OK, listen. Turn off the TV, Fox News is not a good source of information about what's going on in the world. Also close your web browser. Now, get up, and head down to any store that sells lightbulbs.
Now, go to the manager and tell them you heard on HotAir.com, Fox News, and GlobalWarmingIsaRidiculousLiberalMyth-AndSoIsLungCancer-AndEverythingElseScientistsClaimIsToo.com that the manager is breaking the law because of the large number of incandescents on the shelves.
After he laughs at you, call the EPA.
After they laugh at you, call Fox News and demand they tell a story about how the government is refusing to enforce a law that exists in the imagination of every conservative in the country.
Drug traffickers, kidnappers and blood spattered murderers love 'em too.
If you've even watched a single episode of Columbo, you'll know that's not even close to true. The damning speeding camera photo, mistakenly produced as an alibi, always ends up damning the murderer's chances of getting away with it!
Nope, nobody threatened to sue anyone. But the Mozilla foundation was persuaded to change the name to avoid stepping on people's toes and to make things easier for users (do you really want to Google "Phoenix cache crashing problem" and get search results both for the BIOS-embedded browser and the browser now known as Firefox?)
I completely agree. They only have the marketshare they do because of the popularity of MS DOS, but with Digital Research and Apple so ahead of them with GEM and Mac OS, and their attempts at a GUI, thus far (Windows 1.0) being less than successful, how can they possibly survive into the nineties?
To be honest, I think you're setting your sights higher than they need to be.
Amazon has an Android app store. It's bundled with several phones. It's bundled with the best selling non-iTablet tablet, to the exclusion of Google's. It's installable on virtually every Android device, including the SDK VMs.
Developers aren't going to drop Android, and they're not going to boycott the Android Market because of this. But they can, and probably will, make their apps available across multiple stores, and will price according to their costs.
And personally, I don't see a problem with that. In fact, I don't see a problem with what Google is doing, precisely because Android hasn't been a one-market shop now for a year or more. Google's move will make in-app purchases simpler - if you were able to download/buy the app in the first place, you can, without further registration, buy stuff in the app too.
Good. That's how it should be. And Amazon, Applib, etc, will keep Google honest.
The software for a Netbook might not be "tailored for the device" but the vast majority of applications have no problems on a Netbook's CPU, RAM, and 1024x600 screen. And they're "tailored for the device" in that they can rely upon, and see, a keyboard, mouse, and monitor, running in a relatively free eco-system where they can include any functionality a user might possibly want.
The result is that the software for Netbooks is actually functional, and you can get real work done on them in isolation, without needing the support of servers, and without struggling to get by without a decent input system.
Tablets might get there one day, but let's be honest: today, they suck. Even Android tablets, which at least have the free eco-system, but still contain crude, limited, hardware when it comes to getting work done.
Even on open platforms, tablet app creators are going to have problems creating software that's as functional as PC software until tablets come with keyboards and accurate pointing systems. And, let's be honest, if that happens, they're not going to be tablets any more.
... but a heck of a lot of people carry around, uh, tablets.
Not in my experience they don't! The few people I know with tablets rarely take them anywhere, unless they plan to be in one location for a very long time.
Example: I see people with 10" tablets on their desks at my office. I don't see them take them to meetings, the bathroom, and only occasionally do I see them taken for lunch.
10" tablets just aren't portable. Not in the same sense a 7" is.
A sheet of (letter or A4 - I assume you meant one of those) is just too large. Remember nobody carries around a sheet of paper unless it's folded or for a very brief moment.
If the entire point of a tablet is to be right there when you need it, it has to be a device that, ideally, can fit in a large pocket, or otherwise not require effort on your part to move around. This is why I think the iPad is a bad design, why thus far it seems to be infamous as the device you buy someone who claims to love it but that ends up in a drawer.
I'd like the screen enlarged by reducing the bezel on the Fire. But I wouldn't want to see the Fire actually increase, physically, in size. I can honestly say if someone swapped mine for such a device, I'd stop using it, it'd get less use (and that's saying something) than my 10" Honeycomb tablet.
Yeah, but it requires the GTalk plug-in. I'd rather it was in Flash, to be honest, it's one thing to "not use Flash, use open standards", it's another to "Not use Flash, use another even more proprietary plug-in".
So basically if the author of a work dies, their interests change, or they simply run out of free time you should immediately stop caring about their prior works?
It's PEANUT BUTTER JELLY TIME! Peanut butter jelly time! Peanut butter with a jelly on top!
