I never thought twice about the desktop until I upgraded recently. It "just worked".
Gnome3 is an insult. It's almost totally useless. Half of the basic functions I require to do my daily work aren't even available at gunpoint.
Cinnamon was better, but the whole screen freezes except for the mouse pointer and the only cure is to kill the desktop and all apps running in it.
XFCE was closer to Gnome 2 and the screen doesn't lock. But it randomly resets the accessibility and power settings so that on the one hand, hibernation doesn't work and on the other, the keyboard effectively quits working right in the middle of typing things.
I haven't even tried KDE. I didn't like KDE all that much before everyone hated it.
HOW can we have so many desktop choices and all of them be BAD???
Linux users would be given the address of a home depot, a list of vacant lot sites, and a "makefile" for building a hotel. Unfortunately, there would be library dependencies with links to unmaintained building codes.
Only the gentoo users.
The rest of us will settle for Motel 6 and the Yellow Pages. Bookmarked at "Pizza Delivery".
How do I prove that I'm a U.S. citizen with only an out-of-state drivers' license? Bring a copy of my birth certificate? Or maybe being white non-hispanic will be a sufficient proof of my citizenship?
One of the very best ways to obtain a good image is to provide what your customers actually need.
True, but what percent of their customers need a fully functioning Linux driver? I'm betting it's less than 1%.
I think it's an advertising adage that one dissatisfied customer has the leverage of 10 satisfied ones when it comes to spreading the word. And that's assuming that the dissatisfied customer is just an ordinary person. Piss off people who make decisions or who have influence (like Linus), and the damage can become far greater.
I'd also very much doubt that the number of people who at least think they need a fully functioning Linux driver is anywhere near that low these days.
In the sense that an engineer is actually someone that designs, builds or maintains engines, machines, or public works, i.e. works with physical things
While I can sympathize with your point of view, I don't think that I'd consider myself an engineer just because I worked with the physical objects. The actual physical objects are dealt with by the construction workers. The engineer does the "skull work", and that is most definitely intangible, whether the end results involve concrete and rebar or a Java finite-state machine in RAM.
Maybe "software engineers" need a word of their own, but until someone invents one that people will adopt, "software engineer" is about as descriptive as we have. Someone who works using a set of standard rules and equations against a set of materials - albeit more malleable and intangible than in "proper" engineering disciplines - with the end result of producing a functional and reliable result.
Console yourself in this, however. There are mechanical engineers, civil engineers and - if you like - software engineers. But my brother the architect is going crazy because "software architect" has become the euphemism for "person whole bundles up stuff to send to offshore programmers" and its making it hell for him to read the want ads, since he's just a plain "architect" and that isn't enough fuel for the search engines.
It's almost an irrelevant question as the real reasoning behind it means that a CEO can put more money in his/her pocket. The entire decision process is about how much money they can get their fat greedy paws on RIGHT NOW. The fact that it could all fall down tomorrow doesn't come into the equation. This is yet another corporate culture problem.
I won't dispute that. But it's not the only factor involved, and it's as much a symptom as it is a disease.
Throughout the 20th Century the emphasis was on efficiency. First we replaced individual start-to-finish craftsmen with stations on an assembly line. Then we focussed on Economies of Scale, amagamating and merging. Then we added automation. Then went back and replaced people on the assembly line with robots. Finally, we wrapped up the century by developing an ever-expanding suite of business analytics tools. It wasn't quite as tidy and sequential as this, of course, but that was the general trend.
The end results were very efficient indeed. Instead of many factories and offices clanking and banging along, you end up with a few hyper-efficient factories and offices, all running at high speed and in precise tune. Leaving lots of profits for the executives and shareholders and Lower Prices Everyday for customers.
Until they don't.
The downside of efficiency is that it has no "wiggle room". The only direction you can go is down, and the more finely-tuned your processes are, the bigger the chance that a relatively small kink in the tracks can derail the whole high-speed train.
Floods are bad enough, but they're only one possibility. If you concentrate your resources enough, even a really low-probability limited-scope event like a chunk of space debris coming through the roof can have a major impact. No pun intended.
"You seem to care more about NVIDIA's image than about what the Linux community actually needs."
