Yeah, it was optional. We were never really explicitly taught it, but it was there in our handwriting book as something optional for advanced writers (they were called "speed loops"). I don't explicitly use them or not use them, they just kinda turn up sometimes and not others.
I'm Australian and I've recently come to Europe. I write in something that could be called cursive (it's based on Victorian Modern Cursive, and it's often joined up just because I'm too lazy to lift the pen, but it has the aesthetics of modern print handwriting). Europeans often have trouble decyphering certain letters, like a v, which has a round bottom for me, so Europeans think it's a u. Because I always put in the down-stroke of a u (it'd be a v otherwise!), sometimes Europeans think it looks like a messy n. In these cases, I'm writing exactly how I was taught in school.[1]
Also, I have trouble with certain European letters: in particular, many Germans write a small d as a backwards b (i.e. starting from top, going down, and doing an anti-clockwise loop at the bottom). I'm bad at distinguishing left-to-right from right-to-left, so it looks identical to a b for me. (I don't know why that doesn't happen in print.) I also can never understand what counts as an "r" for some people here.
So maybe it's not such a bad thing that handwriting is becoming more print-like...
[1]: Fortunately, the English orthography is designed to assume u and v are identical and that u and n are hard to distinguish. It's why very few words end in -v (think "give", "have", which have a short vowel but a silent -e), and why lots of words have a long o that's pronounced like a short u (think "come", "love").
Have you actually used a speech-to-text system? Not one that's meant to be trained, but one that has to work for anyone speaking their own informal English in their own weird accent while drunk. You can probably do that, even while drunk yourself. People are a lot more resilient than computers. We're designed for it and trained for it for decades. Sure, there's going to be errors. But if you think a computer is going to have less errors than a person at this sort of task, you're crazy.
he has a sufficiently serious mental illness that he probably can't properly be considered responsible for his actions and certainly should have been in a mental ward rather than a jail cell.
So... if someone would rather go to jail than give his ex-wife $2.5 mil, he should be locked up in a mental ward. In that case, our friend the lawyer would still be deprived of his liberty.
Me? I'm in favor of anything that puts lawyers behind bars.
Juries are actually in much more limited use outside of the United States. In Australia, the Parliament gets to decide whether you have a right to a jury (only trials on indictment have the right, and Parliament gets to decide if a trial is on indictment). In other countries, they're only the right for specific serious offences. In yet other countries, like Germany, they're not used at all.
Completely off-topic, but why do I keep seeing these square brackets around html tags? If you know html, how on earth can so many people use the wrong kind of brackets? It's not just one person, I see it regularly here!
Atheists ask questions like "are you agnostic in the little green faries and Santa Claus too?" only because they fail to understand what they're criticising.
Firstly, some people are agnostic about the existence of even their own body. I don't fall into this category, but I think it's the logical consequence of "strong agnosticism". Of course, just because you don't know if you have a left foot (or even if "left" is a valid property) doesn't mean you aren't allowed to act as if you have a left foot.
As a logical consequence of that last sentence, I'm allowed to act as if faries don't exist, even though I'm agnostic about them. Indeed, I act as if things I know exist, don't, every single day. You do too. Maybe you have a health condition you refuse to admit, or you can tell your marriage is breaking down and you don't address it.
From another angle, there is a massive difference between God and Santa Claus, which means I can apply a low probability to Santa Claus's existence, but can't make any statement about God's. Santa Claus is meant to exist in our universe, and he's meant to do particular things e.g. fly around at night carried by reindeer pulling a sleigh giving presents to children who've been good and coal to children who've been bad, and in exchange you give him cookies and milk if your parents are American fundamentalists who've never read their bible, or cake and brandy otherwise. Yet, mum and dad always gave me presents labelled "from Santa Claus", and I never got a lump of coal no matter how bad I'd been, and mum ate the cake and drank the brandy. So it seems like probably Santa Claus doesn't exist, but maybe I just don't understand what Santa Claus is meant to be.
