I installed Mint 14 and I think the Cinnamon desktop is amazing. It's like what Gnome could have been if the devs didn't want to kill it. I still have a soft spot for KDE after using it for years, but Cinnamon is my new favorite Linux setup.
As an IT administratator all I can say is your attitude is poor. Why does the average worker need access to facebook and twitter? they are paid to work not to slack of tweeting and updating profiles.
As the guy who eats lunch with your boss, all I can say is your attitude is poor. The company wants me to carry a phone so they can contact me in an emergency, but they don't want me to enjoy any part of the experience of having the damn thing glued to my hip? No thanks. If you give me a locked-down brick around with me, expect to find it in my desk drawer as I head home for the night.
If I have to have a leash, then it's going to be a fun leash with Angry Birds, Facebook, Twitter, and a decent web browser. Most IT staff seem to get that. If your company culture lets you get away with that attitude, then I think I can explain your higher than average attrition rates.
Just stop right there. You were going to say "but I'm CTO of a Fortune 500 company and we're growing like crazy LOL!" weren't you. No, you're not. You're a powertripping junior staffer at a small company. Big companies who value being able to hire and retain employees understand these kinds of basics. The others? We make fun of them here when their horror stories inevitably leak to the press.
First, Amazon owning ".amazon" is a stupid idea. Really, guys: that's just dumb. Stop it.
Second, were Brazil and Peru even remotely interested in ".amazon" before Amazon tried to create it, or is that a convenient excuse to coerce Amazon to ask their blessing (presumably for a modest compensatory donation)? I don't recall hearing of their grand plans for that TLD before today.
In California, we just voted to get rid of mandatory three-strikes sentencing for non-violent, non-serious offenders. I'm not uncomfortable to giving someone life for, say, their third rape sentence. I'm extremely happy that we collectively decided to no longer give someone life for shoplifting a loaf of bread.
You got modded funny, but that's probably true. Most people I know have several computers in various form factor combinations. I have a phone, tablet, laptop, work PC, and home gaming PC. That might be more than a lot of people, but certainly isn't uncommon.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out which OS will have an order or magnitude more market share than the other in 6-12 months...
I'm guessing Unix/Linux, considering that almost all tablets and smartphones (and a huge chunk of laptops) are running either a Linux distro or a branch of a certified-Unix operating system.
I switched from a Linux desktop to a Mac a couple of years ago and had an initially painful learning period for a few weeks. I'd keep trying to do something the Linux way, give up in frustration and Google it, and find that I was making it way harder than it needed to be. For example, I remember spending a long time in the man pages trying to figure out how to move a stuck print job off a dead printer and onto a working one. I was ready to set fire to the laptop or kick it down a flight of stairs or throw it out the window. Then I discovered that the correct method is to open both printers' job lists and drag the stuck job from one to the other.
OS X is despicably horrible at doing things the Linux way. Seriously rubbish. When I stopped fighting it and started trying to do things the Mac way, it became infinitely easier than I knew a desktop could be.
I still use a Linux desktop every day at work. Thanks, Mint Cinnamon for giving me an easy escape from the hellish tarpit that is Ubuntu Unity! It's tolerable and I don't mind it too much. But after becoming used to OS X, it's nice to come home to my Mac that I actually enjoy using.
But Angry Birds doesn't ship with iOS, does it? To me, that's a big difference. You expect - apparently naively - for your OS vendor to be classier. The unspoken agreement is that they're supposed to sell you a clean system that you can then pollute as you see fit.
When you buy a TV, you expect that you'll see ads in the shows you watch on it. You probably don't expect the TV itself to display ads. Well, that's the sort of separation we've always had with our operating systems, and it's one I'd very much like to keep intact.
You may choose to opt out of personalized advertising by visiting choice.live.com.
First, does that refer to "Windows apps shipped as part of the base system", or "Windows apps bought through our app store"? Apple has a similar switch that disables (most, for now) personalized advertising in 3rd-party apps. It doesn't apply to their own apps, as their own apps don't have ads.
Second, that phrasing explicitly avoids referring to non-personalized advertising. They would be complying with the letter of the agreement by serving you the same generic ads that everyone else sees.