Of course they do. Why in the world would this surprise you? It's a public, for-profit company. The vast majority of contributions to open source by companies are not done out of altruism. They're done out of self-interest.
"I truly don't understand what the big deal is. Just open up your damn specifications already."
There's probably something in how they do things that they think (rightly or wrongly) that gives them an advantage over their competition that either isn't patented or can't be patented (or maybe violates someone else's patents).
One of the very best ways to obtain a good image is to provide what your customers actually need. Or at least what they think they need. And in the long run, it's usually going to be a darn sight cheaper than spending a lot of money on PR types to repair damage that never should have happened to begin with.
Especially when it degenerates to the point where one of the most respected software developers in the world is publicly photographed aiming a rude gesture at you.
The current NVIDIA driver generates all sorts of annoying artifacts on my screen when ordinary web pages scroll. The only reason that I even buy NVIDIA hardware is that their competition is even less supportive. But the lesser of two evils is still evil, and I'd pay good money for something that wasn't evil.
I didn't know Transparency was a "tenant" of the Free Market. I do hope he (she?) pays the rent on time.
Then again, I don't know how transparency is supposed to apply here anyway. There's no "free market" in credit reporting, just a triumvirate, which has itself in a win-win-win situation. They're not competing on price, as far as I know, which would be the only place where transparency would be a market factor, since they're all selling basically the same commodity and not uncommonly all 3 to the same customers.
On the other hand, having transparency on how they operate is a big benefit, "Free Market" or not. Considering that up to now, they've had free rein (sic) to bad-mouth people indelibly, it's only appropriate that the favor be returnable. Even their customers benefit, since they can see both sides of the argument for a change.
Several years ago I had a Windows CE V5 phone that was actually pretty good for a lot of stuff. It had WiFi, extensive IR and Bluetooth support as well as a Grafitti-style stylus interface that I could use faster than a keyboard.
For extended text sessions I had a Bluetooth keyboard that collapsed into a 4x4x1 inch package and ran 8 hours on a AAA battery.
Although my job requires more power than the phone could supply, if I was a writer or other less-greedy person, adding a projector to that would have made a wonderfully light travel PC - especially since I make minimal use of pointing devices when doing word processing.
Obviously you don't want to juggle a setup like that on a plane or in an airport, but in a hotel room or small office, it would have been quite nice.
I still have it actually. The telephone radio died, but the WiFi and other data channels work fine.
A famous man once said, give a man a fish, he eats today and owes you a fish forever. But teach a man to fish, and he'll be competing with you for fish tomorrow.
Actually, what the proponent of this adage really meant was "teach a man to fish, then for the rest of his life he'll have to pay through the nose to rent tackle, boat and launch privileges from you because you own the only bait shop and dock because the only body of water around is your private lake, you bastard!
Those jobs aren't going away based on this legislation, since this legislation merely privatizes them. The "need" for those jobs won't be going away because of this.
That's true.
Of course, the American Way is to "rightsize" workforce, so the actual number of people filling that "need" will be much smaller.
And, of course, we'll outsource them. Say, to Pakistan.
Which begs the question why was the world's largest and wealthiest software company not able to do a "really good work" with previous versions? They didn't know how? Couldn't be bothered? Enjoy causing mischief?
Because they defined "good work" as "locks everyone into a Windows-only monoculture".
So? Did you really think that working "best" is really what matters? In the bean-counter universe, quantity rates over quality - frighten someone into working 10-hour days plus weekends and it's more "productive" than whether or not the time is employed in a worthwhile manner. To a bean counter, anything that doesn't look like a bean doesn't exist.
And the #1 way to scare employees is to point out that, pro or no pro, there are plenty of people in a Third-World country who will be happy to do the work for a fraction of what you can afford to do it for. Having a horde of unemployed people closer to home looking for jobs doesn't help either.
What counts isn't "your price", it's "your worth". And you don't define worth, the employer does. The trend for the last 20-30 years has been to devaluate the worth of line-level employees while simultaeously inflating the worth of the top-tier executives.
Astronaut. Must have experience with moon landing.
early programmers couldn't earn a college degree in something that hadn't been created yet.
And yet, recruiters would still think so.
Wrong:
Astronaut. Must have 5 years experience moon landings with LM Model 35 Rev.7 Rocket engine repair experience preferred. Must be able to prep launch gantries, maintain ground-tracking antennas, and operate crawler-transporter units.