God, on the other hand, is not a part of the universe (as described). Logic and maths (human constructions and not things that fundamentally exist in the same way that the Earth does, regardless of us) are not necessarily meaningful outside of the universe. How can I make any conclusions, using the systems I have, about things that don't follow the rules I know? It is an abuse of logic to say "if I rule out the existence of Santa Claus based on an absence of evidence and evidence of absence, then I should logically rule out the existence of God based on those same criteria". Five minutes ago, you might have almost died a horribly bloody death, and by a miracle, you were saved: and any evidence that that horrible bloody death was about to happen could have been stricken from existence.
(I don't claim that it's not possible to know that God exists; I claim that I don't know how to. It may be possible, other people might know that God exists, and one day, I might to. However, I do think it's impossible to know that God doesn't exist; to know anything about God's existence would take a miracle, and if you can work miracles, you must be God (or using powers he's granted).)
BTW: Zeus and Thor are more like Santa Claus than the Judæo-Christian God, so I assess them in the same way
lol. Where I'm from you're only allowed to water the garden two days a week. On those days, you can only water your garden at certain times of the day. You can only spot-clean the glass on your car or to remove corrosive substances (with a bucket filled from a tap); if you want to clean anything else, you need to go to an approved car wash. Its worse in many other cities in the country. And yet, civilisation, democracy and freedom still continues.
The great thing about my philosophy is, I don't care what you think!:)
[Your sarcasm suggests you disagree with my view. You present the even more thorough and convincing rationalisation of "I can use sarcasm to make your view look bad, therefore you're wrong", so even if I did care, you don't care enough to even try to convince me, so why would I care?]
Incidentally, I think very few people will need to care less for us to have a society with a healthy degree of apathy. Those few, however, will have to care a great deal less.
Apathy makes better government than caring too much. If no-one really cares, no laws are created, enforced or obeyed and everyone just gets on with life.
When did you ever see religion go back on its core beliefs and admit that it was wrong all along?
Something big, say, "Oops, we were wrong. There is no god".
That would be equivalent to science saying "Oops, we were wrong. Falsifiability is meaningless". It does not and will not happen. However, just like science nowadays accepts that the universe was created (but didn't always, and admits it was once wrong), the Catholic Church nowadays accepts that the Earth isn't the centre of the universe (but it didn't always, and admits it was once wrong).
The Catholic Church has largely stopped making claims that can be falsified, because they are largely outside its scope. There are one or two ones left (free will, in particular) that are in theory falsifiable,[1] although science hasn't progressed yet to a point where it can. And a better Catholic theologist than myself might be able to explain free will in a way that's independent of the biochemistry of the brain.
([1]: And, in the current prevailing scientific view, theoretically false.)
Most devout "religion and science are incompatible" fundie Christians fail to understand religion or science. The same is true of "religion and science are incompatible" fundie atheist types. They have a very primitive view of the philosophy of science, and a strawman view of religion.
(And, incidentally, it's entirely possible to personally decide God exists, and realise that He is such that He would want to be worshipped in a particular way, and that He would've already come down to Earth to tell us how. Subscribing to a religion doesn't mean you're incompetent.)
You got the order wrong... Science has nothing to do with faith. It is about choosing the absence of faith. It matters not how strong your faith in an ordered universe is if there exists data that it is not so; as soon as out hypothesis is falsified, we must analyse it with a view to discarding it, no matter how much we want it to be true.
Imagine the universe is evil and knows your intent. Whenever you attempt to test anything, it will give you one set of results; when you aren't testing it, it will give you another set of results (which are similar and largely compatible, but not completely; perhaps someone really can cure leporacy just by touch). It would be impossible to disprove this hypothesis because it's impossible to replicate it. Science takes it on faith that that's not so.
Also, smart people realise science and religion are compatible because science describes one thing, and religion describes another thing. They're compatable in the same kind of way that physics and literature studies are.