I just moved from a state where doctors are required to keep records for seven years, but with a significantly longer statute of limitations for medical malpractice lawsuits. Such lawsuits require access to medical records. Without records, there's no proof that a patient was even seen for the condition they're claiming a tort for. As a consequence, medical offices routinely purged all records more than 7 years old - often by going through an annual first-of-the-year process of pulling the "expired" charts and shredding them all at once.
In that situation, I could totally see a doctor's office trying to help a patient retrieve old records that they happen not to have purged yet, but realizing that they were in an ancient format based on proprietary software from a vendor that no longer exists and stored on an Amiga or some odd thing like that. The easy answer would be, "sorry, we don't have those anymore" and to set fire to the box of floppies they were stored on. The longer answer would be, "we have them, but it's going to be nearly impossible to get at them. If you need them, we'll try to help as much as we can. You'll need to pay our contractor for the work, though."
In that case, is the doctor's office being nice and helpful for trying to help the patient and not turning them away, or are they being jerks for not footing the bill for something they have no legal obligation to provide (and in fact are exposing themselves to liability for even admitting the existence of)?
I don't know if this is analogous to the case in the article or not. I just saw a lot of comments like "LOL STUPID DOCTORS" when it might be possible that there are other unmentioned factors.
But then the Green Party fails to resist the urge to let their inner crazy show through, and says things like:
* Create a nuclear free zone in the Middle East region and require all nations in area to join.
Yes, I'm sure they'll happy go along with us "requiring" them to play nicely, all without us having to park 3 carriers a mile off their coasts to "encourage" them.
It took a lot of yelling and screaming to get the bill of rights into the constitution.
Hamilton opposed the Bill of Rights because he believed people would incorrectly interpret it as an enumeration of rights "granted" to the population. In his own words:
I go further, and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and in the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed constitution, but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers which are not granted; and on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?
And on that count, he was completely correct. There are plenty of people who wrongly believe that we have, say, freedom of speech because the first amendment grants it to us. In reality, we inherently have freedom of speech and the Constitution simply grants the government extremely limited powers to curtail it.
Let me put this in geek terms: the Constitution is a default-deny policy. Given a query in the form "is the Federal government permitted to do X", it can be satisfied by seeing if X is an enumerated power of the Federal government. If not, then no - the government isn't permitted to do it. Madison et al wanted to keep it default deny but add a few explicit deny rules afterward. Hamilton said that was a bad idea because people would start treating those as the canonical list of denied actions, effectively treating the base Constitution as default-allow with enumerated exceptions. And what do you know; he was right about that.
Of course, people would probably have started looking at the Constitution as default-allow over time anyway, and the Bill of Rights is a good fallback position of telling the government that "you aren't allowed to do anything not spelled out in the Constitution, but you're especially not allowed to do this stuff". In that sense, Madison was probably wise in supporting it. But in any case, everyone involved supported the contents of the Bill of Rights, more or less. They just differed on whether it was a good idea to spell them out as a set of special cases.
It was the latter. They were little tables with walls on top to prevent peeking while I filled out my paper ballot. It was pure territoriality. I thought it was more funny than annoying, though. She wasn't trying to stop my vote - she just wanted me to physically do it the way she thought I ought to.
I never felt intimated. I mean, I don't think she was trying to deny my right to vote or anything like that. But dadgummit, those booths were for her table and she was going to defend her ground.
I started using Linux desktops in '98, with Window Maker on Debian with a Linux 2.0 kernel. I used various distros (and even had some forays into BSD desktops) as new hotnesses came and went. I'm perfectly happy compiling my whole system from source, and Emacs is my favorite configuration tool.
About two years ago, my company bought me a MacBook Pro. For the first time in a decade, I was able to spend more time using my system than dicking around with it. Again, I like Linux; I'm not some Apple fanboy who's never used anything else. It's just that OS X was everything I wanted in a Unix desktop. Stuff always worked. I could install almost all the F/OSS stuff I wanted to. The UI was pretty and smooth. There were a couple of little things I would have preferred to change, sure, but by and large it was the best desktop I ever used.
