We should be benchmarking phones. Why? Because there's this push to make phones capable of being docked and turned into traditional desktop machines with an external monitor, mouse and keyboard, and hence being used like traditional desktop machines. For this reason it's still important to see what they're capable of, and whether they'd be fast enough to handle the greater level of functionality you'd expect from a full-blown machine.
The Surface RT is one of the few tablets which can run Microsoft Office (not the web version - an actual native application). Office is not available on the iPad or Android Tablets, and since the RT is cheaper than the Surface Pro and any other competing Windows 8 tablets, that makes it the cheapest tablet available to run Microsoft Office.
Some people LIVE in Microsoft Office to the point where they don't need anything but it and a browser to do their work, which is where the RT would be useful I suppose. Unfortunately, the marketing doesn't seem to hammer this fact for some reason. I would have thought it would have been a rather useful thing to point out in commercials, but maybe I was wrong.
Note that I don't have a Surface and don't give a shit about Office because I code on FPGAs for a living. If I had to I could use LibreOffice easily enough (though I don't because Office 2010 is so damn nice to use). But I do at least understand what the RT was going for - it's just that no-one seems to know.
When I was introducing Windows 7 a couple of years ago (thank god I don't do IT anymore) at an all-girls school, the students took to it very well. They liked the animations, the new appearance, the speed and responsiveness, and ultimately took to it very well. Also did an upgrade to Office 2010 from 2007 and there were no problems at all. I cannot for the life of me think why we'd convert them to Linux/LibreOffice. Even my wife uses things like OneNote, which she just started using yesterday because it was suggested by her Uni as a good notetaking program and it is, with nothing comparable in the open-source scene.
I have yet to see anyone provide evidence that LibreOffice is significantly better than MS Office in any way other being able to run Linux (which doesn't matter because most people use Windows/OS X) and that it's free (which is beneficial, but as far as schools are concerned most of them have Microsoft agreements so it's a sunk cost).
I've been burnt believing for years that Linux would ever make headway on the desktop, so apologies if I seem too negative. It's just that there's no real push to do so because the supporting software just isn't there yet, and probably never will be. Moving purely for ideological reasons screams of an IT admin with little to challenge him otherwise.
As a side note, it's been interesting to note how much Canonical wants to distance Ubuntu from being known as just-another-Linux-distro. Yes it's still Linux, yet it still runs Linux programs, but Ubuntu doesn't mention the word Linux at all in most of its literature unless it's of a technical nature (heck, the word Linux doesn't even appear on http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop except as a keyword in the page's source).
This Slashdot article isn't even in the Linux category here, which I find telling.
Nothing wrong with different forms of entertainment. Everyone's different. Do what you enjoy. I just don't think gaming should require an investment in time/money/energy to the point which it becomes a second job almost - which for a lot of EVE Online players (not you obviously) it "appears" to be the case.
One could argue that hobbies like programming would be seen as putting in the same effort as a second job, which is true. Except that programming can produce something of worth, something you can say is yours and exposes your creative efforts to show to others. Gaming is vapid - entertaining, but still vapid, and when I'm old I'd prefer to see a history of projects I've worked on in my spare time and not a bunch of corporations built in some virtual world. But that's just me.
I'm amazed how much effort people put playing games these days. I honestly think some like games (like EVE Online) are more like jobs than entertainment, if what I've read is any indication. Shit, if some people spent their time in the real world doing and learning things with the same level of zeal and dedication as they do in the virtual world, we might all be Tony Starks.:)
Having said that, the virtual world provides more immediate payoff for your efforts compared to the real world sometimes... which is probably what makes gaming so addictive.
I guess we should just give up on trying to end mass government spying on citizens too then.
What, pray-tell, do you honestly think YOU can do to make a difference? Spread the word? People don't CARE! The Internet seriously inflates how many people care about this issue, and in the end it doesn't matter anyway - the people at the top don't have any motivation to do anything differently because there's nothing to threaten them with. We have no power.
Thinking about how the world is instead of how it should be, that is how a loser thinks.
