You realize that the security of the data itself directly correlates to whether in-house IT has control and the 'stability' of the network, right?
You can't access your Cloudy data if the network is down or unable to handle Cloud type loads.
You can't secure your data if you have no access to the actual data infrastructure, enabling a complete in-house account of everything.
You can't secure your data (or even access it) if your devices are "on the fritz".
All these things rely upon in-house IT controlling things for you (whether that in-house IT be a managed service provider/outsourced or internal employees).
The sad thing is, the idiots pushing these "turnkey solutions" look like experts to the eyes of users once things are underway. "You got this working in X period of time? You must be an IT rockstar". Meanwihle, it's about as complicated as setting up a blog, and doing it once is as difficult as doing it 100 times. When things go south, however, the blame can be placed on the "cloud service", and the resident expert IT rockstar gets away with it scotch free.
I agree, it's a good idea to let them hang themselves early on. Help them along with some complicated questions they will be unable to answer, and know more about their product than they do. (A nice shotgun is the best form of seagull management.) It's not just about job security, it's about making sure people (your customers) don't get brought along for a ride, raped, and then left in a ditch somewhere to die...
It's not just iPad that has wireless issues. It's all Apple wireless devices, from what I've seen. They've got poor connectivity due to the software stack, largely. They poison the spectrum with noise and prevent everyone from getting online. You need a much higher ratio of APs to devices with Apple products than with anything else. Even cheap phones do better.
The problem with BYOD/DIY IT is multi-fold, and it's strongly related to users being unwilling (and unable) to take responsibility for their own decisions.
* With a myriad of Cloud services, everyone using something different. Massive datasets of information end up in a disparate group of services, suitable for only one person's use. It makes the employee irreplaceable until the data is migrated to something else that others are able to access. * Security. I really shouldn't have to expound on this, on Slashdot of all places. At issue is not only the security of what individual users are working with, but the security of the network as a whole as each individual uses * Information management/security. This is similar to the previous point, but goes further. Who owns the data? Who has access to the data when the employee leaves? It's difficult (if not impossible) to gain access to important business information which is on an employee's personal device or cloud service associated with a non-work mail address. * Service reliability. In-house IT may have a history of fucking things up and making a mess of things, but at least someone competent can come along later and, even in many of the worst situations, retrieve it. With Cloud services, there is no such possibility, and there are no backups (in all likelihood). What happens when a Cloud service (god, I hate that word) eats an important document? I've seen it happen, and the user comes crying to IT anyway; the burden falls on us to 'recover' the document, because that's what they're used to. They have no ability to discern why it's not possible. * Device reliability and employee productivity. I'm not going to be able to do anything consistent if I'm hamstrung on both sides when a user's device breaks. I can't replace it with another machine/device from stock (because I haven't been given the budget or time to provide such things). In all likelihood, even if I had such a device I couldn't restore the data to it that needs to be restored, because there's no consistent means of providing those backups. * Time. IT is going to spend a lot more time per-issue and spend a lot more time doing absolutely nothing - also known as sitting on the phone, on hold, waiting for support. Sure, less time will be spent on implementation projects in the medium term, but long term this will be problematic. * Professional degradation. This plays heavily on the "time" issue previously mentioned. I can hardly make a career in IT if the things I'm supporting are fleeting and not exactly technical, just another stupid UI to dig through. This is a short-sighted approach, and is as bad for organizations as it is for me. You won't have people considering IT if all they can do is generalize in 100 different closed and locked product UIs, with their biggest technical skill being knowing how to call support. This will eat into user's time, eventually, as people stop going into IT. When companies eventually want a turnaround, competent IT for in-house maintenance (or MSP) will be fewer and far between, costing quite a bit more than previously.
In short, Cloud services look appealing to users because IT is unappealing to them. IT gets in the way and prevents them from doing things; IT does not provide them with the tools they (think) they need. They look elsewhere, which makes IT look bad. When that backfires, IT then looks bad again when we're unable to recover their data from a proprietary service we have absolutely no ability to reverse engineer.
*** Let me make a pointed warning about a very specific "cloud" service: AutoTask. This is the biggest steaming pile of shit I have ever seen, and it's about as bad as it gets for vendor lock-in. Managers love it, it's got all the right sales words to describe it. It doesn't work, however. Not only are the use fees fairly high, but the product doesn't work. I've seen it display wrong numbers, lose records, display different data depending on which person is logged in (erroneously, regardless of supposed credentials), and i
I'm sorry, 50% isn't that impressive or "progressive".