The Lenovo K1 has a hardware "lock" slider button on one side. Have to admit I find it useless - not because I don't want it to work, I do, but because most apps just ignore it, which means switching it on actually makes the tablet less pleasant and consistant to work with, not more.
There are more modern alternatives. I'm wondering what about his application absolutely has to run on a desktop PC and whether it can be safely assumed the user is connected to the Internet via a high enough bandwidth link.
Shoving some of the functionality into a high powered server farm and moving to a subscription model may have advantages for both users and his company. Piracy would practically cease. Updating core algorithms would be easier. And at the same time, a centralized, shared, processing plant would reduce the hardware requirements on the user's side (not to mention make it easier for the vendor to provide different UIs in future. The vendor could even open source the UI and let users create their own.)
Obviously this only works for some applications, and the fact that this has something to do with video processing doesn't leave me with a lot of hope, but it ought to be on the list of alternatives. Done properly, it's a win-win situation for both sides.
Wow, someone's a little in love with their $600 portable porn and games machine.
I agree with the GP BTW. A device that doesn't have a keyboard and whose UI is anti-keyboard is not the right tool for something that requires a lot of word entry. Which most office jobs do, even if it's just email.
I practically forced myself for two months to use two different tablets, being a professional in the computer field and all, and I can honestly say that anyone who argues tablets are professional tools right now is an idiot. I can see practical uses for them in a professional sphere - medical professionals would find them great as replacements for those awkward PCs in their patient examination rooms right now, for example, if the software were available, but, well there's the joke, it isn't. And they're optimal at virtually nothing else.
Even the stuff you think they'd be great at you realize you need accessories to make work properly. I have Photoshop on my larger tablet, for example. Do I use it? Fuck no. GIMP on my Ubuntu laptop with a mouse is a more usable application. Why? It isn't because GIMP is better software, or has a better UI, it's because drawing/pointing/etc with a finger really isn't sane.
What, ultimately, am I using my tablets for? Well, the Kindle Fire is my little games console and music player. And the 10.1 Honeycomb Android tablet? I dust it off periodically, test the occasional website to make sure it looks OK, and leave it where it is. It's the same size as a Netbook, but nothing like as functional. Why is it the future again?
I'm glad you're willing to torture yourself to prove that somehow you can get real work done on a tablet and that therefore anyone who says they're not good at doing real work (note the distinction) is "arrogant". You can do that, and encourage the manufacturers to figure out how to make it work knowing there's a market out there that'll buy anything anyway. The rest of us will wait until a decent laptop/netbook replacement comes about. We'll continue to be "arrogant" by using the right tools for the job, and using our tablets to play Plants vs Zombies and listen to music.
Public transportation, by it's nature, will be far less convient for the vast majority of people regardless of design.
Really? Because I find the exact opposite. I lived for years in cities that were built properly, so you could walk to nearby services and use public transport for the rest. It was efficient, easy, and stress free. Now I have to drive everywhere - even to the convenience store. It's stressful, inefficient, and expensive.
Your arguments about buses are laughable incidentally and suggest to me you've never ridden on one. Not a single one of those statements is true for a city not designed to force car travel. It's cheaper (usually under a dollar per journey, as opposed to at least a dollar, usually more, on gas, maintenance, and vehicle amortation), the temperature is normally consistant, the lack of stress and the fact there are short distances available to be walked leaves you healthier, you generally can read except in exceptional circumstances (which you can't driving!) and the fuel efficiency of moving multiple passengers in an urbanized city is infinitely better than a suburbanized city full of priuses - think about it, a full size bus generally has a gas miliage of around 10-15mpg. That means it just needs four passengers to beat a hybrid car. And that's ignoring busses that use natural gas or other fuel sources.
" you just have to look at the number of Slashdotters who are literally scared of the idea of living next to a black person to get some idea of how bad the situation is."
who? who is afraid of that?
Stop making shit up. scared to sit next to a black person. Sheeesh.
I suggest you read Slashdot. I recently suggested, after reading a thread of utter racist filth that I was beginning to change my mind on "quotas" and suggested it might be time to require communities have a minimum of some tiny percentage of ethnic minorities. I was flamed to hell and back, not just from the "libertarians" who object to anything, but from people who really, really, really, didn't want black people in their neighborhoods.
I'm tired of this racism shit to be honest. I emigrated to the US about twelve years ago, and it's the only thing that really bothers me about this otherwise wonderful country. That and our ability to elect the worst politicians in the world.
ow fast can determined thieves get to the GPS (or the communications device), disable it, hook up a tow truck and get away?
