) when you need it, this is a trivial and simple thing. It doesn't take will power - it takes knowing what to eat so that your body learns how to regulate these hormones. The cravings for those things disappear because you break the chemical addiction that your body has to them. That is not a metaphor, that addiction is real.
Watch the talk by Dr. Peter Attia on Vimeo about our "dietary guidelines". It's a good start.
Then read the books "The Primal Blueprint" and "Why We Get Fat: And What To Do About It"... throw in "Grain Brain" while you're at it.
I will not go into a diatribe, but I was never really 'overweight'. By essentially cutting out grains, many other carbs, and inflammatory foods my life has changed for the better. I will be turning 47 soon, and feel fantastic.
From my experience, you have to put someone on a performance improvement plan before they can be fired.
You have to have a paper trail showing what steps were taken to try to improve performance.
If they can't improve after X amount of time, then you have the green light to fire them.
All of this is because of legal reasons, so that you have ammunition if they decide to sue the company.
As with most things that seems stupid, lawyers (or the fear of them) are usually to blame.
I worked for about 9 years in one of the big banks, managing software testing teams.
We uses infosys and TCS quite a lot, about 75% of my teams were from there - either offshore (India), nearshore (Mexico), or onshore (US).
One of the reasons we used them was because they were flexible.
Our teams were dependent on what projects got funded and got put on our roadmap. So we could have a project that needed to be staffed up in a month, test for 3 or 4 months, then either dissipate or roll onto another project. They usually had good testers 'on the bench' to work on projects like that.
Over the course of my time there, I had anywhere from 18 to 50 people on my team. The flexibility was very necessary. It was much harder to make the case to hire full-time people because of the nature of how we handled projects. If we needed someone to be onshore, they got us someone onshore even if they had to move them here. Even though they took care of all of that overhead, a lot of my time was spent doing resource management.
Fast forward to today, and I have gotten out of the large corporate world. I have a small team of five and am hiring two more employees. Of the 17 resumes I have reviewed over the last few months, only a couple were not on some kind of work visa. Only 2 were men. I can't really explain it, I just know what resumes I have seen and information from the recruiter. Would I hire anyone not on a visa program? Absolutely! If they would apply and be qualified, I would love to hire them. But my perception is based on the reality of what I am seeing, and that is that the visa program is fine or actually needs more support. (but I also understand this is my situation and not everyone's)
After all, he was the one who repeated over and over that the election was rigged. This would be an opportunity for him to prove his point.
He's a Trumpist. And I've never seen him behave otherwise.
I'm an old KDE user, but switched over to XFCE years ago. I've tried Cinnamon and Mate, but none of them work for me like XFCE, particularly on Mint. Usability, configurability, and no-nonsense are what I like and what I find to be the most productive. I really don't mind that there are these experiments with DEs, maybe some of them will stick and some won't. As long as I can make it simple and effective, there's enough room for more than one.
Ever seen the state of the environment in China? Think Trump gives a damn about that here?
- WhatsAppWeb - You can access your chats from your browser. Makes it so much easier for me to type things or share things that aren't on my phone.
I can tell you it is great. Here is my list of whys (I know some may be covered by other apps):
- I have several friends 2000 miles away. We have had a group chat open for almost 2 years now. We share pics, videos, and life updates. I am not on FB, and this is just more personal. We meet up once or twice a year, and it makes it easy to coordinate things
- my wife and I have a group chat with our daughter... no need to remember to send multiple messages
- WA can handle bigger photos / videos / documents. I once shared a 30MB pdf with a friend on it. My SMS app chokes out on anything over 3MB or so.
- You can leave voice messages, which is kind of fun
- It works! I don't know how many times I have missed texts, either incoming or outgoing. No idea if it is my phone, my carrier, being on wifi, planet alignment, or what. But WA is rock solid reliable
- nice and quick search feature from within a chat
- customized alerts per chat
- it does have a pretty cool set of emojis
It has had its share of bugs, and i don't know WHY it can't show in the icon that there are new messages, and it is owned by FB (which really bugs me), but overall I don't see anything that compares to it out there.
4) after it has all been resolved, and things are back to normal, those people who were on vacation return to work and start it all over again by doing a 'reply all' asking to be removed from the list.
I don't have a FB account.
However, I have used WhatsApp for a few years now. As I understand it, it is used a lot in other countries too. I have used Instagram for a couple of years now as well. Now that FB owns them, I guess they know a lot more about me than I want. While I don't use my real name on either... i am sure the dots can be connected.
If you don't use either of those, it is probably a matter of time before they acquire something that you do use.
Unless support wasn't part of the deal that was signed, then it clearly is Microsoft's fault. And the NFL's. They are the ones who agreed to the deal.
And these three words: User Acceptance Testing
I have a feeling this was technical people saying "it should work" and sales people saying "it's flawless" and the NFL saying "this will be great" and people getting bonuses and high-fiving each other.... and NOBODY actually trying it out in a real setting ahead of time.
Serves them right.
* its software is free as in beer (this is what made me try out linux)
For almost all practical purposes so is Windows and you can get all the good Linux software on Windows and Mac too.
NO, it is not. Mac OS is not either. Free as in beer means free as in beer - no cost. You cannot LEGALLY get Windows for free. Which leads to the OTHER free, which is free as in freedom - which clearly the other two are not either. You can get all the good Linux software on Windows and Mac? Hold that thought.
* its software is free as in software (this is what made me stay on linux for so long)
Like it or not, users in the vast majority don't care about that and it won't draw them to Linux. As far as the software is concerned that same free software like Blender, Gimp and LibreOffice are available on Windows and Mac too. No exclusivity to Linux.