I started a new job two months ago and was issued a desktop machine running Windows. Having no use for that, I wiped the drive and installed Ubuntu. O. M. G. I'd be hard pressed to exaggerate how freaking much I can't stand Unity after adapting to OS X. After several weeks of a crappy desktop UI and the stereotypical Linux experience of a desktop that wouldn't awake from sleep (on a brand new Lenovo, not some weird beige box thing), I switched to Mint's Cinnamon desktop. While it's a lot better than Unity - seriously, great job! - it's still a far cry from OS X.
I'm about to ask my boss if I can switch back to a Mac for the same reasons as before: I need to be getting stuff done instead of trying to figure out how to make my desktop not suck. I'm much closer to being a Linux fanboy than an Apple zealot. But as much as I love Linux and use it for lots of things professionally, I'm done trying to use it as my desktop machine. Life's too short for this stuff.
I live in a small town outside San Francisco. It seems that two local districts vote in the place I went this morning, so a guy at the door routed voters to table A or table B depending on our street addresses. The problem was that competing teams of little-old-lady election volunteers were engaged in a turf war over who "owned" which voting booths. When I got my ballot from table A, the booths closest to it were occupied and the volunteers directed my wife and I to the ones nearer table B.
You would have thought I had peed all over the table B volunteers' Thanksgiving turkey.
Little Old Lady: Sir? Sir! These are for table B! You're supposed to use the booths over by table A!
Me: Umm, is there a difference?
LOL: Yes! These are for table B! If they're all filled up, table B people won't be able to vote!
Me: Well, table A's booths are all filled up and I'd like to vote, too.
LOL, whining and angry: But these are for table B!
Man. Hell hath no wrath like the elderly women proudly doing their quadrennial duties.
Do you check to make sure each update to the iPhone still lets you make calls?
No, but I don't check that each update will maintain the carefully-cultivated call history I've let myself come to depend on. If that information were truly important to the OP, he could have created contacts for his customers and added their addresses. The new maps app will cheerfully let him navigate to a contact's listed address, whether or not that address is in his history. You store their phone numbers in an address book, right? Why wouldn't you keep the rest of their contact information in there, too?
In the end, Apple walked away from the table, the Google offer remained but Apple didn't want to agree to it.
Alternately, Apple offered to integrate turn-by-turn navigation but Google wouldn't consent without dragging along Latitude. Google walked away from the table; the Apple offer remained but Google didn't want to agree to it.
In a disagreement between megacorporations, it's a little naive to say that either one was behaving purely altruistically and reasonably while the other was completely villainous.
I tried to get people up in arms about the Lightning connectors for the new iphones and the authentication needed merely to charge... Several months ago. But slashdot, nor reddit would bother to help get the word out.
There weren't any viable standard charging plugs that could deliver the needed power requirements to everything from an iPod Nano to an iPad 3, so Apple made one. Micro USB isn't rated for iPad 3's power draw so they went with something else (and something I find vastly better from a UI perspective than any USB plug format ever has been), then set that as their new company standard so that you can use the same cables with all their stuff.
To paraphrase: Slashdot is not your personal army. Maybe it's not that Slashdot and Reddit were being lazy or trying to silence you, but that many readers just don't agree with you in the first place.
On the list of people who could possibly get that patent, Microsoft is definitely among the more benign. Can you imagine that as a Sony patent? Within the week, you'd be paying extra to watch your kid play video games. There'd be a "Family Viewing Pack" subscription that would "permit" more than just the player to view the screen at any given time, marketed as a convenience for busy households. On the other hand, I see Microsoft doing absolutely nothing along those lines, and now they own the legal right to tell everyone else not to do it.
I think my non-Microsoft-fanboy cred is pretty well established here, but I'd still rather see them with the patent than pretty much anyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
And how may locomotives use one?
Excellent point. Can you imagine if we used our nuclear technologies for something so backward as, say, ironclad steamboats?
I installed Mint 14 and I think the Cinnamon desktop is amazing. It's like what Gnome could have been if the devs didn't want to kill it. I still have a soft spot for KDE after using it for years, but Cinnamon is my new favorite Linux setup.
