1. Intel's justification is reasonable. They're saying "We're not going to enable specific Intel extensions for CPUs whose support for those features is unknown"
2. Intel's decision to do this, ironically, means Intel's C compiler will generate, even on Intel CPUs, less efficient code than its rivals.
(2) was more an in-passing comment, but interestingly it also makes it harder to accuse Intel of fraud - you're basically in a situation where a reviewer would say "I can use Microsoft C, GCC, or Intel C to compare these two CPUs. Let's pick the one that nobody's likely to use, because it's not free and not part of any mainstream IDEs, and has no compelling feature that would make anyone use it given it generates poorer code than the other two."
I seem to recall they justified it with some bullshit about SSE being a proprietary Intel thing and not testing other CPUs for compliance so they couldn't guarantee correct behaviour blah blah.
I'm probably making myself unpopular by saying this, but that's a perfectly acceptable explanation. Ironically it's hard to see how such a system wouldn't actually make Intel's C compiler look worse, as compiling multiple paths and the associated logic means the CPU will have to do more work to execute code compiled with their compiler, regardless of whether it's made by Intel or AMD.
I wouldn't call that cheating without a lot more context. If you're compiling a set of benchmarks you're likely to run the same executable on multiple machines, it's not going to help Intel in any way to disable code paths based upon what processor is doing the compilation vs running the benchmarks, and any idiot working at Intel is going to realize people will cotton on pretty quickly if it generates different code paths based upon that.
(Yes, under GNU/Linux you might compile it on the machine you're using, because for some reason your package maintainer doesn't bundle the executables, but under GNU/Linux you're going to use GCC, so it's a non-issue.)
I too miss 68K, but I think it was more RISC that killed it than the PC architecture. RISC made it so easy for larger computer manufacturers to develop their own high performance CPUs that there wasn't a lot of incentive to use off-the-shelf chips unless backward compatibility was high on your list. In practice, that meant only PC manufacturers stuck with off-the-shelf designs. Apple worked with Motorola and IBM, Commodore was going to go with PA-RISC for the successor to the Amiga, Sun built their own SPARC, and, of course, Acorn thought "Wouldn't it be a great idea to create a 32 bit RISC chip to replace our 6502s that can be used to power 4G smartphones 30 years from now"?
I like the idea. Devices that fit easily in your pocket with large screens.
If they could make it work, they'd be one of the few positive things to happen to the mobile device world since the T-Mobile G1 that wasn't just "more memory/speed/resolution."
Facebook login of course. The site will connect you once it has verified that the age associated with your Facebook account is high enough, and will contact each of your Facebook friends to get additional verification.
Once verified, to ensure you don't have to repeatedly re-validate your age, the adult site will store subscription information on Facebook itself, together with any relevant interests, fetishes, etc.
It's all perfectly simple, and I know Facebook has been working on making this as easy as possible. Both Zuckerberg himself, and the Russian government - which found the proposals very impressive - have been speaking privately to MPs to explain how the system will work and reassure them of its effectiveness.
Pretty much every Intel chip has been poor in comparison to the competition since the Zilog Z80 came out and ate the 8080s lunch. What Intel's had going for it is that the Very Serious People in the computer industry refuse to take any other platform seriously.
S-100? Shit. But that didn't stop the entire industry deciding it wasn't a "real computer" unless it was S-100 based until IBM jumped in with the PC. Go back to the heyday of the S-100 and long after the Z80 was released, selling at a tenth of the price of the 8080, there were computer companies selling the fucking 8080, and getting customers because it was the "real deal", not a "cheap clone" like the faster and cheaper and SIMD capable Z80.
And then it was the IBM PC, which even in 1981 was one of the worst computers ever designed, but that didn't matter, because it was intended to appeal to the Very Serious People, not people who wanted to use computers to get things done.
Even Torvalds is running around spouting bullshit about how software developers are unable to write software if their desktop doesn't have the same CPU as the server that'll run it, and you'd think he of all people would know better. Still, he's also on record as claiming that AmigaOS isn't an operating system, so there's that. Plus, you know, Bitkeeper.