(This doesn't mean all religions leave things alone that are the domain of science. It just means that it's possible, so it's posible to be both religious and scientific.)
Oh, btw, your view of science is highly idealistic. As Darwin noted, "false facts are highly injurious to the progression of science, for they often endure long". Another scientist has observed that progress in science depends on an older, indoctrinated generation dying off before "heretical" ideas assume mainstream orthodoxy. How often have we seen that -- not outside of science, but inside it?
The fact that Google will have a larger potential market than Linux currently has is a point I've accepted. When I'm doubting is that software developers will treat Google Chrome OS as anything other than a platform they need to port "good enough" software to. So by combining two (different!) markets Google and Linux could both benefit! And that Google were fools when they said their product is based on Linux if it can't run Linux software, and they're going to have to stop doing that!
It doesn't matter whose fault this is; it is unacceptable.
Why will Adobe et al fix this for Google Chrome OS, but not for Google Chrome OS (as well as Linux/X11 people)? That's my question. X11 isn't incapable of being fast and smooth, it's just that the drivers and software need to be (re)written. It's the same either way! Many people at Google run Linux and will continue to do so after Chrome OS is released, so at best it seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Google's online apps outstrip the popularity of open source linux software to such an extent that this will be a nonissue for the web-centric home users Google is targeting.
I only have internet access about three-quarters of the time I'm trying to do work (and when I have it I often achieve less work than in the quarter of the time I don't...), and surely I'm not unrepresentative. Maybe it's the fact that I try to do (uni) work on my laptop that makes me unrepresentative...
You will not be running Firefox on Chrome OS, because the Chrome Browser is the basis for the desktop environment.
I wouldn't. But there's enough people who switch to Linux and insist on using Firefox even though it sucks donkeysballs when there's browsers on Linux which don't. I'm not the Firefox-OpenOffice.org-etc type,[1] so I'm trying to judge a group I'm not: but you're probably right in that the sort of person who installs Ubuntu/has someone install Ubuntu onto their computer to make it work when Windows dies, but then assumes they will have access to the same (free) software they were running on Windows, is not the sort of person who will be buying these Google Chrome OS machines. I don't know... (and I don't plan on buying one).
[1]: I'm the has-run-Linux-for-10+-years, writes-patches-to-his-regular-software-to-make-sure-it-works-for-him type. Linux seems amazingly more popular now than it did when I started using it, so that might make me overestimate it today, but it seems like many people who choose to use Linux now don't necessarily understand the costs/benefits switching OSes have. But they do know Linux runs their software--i.e. Firefox and OpenOffice.
All file pickers are idiotic and stupid, and they all always default to the wrong folder. Gtk's has one redeeming feature not found in Windows (I'm not familiar enough with any other system's).If you already have a folder you want to go to open in another window (e.g. file manager), you can drag and drop the file/folder from there to the filepicker, and it selects that file/folder.
Since that feature's been around/I've known of it, there's no other feature I've ever wanted in a file picker. Just that, and a box to type the name of a file in for saving. If you often have the folder your working in open in a file manager, you might find working like this is not only a life saver, but much better then anything else you've been missing. (If you don't, it's probably useless, and I'm not saying they shouldn't improve the filepicker --- just that I haven't noticed whether it's deficient since I've done it this way, and it might be compatible with your working style too.)
Mozilla's fault. (I doubt Google cares about this, though.)
Flash runs faster on Windows
Macromedia's fault.
hardware video acceleration is available and stable on Windows...
Driver writers' fault.
this is no fault of the Linux kernel, it's just awkward to step around X. These three issues pretty much represent the crux of what is important on a netbook. Thus, we should assume that X is not fit for the job.
It's got nothing to do with X. X11 has more users than Google Chrome OS has. At best, one can assume third-party software writers will care as much for an X11-based Google Chrome OS as they would for an independent Google Chrome OS (meaning they have to port three times). It's hard to see how you could rationally conclude they'll care more for an Linux-based Google OS that uses its own graphical system, then they'd care for a Linux-based Google OS that uses X11. It's also hard to see how you could rationally conclude it'd be easier for end users to deal with a Linux-based Google OS that can't run Linux software, then a Linux-based Google OS that can run Linux software.