That (briefly) is how a corporate HR position advertisement reads.
Relevance to this story? This is a clear case of a website stealing an artist's work. The artist has the privilege granted by the Constitution to demand his work either be removed, or paid for. To imply the artist does not have the right to hire a lawyer to protect his due income for labor performed, places you on the wrong side of the argument.
Actually, I think the Constitution only sets up the framework, with the specific privileges being added later. And the specific abuses even later. But that's just legal nitpicking.
If I ran FJ, and a situation like this had developed where someone's website was effectively being mirrored in its entirety and its author contacted me, I'd seriously consider making it an official mirror, put in a little Oatmeal advertising, and pay Matthew royalties. Everybody happy.
Lawyers are the last (first?) refuge of the incompetent (with apologies to Asimov).
You know they could be bringing these people in because all the decent, diligent, intelligent and reliable local workers have jobs already and those without jobs are crap at what they do. Or am I mistaken and actually all Americans, even the thick and stupid ones, are better workers than highly-educated and motivated people from countries like India or from within the EU?
Just a thought.
The problem here is that H1-B workers are not all superstars. Our local corporations are full of mediocre-to-poor H1-B people. Of course, they're also full of mediocre-to-poor natives, as well, but the difference is that we didn't come up with special regulations to import them. Or pay them reduced salaries off the bat.
If H1-B really did what it claimed to do, the average H1-B worker wouldn't be collecting 60% of what the same American worker was being paid, they'd be receiving more like 120%. Supply and demand does, after all, state that people will pay a premium for something if it's truly a scarce commodity.
I can agree to a point. I certainly know people/places that just throw money at a problem. And I know that when systems and down and the customer is starting to panic, that I've come up with some interesting and very good solutions. However there are problems with always trying to solve solutions with 'hacks'. They become unsupportable, they fail in unexpected ways, and they make it harder for you to get a budget to do things you simply can't/shouldn't hack a solution together for. 'What, why do we need a SAN? Remember how you wired those netbooks together for our web farm! Figure something out for us. KTHXBYE.'
But I do agree you need someone who can think creatively and not be locked into marketing speak anytime a problem comes up.
I've seen very large software efforts fail because they were engineered to use state-of-the-art buzzword tools and methodologies and got so lost in the design that nothing ever got produced.
I've seen systems that were hacked out (as in with a machete) over a bleary drunken weekend become production mainstays.
However, the hacked-out systems cost a small fortune in ongoing tweaks, patches, and repairs. So eventually management decides to replace them with "properly" done systems created using the latest state-of-the-art buzzword tools and methodologies. Except that the replacement never gets into production, or works so horribly that it gets pulled and the hacked-out version takes over again.
IT will never be mature until we can come up with a decent alternative.
My reason is simple. I just don't care anymore. Whatever the Distribution gives me by default, ill go ahead and use. Just as long as I can put an icon for my terminal I am good.
That was pretty much me. But the latest Gnome is so very, VERY awful that I just switched to Cinnamon. I've heard that the new Gnome Desktop was designed with tablets in mind, but I have my doubts - even on my tablet, the multiple levels of indirection to do common things appears awkward. Besides, I have a LINUX DESKTOP, dammit!
If Gnome originally was a slavish attempt to re-create Microsoft Windows - "registry" and all - the latest attempt appears to be a slavish attempt to re-create the Macintosh environment. I feel like I've been crammed into a bottle. All of the productivity applets and monitors that lurked in the corners are gone. GUI command buttons that had alternative icons and/or command parameters are gone. The desktop cluttered with icons is gone (at least I got that one back). And then, just to kick me when I'm down, every time I shoot up to the menu-bar of my maximize app the whole freaking window gets reduced to an alternate view and I lost the input focus. Do they even support mice with more than one button now?
I'm not 100% negative. I do think that they did a much tidier job on preferences. But it's not a fair trade for all they took from me.
So why am I not using KDE? For the most trivial reasons. The last time or 6 I worked with KDE, the default was those bloody bouncing icons that give me motion sickness. For out-of-the-box, Gnome was less annoying to me. Now that Gnome has become seriously annoying itself, I'd consider KDE, except that the current KDE controversy sounds just as bad as the current Gnome controversy.