I don't think Intel has ever cheated. They just benefited from idiocy in our industry by the people who run our industry, the people who report on it, the people who consult on it. The worst I can accuse them of is taking advantage of ignorance, most famously in the Netburst fiasco, the only point of which was seemingly to be able to make CPUs with higher clocks, at the cost of performance compared to previous generations and the PowerPC (but a 3GHz Netburst Pentium was still faster than a 2GHz Netburst Pentium, so if Netburst hadn't hit the limits of the thermal envelope, it might still have been progress.)
Stopping the merger has nothing to do with preventing monopolies, in fact the reverse is true.
If the Sprint-T Mobile merger goes ahead, there will be three large mobile carriers able to compete with one another.
If it doesn't, there will be two large mobile carriers and one smaller carrier. (Sprint is pretty much dead at this point, it's not shown a yearly profit in over a decade, the mobile portion hasn't, to the best of my knowledge, ever been profitable.)
Two carriers dominating the industry is far more monopolistic than three.
Liked the first 20 minutes or so. When Professor X came on, I felt the scene was a little forced, and was a little confused by Captain America and Wolverine welcoming Magneto like an old friend.
But it really just got unintelligible when the Fantastic Four joined the group. The subplot with Iron Man and Mister Fantastic arguing over everything just got irritating, and I didn't see why Mystique would disappear with The Human Torch and Groot for the "White House Mission" without letting Fury know what they planned to do, they could have screwed everything up.
And what was with Captain Marvel? She was advertised as having a major role in this but all you see is her at HQ smiling.
And was that really Admiral Holdo broadcasting the "Message from the future"?
True, but that'll end up reducing the value of the games themselves. If you can't sell them or trade them in then you're not going to want to spend as much money on one. So the games makers will have to sell games for a much lower amount.
If you look at Steam, you kinda see that already. Oh sure, when a game comes out it's full priced, but it's typically below $20 within a year, and below $10 within five.
A supermarket chain isn't that radical in some ways, after all in the US Publix Supermarkets, while not a cooperative, is employee owned. But, hold on to your hat, because the UK also did have until fairly recently... a cooperative bank. The bank still exists but is no longer a cooperative, but it lasted several decades as one.
In all these instances, employees are paid even during unprofitable periods. There's nothing odd about that - most businesses will dip into lines of credit or savings during bad months to pay wages, even the wages of the owner if the owner works there, which for most businesses is the case. One of the first rules about starting a new business is to ensure there's enough money from initial investments to pay yourself for as long as it'll take before the company starts showing a profit. It helps nobody if you lose your house a few months after your business is started because you've refused to pay yourself, and thus the mortgage, until the numbers turn green.
I think many voters gave up on finding politicians who will solve their problems a while ago. Now, for at least half the electorate, it's a tribal thing. Which of the problems ordinary Republicans have are being addressed by any serious Republican candidates? At the last election... maybe Jeb and Rubio kinda sorta, but even then only for a small number of groups.
The problem with the "local is best" mentality is it tends to assume that most problems aren't national and it also provides people with ways to have their cake and eat it. If my city decided it was going to solve the healthcare crisis for its inhabitants, it'd get swamped pretty quickly by people who live outside the city, benefiting from not having to pay for the city's services, moving in only once they require the services.
Nor can a city in the middle of nowhere expect to make macroeconomic policy changes that'd encourage business investment.
The reality is most politics needs to be national. In most countries, this is a given and it works. In the US, there's a good argument for suggesting the current constitutional structure is never going to work again, but that's not going to be fixed by making politics "local" or giving power to institutions like the States that have historically abused it in certain regions.
Without a network connection, disc-based games still work. Digital download games usually don't work anymore
I've only tried the limited digital download system on our ancient Xbox 360, but I wasn't aware it was dramatically different from the XBone's. Games do, in fact, run fine offline. The only time it's necessary to make them go online are (1) if they're online games (d'uh!) which would apply to DVDs too, or (2) when downloading them, which you generally only do once.
Where do you get it from that you need to have a live internet connection to play an already downloaded digital download game?