No, it's how someone who knows they have only one life to live acts. Not a loser - a smart person. Snowdon tried to do something about it, and now his life is completely and utterly fucked - asylum or not. He raised hell, and apart from some attention, nothing has happened of worth and history is a very strong indicator that nothing will happen in the future (as far as improving things is concerned)
I'm not saying it's right. I'm simply saying that it's EXTREMELY DANGEROUS to be a dreamer in a world like this. You can't fight them. So don't. Enjoy what we have and work around the problems as they come up. Might sound like giving up, but most people on other tech sites keep using Microsoft, Apple and Google technologies because honestly, you don't have anything to gain by not doing so.
Oh they exist. You just choose to hang around with those who hate it, most likely. Not saying the ribbon's good or bad, but FFS, it was released in 2007. Can't geeks learn how to use it by now? If it was really that useless you'd think the world would have fallen apart by now given how widespread Office is.
I find LO to be more garbage than MS Office. It has a terrible lack of polish. For example, adjusting the row or column position of a table using the mouse in LO Writer in Windows, causes a dotted line to remain on the page after having made the adjustment. It's not supposed to remain because you can clearly see it get wiped off if you scroll down then up the page again. Minimize+maximize resolves the issue, but the fact the developers don't give a shit about such details shows a lack of care towards the user experience (it might work fine in Linux, but given most people use Windows it might be worth giving Windows a bit more attention sometimes, LO developers).
That and the fact you can't resize a table using the mouse, you can't interactively crop an image like you can in Word, and a multitude of things which irritate me when compared to how fucking easy they are in MS Office, and I finally realized why NO ONE uses LO by choice unless you have no self-respect (or use Linux on the desktop, in which case the same applies).
Oh yeah. LO's dictionary recognizes the word movie, but not the word movies. Shit like this makes me question why I bother sometimes.
I like how you say the movies are shitty, as if you know what the poster (and other Netflix users) watch. Saying they're shitty is somehow supposed to enhance your position - to suggest that they're not worth it anyway to offset the DRM aspect.
Let's face it, hardware locked "trusted computing" phones and other hardware are the norm and getting worse no matter WHAT we do. We don't have the influence to tell every other person out there to not buy them - telling people to not enjoy life and modern technology over some ideological issues that really aren't that bad in the first place isn't going to work. Heck, as I get older I find myself less and less caring as well as more important things take priority in my life.
We can't stop locked hardware trends because the companies are too powerful. Fight battles that can be won.
There's no need for OpenOffice and LibreOffice to merge. Yes it would be nice in so far as consolidating manpower and reducing confusion, but in terms of functionality and features, anything that is introduced in OpenOffice, the team at LibreOffice take and integrate into their package because they're perfectly allowed to by virtue of the license.
So sticking with LO means you get the maximum number of features with no real loss apart from a less marketable name (which I'm beyond caring about at this point - if it were that important I'd have giving up on GIMP a long time ago).
It's a bit disingenuous to not expect the release of a new Apple product (even if it's just a refresh of an existing line) to be news-worthy on a tech site. If it really bugs you that a new product was released, you can either skip over the article completely (the easiest option) or remove the Apple category from the list of stories to show.
Well the only company right now who seems to be interested in that idea right now is Canonical, but I don't have much faith with them as they've yet to turn a profit (and so don't have much in the way of proven business capabilities to rely on).
Having said that, the idea of a phone being able to turn into a desktop via a dock is probably going to increase in popularity so it wouldn't surprise me to see Android eventually take on that ability. Just not yet.
Aha, but I'm not the sysadmin. Besides, the sysadmin doesn't care. His job (apart from the necessities of keeping the system running) is to ensure people can do their jobs and to help facilitate this goal. If it means people can use VNC sessions similar to Windows' remote desktop, so be it. The best way isn't always the best way - particularly if the goal is still achieved.
Misdirected problem
on
The Last GUADEC?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
People are increasingly leaving the desktop computer
No, they aren't.
They are just not buying new ones because they have reached a level where they are good enough for what they do and have no huge motivation for upgrading. That's why the PC market is crumbling, not because people aren't using PCs anymore, but because they are content with what they have on the desktop.
Now I don't get why GNOME is jumping on the Tablet/Smartphone bandwagon when they don't even have to sell anything.
All in all this has turned out to be a fucking disaster, and it's all the GNOME team's fault for being too arrogant to listen to the screams and cries and often well documented problems people had with this new direction. What a fucking mess.