Again... hold that thought.
* it has working package management. updating software is no nightmare. Windows has to force its customers to update it, because its a nightmare.
yep! But remember Windows has Chocolatey and Mac has Homebrew, this covers many of the free software options and for proprietary software you most often need to go through their updaters whether you're on Windows, Mac or Linux anyway.
It's great that it does what you need but you have to remember that above anything else a computer is a tool to run the programs a user needs and while Windows and Mac run pretty much anything Linux does the same cannot be said the other way around and most standard applications in industry support Windows & Mac but not Linux. It might be more secure and/or more stable and free of charge and open source but none of those things matter if it doesn't run the applications I need.
So it's a chicken and egg problem, if you want people to use it they need their applications to support it and to do that you need users. So what you need to offer is some disruptive innovation, some great feature that draws people to Linux, something so good that they would be willing to temporarily forgo the lack of applications and work through the kludge of dual-booting or VMs until their programs supported Linux as a first class citizen. But for the entire life of the hundreds of Linux desktop distributions none has ever offered the user such a feature(s).
Now you can pretend this isn't true, mod it down and fantasize about how desktop Linux is simple held back by a big conspiracy perpetrated by Microsoft and Apple but the fact is it has succeeded incredibly in pretty much all other markets including those in which Microsoft and Apple participate - and it dominates! Server? Dominates! Embedded? Dominates! Mobile? Dominates! Desktop? Utter failure!
So you say Linux dominates in server, embedded, and mobile. So remember what the question was - why do you use linux? The three word answer could very well be "Server, Embedded, Mobile".
And if you don't like the linux desktop because you like or use something that isn't supported on it, that is ok too. I don't think that is an utter failure, however. That is more up to the applications than the OS. There is nothing the OS is doing to prevent them from creating a version for linux. Which brings me all the way back to where I said to hold that thought. Do you know WHY apps that are on linux are also on Windows and Mac? Because of the openness, the other freedom mentioned above. It's not ABOUT exclusivity. It's not about cornering market share, or keeping secrets, or patents, or obscurity, or profits, or lock-out, or lock-in, or backroom deals, or crushing the competition.
I use it, and have used it exclusively outside of my job, since 1998. No dual boot, no VM. It does everything I want. I can't say it hasn't been frustrating at times, but I have never ONCE considered going to windows or mac. It meshes we
I think it is interesting to see and note. It's data. More data gives you more things to compare. We aren't exactly comparing like for like here. The US is huge. Yet it is compared to European countries, some of which are tiny. Look, we're different. So that we work more is just a data point, and judgement shouldn't be passed down on that data alone. The type of work is relevant as well.
Moreover, how do other places like Japan or China or Australia compare? We likely won't have comparable data, so it makes coming to conclusions more tricky.
I get that this is a simple generalized comparison. Jumping to conclusions based on it is quite irresponsible, IMO.
I agree. Although for me the downfall wasn't going 'pretty', it was in instability. For almost a year I struggled with a bug where something would cause dbus to inexplicably eat 100% of the CPU and the only way to get out of it was to reboot. I could just restart KDE, but then it would come back. I had my machine on 24/7, and about once a week I would wake up to the cpu having been pegged all night. Sometimes it would happen while I was using it. It was maddening. I posted and searched, and nobody had an answer. I was running Kubuntu at the time, so I tried other things. I fell in love with the simplicity of XFCE and haven't looked back.
OK, I did look back once, but for me the magic was gone.
It was like I went to a bar to meet an ex-girlfriend. I could recall past memories, but it was uncomfortable. She never really supported me, we always had to do things her way. I realized we had just grown apart. I was happy for her, but I too was happier now.
And she wore WAY too much makeup.
The owner is 25 years old and it has been operating since 2006?
I was mowing yards and doing odd jobs saving up for a car when I was 15.
All 3 of my kids (ages 7-11) have a computer. They were all hand-me-downs from friends/family who decided to upgrade. One is an i5, one is a decent dual-core, and the other is I think an i3 laptop. My wife has an i3 laptop. They all run Win7, and run just fine for homework, Minecraft, HumbleBundle games, etc. I have an older intel quad-core that I built probably 6 years ago that runs Mint18XFCE. I have a couple of other older systems that I have been trying to sell for really cheap that nobody wants.
Unless you have specific applications or needs (like gaming), you don't need to upgrade. I run XFCE, which I run because I like it not due to needing 'minimal resources'. There are times I would like some more horsepower (like when ripping/converting DVDs to mp4 for our media server) but for the most part it just runs great. I never get over 1/2 memory use, I have plenty of storage. I even run mine as a media server, it's on 24/7.
I don't see tablets or phones (or even laptops) taking the place of my home computer any time soon.
It's funny because at work I have a new i7 vPro laptop running Win10, and with all the corporate junk on it for scanning and stuff, it runs about as fast as any other work computer I have had. Still with freezes, crashes, etc. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Exactly! They should bet their entire re-emergence into a highly competitive market on antiquated features that statistically NOBODY is asking for.
Well, tell me this - what good will it do you to worry about it? Or even discuss it?
You aren't going to change how a company runs. I am not even saying that there was an issue there or not. I am just saying that performance management systems are inherently broken, especially at large companies. I think i am actually a very good manager, because I don't rely on one-size-fits-all antiquated systems to determine how people are performing. I have been around enough large companies to know that there are loopholes in everything. I have also given up on trying to change those things. It is a waste of time. That is why I got out of the large corporate world. I have worked at two companies that had over 200k employees. No more of that for me.