Making $50k a year (high on the average), I'm going to pay 28% in taxes to the Federal government, give or take. Then there's state tax, about 10% if you're in a more populated state (9.3% in California). Then I've got another 17% of that eaten away by sales/use tax, and of course we have things like additional taxes on utilities and pre-existing property.
That ends up a bit over 50% of total income if you're spending your entire income to survive (as many are), or a bit less if you're investing and making money. States like New York and New Jersey are very similar (I believe state income tax is about 6% there, and sales is around 4-8% depending on the locality).
For all that, we get mangy street people and illiterate immigrants who do shittier work than the natives.
The Greeks are not an example of socialist malpractice, they're an example of corruption, mismanagement and overspending.
One may argue thta socialist malpractice is, in fact, corruption, mismanagement, and overspending. Where there are palms to grease and few morals, palms will be greased and your trifecta will start taking hold of the society as a whole. No, it's not singularly endemic to socialism, though socialism certainly makes it more possible through large government and limited accountability.
50% is "quite high"? Imagine my chagrin at reading that, paying roughly that at what might be considered a low middle class income.
We don't get any such vacation periods (unheard of), work 60 hours a week (because it's required and we can be fired for it not happening), and so-called welfare doesn't even cover what it claims to cover, only paying enough to keep the people from leaving the ghettos or seeking jobs, but not enough in the right places to actually pay for anything if you work for a living.
Every attempt to add such a "bonus" to our social welfare ends up in more government pork, more taxes, more national debt, and more "welfare".
With a government like this, is it a surprise that we have a Tea Party?
I work in IT as a sysadmin. I love my job - the people I work with directly, the people I support, and the systems I work with.
I'm also a bit a workaholic. I expect to have to do some work after-hours; however,the expectation of management is that I work all the time. "You work until the job is done" is their expectation, based on the fact that I'm salaried. All the while, they're not understanding of personal obligations outside of work, and fully expect me to work (literally) all the time. It's little things like not providing sufficient support for the environment when key people are on vacation, not allowing flex time and not paying anything but "approved" overtime (for those who get paid hourly). OT is never approved, but it's always required. "Such and such had a problem last night at 7pm, why did you not call her immediately?" kind of bullshit.
This is, of course, on top of the normal IT "weekend" work to do upgrades, migrations, and installs so as to not disrupt the users. Four 9's of availability during work hours, and all that.
That's why it pisses us off. We're expected to do it, with no additional compensation. Our income does not usually reflect the added responsibilities. We're paid for 40, and work 60. Unlike most jobs with defined tasks and responsibilities, our's are broad and amorphous: "keep the systems running optimally", "fix problems as they arise", "perform upgrades and equipment replacement" and so on. Often, we've got no control over when or what happens, such as the environment we're inheriting or when something dies in the middle of the night.
Unfortunately, they're not designed to survive the idiots in sales, executive, and accounting.
"This isn't needed, we can make another 15% on the project by cutting this. And we can upsell the product as not needing this over here if we just add a pretty ribbon. And then we can retire."
So what does this have to do with using new, safe(r) reactor designs, exactly?
Better to get them in place ASAP and replace the ancient ones, yes? Or do you propose using coal to blot out the sun, or some alternative (like fascist restriction of power production and use)?
You're like my kids. "I had a meatball with an onion in it once, and I don't like onions, so I'm never going to try anyone's meatballs ever again."
Everything would be better if humans weren't involved. However, things that were obscenely dangerous just a decade ago are ridiculously safe now. They're not just safer because we've regulated mostly everything out of existence, but they're safer because of engineering improvements. Farm machinery is a good example of this: farmers are now frequently fat due to inactivity, having machines do all their work. Tractor cabs are as luxurious as BMWs and Mercendes with heated leather seats and widescreen LCD TVs. "Industrial accidents" become more rare as time goes on not only because fewer people are needed (more efficient) but because things have become ridiculously, ridiculously safe.