If Google's not using X11, they're going to have to be really careful about making sure people don't talk about Linux and Google Chrome OS in the same sentence, except as a contrast. Otherwise people are going to be wondering--Firefox and OpenOffice.org and Skype and Pidgin and whathaveyou all run on Linux. Why don't they run on this Linux (yet)?
(Plus, as far as speed's concerned, when it comes down to it, X11 is plenty fast enough for a netbook. For chrissake, who's going to run something that needs instant responsiveness on a netbook?)
It seems it was the whole system rather than just the gui which has put you off Mac OS X, but thanks for your comments anyway. (You also seem to think I like Mac OS X. Nothing could be further from the truth, and many of your complaints I share, both about the gui and more generally.)
I love the insinuation that I don't know what the hell I'm talking about, though, that's nice.
I'm sorry, now I'm offended. I really tried to make it clear I just wanted to know the whole picture: your opinion and the basis for it. It's hard to ask for a complete perspective of someone's opinion on the internet, because it ends up sounding like you're insinuating something, but that was really not my goal and I tried to make that clear. How would you have asked it, so you wouldn't've misunderstood my motivation for asking? I tried to be explicit, but that evidently failed.
Otherwise, your post has been helpful/informative; thanks for that.
I guess the Metal-style apps often seem (to me) to represent a break from the classic Mac past, but it's my recollection they've been growing since the first release of Mac OS X: the Metal Finder wasn't there at day one (was it?) and this gradual increase (gradual compared to a sharp wall at 10.0) is part of why I think Mac OS X is a continuation of classic Mac. If they hadn't've changed OS, I think they would still have made many of these changes--although I doubt they would've got rid of so many fetaures.
BTW: Gnome has a spatial file manager, or at least a spatial mode. Unlike Mac OS X's Finder, the decision to use spatial vs non-spatial mode is a system-wide configuration all file manager windows respect, so it's obvious what you're going to get. I would consider Gnome to be a (very minor, but still noticeable) member of "the industry", so it's still around.
How do you feel Mac OS X's let you down, ui-wise? Have you ever used a Mac OS X machine as your main machine for an extended period of time? Real question (and I won't judge your first answer based on the second). I've never heard of any classic user who left OS X because of the GUI (altho I've heard of many who've left for other reasons, like software availability or price).
Its GUI has much in common. Aside form the obvious things like the (silly) global menubar, conflating the systray and the menubar, the (silly) close-button-in-the-left-corner, or putting disk drives on the desktop, the way you interract with the system seems very similar to me. It's very different from other well-known operating systems of 2001. And for most classic Mac users, the GUI was all that mattered: who gives a rats where the kernel comes from, as long as it doesn't hang up?
(None of the things I've explicitly mentioned are/were unique to Mac OS (X), but their existence in OS X is definitely because of classic Mac OS, and are in contradiction to OS X's NeXTSTEP lineage or Windows.)
In the olden days, this place was much more of a free software place, ISTR. Now it's just general computery stuff. Also, Mac OS X is in some ways the continuation of Mac OS, but in other ways it's very much not; the userbase nowadays is a lot more diverse. Mac OSwas used relatively little by the target audience of this place, that changed when Apple appeared to "get it" by putting Unix underneath a sparkly gui (but the command line's never been the reason Iuse GNU/Linux on my computers, except for about eight months when I had a computer that was too slow to run contemporary guis as my main box).
Slashdot Mirror
That wouldn't come close to solving the problem--seven years can be a long time in science.
Yeah, it was optional. We were never really explicitly taught it, but it was there in our handwriting book as something optional for advanced writers (they were called "speed loops"). I don't explicitly use them or not use them, they just kinda turn up sometimes and not others.
