Chrome OS is a crippled excuse for a desktop environment. But if the GUI can somehow be divorced from Google's obsession with the cloud, it would make the more popular Linux desktop GUIs appear like overdesigned junk art. The Aura window manager is simply beautiful or beautifully simple.
Or maybe they're the rats on the "burning platform" described by another former Microsoft executive (http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/12/10/23/1658222/can-nokia-save-itself):
"When ex-Microsoft executive Stephen Elop took the reins of Nokia back in 2011, he memorably compared the Finnish phone-maker to a burning old platform in the North Sea. 'I have learned that we are standing on a burning platform,' he wrote in a widely circulated memo. 'And, we have more than one explosion -- we have multiple points of scorching heat that are fueling a blazing fire around us.'"
"That one can get away with breaking a law isn't an excuse for doing so."
I'd say it depends. If what you're planning to do requires a battalion of lawyers to find out if you broke the law, then go ahead and do it, but DON'T advertise your exploit on Facebook or Twitter. It's different, however, if you're thinking of committing something that even a fifteen-year-old knows is wrong, like dumping toxic waste in a river or offing your business partner. Then you're either an idiot or a evil genius.
Example for Scenario 1: the Apple vs. the World patent cases. Example for Scenario 2: Hans Reiser's murder case.
But what if parasitic aliens (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Body_Snatchers) infect the minds of the electors, or less sci-fi-sh: blackmail them into voting for the other candidate? It's highly unlikely in an election where there's a large gap between the winner and the loser, but what if the difference is down to a vote or two that can easily be offset by doing something funny to a handful of electors?
"Maybe this is a dumb question, but why do we still have the split between Open* and Libre*?"
LibreOffice is under some version of the GPL. OpenOffice is under a more permissive free software licence. Changes can flow from OpenOffice to LibreOffice but not the other way around.
"At lest we wouldn't still be stuck there a decade later. When Democrats go to war, they tend to strike surgically based on the advice of expert strategists who actually went to school to learn how to do these things."
Hate to burst your partisan bubble. But it was the Democratic Kennedy-Johnson administrations that escalated the war in Vietnam. On the other hand, the first Iraq War was effectively a surgical strike that kicked out the invading Iraqis from Kuwait. Bush senior could have kicked out Saddam as well but he didn't. For all his Star Wars bluster, Reagan didn't involve the US in any major wars.
As far as actual physics achievements, yes there's no comparison between the two. But as a science "presenter", Kaku wins. His books are another matter though. The last one I read - not sure if it's Physics of the Future/Impossible - I had the feeling he hired Google as editor. There was so much trivia you even got whole paragraphs enclosed in parentheses. I still prefer Carl Sagan, who managed to connect the dots in Cosmos, or Brian Cox, if he could just get rid of his annoying accent.
"Where you see a prison, I see an zombie-proof enclave."
A zombie-proof enclave where you can get buggered or eaten by your food/stimulation-deprvied fellow humans. I'd rather take my chances outside with the slow-moving brainless undead.
"I tend to think that Universities are less likely to biased in their poll meta-analysis in the first place, and of course I'm a big fan of Bayesian analysis for large multifactorial problems with many levels of conditional and marginal probability."
The university you refer to might be an exception, but I've always assumed that, just like Life, Universities have a liberal bias. Entirely anecdotal because I'm too lazy to Google for citations:
1. Universities are dominated by people who are or want to be seen as Progressive. Obviously, you can't be progressive, whatever that means, if you're conservative.
2. Most colleges and universities are beneficiaries of government spending, which is likely to be reduced by conservatives slashing budgets for everything but Defence.
I guess plenty of Slashdot discussions still revolve around the "reputations" these two OS types established at the start of the millenium. It's nice for a joke or two, or for some clueless fanboy to rant about. But the latest Windows and Linux releases are roughly at the same level of in/security and difficulty/ease of use, bar things like misbehaving user pograms and unsupported hardware. The moral here maybe that if you're starting a new software product you have to put equal attention into these two things.
TFA is about an OLPC deployment in Africa. So maybe teachers in Africa and other developing nations are more replaceable than their unionized counterparts in the US and other industrialized, or should that be de-industrializing, countries? I see the Orwellian possibilities of replacing skilled or moderately skilled teachers with government minders whose only job would be to ensure that the kids are using the tablets in the prescribed manner. Obviously there would be holes in the most locked-down product, but gadget-based learning is easier to administer or manage.
I know there are evil unions. But in a world where there are evil corporations, that sort of evens up things a bit.