People are porting traditional Linux applications to Android at a very rapid rate. You can even get Octave working on Android now through the store. But Android is NOT A DESKTOP OS and it seems more trouble than it's worth to try to force it to be one. Better to just use Windows or a Linux distro on a compatible touch device if that's your goal.
I USED to admin Windows servers, mainly because I had to for a while (a job's a job). Then I got out of that god-awful business and work as an embedded engineer because it's what I spent ages doing engineering for at college. Figured I'd actually put the degree to use.:)
We use CentOS here. Fowarding X programs is common for some of us, but a lot of other people often request VNC connections so that they can work on the machines remotely like they do with our Windows servers. Who am I to tell them to do things differently?
The guy's brainwashed. Giving himself up completely to the company. Of course he's going to say nice things about their ideas/products. If he didn't like them, he wouldn't have posted as it would have been career suicide (if he could be identified of course).
What's the point of freedom if you can't do your job which may well require using propritary software that just so happens to assist in performing said job?
Why the fuck are we even using computers for anyway? For the sake of it? Or because they are tools to perform a task? Fuck you guys are stupid sometimes.
Or maybe it's just that the media thrives on controversy, not on informing the public.
This is more insightful than you think. Sure it sounds obvious, but since this nugget is not constantly in the front of most people's minds when they read/watch/listen to the media, the manipulative nature of media still has an impact and people still believe the myth that the media are there to inform.
Some media is better than others - I rather like the BBC, but even their journalists/editors do stupid shit like misleading headlines every so often (perfect example: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23394233)
Don't worry about it. He accused me of being young and naieve about computers (which is interesting, since I code on FPGAs for a living), as if he's some amazing gift to the computing world.
I fucking hate people who talk down strangers like this.
I'm going to start watching to see if that phenomenon arises frequently.
I hope you realize that if this phenomenon exists and you spot it numerous times, it's potentially going to ruin your future movie viewings as you'll be consciously aware of it. It's the same for anyone who's spent hours reading tvtropes and hence noticing things in the shows they watch as well and can no longer avoid.
Slashdot Mirror
We should be benchmarking phones. Why? Because there's this push to make phones capable of being docked and turned into traditional desktop machines with an external monitor, mouse and keyboard, and hence being used like traditional desktop machines. For this reason it's still important to see what they're capable of, and whether they'd be fast enough to handle the greater level of functionality you'd expect from a full-blown machine.
The Surface RT is one of the few tablets which can run Microsoft Office (not the web version - an actual native application). Office is not available on the iPad or Android Tablets, and since the RT is cheaper than the Surface Pro and any other competing Windows 8 tablets, that makes it the cheapest tablet available to run Microsoft Office.
Some people LIVE in Microsoft Office to the point where they don't need anything but it and a browser to do their work, which is where the RT would be useful I suppose. Unfortunately, the marketing doesn't seem to hammer this fact for some reason. I would have thought it would have been a rather useful thing to point out in commercials, but maybe I was wrong.
Note that I don't have a Surface and don't give a shit about Office because I code on FPGAs for a living. If I had to I could use LibreOffice easily enough (though I don't because Office 2010 is so damn nice to use). But I do at least understand what the RT was going for - it's just that no-one seems to know.
When I was introducing Windows 7 a couple of years ago (thank god I don't do IT anymore) at an all-girls school, the students took to it very well. They liked the animations, the new appearance, the speed and responsiveness, and ultimately took to it very well. Also did an upgrade to Office 2010 from 2007 and there were no problems at all. I cannot for the life of me think why we'd convert them to Linux/LibreOffice. Even my wife uses things like OneNote, which she just started using yesterday because it was suggested by her Uni as a good notetaking program and it is, with nothing comparable in the open-source scene.
I have yet to see anyone provide evidence that LibreOffice is significantly better than MS Office in any way other being able to run Linux (which doesn't matter because most people use Windows/OS X) and that it's free (which is beneficial, but as far as schools are concerned most of them have Microsoft agreements so it's a sunk cost).