I'm Australian and I've recently come to Europe. I write in something that could be called cursive (it's based on Victorian Modern Cursive, and it's often joined up just because I'm too lazy to lift the pen, but it has the aesthetics of modern print handwriting). Europeans often have trouble decyphering certain letters, like a v, which has a round bottom for me, so Europeans think it's a u. Because I always put in the down-stroke of a u (it'd be a v otherwise!), sometimes Europeans think it looks like a messy n. In these cases, I'm writing exactly how I was taught in school.[1]
Also, I have trouble with certain European letters: in particular, many Germans write a small d as a backwards b (i.e. starting from top, going down, and doing an anti-clockwise loop at the bottom). I'm bad at distinguishing left-to-right from right-to-left, so it looks identical to a b for me. (I don't know why that doesn't happen in print.) I also can never understand what counts as an "r" for some people here.
So maybe it's not such a bad thing that handwriting is becoming more print-like...
[1]: Fortunately, the English orthography is designed to assume u and v are identical and that u and n are hard to distinguish. It's why very few words end in -v (think "give", "have", which have a short vowel but a silent -e), and why lots of words have a long o that's pronounced like a short u (think "come", "love").
Have you actually used a speech-to-text system? Not one that's meant to be trained, but one that has to work for anyone speaking their own informal English in their own weird accent while drunk. You can probably do that, even while drunk yourself. People are a lot more resilient than computers. We're designed for it and trained for it for decades. Sure, there's going to be errors. But if you think a computer is going to have less errors than a person at this sort of task, you're crazy.
he has a sufficiently serious mental illness that he probably can't properly be considered responsible for his actions and certainly should have been in a mental ward rather than a jail cell.
So ... if someone would rather go to jail than give his ex-wife $2.5 mil, he should be locked up in a mental ward. In that case, our friend the lawyer would still be deprived of his liberty.
Me? I'm in favor of anything that puts lawyers behind bars.
Juries are actually in much more limited use outside of the United States. In Australia, the Parliament gets to decide whether you have a right to a jury (only trials on indictment have the right, and Parliament gets to decide if a trial is on indictment). In other countries, they're only the right for specific serious offences. In yet other countries, like Germany, they're not used at all.
[b]power of sale[/b]
Completely off-topic, but why do I keep seeing these square brackets around html tags? If you know html, how on earth can so many people use the wrong kind of brackets? It's not just one person, I see it regularly here!
Atheists ask questions like "are you agnostic in the little green faries and Santa Claus too?" only because they fail to understand what they're criticising.
Firstly, some people are agnostic about the existence of even their own body. I don't fall into this category, but I think it's the logical consequence of "strong agnosticism". Of course, just because you don't know if you have a left foot (or even if "left" is a valid property) doesn't mean you aren't allowed to act as if you have a left foot.
As a logical consequence of that last sentence, I'm allowed to act as if faries don't exist, even though I'm agnostic about them. Indeed, I act as if things I know exist, don't, every single day. You do too. Maybe you have a health condition you refuse to admit, or you can tell your marriage is breaking down and you don't address it.
From another angle, there is a massive difference between God and Santa Claus, which means I can apply a low probability to Santa Claus's existence, but can't make any statement about God's. Santa Claus is meant to exist in our universe, and he's meant to do particular things e.g. fly around at night carried by reindeer pulling a sleigh giving presents to children who've been good and coal to children who've been bad, and in exchange you give him cookies and milk if your parents are American fundamentalists who've never read their bible, or cake and brandy otherwise. Yet, mum and dad always gave me presents labelled "from Santa Claus", and I never got a lump of coal no matter how bad I'd been, and mum ate the cake and drank the brandy. So it seems like probably Santa Claus doesn't exist, but maybe I just don't understand what Santa Claus is meant to be.