"I doubt that Samsung has anything left to learn about building ships."
Yeah Samsung are masters at building everything from a ship to a microchip, but they certainly needed quite a bit of inspiration to DESIGN their own Gangnam brand of round-cornered gadgets.
DNA-tailored bio-weapons would give a whole new meaning to the word "genocide". Sure they'd make for a good assassination tool, but wouldn't the same DNA watermarking technques apply when dealing with groups of genetically related individuals? While current genetic theories rule out race-specific weapons of mass destruction that don't suffer from huge collateral damage, they could be used effectively to settle scores between Mafia-style crime families.
Disclosure not disclaimer. Wired actually admits paying the phone finder: "(Disclosure: Wired agreed to pay Barton a freelance fee for the photos published with this article.)"
But yes, Google wasn't exactly being nice here. Maybe that was part of the comedy act? That "little but really pushy" Google agent going up against the bartender's "well-inked" associate with a "don't-fuck-with-me" attitude.
What's with all the cloak-and-dagger over some cellphone that resembles every other cellphone made within the past two years? If I were the head of research at one of these mobile companies, I'll order any employee taking out a phone for testing to have the phone chained to his or her wrist.
Nothing in the sentence you quoted hints at "hate Linus so much". It's merely an assertion that Linus Torvalds didn't write all the pieces of the "whole operating system" popularly known as Linux. Here's your quote in context:
A better citation for your "hate Linus so much" thesis would be the following passage. Reading between the lines, you can detect a whiff of prom-queen envy from the GNU folks about the prominence that had been given to the "contributions that come from Linus Torvalds' camp."
"For many years, the media and the user community itself has given undue weight to the contributions that come from Linus Torvalds' camp and fostered a skewed account of the operating system's history, while barely acknowledging the existence of the GNU project at all."
"Gamers need great controls, and frankly the controls on touch screen games stink."
Gamers need games. When fewer games are made for consoles because game developers see tablets/smartphones as the more lucrative market in terms of either higher volume or cheaper development costs, then it becomes a vicious cycle of consoles becoming less popular because there are fewer games, making it even less lucrative as a market.
Sure the controls might stink as far as hardcore gamers are concerned. But the cooler product doesn't always win. The Soyuz outlasted the Space Shuttle. Android has shrunk the iPhone market share.
The US because of its electoral Olympics is in better shape to deal with any social disorder. It's entertainment good enough to divert the peoples attention from the system's real problems. No need for the large-scale supression of protests.
Even if it has the trade surplus, China cannot politically afford an Iraq or even Afghanistan-scale war at the moment without triggering social unrest that dwarfs the Cultural Revolution. The gap between richest and poorest there is larger than it's ever been in the US or Russia. The US can stagnate for a decade before the lower/middle-classes literally rise up in arms, while China has to maintain its "tiger" growth rate just to keep its mass of workers from having other ideas besides dutifully assembling toys and iPhones.
The only China crisis I see would come from the collapse of the present system and the rise of a new Mao.
Here's where the GNU-slash "zealots" may actually have a point. You've just committed the common error of confusing the Linux kernel for the operating system that consists of various other pieces, including but not limited to the system software produced by the GNU project. Linus Torvalds has a significant say only on the Linux kernel.
If you want proof, Google no further than Linus's unflattering comments about Gnome 3. Did the Gnome developers rip out Gnome Shell after Linus dubbed Gnome 3 an "unholy mess"? Any "improvements" to the Gnome 3 user XP are due more to the collective howl of the Net than to any Linus rant.
Much as I hate Facebook with a passion, I think this is the "right" strategy for them to survive in a litigious patent regime. In a patent war, you need every weapon you could get. Frivolous patents like this may well be more effective in a patent war than essential patents where you can get sued for abusing FRAND licensing:
On hindsight, Google's acquistion of Motorola Mobility doesn't appear to have benefited it much in its court cases with Apple and Microsoft, two companies with a large chest of non-essential, even frivolous patents.
Corporate moral: Patent everything, even if a two-year-old child can build it.
Here's another questionable choice of words in the summary: "Once the study is complete, we'll be building a 3D physical computer simulation of the analytical engine to verify that his design is workable." 3D "physical" computer "simulation"?
Well, since any third party will likely be excluded AGAIN from the "official" presidential debates, why not gather the third party candidates together for some sports analyst-style commentary on the debate? The debate will be streamed live into a studio where the other candidates are gathered. They will then be given a chance to comment or savage the arguments or lack thereof of the Democratic/Republican candiates. Of course, it won't have the immediacy of a real debate, but since the official debate is shaping out to be a verbal boxing match anyway, this will at least give the third party candiates a chance to have their views heard.