I'd assume a cost fix can mitigate a technology problem. The Nintendo Wii was cheaper than the '360, and was SD, had a relatively slow CPU, etc. The Wii was well marketed, and had an intuitively obvious way to play games that hadn't been tried before that allowed new types of game to be created, but I'm sure cost factored into the massive sales of the product too.
That said, is the Xbone actually suffering a drought of high quality current games at the moment? I was under the impression it was pretty much doing as well as the PlayStation on that score.
Many libertarians are strong environmentalists and believe the principle of non-aggression applies to spewing out unwanted particulates, sound or light (all forms of pollution) is a form of aggression and therefore prohibited
But most aren't. Try mentioning externalities in a Libertarian forum and you'll usually suffer derision and ridicule. Look at libertarian lobbying groups and forums like Reason and their attitude towards, for example, global warming.
Now, I'm glad _you_ see the light on this, and I like your argument, it makes logical sense and would fit within the proto-libertarian ideology if such a thing were thrashed out into a coherent block. But in practice, environmentalism is seen as this thing the government would have to be involved in, that restricts people from doing what they want. Not hard to see why the people who are attracted to libertarianism reject the logic when it goes in that direction.
The ACA wasn't created by "the left", it was the centrists in the Democratic party who pushed it, wanting something they believed (because they're idiots) Conservatives would support (which is why it's based upon Mitt Romney's 2004 proposals.) The left wanted single payer, and pushed for, at the very minimum, a government run insurer ("The Public Option") and were stymied because Joe Lieberman refused to allow the ACA to pass the Senate with his vote unless it was dropped.
The ACA is also only a tweaking of the existing system, still keeping the fundamental building blocks in place, so it's hard to see how it can be responsible for "most publicly traded insurance companies (seeing) their stock prices shoot through the roof". Regardless, blaming "the left" for this when the left wanted government competition to the insurers is absurd.
The left isn't using "the social safety net" to "buy votes" either but you'll never be convinced of that despite the fact it's pretty obviously left wing ideology for the government to use taxes to provide financial support for those unable to support themselves. Also when did we have "Wall Street buddies"? What Bizarroworld are you living in? Because Hillary Clinton (hardly a left winger herself) made a few speeches to a bank or two Wall Street is left wing now?
The issue here is not.MHT, it's bugs in Internet Explorer..MHT is just being used as a way to get the payload to IE. Send it somewhere else, be it/dev/null or Chrome, and you've solved the problem.
Keeping the subject to Torvald's advocacy of the technologies as some way to bypass distribution dependencies: these systems paper over the problems, leaving the central issues unfixed. They're no better, and perhaps even worse, than developers insisting on static linking all their applications dependencies. They introduce problems that package management was introduced to fix, destroying the ability of a system administrator to know, for example, that a system update has actually removed insecure versions of a library.
In terms of how Torvalds is advocating they be used they're designed to "solve" a problem without understanding why that problem existed in the first place, which was that there are different views on how distributions should work and be updated.
It's the kind of half-assed "solution" I'd expect Microsoft to come up with.
Yes, they have their place, but fuck whoever suggests their best application is on trying to make the same application work on multiple distributions. That's the last reason anyone should use them.
Yeah, I think the headline is, not merely misleading, but a complete lie. There's nothing about this system - as described - that's evaluating readers of Slashdot, merely something trying to determine if a transaction might be the result of stolen or faked credentials.
We kinda had a standard. GNOME. Even it wasn't "first", it was created after KDE which, while decent, had legitimate licensing problems at the time GNOME was created.
Then GNOME fell apart, and now we have at least three forks (GNOME 3, Mate, and Cinnamon), one dead fork (Unity), and Torvalds is saying we need another standard?
(And another annoyance - Torvalds sees Snaps and Flatpaks as the "solution" to the package management/distro issue? Really? Yeah, let's just replicate the userland for each application you install to deal with what was a non-issue.)
Anyone remember Ubuntu circa 2008? The OS that at the time "just worked" in a way that Windows never did - it actually ran on more hardware at the time than a generic Windows installer. And was much more user friendly than XP or Vista, and just all around better?