That's a little like saying "It'd be easy to steal these secret documents from this locked room. All you have to do is set fire to the building and then suck the ash under the door."
People who steal things, with few exceptions, do so because the things they steal have value after they've been stolen. Turning a motor vehicle into a brick kinda causes it to lose 99% of its value. At that point, you're left with something no more valuable than a totalled regular car, so why waste time trying to steal the high tech supercar when you can just sneak into a scrap metal dealer at night?
Utterly incompetent planning policies that have resulted in an overly spread out suburban layout in most "cities" with zoning making mixed development (ie supermarkets near the people they serve) all but impossible. The result of this is that profitable public transport is pretty close to impossible in most of the US. And even unprofitable public transport would have problems related to adding absurd amounts of time to already long journeys. Zoning reforms aren't even being considered, and if they were, it would take decades before they made a difference.
Social reasons: huge numbers of people, especially the suburban white middle class, have convinced themselves that mingling with strangers of all races and classes is somehow dangerous and scary. They will not get in a bus, period. I don't really understand it, but you just have to look at the number of Slashdotters who are literally scared of the idea of living next to a black person to get some idea of how bad the situation is.
If I had a billion dollars, I'd waste it on building a good public transport system. Yes, I said waste it. It's something I want to exist, and I want someone to give it a try, but I'm all too aware how difficult it would be to get such a thing to succeed.
I'm sorry, I don't understand. A regular car is usually worth tens of thousands of dollars too, and it's usable even by someone who doesn't own it with a minor modification to keyhole.
Yes, there's a lot of electronics in a self driving car, but the majority of those electronics are going to be useless outside of the context of... that car or a car like it.
Actually, I suspect it'll be more difficult to steal one of these things in practice. This is a car that drives itself. It needs access to GPS and up to date databases on traffic patterns to work properly. That means it'll be calling home on a regular basis, possibly even all the time, and giving away its location. Steal it, and you're guaranteed to be caught, convicted, and serving time.
Your conclusion would look very different if you included the last three versions of Windows NT Workstation (XP, Vista, and 7), as you did Mac OS X.
Indeed, if you go back to the first release of a "completed" version of Mac OS X, 10.0, that was released in 2001, with 10.1 following a few months later. Jaguar and Panther were 2002 and 2003 respectively, Tiger 2005, Leopard 2007, Snow Leopard 2009, and Lion in 2011. With the exception of 10.0 to 10.1, all of these were paid upgrades, so taking that into account and counting them as a single product, I'd say, since 2001, Apple has released seven versions of Mac OS X.
During that time, Microsoft has released three versions of Windows NT Workstation: XP, Vista, and 7.
I mention this not to be pedantic, but to explain a little one of the reasons why I decided to get away from Apple and Mac OS X despite liking the environment a lot. A situation where, just to run a recent app, I'd have to pay Apple not just to upgrade my operating system, but in my case, upgrade my hardware too - none of my Macs were post-Panther compatible, and more fool I if I'd bought a Mac then that was - was just plain ridiculous.
I didn't switch to Windows, though had I done it would have at least solved the hardware issue. I switched to Ubuntu.
You wouldn't use the channel switcher for that, you'd use the menu. Here's why:
I'm basing this on personal observation and there are two things to note. The first is that ATSC, when I use it, has a friggin' dash in the channel, and channel/subchannel numbers that are variable length, so if you're just using the antenna, where there are few enough channels to easily remember the numbers, you're having to type in a fairly convoluted channel number.
We have satellite at home, Dish Network. When we change channels we almost never use either up/down or the number pad. We hit "Guide", and find the channel we want. My wife has memorized, I think, three or so channel numbers, and I have a few too, but then again, the whole "Variable length number" thing becomes a problem.
It would be a huge improvement if I could hit "Menu", see a guide occupying most of the screen with maybe tabs at the top letting me go to other sources of video, and then select the channel from the guide.
One thing I can think of is that it might be worth while sticking an e-Ink touchscreen on the remote that you can bookmark channels on, so the ten or so channels people actually watch regularly are right there. I'd rather have that than a number pad.
I see what you mean about "User menu". For an alternative, try the repos described here: http://www.webupd8.org/2011/11/indicator-applet-ported-to-gnome-3-can.html - basically there's a combined indicator app that includes the user menu. You may not like it because it's a combined thing (ie includes indicators), I don't know, but it looks a whole lot better. It includes an indicator strip.