God, on the other hand, is not a part of the universe (as described). Logic and maths (human constructions and not things that fundamentally exist in the same way that the Earth does, regardless of us) are not necessarily meaningful outside of the universe. How can I make any conclusions, using the systems I have, about things that don't follow the rules I know? It is an abuse of logic to say "if I rule out the existence of Santa Claus based on an absence of evidence and evidence of absence, then I should logically rule out the existence of God based on those same criteria". Five minutes ago, you might have almost died a horribly bloody death, and by a miracle, you were saved: and any evidence that that horrible bloody death was about to happen could have been stricken from existence.
(I don't claim that it's not possible to know that God exists; I claim that I don't know how to. It may be possible, other people might know that God exists, and one day, I might to. However, I do think it's impossible to know that God doesn't exist; to know anything about God's existence would take a miracle, and if you can work miracles, you must be God (or using powers he's granted).)
BTW: Zeus and Thor are more like Santa Claus than the Judæo-Christian God, so I assess them in the same way
What's wrong with two-user forks? I have a bunch of one and a couple of two user forks on my computer. Isn't that what free software's about?
lol. Where I'm from you're only allowed to water the garden two days a week. On those days, you can only water your garden at certain times of the day. You can only spot-clean the glass on your car or to remove corrosive substances (with a bucket filled from a tap); if you want to clean anything else, you need to go to an approved car wash. Its worse in many other cities in the country. And yet, civilisation, democracy and freedom still continues.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
In your sig, "us" and "you" really should be variables, not string constants. Who they refer to depends on the context, y'see.
The great thing about my philosophy is, I don't care what you think! :)
[Your sarcasm suggests you disagree with my view. You present the even more thorough and convincing rationalisation of "I can use sarcasm to make your view look bad, therefore you're wrong", so even if I did care, you don't care enough to even try to convince me, so why would I care?]
Incidentally, I think very few people will need to care less for us to have a society with a healthy degree of apathy. Those few, however, will have to care a great deal less.
Apathy makes better government than caring too much. If no-one really cares, no laws are created, enforced or obeyed and everyone just gets on with life.
Any particular reason why you are so keen on finding excuses for the lawyer to weasel out of his promise?
Because if a lawyer can weasel out of his promise, no-one will ever trust lawyers again! (... don't I wish)
And given your sig, I would trust you on this one...
When did you ever see religion go back on its core beliefs and admit that it was wrong all along?
Something big, say, "Oops, we were wrong. There is no god".
That would be equivalent to science saying "Oops, we were wrong. Falsifiability is meaningless". It does not and will not happen. However, just like science nowadays accepts that the universe was created (but didn't always, and admits it was once wrong), the Catholic Church nowadays accepts that the Earth isn't the centre of the universe (but it didn't always, and admits it was once wrong).
The Catholic Church has largely stopped making claims that can be falsified, because they are largely outside its scope. There are one or two ones left (free will, in particular) that are in theory falsifiable,[1] although science hasn't progressed yet to a point where it can. And a better Catholic theologist than myself might be able to explain free will in a way that's independent of the biochemistry of the brain.
([1]: And, in the current prevailing scientific view, theoretically false.)
Most devout "religion and science are incompatible" fundie Christians fail to understand religion or science. The same is true of "religion and science are incompatible" fundie atheist types. They have a very primitive view of the philosophy of science, and a strawman view of religion.
(And, incidentally, it's entirely possible to personally decide God exists, and realise that He is such that He would want to be worshipped in a particular way, and that He would've already come down to Earth to tell us how. Subscribing to a religion doesn't mean you're incompetent.)
You got the order wrong... Science has nothing to do with faith. It is about choosing the absence of faith. It matters not how strong your faith in an ordered universe is if there exists data that it is not so; as soon as out hypothesis is falsified, we must analyse it with a view to discarding it, no matter how much we want it to be true.
Imagine the universe is evil and knows your intent. Whenever you attempt to test anything, it will give you one set of results; when you aren't testing it, it will give you another set of results (which are similar and largely compatible, but not completely; perhaps someone really can cure leporacy just by touch). It would be impossible to disprove this hypothesis because it's impossible to replicate it. Science takes it on faith that that's not so.