As an IT administratator all I can say is your attitude is poor. Why does the average worker need access to facebook and twitter? they are paid to work not to slack of tweeting and updating profiles.
As the guy who eats lunch with your boss, all I can say is your attitude is poor. The company wants me to carry a phone so they can contact me in an emergency, but they don't want me to enjoy any part of the experience of having the damn thing glued to my hip? No thanks. If you give me a locked-down brick around with me, expect to find it in my desk drawer as I head home for the night.
If I have to have a leash, then it's going to be a fun leash with Angry Birds, Facebook, Twitter, and a decent web browser. Most IT staff seem to get that. If your company culture lets you get away with that attitude, then I think I can explain your higher than average attrition rates.
Just stop right there. You were going to say "but I'm CTO of a Fortune 500 company and we're growing like crazy LOL!" weren't you. No, you're not. You're a powertripping junior staffer at a small company. Big companies who value being able to hire and retain employees understand these kinds of basics. The others? We make fun of them here when their horror stories inevitably leak to the press.
First, Amazon owning ".amazon" is a stupid idea. Really, guys: that's just dumb. Stop it.
Second, were Brazil and Peru even remotely interested in ".amazon" before Amazon tried to create it, or is that a convenient excuse to coerce Amazon to ask their blessing (presumably for a modest compensatory donation)? I don't recall hearing of their grand plans for that TLD before today.
What does that have to do with NTP?
That's a remarkable claim. Can you provide evidence for it?
In California, we just voted to get rid of mandatory three-strikes sentencing for non-violent, non-serious offenders. I'm not uncomfortable to giving someone life for, say, their third rape sentence. I'm extremely happy that we collectively decided to no longer give someone life for shoplifting a loaf of bread.
You got modded funny, but that's probably true. Most people I know have several computers in various form factor combinations. I have a phone, tablet, laptop, work PC, and home gaming PC. That might be more than a lot of people, but certainly isn't uncommon.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out which OS will have an order or magnitude more market share than the other in 6-12 months...
I'm guessing Unix/Linux, considering that almost all tablets and smartphones (and a huge chunk of laptops) are running either a Linux distro or a branch of a certified-Unix operating system.
I switched from a Linux desktop to a Mac a couple of years ago and had an initially painful learning period for a few weeks. I'd keep trying to do something the Linux way, give up in frustration and Google it, and find that I was making it way harder than it needed to be. For example, I remember spending a long time in the man pages trying to figure out how to move a stuck print job off a dead printer and onto a working one. I was ready to set fire to the laptop or kick it down a flight of stairs or throw it out the window. Then I discovered that the correct method is to open both printers' job lists and drag the stuck job from one to the other.
OS X is despicably horrible at doing things the Linux way. Seriously rubbish. When I stopped fighting it and started trying to do things the Mac way, it became infinitely easier than I knew a desktop could be.
I still use a Linux desktop every day at work. Thanks, Mint Cinnamon for giving me an easy escape from the hellish tarpit that is Ubuntu Unity! It's tolerable and I don't mind it too much. But after becoming used to OS X, it's nice to come home to my Mac that I actually enjoy using.
What - Like Angry Birds on the iPad?
But Angry Birds doesn't ship with iOS, does it? To me, that's a big difference. You expect - apparently naively - for your OS vendor to be classier. The unspoken agreement is that they're supposed to sell you a clean system that you can then pollute as you see fit.
When you buy a TV, you expect that you'll see ads in the shows you watch on it. You probably don't expect the TV itself to display ads. Well, that's the sort of separation we've always had with our operating systems, and it's one I'd very much like to keep intact.
You may choose to opt out of personalized advertising by visiting choice.live.com.
First, does that refer to "Windows apps shipped as part of the base system", or "Windows apps bought through our app store"? Apple has a similar switch that disables (most, for now) personalized advertising in 3rd-party apps. It doesn't apply to their own apps, as their own apps don't have ads.
Second, that phrasing explicitly avoids referring to non-personalized advertising. They would be complying with the letter of the agreement by serving you the same generic ads that everyone else sees.