According to Bradbury it wasn't about censorship. According to everybody else and their mother it WAS about censorship. So clearly the takeaway is that Bradbury sucks at getting his point across.
I wonder myself. When I read it originally, I, too thought it was about censorship. Then again, we lived in fear of "1984" and "Big Brother" getting on TV and telling us how to think and police states where our movements were under constant surveillance.
I re-read Fahrenheit 451 recently and realized that I'd read it all wrong. It's a frighteningly accurate portrayal of a society that had become so addicted to superficial entertainments that they considered people whose idea of a good time as a quiet night reading as being in immediate need of commitment to a mental institution, leaving the books behind as basically hazardous waste to be disposed of. The "censorship" side comes in because the mere idea of wanting to own or read a book indicated infection with this mental illness.
In a way, it mirrors the short story "The Veldt", where people wrap themselves in video-walled cocoons with a good side order of Bradbury's favorite hobby-horse that sometimes it's better to be crazy and creative than sane and dull. His writings contain a real hatred of psychiatric pharmaceuticals. Which at the time were extremely crude, but even so...
Darwin's "Law" is not an iron mold into which species are poured - it's closer to a statistical predictor. It works on species, not on individuals, and for Chthulhu's sake it does not dictate that only the nastiest, most vicious, well-armoured creatures will succeed, political/economic pundits notwithstanding. Otherwise, we wouldn't have bunny rabbits and butterflies.
Actually, in the case of the bat, I'd be concerned that it had rabies. Unless they'd bounced off some other part of your vehicle (or some other vehicle) first, I cannot believe that they hadn't figured out how to have sex as a flying species. The more closely mutations relate to reproduction, the more likely they are to propagate.
Slashdot Mirror
I never thought twice about the desktop until I upgraded recently. It "just worked".
Gnome3 is an insult. It's almost totally useless. Half of the basic functions I require to do my daily work aren't even available at gunpoint.
Cinnamon was better, but the whole screen freezes except for the mouse pointer and the only cure is to kill the desktop and all apps running in it.
XFCE was closer to Gnome 2 and the screen doesn't lock. But it randomly resets the accessibility and power settings so that on the one hand, hibernation doesn't work and on the other, the keyboard effectively quits working right in the middle of typing things.
I haven't even tried KDE. I didn't like KDE all that much before everyone hated it.
HOW can we have so many desktop choices and all of them be BAD???
Linux users would be given the address of a home depot, a list of vacant lot sites, and a "makefile" for building a hotel. Unfortunately, there would be library dependencies with links to unmaintained building codes.
Only the gentoo users.
The rest of us will settle for Motel 6 and the Yellow Pages. Bookmarked at "Pizza Delivery".
How do I prove that I'm a U.S. citizen with only an out-of-state drivers' license? Bring a copy of my birth certificate? Or maybe being white non-hispanic will be a sufficient proof of my citizenship?
It has to be a "long-form" birth certificate.
We're talking about Arizona, remember.
It would take five minutes for an upset parent or a lawyer to show up.
Yes, but these days they'd have to wait. Homeland Security would be there first.
And as a parent, I can tell you I'd need a high level of trust in the instructor before I let them take my kids alone into the woods.
You mean like the parents of State College, PA? But that's nothing new. Ask Holden Caulfield.
One of the very best ways to obtain a good image is to provide what your customers actually need.
True, but what percent of their customers need a fully functioning Linux driver? I'm betting it's less than 1%.
I think it's an advertising adage that one dissatisfied customer has the leverage of 10 satisfied ones when it comes to spreading the word. And that's assuming that the dissatisfied customer is just an ordinary person. Piss off people who make decisions or who have influence (like Linus), and the damage can become far greater.
I'd also very much doubt that the number of people who at least think they need a fully functioning Linux driver is anywhere near that low these days.
In the sense that an engineer is actually someone that designs, builds or maintains engines, machines, or public works, i.e. works with physical things
While I can sympathize with your point of view, I don't think that I'd consider myself an engineer just because I worked with the physical objects. The actual physical objects are dealt with by the construction workers. The engineer does the "skull work", and that is most definitely intangible, whether the end results involve concrete and rebar or a Java finite-state machine in RAM.