I've been burnt believing for years that Linux would ever make headway on the desktop, so apologies if I seem too negative. It's just that there's no real push to do so because the supporting software just isn't there yet, and probably never will be. Moving purely for ideological reasons screams of an IT admin with little to challenge him otherwise.
As a side note, it's been interesting to note how much Canonical wants to distance Ubuntu from being known as just-another-Linux-distro. Yes it's still Linux, yet it still runs Linux programs, but Ubuntu doesn't mention the word Linux at all in most of its literature unless it's of a technical nature (heck, the word Linux doesn't even appear on http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop except as a keyword in the page's source).
This Slashdot article isn't even in the Linux category here, which I find telling.
Nothing wrong with different forms of entertainment. Everyone's different. Do what you enjoy. I just don't think gaming should require an investment in time/money/energy to the point which it becomes a second job almost - which for a lot of EVE Online players (not you obviously) it "appears" to be the case.
One could argue that hobbies like programming would be seen as putting in the same effort as a second job, which is true. Except that programming can produce something of worth, something you can say is yours and exposes your creative efforts to show to others. Gaming is vapid - entertaining, but still vapid, and when I'm old I'd prefer to see a history of projects I've worked on in my spare time and not a bunch of corporations built in some virtual world. But that's just me.
It seems as though Apple has more security and protections on preventing stuff from being taken by employees than the NSA.
I'm amazed how much effort people put playing games these days. I honestly think some like games (like EVE Online) are more like jobs than entertainment, if what I've read is any indication. Shit, if some people spent their time in the real world doing and learning things with the same level of zeal and dedication as they do in the virtual world, we might all be Tony Starks. :)
Having said that, the virtual world provides more immediate payoff for your efforts compared to the real world sometimes... which is probably what makes gaming so addictive.
What, pray-tell, do you honestly think YOU can do to make a difference? Spread the word? People don't CARE! The Internet seriously inflates how many people care about this issue, and in the end it doesn't matter anyway - the people at the top don't have any motivation to do anything differently because there's nothing to threaten them with. We have no power.
No, it's how someone who knows they have only one life to live acts. Not a loser - a smart person. Snowdon tried to do something about it, and now his life is completely and utterly fucked - asylum or not. He raised hell, and apart from some attention, nothing has happened of worth and history is a very strong indicator that nothing will happen in the future (as far as improving things is concerned)
I'm not saying it's right. I'm simply saying that it's EXTREMELY DANGEROUS to be a dreamer in a world like this. You can't fight them. So don't. Enjoy what we have and work around the problems as they come up. Might sound like giving up, but most people on other tech sites keep using Microsoft, Apple and Google technologies because honestly, you don't have anything to gain by not doing so.
Spoken by someone who has no idea Outlook does more than just emails. Or does not understand that people like GUIs.
Oh they exist. You just choose to hang around with those who hate it, most likely. Not saying the ribbon's good or bad, but FFS, it was released in 2007. Can't geeks learn how to use it by now? If it was really that useless you'd think the world would have fallen apart by now given how widespread Office is.
I find LO to be more garbage than MS Office. It has a terrible lack of polish. For example, adjusting the row or column position of a table using the mouse in LO Writer in Windows, causes a dotted line to remain on the page after having made the adjustment. It's not supposed to remain because you can clearly see it get wiped off if you scroll down then up the page again. Minimize+maximize resolves the issue, but the fact the developers don't give a shit about such details shows a lack of care towards the user experience (it might work fine in Linux, but given most people use Windows it might be worth giving Windows a bit more attention sometimes, LO developers).
That and the fact you can't resize a table using the mouse, you can't interactively crop an image like you can in Word, and a multitude of things which irritate me when compared to how fucking easy they are in MS Office, and I finally realized why NO ONE uses LO by choice unless you have no self-respect (or use Linux on the desktop, in which case the same applies).
Oh yeah. LO's dictionary recognizes the word movie, but not the word movies. Shit like this makes me question why I bother sometimes.
I like how you say the movies are shitty, as if you know what the poster (and other Netflix users) watch. Saying they're shitty is somehow supposed to enhance your position - to suggest that they're not worth it anyway to offset the DRM aspect.