I just moved from a state where doctors are required to keep records for seven years, but with a significantly longer statute of limitations for medical malpractice lawsuits. Such lawsuits require access to medical records. Without records, there's no proof that a patient was even seen for the condition they're claiming a tort for. As a consequence, medical offices routinely purged all records more than 7 years old - often by going through an annual first-of-the-year process of pulling the "expired" charts and shredding them all at once.
In that situation, I could totally see a doctor's office trying to help a patient retrieve old records that they happen not to have purged yet, but realizing that they were in an ancient format based on proprietary software from a vendor that no longer exists and stored on an Amiga or some odd thing like that. The easy answer would be, "sorry, we don't have those anymore" and to set fire to the box of floppies they were stored on. The longer answer would be, "we have them, but it's going to be nearly impossible to get at them. If you need them, we'll try to help as much as we can. You'll need to pay our contractor for the work, though."
In that case, is the doctor's office being nice and helpful for trying to help the patient and not turning them away, or are they being jerks for not footing the bill for something they have no legal obligation to provide (and in fact are exposing themselves to liability for even admitting the existence of)?
I don't know if this is analogous to the case in the article or not. I just saw a lot of comments like "LOL STUPID DOCTORS" when it might be possible that there are other unmentioned factors.
He was rejected because he was too much of a Democrat and we need some far right wing libertarian reactionary like me to lead America!!
Wait, what? Obama is much closer to Libertarian than Rick Santorum has ever been. I can't properly describe his politics without going all Godwin.
You had a choice: http://www.jillstein.org/issues
But then the Green Party fails to resist the urge to let their inner crazy show through, and says things like:
* Create a nuclear free zone in the Middle East region and require all nations in area to join.
Yes, I'm sure they'll happy go along with us "requiring" them to play nicely, all without us having to park 3 carriers a mile off their coasts to "encourage" them.
It took a lot of yelling and screaming to get the bill of rights into the constitution.
Hamilton opposed the Bill of Rights because he believed people would incorrectly interpret it as an enumeration of rights "granted" to the population. In his own words:
And on that count, he was completely correct. There are plenty of people who wrongly believe that we have, say, freedom of speech because the first amendment grants it to us. In reality, we inherently have freedom of speech and the Constitution simply grants the government extremely limited powers to curtail it.
Let me put this in geek terms: the Constitution is a default-deny policy. Given a query in the form "is the Federal government permitted to do X", it can be satisfied by seeing if X is an enumerated power of the Federal government. If not, then no - the government isn't permitted to do it. Madison et al wanted to keep it default deny but add a few explicit deny rules afterward. Hamilton said that was a bad idea because people would start treating those as the canonical list of denied actions, effectively treating the base Constitution as default-allow with enumerated exceptions. And what do you know; he was right about that.
Of course, people would probably have started looking at the Constitution as default-allow over time anyway, and the Bill of Rights is a good fallback position of telling the government that "you aren't allowed to do anything not spelled out in the Constitution, but you're especially not allowed to do this stuff". In that sense, Madison was probably wise in supporting it. But in any case, everyone involved supported the contents of the Bill of Rights, more or less. They just differed on whether it was a good idea to spell them out as a set of special cases.
It was the latter. They were little tables with walls on top to prevent peeking while I filled out my paper ballot. It was pure territoriality. I thought it was more funny than annoying, though. She wasn't trying to stop my vote - she just wanted me to physically do it the way she thought I ought to.
I never felt intimated. I mean, I don't think she was trying to deny my right to vote or anything like that. But dadgummit, those booths were for her table and she was going to defend her ground.
I started using Linux desktops in '98, with Window Maker on Debian with a Linux 2.0 kernel. I used various distros (and even had some forays into BSD desktops) as new hotnesses came and went. I'm perfectly happy compiling my whole system from source, and Emacs is my favorite configuration tool.
About two years ago, my company bought me a MacBook Pro. For the first time in a decade, I was able to spend more time using my system than dicking around with it. Again, I like Linux; I'm not some Apple fanboy who's never used anything else. It's just that OS X was everything I wanted in a Unix desktop. Stuff always worked. I could install almost all the F/OSS stuff I wanted to. The UI was pretty and smooth. There were a couple of little things I would have preferred to change, sure, but by and large it was the best desktop I ever used.