What the hell went wrong? Was it just GNOME, or was Unity going to happen anyway? IIRC it started as a "Netbook UI".
While the feces on walls thing is new, the not showering thing has been reported for several years.
Not that any of this has to do with whether Assange should be granted asylum or not (probably not, he was running from a rape investigation) or whether he should be being charged by the US as a party to Manning's "crimes" (probably not on that, no.) It suggests he's an asshole (but we already knew that about stuff that's actually important), I'm just saying that at least some of this, about the cat and the lack of personal hygene, is old news.
What I find most disturbing about the trend is how the younger generation seems to have lost the ability to discern the abysmal video quality of streaming services from the usually way better video quality from physical media.
Younger generation huh?
I can't tell the difference between Blu-ray and Amazon/VUDU over my Comcast connection unless, for some reason, the bandwidth is constrained and the feed has to drop to a lower resolution. I don't see any artifacts and even back in the days when this was being introduced, I remember seeing people making comparisons between AppleTV's HD services and Blu-ray and finding it hard to come up with examples where there were any real differences - generally the only things that perform badly at 6Mbps are big fiery full-screen explosions.
Is it me? Well, in addition to poorer resolution, I could always see the artifacts in DVD. Even on a shitty SD CRT. So my eyesight isn't that bad.
This is not to say that someone with a trained eye can't tell the difference, I'm sure some can. But even among those, I'm fairly sure for most people streaming quality is "good enough".
I don't think it has anything to do with people being "young", I think you're just a jackass.
Most of your first paragraph I agree with but FWIW their search has always been shit. I was complaining about it in 2002, I've always been surprised they've never done a thing to improve it.
Unfortunately there's a fetish among search engine designers, including internal search engines like Amazon's, for "more is more": and let's be honest, if even Google does that, and would rather give you a million irrelevant and time wasting results than admit it couldn't find anything and say "0 results found", what incentive is there for Amazon - who benefit from irrelevant answers because there are plenty of shoppers just browsing and looking for "ideas" - to fix their search engine?
Slashdot Mirror
I understand that, I'm saying:
1. Intel's justification is reasonable. They're saying "We're not going to enable specific Intel extensions for CPUs whose support for those features is unknown"
2. Intel's decision to do this, ironically, means Intel's C compiler will generate, even on Intel CPUs, less efficient code than its rivals.
(2) was more an in-passing comment, but interestingly it also makes it harder to accuse Intel of fraud - you're basically in a situation where a reviewer would say "I can use Microsoft C, GCC, or Intel C to compare these two CPUs. Let's pick the one that nobody's likely to use, because it's not free and not part of any mainstream IDEs, and has no compelling feature that would make anyone use it given it generates poorer code than the other two."
I'm probably making myself unpopular by saying this, but that's a perfectly acceptable explanation. Ironically it's hard to see how such a system wouldn't actually make Intel's C compiler look worse, as compiling multiple paths and the associated logic means the CPU will have to do more work to execute code compiled with their compiler, regardless of whether it's made by Intel or AMD.
I wouldn't call that cheating without a lot more context. If you're compiling a set of benchmarks you're likely to run the same executable on multiple machines, it's not going to help Intel in any way to disable code paths based upon what processor is doing the compilation vs running the benchmarks, and any idiot working at Intel is going to realize people will cotton on pretty quickly if it generates different code paths based upon that.
(Yes, under GNU/Linux you might compile it on the machine you're using, because for some reason your package maintainer doesn't bundle the executables, but under GNU/Linux you're going to use GCC, so it's a non-issue.)
I too miss 68K, but I think it was more RISC that killed it than the PC architecture. RISC made it so easy for larger computer manufacturers to develop their own high performance CPUs that there wasn't a lot of incentive to use off-the-shelf chips unless backward compatibility was high on your list. In practice, that meant only PC manufacturers stuck with off-the-shelf designs. Apple worked with Motorola and IBM, Commodore was going to go with PA-RISC for the successor to the Amiga, Sun built their own SPARC, and, of course, Acorn thought "Wouldn't it be a great idea to create a 32 bit RISC chip to replace our 6502s that can be used to power 4G smartphones 30 years from now"?