Also, smart people realise science and religion are compatible because science describes one thing, and religion describes another thing. They're compatable in the same kind of way that physics and literature studies are.
(This doesn't mean all religions leave things alone that are the domain of science. It just means that it's possible, so it's posible to be both religious and scientific.)
Oh, btw, your view of science is highly idealistic. As Darwin noted, "false facts are highly injurious to the progression of science, for they often endure long". Another scientist has observed that progress in science depends on an older, indoctrinated generation dying off before "heretical" ideas assume mainstream orthodoxy. How often have we seen that -- not outside of science, but inside it?
The fact that Google will have a larger potential market than Linux currently has is a point I've accepted. When I'm doubting is that software developers will treat Google Chrome OS as anything other than a platform they need to port "good enough" software to. So by combining two (different!) markets Google and Linux could both benefit! And that Google were fools when they said their product is based on Linux if it can't run Linux software, and they're going to have to stop doing that!
It doesn't matter whose fault this is; it is unacceptable.
Why will Adobe et al fix this for Google Chrome OS, but not for Google Chrome OS (as well as Linux/X11 people)? That's my question. X11 isn't incapable of being fast and smooth, it's just that the drivers and software need to be (re)written. It's the same either way! Many people at Google run Linux and will continue to do so after Chrome OS is released, so at best it seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Google's online apps outstrip the popularity of open source linux software to such an extent that this will be a nonissue for the web-centric home users Google is targeting.
I only have internet access about three-quarters of the time I'm trying to do work (and when I have it I often achieve less work than in the quarter of the time I don't...), and surely I'm not unrepresentative. Maybe it's the fact that I try to do (uni) work on my laptop that makes me unrepresentative...
You will not be running Firefox on Chrome OS, because the Chrome Browser is the basis for the desktop environment.
I wouldn't. But there's enough people who switch to Linux and insist on using Firefox even though it sucks donkeysballs when there's browsers on Linux which don't. I'm not the Firefox-OpenOffice.org-etc type,[1] so I'm trying to judge a group I'm not: but you're probably right in that the sort of person who installs Ubuntu/has someone install Ubuntu onto their computer to make it work when Windows dies, but then assumes they will have access to the same (free) software they were running on Windows, is not the sort of person who will be buying these Google Chrome OS machines. I don't know ... (and I don't plan on buying one).
[1]: I'm the has-run-Linux-for-10+-years, writes-patches-to-his-regular-software-to-make-sure-it-works-for-him type. Linux seems amazingly more popular now than it did when I started using it, so that might make me overestimate it today, but it seems like many people who choose to use Linux now don't necessarily understand the costs/benefits switching OSes have. But they do know Linux runs their software--i.e. Firefox and OpenOffice.
All file pickers are idiotic and stupid, and they all always default to the wrong folder. Gtk's has one redeeming feature not found in Windows (I'm not familiar enough with any other system's).If you already have a folder you want to go to open in another window (e.g. file manager), you can drag and drop the file/folder from there to the filepicker, and it selects that file/folder.
Since that feature's been around/I've known of it, there's no other feature I've ever wanted in a file picker. Just that, and a box to type the name of a file in for saving. If you often have the folder your working in open in a file manager, you might find working like this is not only a life saver, but much better then anything else you've been missing. (If you don't, it's probably useless, and I'm not saying they shouldn't improve the filepicker --- just that I haven't noticed whether it's deficient since I've done it this way, and it might be compatible with your working style too.)
Firefox runs faster on Windows
Mozilla's fault. (I doubt Google cares about this, though.)
Flash runs faster on Windows
Macromedia's fault.
hardware video acceleration is available and stable on Windows...
Driver writers' fault.
this is no fault of the Linux kernel, it's just awkward to step around X. These three issues pretty much represent the crux of what is important on a netbook. Thus, we should assume that X is not fit for the job.