I haven't watched any of the unofficial debates, so I don't know if this is already being done on a time-shifted basis.
"This is the typical opinion here I know, but it's all like the doomsayer with the board that reads "the end of the world is nigh" just because it's different. You do a disservice to everyone."
End of the world, no. There's still Win 7, and for those hapless 3rd World pirates, there's still Win XP. Win 8 is simply, let's just say, off the mark. But one more of this, and it'll be the end of the world. For Microsoft, that is.
Here's another thing about Win 8. It's probably the least future-proof among the major desktop and mobile OS out there. Why? Because it's not the type of OS that you can easily adapt to a VR/AR headset/glasses (ex: Google Glass). Its most important component, the full-size Start Screen, occupies the whole screen, and thus it would block the person or object in front of you. Contrast this with the OSX dock which sits at the bottom of the screen, pretty much like the dashboard of a car.
WRT your comment "without something modal poking you in the eyeball", the Win 8 Start screen is the very definition of modal. It won't poke you in the eye, because it hits you flush, or should I say square, on the face.
"but I really don't understand why people don't just install Ubuntu or something."
According to the usual random Google sources, the new Chromebook appears to be running a Samsung-branded System-on-a-Chip called "Exynos 5 Dual Processor" (http://www.chromestory.com/2012/10/googles-new-249-chromebook-complete-specs/).
A quick check at Wikipedia showed that Exynos is composed of a 1.7 GHz Dual-core ARM Cortex-A15 CPU and ARM Mali-T604 GPU (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exynos#List_of_Exynos_SoC). If I remember correctly, opensource support for the Mail GPU is a work-in-progress. So unless Ubuntu has the same OEM-level access to the binary drivers, running Unity on the Chromebook will be a painfully slow, framebuffer-only experience.
However if your idea of a window manager consists of terminal sessions running Links, Mutt, and Bash, this would make a mighty fine Emacsbook.
Slashdot Mirror
Chrome OS is a crippled excuse for a desktop environment. But if the GUI can somehow be divorced from Google's obsession with the cloud, it would make the more popular Linux desktop GUIs appear like overdesigned junk art. The Aura window manager is simply beautiful or beautifully simple.
Or maybe they're the rats on the "burning platform" described by another former Microsoft executive (http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/12/10/23/1658222/can-nokia-save-itself):
"When ex-Microsoft executive Stephen Elop took the reins of Nokia back in 2011, he memorably compared the Finnish phone-maker to a burning old platform in the North Sea. 'I have learned that we are standing on a burning platform,' he wrote in a widely circulated memo. 'And, we have more than one explosion -- we have multiple points of scorching heat that are fueling a blazing fire around us.'"
"That one can get away with breaking a law isn't an excuse for doing so."
I'd say it depends. If what you're planning to do requires a battalion of lawyers to find out if you broke the law, then go ahead and do it, but DON'T advertise your exploit on Facebook or Twitter. It's different, however, if you're thinking of committing something that even a fifteen-year-old knows is wrong, like dumping toxic waste in a river or offing your business partner. Then you're either an idiot or a evil genius.
Example for Scenario 1: the Apple vs. the World patent cases. Example for Scenario 2: Hans Reiser's murder case.
But what if parasitic aliens (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Body_Snatchers) infect the minds of the electors, or less sci-fi-sh: blackmail them into voting for the other candidate? It's highly unlikely in an election where there's a large gap between the winner and the loser, but what if the difference is down to a vote or two that can easily be offset by doing something funny to a handful of electors?
"Maybe this is a dumb question, but why do we still have the split between Open* and Libre*?"
LibreOffice is under some version of the GPL. OpenOffice is under a more permissive free software licence. Changes can flow from OpenOffice to LibreOffice but not the other way around.
"At lest we wouldn't still be stuck there a decade later. When Democrats go to war, they tend to strike surgically based on the advice of expert strategists who actually went to school to learn how to do these things."
Hate to burst your partisan bubble. But it was the Democratic Kennedy-Johnson administrations that escalated the war in Vietnam. On the other hand, the first Iraq War was effectively a surgical strike that kicked out the invading Iraqis from Kuwait. Bush senior could have kicked out Saddam as well but he didn't. For all his Star Wars bluster, Reagan didn't involve the US in any major wars.