I like the idea. Devices that fit easily in your pocket with large screens.
If they could make it work, they'd be one of the few positive things to happen to the mobile device world since the T-Mobile G1 that wasn't just "more memory/speed/resolution."
Facebook login of course. The site will connect you once it has verified that the age associated with your Facebook account is high enough, and will contact each of your Facebook friends to get additional verification.
Once verified, to ensure you don't have to repeatedly re-validate your age, the adult site will store subscription information on Facebook itself, together with any relevant interests, fetishes, etc.
It's all perfectly simple, and I know Facebook has been working on making this as easy as possible. Both Zuckerberg himself, and the Russian government - which found the proposals very impressive - have been speaking privately to MPs to explain how the system will work and reassure them of its effectiveness.
Pretty much every Intel chip has been poor in comparison to the competition since the Zilog Z80 came out and ate the 8080s lunch. What Intel's had going for it is that the Very Serious People in the computer industry refuse to take any other platform seriously.
S-100? Shit. But that didn't stop the entire industry deciding it wasn't a "real computer" unless it was S-100 based until IBM jumped in with the PC. Go back to the heyday of the S-100 and long after the Z80 was released, selling at a tenth of the price of the 8080, there were computer companies selling the fucking 8080, and getting customers because it was the "real deal", not a "cheap clone" like the faster and cheaper and SIMD capable Z80.
And then it was the IBM PC, which even in 1981 was one of the worst computers ever designed, but that didn't matter, because it was intended to appeal to the Very Serious People, not people who wanted to use computers to get things done.
Even Torvalds is running around spouting bullshit about how software developers are unable to write software if their desktop doesn't have the same CPU as the server that'll run it, and you'd think he of all people would know better. Still, he's also on record as claiming that AmigaOS isn't an operating system, so there's that. Plus, you know, Bitkeeper.
I don't think Intel has ever cheated. They just benefited from idiocy in our industry by the people who run our industry, the people who report on it, the people who consult on it. The worst I can accuse them of is taking advantage of ignorance, most famously in the Netburst fiasco, the only point of which was seemingly to be able to make CPUs with higher clocks, at the cost of performance compared to previous generations and the PowerPC (but a 3GHz Netburst Pentium was still faster than a 2GHz Netburst Pentium, so if Netburst hadn't hit the limits of the thermal envelope, it might still have been progress.)
Stopping the merger has nothing to do with preventing monopolies, in fact the reverse is true.
If the Sprint-T Mobile merger goes ahead, there will be three large mobile carriers able to compete with one another.
If it doesn't, there will be two large mobile carriers and one smaller carrier. (Sprint is pretty much dead at this point, it's not shown a yearly profit in over a decade, the mobile portion hasn't, to the best of my knowledge, ever been profitable.)
Two carriers dominating the industry is far more monopolistic than three.
Liked the first 20 minutes or so. When Professor X came on, I felt the scene was a little forced, and was a little confused by Captain America and Wolverine welcoming Magneto like an old friend.
But it really just got unintelligible when the Fantastic Four joined the group. The subplot with Iron Man and Mister Fantastic arguing over everything just got irritating, and I didn't see why Mystique would disappear with The Human Torch and Groot for the "White House Mission" without letting Fury know what they planned to do, they could have screwed everything up.
And what was with Captain Marvel? She was advertised as having a major role in this but all you see is her at HQ smiling.
And was that really Admiral Holdo broadcasting the "Message from the future"?
True, but that'll end up reducing the value of the games themselves. If you can't sell them or trade them in then you're not going to want to spend as much money on one. So the games makers will have to sell games for a much lower amount.
If you look at Steam, you kinda see that already. Oh sure, when a game comes out it's full priced, but it's typically below $20 within a year, and below $10 within five.
Here's a fairly famous mainstream Cooperative that operates in the UK. It's a supermarket chain. There's a Wikipedia article on it too.