I'm not having a problem with workspace switcher. You may find the problem is with your theme because the switcher is using the current theme's highlight colors, albeit in an opposite form (background of switcher and of non-current workspaces is highlight color, for some reason, while background of current workspace is regular background workspace.) On my screen the highlight color is close enough to the regular background color with the current theme that it's somewhat subtle.
Hopefully the ported indicator applet will fix things for you. What annoys me is that Canonical doesn't include this in the main repository.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, listen. Turn off the TV, Fox News is not a good source of information about what's going on in the world. Also close your web browser. Now, get up, and head down to any store that sells lightbulbs.
Now, go to the manager and tell them you heard on HotAir.com, Fox News, and GlobalWarmingIsaRidiculousLiberalMyth-AndSoIsLungCancer-AndEverythingElseScientistsClaimIsToo.com that the manager is breaking the law because of the large number of incandescents on the shelves.
After he laughs at you, call the EPA.
After they laugh at you, call Fox News and demand they tell a story about how the government is refusing to enforce a law that exists in the imagination of every conservative in the country.
If you've even watched a single episode of Columbo, you'll know that's not even close to true. The damning speeding camera photo, mistakenly produced as an alibi, always ends up damning the murderer's chances of getting away with it!
This is why we're naming our first child "Google."
Google McDonalds. No risk of trademark violation there.
Nope, nobody threatened to sue anyone. But the Mozilla foundation was persuaded to change the name to avoid stepping on people's toes and to make things easier for users (do you really want to Google "Phoenix cache crashing problem" and get search results both for the BIOS-embedded browser and the browser now known as Firefox?)
I hate the way the USA posts Goat.cx links to Slashdot all the time.
I completely agree. They only have the marketshare they do because of the popularity of MS DOS, but with Digital Research and Apple so ahead of them with GEM and Mac OS, and their attempts at a GUI, thus far (Windows 1.0) being less than successful, how can they possibly survive into the nineties?
To be honest, I think you're setting your sights higher than they need to be.
Amazon has an Android app store. It's bundled with several phones. It's bundled with the best selling non-iTablet tablet, to the exclusion of Google's. It's installable on virtually every Android device, including the SDK VMs.
Developers aren't going to drop Android, and they're not going to boycott the Android Market because of this. But they can, and probably will, make their apps available across multiple stores, and will price according to their costs.
And personally, I don't see a problem with that. In fact, I don't see a problem with what Google is doing, precisely because Android hasn't been a one-market shop now for a year or more. Google's move will make in-app purchases simpler - if you were able to download/buy the app in the first place, you can, without further registration, buy stuff in the app too.
Good. That's how it should be. And Amazon, Applib, etc, will keep Google honest.
The software for a Netbook might not be "tailored for the device" but the vast majority of applications have no problems on a Netbook's CPU, RAM, and 1024x600 screen. And they're "tailored for the device" in that they can rely upon, and see, a keyboard, mouse, and monitor, running in a relatively free eco-system where they can include any functionality a user might possibly want.
The result is that the software for Netbooks is actually functional, and you can get real work done on them in isolation, without needing the support of servers, and without struggling to get by without a decent input system.
Tablets might get there one day, but let's be honest: today, they suck. Even Android tablets, which at least have the free eco-system, but still contain crude, limited, hardware when it comes to getting work done.
Even on open platforms, tablet app creators are going to have problems creating software that's as functional as PC software until tablets come with keyboards and accurate pointing systems. And, let's be honest, if that happens, they're not going to be tablets any more.
Not in my experience they don't! The few people I know with tablets rarely take them anywhere, unless they plan to be in one location for a very long time.
Example: I see people with 10" tablets on their desks at my office. I don't see them take them to meetings, the bathroom, and only occasionally do I see them taken for lunch.
10" tablets just aren't portable. Not in the same sense a 7" is.
A sheet of (letter or A4 - I assume you meant one of those) is just too large. Remember nobody carries around a sheet of paper unless it's folded or for a very brief moment.
If the entire point of a tablet is to be right there when you need it, it has to be a device that, ideally, can fit in a large pocket, or otherwise not require effort on your part to move around. This is why I think the iPad is a bad design, why thus far it seems to be infamous as the device you buy someone who claims to love it but that ends up in a drawer.
I'd like the screen enlarged by reducing the bezel on the Fire. But I wouldn't want to see the Fire actually increase, physically, in size. I can honestly say if someone swapped mine for such a device, I'd stop using it, it'd get less use (and that's saying something) than my 10" Honeycomb tablet.