Maybe "software engineers" need a word of their own, but until someone invents one that people will adopt, "software engineer" is about as descriptive as we have. Someone who works using a set of standard rules and equations against a set of materials - albeit more malleable and intangible than in "proper" engineering disciplines - with the end result of producing a functional and reliable result.
Console yourself in this, however. There are mechanical engineers, civil engineers and - if you like - software engineers. But my brother the architect is going crazy because "software architect" has become the euphemism for "person whole bundles up stuff to send to offshore programmers" and its making it hell for him to read the want ads, since he's just a plain "architect" and that isn't enough fuel for the search engines.
It's almost an irrelevant question as the real reasoning behind it means that a CEO can put more money in his/her pocket. The entire decision process is about how much money they can get their fat greedy paws on RIGHT NOW. The fact that it could all fall down tomorrow doesn't come into the equation. This is yet another corporate culture problem.
I won't dispute that. But it's not the only factor involved, and it's as much a symptom as it is a disease.
Throughout the 20th Century the emphasis was on efficiency. First we replaced individual start-to-finish craftsmen with stations on an assembly line. Then we focussed on Economies of Scale, amagamating and merging. Then we added automation. Then went back and replaced people on the assembly line with robots. Finally, we wrapped up the century by developing an ever-expanding suite of business analytics tools. It wasn't quite as tidy and sequential as this, of course, but that was the general trend.
The end results were very efficient indeed. Instead of many factories and offices clanking and banging along, you end up with a few hyper-efficient factories and offices, all running at high speed and in precise tune. Leaving lots of profits for the executives and shareholders and Lower Prices Everyday for customers.
Until they don't.
The downside of efficiency is that it has no "wiggle room". The only direction you can go is down, and the more finely-tuned your processes are, the bigger the chance that a relatively small kink in the tracks can derail the whole high-speed train.
Floods are bad enough, but they're only one possibility. If you concentrate your resources enough, even a really low-probability limited-scope event like a chunk of space debris coming through the roof can have a major impact. No pun intended.
Sometimes being too efficient isn't so good.
"You seem to care more about NVIDIA's image than about what the Linux community actually needs."
Of course they do. Why in the world would this surprise you? It's a public, for-profit company. The vast majority of contributions to open source by companies are not done out of altruism. They're done out of self-interest.
"I truly don't understand what the big deal is. Just open up your damn specifications already."
There's probably something in how they do things that they think (rightly or wrongly) that gives them an advantage over their competition that either isn't patented or can't be patented (or maybe violates someone else's patents).
One of the very best ways to obtain a good image is to provide what your customers actually need. Or at least what they think they need. And in the long run, it's usually going to be a darn sight cheaper than spending a lot of money on PR types to repair damage that never should have happened to begin with.
Especially when it degenerates to the point where one of the most respected software developers in the world is publicly photographed aiming a rude gesture at you.
The current NVIDIA driver generates all sorts of annoying artifacts on my screen when ordinary web pages scroll. The only reason that I even buy NVIDIA hardware is that their competition is even less supportive. But the lesser of two evils is still evil, and I'd pay good money for something that wasn't evil.
It was bad enough being forced into logging out and back in again because the desktop couldn't gracefully handle updates.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/tenet?s=t
... Except for the color Nook tablets, curse them!
I didn't know Transparency was a "tenant" of the Free Market. I do hope he (she?) pays the rent on time.
Then again, I don't know how transparency is supposed to apply here anyway. There's no "free market" in credit reporting, just a triumvirate, which has itself in a win-win-win situation. They're not competing on price, as far as I know, which would be the only place where transparency would be a market factor, since they're all selling basically the same commodity and not uncommonly all 3 to the same customers.
On the other hand, having transparency on how they operate is a big benefit, "Free Market" or not. Considering that up to now, they've had free rein (sic) to bad-mouth people indelibly, it's only appropriate that the favor be returnable. Even their customers benefit, since they can see both sides of the argument for a change.
Several years ago I had a Windows CE V5 phone that was actually pretty good for a lot of stuff. It had WiFi, extensive IR and Bluetooth support as well as a Grafitti-style stylus interface that I could use faster than a keyboard.
For extended text sessions I had a Bluetooth keyboard that collapsed into a 4x4x1 inch package and ran 8 hours on a AAA battery.