A supermarket chain isn't that radical in some ways, after all in the US Publix Supermarkets, while not a cooperative, is employee owned. But, hold on to your hat, because the UK also did have until fairly recently... a cooperative bank. The bank still exists but is no longer a cooperative, but it lasted several decades as one.
In all these instances, employees are paid even during unprofitable periods. There's nothing odd about that - most businesses will dip into lines of credit or savings during bad months to pay wages, even the wages of the owner if the owner works there, which for most businesses is the case. One of the first rules about starting a new business is to ensure there's enough money from initial investments to pay yourself for as long as it'll take before the company starts showing a profit. It helps nobody if you lose your house a few months after your business is started because you've refused to pay yourself, and thus the mortgage, until the numbers turn green.
I think many voters gave up on finding politicians who will solve their problems a while ago. Now, for at least half the electorate, it's a tribal thing. Which of the problems ordinary Republicans have are being addressed by any serious Republican candidates? At the last election... maybe Jeb and Rubio kinda sorta, but even then only for a small number of groups.
The problem with the "local is best" mentality is it tends to assume that most problems aren't national and it also provides people with ways to have their cake and eat it. If my city decided it was going to solve the healthcare crisis for its inhabitants, it'd get swamped pretty quickly by people who live outside the city, benefiting from not having to pay for the city's services, moving in only once they require the services.
Nor can a city in the middle of nowhere expect to make macroeconomic policy changes that'd encourage business investment.
The reality is most politics needs to be national. In most countries, this is a given and it works. In the US, there's a good argument for suggesting the current constitutional structure is never going to work again, but that's not going to be fixed by making politics "local" or giving power to institutions like the States that have historically abused it in certain regions.
What were they using before when they designed bicycle helmets? Astrology? Homeopathy? Republicanism?
I've only tried the limited digital download system on our ancient Xbox 360, but I wasn't aware it was dramatically different from the XBone's. Games do, in fact, run fine offline. The only time it's necessary to make them go online are (1) if they're online games (d'uh!) which would apply to DVDs too, or (2) when downloading them, which you generally only do once.
Where do you get it from that you need to have a live internet connection to play an already downloaded digital download game?
I'd assume a cost fix can mitigate a technology problem. The Nintendo Wii was cheaper than the '360, and was SD, had a relatively slow CPU, etc. The Wii was well marketed, and had an intuitively obvious way to play games that hadn't been tried before that allowed new types of game to be created, but I'm sure cost factored into the massive sales of the product too.
That said, is the Xbone actually suffering a drought of high quality current games at the moment? I was under the impression it was pretty much doing as well as the PlayStation on that score.
But most aren't. Try mentioning externalities in a Libertarian forum and you'll usually suffer derision and ridicule. Look at libertarian lobbying groups and forums like Reason and their attitude towards, for example, global warming.
Now, I'm glad _you_ see the light on this, and I like your argument, it makes logical sense and would fit within the proto-libertarian ideology if such a thing were thrashed out into a coherent block. But in practice, environmentalism is seen as this thing the government would have to be involved in, that restricts people from doing what they want. Not hard to see why the people who are attracted to libertarianism reject the logic when it goes in that direction.
The ACA wasn't created by "the left", it was the centrists in the Democratic party who pushed it, wanting something they believed (because they're idiots) Conservatives would support (which is why it's based upon Mitt Romney's 2004 proposals.) The left wanted single payer, and pushed for, at the very minimum, a government run insurer ("The Public Option") and were stymied because Joe Lieberman refused to allow the ACA to pass the Senate with his vote unless it was dropped.
The ACA is also only a tweaking of the existing system, still keeping the fundamental building blocks in place, so it's hard to see how it can be responsible for "most publicly traded insurance companies (seeing) their stock prices shoot through the roof". Regardless, blaming "the left" for this when the left wanted government competition to the insurers is absurd.
The left isn't using "the social safety net" to "buy votes" either but you'll never be convinced of that despite the fact it's pretty obviously left wing ideology for the government to use taxes to provide financial support for those unable to support themselves. Also when did we have "Wall Street buddies"? What Bizarroworld are you living in? Because Hillary Clinton (hardly a left winger herself) made a few speeches to a bank or two Wall Street is left wing now?