It's got nothing to do with X. X11 has more users than Google Chrome OS has. At best, one can assume third-party software writers will care as much for an X11-based Google Chrome OS as they would for an independent Google Chrome OS (meaning they have to port three times). It's hard to see how you could rationally conclude they'll care more for an Linux-based Google OS that uses its own graphical system, then they'd care for a Linux-based Google OS that uses X11. It's also hard to see how you could rationally conclude it'd be easier for end users to deal with a Linux-based Google OS that can't run Linux software, then a Linux-based Google OS that can run Linux software.
If Google's not using X11, they're going to have to be really careful about making sure people don't talk about Linux and Google Chrome OS in the same sentence, except as a contrast. Otherwise people are going to be wondering--Firefox and OpenOffice.org and Skype and Pidgin and whathaveyou all run on Linux. Why don't they run on this Linux (yet)?
(Plus, as far as speed's concerned, when it comes down to it, X11 is plenty fast enough for a netbook. For chrissake, who's going to run something that needs instant responsiveness on a netbook?)
It seems it was the whole system rather than just the gui which has put you off Mac OS X, but thanks for your comments anyway. (You also seem to think I like Mac OS X. Nothing could be further from the truth, and many of your complaints I share, both about the gui and more generally.)
I love the insinuation that I don't know what the hell I'm talking about, though, that's nice.
I'm sorry, now I'm offended. I really tried to make it clear I just wanted to know the whole picture: your opinion and the basis for it. It's hard to ask for a complete perspective of someone's opinion on the internet, because it ends up sounding like you're insinuating something, but that was really not my goal and I tried to make that clear. How would you have asked it, so you wouldn't've misunderstood my motivation for asking? I tried to be explicit, but that evidently failed.
Otherwise, your post has been helpful/informative; thanks for that.
I guess the Metal-style apps often seem (to me) to represent a break from the classic Mac past, but it's my recollection they've been growing since the first release of Mac OS X: the Metal Finder wasn't there at day one (was it?) and this gradual increase (gradual compared to a sharp wall at 10.0) is part of why I think Mac OS X is a continuation of classic Mac. If they hadn't've changed OS, I think they would still have made many of these changes--although I doubt they would've got rid of so many fetaures.
BTW: Gnome has a spatial file manager, or at least a spatial mode. Unlike Mac OS X's Finder, the decision to use spatial vs non-spatial mode is a system-wide configuration all file manager windows respect, so it's obvious what you're going to get. I would consider Gnome to be a (very minor, but still noticeable) member of "the industry", so it's still around.
How do you feel Mac OS X's let you down, ui-wise? Have you ever used a Mac OS X machine as your main machine for an extended period of time? Real question (and I won't judge your first answer based on the second). I've never heard of any classic user who left OS X because of the GUI (altho I've heard of many who've left for other reasons, like software availability or price).
Its GUI has much in common. Aside form the obvious things like the (silly) global menubar, conflating the systray and the menubar, the (silly) close-button-in-the-left-corner, or putting disk drives on the desktop, the way you interract with the system seems very similar to me. It's very different from other well-known operating systems of 2001. And for most classic Mac users, the GUI was all that mattered: who gives a rats where the kernel comes from, as long as it doesn't hang up?
(None of the things I've explicitly mentioned are/were unique to Mac OS (X), but their existence in OS X is definitely because of classic Mac OS, and are in contradiction to OS X's NeXTSTEP lineage or Windows.)
In the olden days, this place was much more of a free software place, ISTR. Now it's just general computery stuff. Also, Mac OS X is in some ways the continuation of Mac OS, but in other ways it's very much not; the userbase nowadays is a lot more diverse. Mac OSwas used relatively little by the target audience of this place, that changed when Apple appeared to "get it" by putting Unix underneath a sparkly gui (but the command line's never been the reason Iuse GNU/Linux on my computers, except for about eight months when I had a computer that was too slow to run contemporary guis as my main box).