I started a new job two months ago and was issued a desktop machine running Windows. Having no use for that, I wiped the drive and installed Ubuntu. O. M. G. I'd be hard pressed to exaggerate how freaking much I can't stand Unity after adapting to OS X. After several weeks of a crappy desktop UI and the stereotypical Linux experience of a desktop that wouldn't awake from sleep (on a brand new Lenovo, not some weird beige box thing), I switched to Mint's Cinnamon desktop. While it's a lot better than Unity - seriously, great job! - it's still a far cry from OS X.
I'm about to ask my boss if I can switch back to a Mac for the same reasons as before: I need to be getting stuff done instead of trying to figure out how to make my desktop not suck. I'm much closer to being a Linux fanboy than an Apple zealot. But as much as I love Linux and use it for lots of things professionally, I'm done trying to use it as my desktop machine. Life's too short for this stuff.
I live in a small town outside San Francisco. It seems that two local districts vote in the place I went this morning, so a guy at the door routed voters to table A or table B depending on our street addresses. The problem was that competing teams of little-old-lady election volunteers were engaged in a turf war over who "owned" which voting booths. When I got my ballot from table A, the booths closest to it were occupied and the volunteers directed my wife and I to the ones nearer table B.
You would have thought I had peed all over the table B volunteers' Thanksgiving turkey.
Little Old Lady: Sir? Sir! These are for table B! You're supposed to use the booths over by table A!
Me: Umm, is there a difference?
LOL: Yes! These are for table B! If they're all filled up, table B people won't be able to vote!
Me: Well, table A's booths are all filled up and I'd like to vote, too.
LOL, whining and angry: But these are for table B!
Man. Hell hath no wrath like the elderly women proudly doing their quadrennial duties.
I still can't bring myself to kill my ICQ account. Some people collect stamps. Others collect figurines. I collect dead social networks.
Do you check to make sure each update to the iPhone still lets you make calls?
No, but I don't check that each update will maintain the carefully-cultivated call history I've let myself come to depend on. If that information were truly important to the OP, he could have created contacts for his customers and added their addresses. The new maps app will cheerfully let him navigate to a contact's listed address, whether or not that address is in his history. You store their phone numbers in an address book, right? Why wouldn't you keep the rest of their contact information in there, too?
In the end, Apple walked away from the table, the Google offer remained but Apple didn't want to agree to it.
Alternately, Apple offered to integrate turn-by-turn navigation but Google wouldn't consent without dragging along Latitude. Google walked away from the table; the Apple offer remained but Google didn't want to agree to it.
In a disagreement between megacorporations, it's a little naive to say that either one was behaving purely altruistically and reasonably while the other was completely villainous.
I tried to get people up in arms about the Lightning connectors for the new iphones and the authentication needed merely to charge... Several months ago. But slashdot, nor reddit would bother to help get the word out.
There weren't any viable standard charging plugs that could deliver the needed power requirements to everything from an iPod Nano to an iPad 3, so Apple made one. Micro USB isn't rated for iPad 3's power draw so they went with something else (and something I find vastly better from a UI perspective than any USB plug format ever has been), then set that as their new company standard so that you can use the same cables with all their stuff.
To paraphrase: Slashdot is not your personal army. Maybe it's not that Slashdot and Reddit were being lazy or trying to silence you, but that many readers just don't agree with you in the first place.
On the list of people who could possibly get that patent, Microsoft is definitely among the more benign. Can you imagine that as a Sony patent? Within the week, you'd be paying extra to watch your kid play video games. There'd be a "Family Viewing Pack" subscription that would "permit" more than just the player to view the screen at any given time, marketed as a convenience for busy households. On the other hand, I see Microsoft doing absolutely nothing along those lines, and now they own the legal right to tell everyone else not to do it.
I think my non-Microsoft-fanboy cred is pretty well established here, but I'd still rather see them with the patent than pretty much anyone else.