Ackshurely it's about ethics in astronomy...
Is there a TV you don't own that you could not stop talking about too?
Only if that browser has the same bug.
The issue here is not .MHT, it's bugs in Internet Explorer. .MHT is just being used as a way to get the payload to IE. Send it somewhere else, be it /dev/null or Chrome, and you've solved the problem.
Keeping the subject to Torvald's advocacy of the technologies as some way to bypass distribution dependencies: these systems paper over the problems, leaving the central issues unfixed. They're no better, and perhaps even worse, than developers insisting on static linking all their applications dependencies. They introduce problems that package management was introduced to fix, destroying the ability of a system administrator to know, for example, that a system update has actually removed insecure versions of a library.
In terms of how Torvalds is advocating they be used they're designed to "solve" a problem without understanding why that problem existed in the first place, which was that there are different views on how distributions should work and be updated.
It's the kind of half-assed "solution" I'd expect Microsoft to come up with.
Yes, they have their place, but fuck whoever suggests their best application is on trying to make the same application work on multiple distributions. That's the last reason anyone should use them.
Yeah, I think the headline is, not merely misleading, but a complete lie. There's nothing about this system - as described - that's evaluating readers of Slashdot, merely something trying to determine if a transaction might be the result of stolen or faked credentials.
That was my first thought.
We kinda had a standard. GNOME. Even it wasn't "first", it was created after KDE which, while decent, had legitimate licensing problems at the time GNOME was created.
Then GNOME fell apart, and now we have at least three forks (GNOME 3, Mate, and Cinnamon), one dead fork (Unity), and Torvalds is saying we need another standard?
(And another annoyance - Torvalds sees Snaps and Flatpaks as the "solution" to the package management/distro issue? Really? Yeah, let's just replicate the userland for each application you install to deal with what was a non-issue.)
Anyone remember Ubuntu circa 2008? The OS that at the time "just worked" in a way that Windows never did - it actually ran on more hardware at the time than a generic Windows installer. And was much more user friendly than XP or Vista, and just all around better?
What the hell went wrong? Was it just GNOME, or was Unity going to happen anyway? IIRC it started as a "Netbook UI".
While the feces on walls thing is new, the not showering thing has been reported for several years.
Not that any of this has to do with whether Assange should be granted asylum or not (probably not, he was running from a rape investigation) or whether he should be being charged by the US as a party to Manning's "crimes" (probably not on that, no.) It suggests he's an asshole (but we already knew that about stuff that's actually important), I'm just saying that at least some of this, about the cat and the lack of personal hygene, is old news.
Also it's not even a wiki.
Younger generation huh?
I can't tell the difference between Blu-ray and Amazon/VUDU over my Comcast connection unless, for some reason, the bandwidth is constrained and the feed has to drop to a lower resolution. I don't see any artifacts and even back in the days when this was being introduced, I remember seeing people making comparisons between AppleTV's HD services and Blu-ray and finding it hard to come up with examples where there were any real differences - generally the only things that perform badly at 6Mbps are big fiery full-screen explosions.
Is it me? Well, in addition to poorer resolution, I could always see the artifacts in DVD. Even on a shitty SD CRT. So my eyesight isn't that bad.
This is not to say that someone with a trained eye can't tell the difference, I'm sure some can. But even among those, I'm fairly sure for most people streaming quality is "good enough".
I don't think it has anything to do with people being "young", I think you're just a jackass.
Most of your first paragraph I agree with but FWIW their search has always been shit. I was complaining about it in 2002, I've always been surprised they've never done a thing to improve it.
Unfortunately there's a fetish among search engine designers, including internal search engines like Amazon's, for "more is more": and let's be honest, if even Google does that, and would rather give you a million irrelevant and time wasting results than admit it couldn't find anything and say "0 results found", what incentive is there for Amazon - who benefit from irrelevant answers because there are plenty of shoppers just browsing and looking for "ideas" - to fix their search engine?