Although my job requires more power than the phone could supply, if I was a writer or other less-greedy person, adding a projector to that would have made a wonderfully light travel PC - especially since I make minimal use of pointing devices when doing word processing.
Obviously you don't want to juggle a setup like that on a plane or in an airport, but in a hotel room or small office, it would have been quite nice.
I still have it actually. The telephone radio died, but the WiFi and other data channels work fine.
A famous man once said, give a man a fish, he eats today and owes you a fish forever. But teach a man to fish, and he'll be competing with you for fish tomorrow.
Actually, what the proponent of this adage really meant was "teach a man to fish, then for the rest of his life he'll have to pay through the nose to rent tackle, boat and launch privileges from you because you own the only bait shop and dock because the only body of water around is your private lake, you bastard!
Those jobs aren't going away based on this legislation, since this legislation merely privatizes them. The "need" for those jobs won't be going away because of this.
That's true.
Of course, the American Way is to "rightsize" workforce, so the actual number of people filling that "need" will be much smaller.
And, of course, we'll outsource them. Say, to Pakistan.
Which begs the question why was the world's largest and wealthiest software company not able to do a "really good work" with previous versions? They didn't know how? Couldn't be bothered? Enjoy causing mischief?
Because they defined "good work" as "locks everyone into a Windows-only monoculture".
scared employee cannot work at his best.
So? Did you really think that working "best" is really what matters? In the bean-counter universe, quantity rates over quality - frighten someone into working 10-hour days plus weekends and it's more "productive" than whether or not the time is employed in a worthwhile manner. To a bean counter, anything that doesn't look like a bean doesn't exist.
And the #1 way to scare employees is to point out that, pro or no pro, there are plenty of people in a Third-World country who will be happy to do the work for a fraction of what you can afford to do it for. Having a horde of unemployed people closer to home looking for jobs doesn't help either.
What counts isn't "your price", it's "your worth". And you don't define worth, the employer does. The trend for the last 20-30 years has been to devaluate the worth of line-level employees while simultaeously inflating the worth of the top-tier executives.
WANTED:
Astronaut. Must have experience with moon landing.
early programmers couldn't earn a college degree in something that hadn't been created yet.
And yet, recruiters would still think so.
Wrong:
Astronaut. Must have 5 years experience moon landings with LM Model 35 Rev.7 Rocket engine repair experience preferred. Must be able to prep launch gantries, maintain ground-tracking antennas, and operate crawler-transporter units.
That (briefly) is how a corporate HR position advertisement reads.
Relevance to this story? This is a clear case of a website stealing an artist's work. The artist has the privilege granted by the Constitution to demand his work either be removed, or paid for. To imply the artist does not have the right to hire a lawyer to protect his due income for labor performed, places you on the wrong side of the argument.
Actually, I think the Constitution only sets up the framework, with the specific privileges being added later. And the specific abuses even later. But that's just legal nitpicking.
If I ran FJ, and a situation like this had developed where someone's website was effectively being mirrored in its entirety and its author contacted me, I'd seriously consider making it an official mirror, put in a little Oatmeal advertising, and pay Matthew royalties. Everybody happy.
Lawyers are the last (first?) refuge of the incompetent (with apologies to Asimov).
You know they could be bringing these people in because all the decent, diligent, intelligent and reliable local workers have jobs already and those without jobs are crap at what they do. Or am I mistaken and actually all Americans, even the thick and stupid ones, are better workers than highly-educated and motivated people from countries like India or from within the EU?
Just a thought.
The problem here is that H1-B workers are not all superstars. Our local corporations are full of mediocre-to-poor H1-B people. Of course, they're also full of mediocre-to-poor natives, as well, but the difference is that we didn't come up with special regulations to import them. Or pay them reduced salaries off the bat.
If H1-B really did what it claimed to do, the average H1-B worker wouldn't be collecting 60% of what the same American worker was being paid, they'd be receiving more like 120%. Supply and demand does, after all, state that people will pay a premium for something if it's truly a scarce commodity.
quote>
Basically, it feels to me like the economic equivalent of the Universe's natural tendency to want to disipate any differential of anything.
So entropy is a good thing?