"Nobody goes there any more, it's too crowded."
Yeah, but it requires the GTalk plug-in. I'd rather it was in Flash, to be honest, it's one thing to "not use Flash, use open standards", it's another to "Not use Flash, use another even more proprietary plug-in".
It's PEANUT BUTTER JELLY TIME! Peanut butter jelly time! Peanut butter with a jelly on top!
The Lenovo K1 has a hardware "lock" slider button on one side. Have to admit I find it useless - not because I don't want it to work, I do, but because most apps just ignore it, which means switching it on actually makes the tablet less pleasant and consistant to work with, not more.
There are more modern alternatives. I'm wondering what about his application absolutely has to run on a desktop PC and whether it can be safely assumed the user is connected to the Internet via a high enough bandwidth link.
Shoving some of the functionality into a high powered server farm and moving to a subscription model may have advantages for both users and his company. Piracy would practically cease. Updating core algorithms would be easier. And at the same time, a centralized, shared, processing plant would reduce the hardware requirements on the user's side (not to mention make it easier for the vendor to provide different UIs in future. The vendor could even open source the UI and let users create their own.)
Obviously this only works for some applications, and the fact that this has something to do with video processing doesn't leave me with a lot of hope, but it ought to be on the list of alternatives. Done properly, it's a win-win situation for both sides.
Wow, someone's a little in love with their $600 portable porn and games machine.
I agree with the GP BTW. A device that doesn't have a keyboard and whose UI is anti-keyboard is not the right tool for something that requires a lot of word entry. Which most office jobs do, even if it's just email.
I practically forced myself for two months to use two different tablets, being a professional in the computer field and all, and I can honestly say that anyone who argues tablets are professional tools right now is an idiot. I can see practical uses for them in a professional sphere - medical professionals would find them great as replacements for those awkward PCs in their patient examination rooms right now, for example, if the software were available, but, well there's the joke, it isn't. And they're optimal at virtually nothing else.
Even the stuff you think they'd be great at you realize you need accessories to make work properly. I have Photoshop on my larger tablet, for example. Do I use it? Fuck no. GIMP on my Ubuntu laptop with a mouse is a more usable application. Why? It isn't because GIMP is better software, or has a better UI, it's because drawing/pointing/etc with a finger really isn't sane.
What, ultimately, am I using my tablets for? Well, the Kindle Fire is my little games console and music player. And the 10.1 Honeycomb Android tablet? I dust it off periodically, test the occasional website to make sure it looks OK, and leave it where it is. It's the same size as a Netbook, but nothing like as functional. Why is it the future again?
I'm glad you're willing to torture yourself to prove that somehow you can get real work done on a tablet and that therefore anyone who says they're not good at doing real work (note the distinction) is "arrogant". You can do that, and encourage the manufacturers to figure out how to make it work knowing there's a market out there that'll buy anything anyway. The rest of us will wait until a decent laptop/netbook replacement comes about. We'll continue to be "arrogant" by using the right tools for the job, and using our tablets to play Plants vs Zombies and listen to music.
Really? Because I find the exact opposite. I lived for years in cities that were built properly, so you could walk to nearby services and use public transport for the rest. It was efficient, easy, and stress free. Now I have to drive everywhere - even to the convenience store. It's stressful, inefficient, and expensive.
Your arguments about buses are laughable incidentally and suggest to me you've never ridden on one. Not a single one of those statements is true for a city not designed to force car travel. It's cheaper (usually under a dollar per journey, as opposed to at least a dollar, usually more, on gas, maintenance, and vehicle amortation), the temperature is normally consistant, the lack of stress and the fact there are short distances available to be walked leaves you healthier, you generally can read except in exceptional circumstances (which you can't driving!) and the fuel efficiency of moving multiple passengers in an urbanized city is infinitely better than a suburbanized city full of priuses - think about it, a full size bus generally has a gas miliage of around 10-15mpg. That means it just needs four passengers to beat a hybrid car. And that's ignoring busses that use natural gas or other fuel sources.
I suggest you read Slashdot. I recently suggested, after reading a thread of utter racist filth that I was beginning to change my mind on "quotas" and suggested it might be time to require communities have a minimum of some tiny percentage of ethnic minorities. I was flamed to hell and back, not just from the "libertarians" who object to anything, but from people who really, really, really, didn't want black people in their neighborhoods.