As far as actual physics achievements, yes there's no comparison between the two. But as a science "presenter", Kaku wins. His books are another matter though. The last one I read - not sure if it's Physics of the Future/Impossible - I had the feeling he hired Google as editor. There was so much trivia you even got whole paragraphs enclosed in parentheses. I still prefer Carl Sagan, who managed to connect the dots in Cosmos, or Brian Cox, if he could just get rid of his annoying accent.
"Where you see a prison, I see an zombie-proof enclave."
A zombie-proof enclave where you can get buggered or eaten by your food/stimulation-deprvied fellow humans. I'd rather take my chances outside with the slow-moving brainless undead.
"I tend to think that Universities are less likely to biased in their poll meta-analysis in the first place, and of course I'm a big fan of Bayesian analysis for large multifactorial problems with many levels of conditional and marginal probability."
The university you refer to might be an exception, but I've always assumed that, just like Life, Universities have a liberal bias. Entirely anecdotal because I'm too lazy to Google for citations:
1. Universities are dominated by people who are or want to be seen as Progressive. Obviously, you can't be progressive, whatever that means, if you're conservative.
2. Most colleges and universities are beneficiaries of government spending, which is likely to be reduced by conservatives slashing budgets for everything but Defence.
I guess plenty of Slashdot discussions still revolve around the "reputations" these two OS types established at the start of the millenium. It's nice for a joke or two, or for some clueless fanboy to rant about. But the latest Windows and Linux releases are roughly at the same level of in/security and difficulty/ease of use, bar things like misbehaving user pograms and unsupported hardware. The moral here maybe that if you're starting a new software product you have to put equal attention into these two things.
So what, we get to choose between control by Big Content or Big Brother? At the moment Big Content appears to be the more benign choice.
TFA is about an OLPC deployment in Africa. So maybe teachers in Africa and other developing nations are more replaceable than their unionized counterparts in the US and other industrialized, or should that be de-industrializing, countries? I see the Orwellian possibilities of replacing skilled or moderately skilled teachers with government minders whose only job would be to ensure that the kids are using the tablets in the prescribed manner. Obviously there would be holes in the most locked-down product, but gadget-based learning is easier to administer or manage.
I know there are evil unions. But in a world where there are evil corporations, that sort of evens up things a bit.
"I doubt that Samsung has anything left to learn about building ships."
Yeah Samsung are masters at building everything from a ship to a microchip, but they certainly needed quite a bit of inspiration to DESIGN their own Gangnam brand of round-cornered gadgets.
DNA-tailored bio-weapons would give a whole new meaning to the word "genocide". Sure they'd make for a good assassination tool, but wouldn't the same DNA watermarking technques apply when dealing with groups of genetically related individuals? While current genetic theories rule out race-specific weapons of mass destruction that don't suffer from huge collateral damage, they could be used effectively to settle scores between Mafia-style crime families.
Disclosure not disclaimer. Wired actually admits paying the phone finder: "(Disclosure: Wired agreed to pay Barton a freelance fee for the photos published with this article.)"
But yes, Google wasn't exactly being nice here. Maybe that was part of the comedy act? That "little but really pushy" Google agent going up against the bartender's "well-inked" associate with a "don't-fuck-with-me" attitude.
What's with all the cloak-and-dagger over some cellphone that resembles every other cellphone made within the past two years? If I were the head of research at one of these mobile companies, I'll order any employee taking out a phone for testing to have the phone chained to his or her wrist.
Nothing in the sentence you quoted hints at "hate Linus so much". It's merely an assertion that Linus Torvalds didn't write all the pieces of the "whole operating system" popularly known as Linux. Here's your quote in context:
http://trisquel.info/en/i-notice-website-refers-trisquel-distribution-gnulinux-and-not-linux-why
A better citation for your "hate Linus so much" thesis would be the following passage. Reading between the lines, you can detect a whiff of prom-queen envy from the GNU folks about the prominence that had been given to the "contributions that come from Linus Torvalds' camp."
"For many years, the media and the user community itself has given undue weight to the contributions that come from Linus Torvalds' camp and fostered a skewed account of the operating system's history, while barely acknowledging the existence of the GNU project at all."
"Gamers need great controls, and frankly the controls on touch screen games stink."
Gamers need games. When fewer games are made for consoles because game developers see tablets/smartphones as the more lucrative market in terms of either higher volume or cheaper development costs, then it becomes a vicious cycle of consoles becoming less popular because there are fewer games, making it even less lucrative as a market.
Sure the controls might stink as far as hardcore gamers are concerned. But the cooler product doesn't always win. The Soyuz outlasted the Space Shuttle. Android has shrunk the iPhone market share.