I can agree to a point. I certainly know people/places that just throw money at a problem. And I know that when systems and down and the customer is starting to panic, that I've come up with some interesting and very good solutions. However there are problems with always trying to solve solutions with 'hacks'. They become unsupportable, they fail in unexpected ways, and they make it harder for you to get a budget to do things you simply can't/shouldn't hack a solution together for. 'What, why do we need a SAN? Remember how you wired those netbooks together for our web farm! Figure something out for us. KTHXBYE.'
But I do agree you need someone who can think creatively and not be locked into marketing speak anytime a problem comes up.
I've seen very large software efforts fail because they were engineered to use state-of-the-art buzzword tools and methodologies and got so lost in the design that nothing ever got produced.
I've seen systems that were hacked out (as in with a machete) over a bleary drunken weekend become production mainstays.
However, the hacked-out systems cost a small fortune in ongoing tweaks, patches, and repairs. So eventually management decides to replace them with "properly" done systems created using the latest state-of-the-art buzzword tools and methodologies. Except that the replacement never gets into production, or works so horribly that it gets pulled and the hacked-out version takes over again.
IT will never be mature until we can come up with a decent alternative.
My reason is simple. I just don't care anymore. Whatever the Distribution gives me by default, ill go ahead and use. Just as long as I can put an icon for my terminal I am good.
That was pretty much me. But the latest Gnome is so very, VERY awful that I just switched to Cinnamon. I've heard that the new Gnome Desktop was designed with tablets in mind, but I have my doubts - even on my tablet, the multiple levels of indirection to do common things appears awkward. Besides, I have a LINUX DESKTOP, dammit!
If Gnome originally was a slavish attempt to re-create Microsoft Windows - "registry" and all - the latest attempt appears to be a slavish attempt to re-create the Macintosh environment. I feel like I've been crammed into a bottle. All of the productivity applets and monitors that lurked in the corners are gone. GUI command buttons that had alternative icons and/or command parameters are gone. The desktop cluttered with icons is gone (at least I got that one back). And then, just to kick me when I'm down, every time I shoot up to the menu-bar of my maximize app the whole freaking window gets reduced to an alternate view and I lost the input focus. Do they even support mice with more than one button now?
I'm not 100% negative. I do think that they did a much tidier job on preferences. But it's not a fair trade for all they took from me.
So why am I not using KDE? For the most trivial reasons. The last time or 6 I worked with KDE, the default was those bloody bouncing icons that give me motion sickness. For out-of-the-box, Gnome was less annoying to me. Now that Gnome has become seriously annoying itself, I'd consider KDE, except that the current KDE controversy sounds just as bad as the current Gnome controversy.
According to Bradbury it wasn't about censorship. According to everybody else and their mother it WAS about censorship. So clearly the takeaway is that Bradbury sucks at getting his point across.
I wonder myself. When I read it originally, I, too thought it was about censorship. Then again, we lived in fear of "1984" and "Big Brother" getting on TV and telling us how to think and police states where our movements were under constant surveillance.
I re-read Fahrenheit 451 recently and realized that I'd read it all wrong. It's a frighteningly accurate portrayal of a society that had become so addicted to superficial entertainments that they considered people whose idea of a good time as a quiet night reading as being in immediate need of commitment to a mental institution, leaving the books behind as basically hazardous waste to be disposed of. The "censorship" side comes in because the mere idea of wanting to own or read a book indicated infection with this mental illness.
In a way, it mirrors the short story "The Veldt", where people wrap themselves in video-walled cocoons with a good side order of Bradbury's favorite hobby-horse that sometimes it's better to be crazy and creative than sane and dull. His writings contain a real hatred of psychiatric pharmaceuticals. Which at the time were extremely crude, but even so...
Darwin's "Law" is not an iron mold into which species are poured - it's closer to a statistical predictor. It works on species, not on individuals, and for Chthulhu's sake it does not dictate that only the nastiest, most vicious, well-armoured creatures will succeed, political/economic pundits notwithstanding. Otherwise, we wouldn't have bunny rabbits and butterflies.
Actually, in the case of the bat, I'd be concerned that it had rabies. Unless they'd bounced off some other part of your vehicle (or some other vehicle) first, I cannot believe that they hadn't figured out how to have sex as a flying species. The more closely mutations relate to reproduction, the more likely they are to propagate.