Let's face it, hardware locked "trusted computing" phones and other hardware are the norm and getting worse no matter WHAT we do. We don't have the influence to tell every other person out there to not buy them - telling people to not enjoy life and modern technology over some ideological issues that really aren't that bad in the first place isn't going to work. Heck, as I get older I find myself less and less caring as well as more important things take priority in my life.
We can't stop locked hardware trends because the companies are too powerful. Fight battles that can be won.
There's no need for OpenOffice and LibreOffice to merge. Yes it would be nice in so far as consolidating manpower and reducing confusion, but in terms of functionality and features, anything that is introduced in OpenOffice, the team at LibreOffice take and integrate into their package because they're perfectly allowed to by virtue of the license.
So sticking with LO means you get the maximum number of features with no real loss apart from a less marketable name (which I'm beyond caring about at this point - if it were that important I'd have giving up on GIMP a long time ago).
Dupe.
samzenpus, you fucking suck sometimes. Hope you're not getting paid for this.
It's a bit disingenuous to not expect the release of a new Apple product (even if it's just a refresh of an existing line) to be news-worthy on a tech site. If it really bugs you that a new product was released, you can either skip over the article completely (the easiest option) or remove the Apple category from the list of stories to show.
Well the only company right now who seems to be interested in that idea right now is Canonical, but I don't have much faith with them as they've yet to turn a profit (and so don't have much in the way of proven business capabilities to rely on).
Having said that, the idea of a phone being able to turn into a desktop via a dock is probably going to increase in popularity so it wouldn't surprise me to see Android eventually take on that ability. Just not yet.
Aha, but I'm not the sysadmin. Besides, the sysadmin doesn't care. His job (apart from the necessities of keeping the system running) is to ensure people can do their jobs and to help facilitate this goal. If it means people can use VNC sessions similar to Windows' remote desktop, so be it. The best way isn't always the best way - particularly if the goal is still achieved.
No, they aren't.
They are just not buying new ones because they have reached a level where they are good enough for what they do and have no huge motivation for upgrading. That's why the PC market is crumbling, not because people aren't using PCs anymore, but because they are content with what they have on the desktop.
Now I don't get why GNOME is jumping on the Tablet/Smartphone bandwagon when they don't even have to sell anything.
All in all this has turned out to be a fucking disaster, and it's all the GNOME team's fault for being too arrogant to listen to the screams and cries and often well documented problems people had with this new direction. What a fucking mess.
People are porting traditional Linux applications to Android at a very rapid rate. You can even get Octave working on Android now through the store. But Android is NOT A DESKTOP OS and it seems more trouble than it's worth to try to force it to be one. Better to just use Windows or a Linux distro on a compatible touch device if that's your goal.
I USED to admin Windows servers, mainly because I had to for a while (a job's a job). Then I got out of that god-awful business and work as an embedded engineer because it's what I spent ages doing engineering for at college. Figured I'd actually put the degree to use. :)
We use CentOS here. Fowarding X programs is common for some of us, but a lot of other people often request VNC connections so that they can work on the machines remotely like they do with our Windows servers. Who am I to tell them to do things differently?
The guy's brainwashed. Giving himself up completely to the company. Of course he's going to say nice things about their ideas/products. If he didn't like them, he wouldn't have posted as it would have been career suicide (if he could be identified of course).
What's the point of freedom if you can't do your job which may well require using propritary software that just so happens to assist in performing said job?
Why the fuck are we even using computers for anyway? For the sake of it? Or because they are tools to perform a task? Fuck you guys are stupid sometimes.
This is more insightful than you think. Sure it sounds obvious, but since this nugget is not constantly in the front of most people's minds when they read/watch/listen to the media, the manipulative nature of media still has an impact and people still believe the myth that the media are there to inform.
Some media is better than others - I rather like the BBC, but even their journalists/editors do stupid shit like misleading headlines every so often (perfect example: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-23394233)
Don't worry about it. He accused me of being young and naieve about computers (which is interesting, since I code on FPGAs for a living), as if he's some amazing gift to the computing world.
I fucking hate people who talk down strangers like this.
I hope you realize that if this phenomenon exists and you spot it numerous times, it's potentially going to ruin your future movie viewings as you'll be consciously aware of it. It's the same for anyone who's spent hours reading tvtropes and hence noticing things in the shows they watch as well and can no longer avoid.