The US because of its electoral Olympics is in better shape to deal with any social disorder. It's entertainment good enough to divert the peoples attention from the system's real problems. No need for the large-scale supression of protests.
Even if it has the trade surplus, China cannot politically afford an Iraq or even Afghanistan-scale war at the moment without triggering social unrest that dwarfs the Cultural Revolution. The gap between richest and poorest there is larger than it's ever been in the US or Russia. The US can stagnate for a decade before the lower/middle-classes literally rise up in arms, while China has to maintain its "tiger" growth rate just to keep its mass of workers from having other ideas besides dutifully assembling toys and iPhones.
The only China crisis I see would come from the collapse of the present system and the rise of a new Mao.
Here's where the GNU-slash "zealots" may actually have a point. You've just committed the common error of confusing the Linux kernel for the operating system that consists of various other pieces, including but not limited to the system software produced by the GNU project. Linus Torvalds has a significant say only on the Linux kernel.
If you want proof, Google no further than Linus's unflattering comments about Gnome 3. Did the Gnome developers rip out Gnome Shell after Linus dubbed Gnome 3 an "unholy mess"? Any "improvements" to the Gnome 3 user XP are due more to the collective howl of the Net than to any Linus rant.
Who needs a holodeck when you can have a replicator?
Much as I hate Facebook with a passion, I think this is the "right" strategy for them to survive in a litigious patent regime. In a patent war, you need every weapon you could get. Frivolous patents like this may well be more effective in a patent war than essential patents where you can get sued for abusing FRAND licensing:
http://apple.slashdot.org/story/12/10/24/2033252/doj-investigating-samsung-for-patent-abuse
On hindsight, Google's acquistion of Motorola Mobility doesn't appear to have benefited it much in its court cases with Apple and Microsoft, two companies with a large chest of non-essential, even frivolous patents.
Corporate moral: Patent everything, even if a two-year-old child can build it.
Here's another questionable choice of words in the summary: "Once the study is complete, we'll be building a 3D physical computer simulation of the analytical engine to verify that his design is workable." 3D "physical" computer "simulation"?
Well, since any third party will likely be excluded AGAIN from the "official" presidential debates, why not gather the third party candidates together for some sports analyst-style commentary on the debate? The debate will be streamed live into a studio where the other candidates are gathered. They will then be given a chance to comment or savage the arguments or lack thereof of the Democratic/Republican candiates. Of course, it won't have the immediacy of a real debate, but since the official debate is shaping out to be a verbal boxing match anyway, this will at least give the third party candiates a chance to have their views heard.
I haven't watched any of the unofficial debates, so I don't know if this is already being done on a time-shifted basis.
"This is the typical opinion here I know, but it's all like the doomsayer with the board that reads "the end of the world is nigh" just because it's different. You do a disservice to everyone."
End of the world, no. There's still Win 7, and for those hapless 3rd World pirates, there's still Win XP. Win 8 is simply, let's just say, off the mark. But one more of this, and it'll be the end of the world. For Microsoft, that is.
Here's another thing about Win 8. It's probably the least future-proof among the major desktop and mobile OS out there. Why? Because it's not the type of OS that you can easily adapt to a VR/AR headset/glasses (ex: Google Glass). Its most important component, the full-size Start Screen, occupies the whole screen, and thus it would block the person or object in front of you. Contrast this with the OSX dock which sits at the bottom of the screen, pretty much like the dashboard of a car.
WRT your comment "without something modal poking you in the eyeball", the Win 8 Start screen is the very definition of modal. It won't poke you in the eye, because it hits you flush, or should I say square, on the face.
Cheers and peace!
"but I really don't understand why people don't just install Ubuntu or something."
According to the usual random Google sources, the new Chromebook appears to be running a Samsung-branded System-on-a-Chip called "Exynos 5 Dual Processor" (http://www.chromestory.com/2012/10/googles-new-249-chromebook-complete-specs/).
A quick check at Wikipedia showed that Exynos is composed of a 1.7 GHz Dual-core ARM Cortex-A15 CPU and ARM Mali-T604 GPU (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exynos#List_of_Exynos_SoC). If I remember correctly, opensource support for the Mail GPU is a work-in-progress. So unless Ubuntu has the same OEM-level access to the binary drivers, running Unity on the Chromebook will be a painfully slow, framebuffer-only experience.
However if your idea of a window manager consists of terminal sessions running Links, Mutt, and Bash, this would make a mighty fine Emacsbook.