When it comes down to it, things are dangerous when humans have to be directly involved. Servers run for decades without being touched. Some vehicles can run a very, very long time without more than having their fluids/filters changed due to good engineering. I imagine large chip fabrication plants are almost entirely automated, because it's safer and more efficient than using humans. These were all engineered well. Modern reactors are designed to not only need human intervention to fail safely; they're designed to fail passively without an auxiliary backup for safety - like safety glass.
from what i've seen, the average site, as developed by india, is about 2-3 times that large. a single javascript for the page (of several) might be about 1Mb, though. From what i've seen, it's not uncommon for a page to have more than 5Mb of non-reusable elements. You can thank outsourcing, cut-and-paste programmers, and easily themeable click-to-install frameworks for this.
Don't waste your time on solving problems that were already solved in a thousand ways 10 years ago.
ORLY.
If everyone still had that mindset, we'd be using fvwm or fvwm95, or maybe icwm. Remember GNOME 1? Talk about uncomfortable - the latest gnome incarnations are actually better.:)
Or worse still, we'd be using Windows 9x and NT.
The recent Linux DEs and WMs are drastically better than what came before, regardless of whether you're talking about KDE, fluxbox, awesome, lxde, or even Unity. There isn't even a comparison.
On the earlier awesomewm versions, configuration was a bit of a bear, but only because it was unfamiliar. I tried to fix the wm into my concept instead of learning the concept (never a good idea). Since then, they've changed the defaults quite a bit (at least on Ubuntu/Debian, which is what most of the devs use, IIRC), and the only thing I have had to do is set CapsLock to be my "Mod4" key. The defaults are quite sane and intuitive.
See my earlier posts on this thread, if you'd like more of my thoughts/config info.
Configuration is in lua (which looks a bit like python to me in syntax), which is used for most game UIs, as I understand it. I've not had to mess with it. It just works.
A big part of my environment is the keyboard I use. I started using Awesome on an X30 Thinkpad, which has a clit mouse. I set the cursor acceleration fairly high (but not so high I'm frustrated on other computers - xset r rate 450 80) so that I'm able to basically 'throw' the cursor to a tiled app or different monitor instead of relying 100% on the keyboard. With sloppy focus (default in awesome) this works very well. Sloppy focus and tiling were made to be wed, IMO.
That said, awesome is one of those things you either love to death immediately, or hate forever. You've got to be wed to a keyboard or willing to divorce yourself from "Windows-isms" to jump in head first, because it isn't -well- suited for mouse use, IMO.
I've run awesome on everything from an ancient NEC MobilePro 780 (32Mb RAM, 184MHz MIPSIII CPU, 4" 640x240 or such LCD) - it barely ran, and took about a month to build - but it did run!) to my current i7 workstations. It performs admirably on both very small, awkward input devices to full workstations with multiple heads.
Re: awesome: it's written in Lua, and quite easily customizable as a result. I don't really touch it from the defaults, however, aside to set CapsLock to be "mod4" with xmodmap, or modify the rc.lua config to do the same:
Other than that, I use xfce4-terminal, as its been the most 'stable' in terms of development changes over the last couple years, low on memory (a good thing, since I've usually got about 50 of them open at any one time) and quick to set up/already there, usually. I'll run all this on two displays on Ubuntu, usually, with most tiles (what awesome calls a virtual desktop, basically) with terminals segregated by work task, chromium/chrome, etc. and virtualbox for work-required Windows apps.
You guys both have a point, but you're also being assholes.
I've known people who have "20 years in the business", with resumes and 'experience' to match who are insufferable, incompetent idiots. I know people who have only been working on computers for 10 months (in any practical fashion aside from basic end user stuff) and are more capable and intelligent than said 20-year veterans.
There was no reason to jump on him for his claims. 10 years of 60-hour-week computing isn't necessarily impressive, but it does mean he uses a computer quite a bit. There's been a lot of time for concepts and principles to leech into his brain, regardless of his efforts. Everybody's different.
I'd sorta agree, KDE is uniquely polished and clean compared to the other "full" DEs. If I've got to pick between something 'major and current', KDE is it. The biggest disadvantage it has, IMO, is all the dbus etc. subsystems which are required to be running for any of the KDE-related stuff to also be running. (I'm sure you'll find that, in piecing together your desktops, you've got to run some complementary/competitive background processes to keep it all tied together. I don't find this preferable.)
I used to use XFCE4 and dabbled with lxde for a while. I'd jump back to something like these (or icewm, back in the day) when one of the others became too bloated/slow, consuming most resources.