I'm tired of this racism shit to be honest. I emigrated to the US about twelve years ago, and it's the only thing that really bothers me about this otherwise wonderful country. That and our ability to elect the worst politicians in the world.
That's a little like saying "It'd be easy to steal these secret documents from this locked room. All you have to do is set fire to the building and then suck the ash under the door."
People who steal things, with few exceptions, do so because the things they steal have value after they've been stolen. Turning a motor vehicle into a brick kinda causes it to lose 99% of its value. At that point, you're left with something no more valuable than a totalled regular car, so why waste time trying to steal the high tech supercar when you can just sneak into a scrap metal dealer at night?
A number of reasons.
If I had a billion dollars, I'd waste it on building a good public transport system. Yes, I said waste it. It's something I want to exist, and I want someone to give it a try, but I'm all too aware how difficult it would be to get such a thing to succeed.
I'm sorry, I don't understand. A regular car is usually worth tens of thousands of dollars too, and it's usable even by someone who doesn't own it with a minor modification to keyhole.
Yes, there's a lot of electronics in a self driving car, but the majority of those electronics are going to be useless outside of the context of... that car or a car like it.
Actually, I suspect it'll be more difficult to steal one of these things in practice. This is a car that drives itself. It needs access to GPS and up to date databases on traffic patterns to work properly. That means it'll be calling home on a regular basis, possibly even all the time, and giving away its location. Steal it, and you're guaranteed to be caught, convicted, and serving time.
Your conclusion would look very different if you included the last three versions of Windows NT Workstation (XP, Vista, and 7), as you did Mac OS X.
Indeed, if you go back to the first release of a "completed" version of Mac OS X, 10.0, that was released in 2001, with 10.1 following a few months later. Jaguar and Panther were 2002 and 2003 respectively, Tiger 2005, Leopard 2007, Snow Leopard 2009, and Lion in 2011. With the exception of 10.0 to 10.1, all of these were paid upgrades, so taking that into account and counting them as a single product, I'd say, since 2001, Apple has released seven versions of Mac OS X.
During that time, Microsoft has released three versions of Windows NT Workstation: XP, Vista, and 7.
I mention this not to be pedantic, but to explain a little one of the reasons why I decided to get away from Apple and Mac OS X despite liking the environment a lot. A situation where, just to run a recent app, I'd have to pay Apple not just to upgrade my operating system, but in my case, upgrade my hardware too - none of my Macs were post-Panther compatible, and more fool I if I'd bought a Mac then that was - was just plain ridiculous.
I didn't switch to Windows, though had I done it would have at least solved the hardware issue. I switched to Ubuntu.
You wouldn't use the channel switcher for that, you'd use the menu. Here's why:
I'm basing this on personal observation and there are two things to note. The first is that ATSC, when I use it, has a friggin' dash in the channel, and channel/subchannel numbers that are variable length, so if you're just using the antenna, where there are few enough channels to easily remember the numbers, you're having to type in a fairly convoluted channel number.
We have satellite at home, Dish Network. When we change channels we almost never use either up/down or the number pad. We hit "Guide", and find the channel we want. My wife has memorized, I think, three or so channel numbers, and I have a few too, but then again, the whole "Variable length number" thing becomes a problem.
It would be a huge improvement if I could hit "Menu", see a guide occupying most of the screen with maybe tabs at the top letting me go to other sources of video, and then select the channel from the guide.
One thing I can think of is that it might be worth while sticking an e-Ink touchscreen on the remote that you can bookmark channels on, so the ten or so channels people actually watch regularly are right there. I'd rather have that than a number pad.
Like I said, set up would be done on the TV itself. The remote would be for watching TV, not for configuring it.
I see what you mean about "User menu". For an alternative, try the repos described here: http://www.webupd8.org/2011/11/indicator-applet-ported-to-gnome-3-can.html - basically there's a combined indicator app that includes the user menu. You may not like it because it's a combined thing (ie includes indicators), I don't know, but it looks a whole lot better. It includes an indicator strip.
I'm not having a problem with workspace switcher. You may find the problem is with your theme because the switcher is using the current theme's highlight colors, albeit in an opposite form (background of switcher and of non-current workspaces is highlight color, for some reason, while background of current workspace is regular background workspace.) On my screen the highlight color is close enough to the regular background color with the current theme that it's somewhat subtle.
Hopefully the ported indicator applet will fix things for you. What annoys me is that Canonical doesn't include this in the main repository.
LDAP is a directory service, not a contacts storage system. Think "phone book" vs "little black book."