Personally, I'm a fan of awesome. It's fairly lightweight (currently using 36Mb, 201 shared), blazingly fast, and minimalist. If I want to use the mouse (rarely), I can do so (as it has a task bar and a menu, etc.), behaving a bit like openbox (or similar). If I want to float my windows about like most DEs, I can do so, or I can (as I preference) tile the windows to use the most of my screen effectively. It's keyboard-centric (though the learning curve was negligible - I use similar default bindings in browsers already), and makes the best use of the the "virtual desktop" concept of any DE I've seen aside from Enlightenment DR16, back in the day. It's got x.org compliant status area implementation, a clock, and implemented using the newer xcb instead of the older (and crappier) xlib. Most importantly, I've been using it since the 0.2.0 days (3, 4, 5 years?) and haven't had any marked problems with it (other than Ubuntu fucking something up with 11.04's Xorg implementation, making xmodmap not work). I highly recommend it for anyone tired of standard fare.
After looking at port scans this morning, I have one thing to say: what goes around comes around. I have a hard time thinking such incompetence as would lead to so many exploited machines is possible without just a little bit of malice.
That's a real shame. I wonder if this applies to the Nook Simple Touch as well? It's the first e-ink reader I've found that has the physical controls I'd want in an ebook reader (touchscreen of sorts, , and also has a very nice form factor (perfect for "put it anywhrere").
Or, for those moments when you are peacfully protesting in sanfransico, and the police forcibly disperse you.
Will never happen. Staunch supporters of the people would never use the tools and very symbols of Western Capitalism and Corporate Greed.
That, and the Marxists would never be actually peaceful. Throw things, yell, and intimidate, then lie that they're being peaceful? Sure, that's another story.
Apple isn't the only one with a stupid patent portfolio. They're the only ones that are wielding it abusively, though (at this time).
Name one other large semi-monopolistic company which is suing anyone and everyone who implements something similar to their own largely successful product. There aren't any, currently. Predatory companies do this kind of thing when they think they're sufficiently larger than the other players to walk all over them, and their competition stands a good chance of pushing their product down in market revenue. That's what it comes down to: Apple has failed to innovate or improve enough to keep the iPhone notable (getting beaten by that 'linux thing', Android) in the past 5 years. The only thing Apple innovated was the cultural business concept that smartphones had a consumer market (pushing the "fuck you we're charging for every bit" behavior of carriers into panic mode).
Who does this "put off" other than techno-geeks that read sites like/.? I don't think the average consumer is taking Apple's heavy-handed patent tactics into account when they are picking out their next smartphone. This is a win-win for Apple
Is it?
Look back to Dell and the "Dude, you got a Dell!" advertising campaign era. Geeks didn't buy their shit because it was, well, shit. Their computers weren't very good, they broke and were poorly constructed.
This will happen to Apple, too. The "shiney smartphone" nature of iPhones has worn off, now that everyone sees there's nothing special about them, and that Android phones are actually nicer and more featureful. If you're an adult geek and not giving your geek friends shit for buying trendy Apple products, or more specifically, for spending all that money on something which doesn't even work well, if at all (GPS navigation and poor call quality come to mind), you're probably not discerning enough to do anything in IT but programming. (Common people are somewhat more able than geeks, I've noticed, at being able to determine "hey, that's better than this for my uses" when pressed with a functional use case. I don't get that, but it's oddly true.)
When nobody but the common layman is using Apple products, people will take note of the discrepancy. "Why do none of the mechanics drive Priuses?" It's the same line of reasoning, and will result in (IMO) fairly significant backlash.
Slashdot Mirror
You realize that the security of the data itself directly correlates to whether in-house IT has control and the 'stability' of the network, right?
You can't access your Cloudy data if the network is down or unable to handle Cloud type loads.
You can't secure your data if you have no access to the actual data infrastructure, enabling a complete in-house account of everything.
You can't secure your data (or even access it) if your devices are "on the fritz".
All these things rely upon in-house IT controlling things for you (whether that in-house IT be a managed service provider/outsourced or internal employees).
The sad thing is, the idiots pushing these "turnkey solutions" look like experts to the eyes of users once things are underway. "You got this working in X period of time? You must be an IT rockstar". Meanwihle, it's about as complicated as setting up a blog, and doing it once is as difficult as doing it 100 times. When things go south, however, the blame can be placed on the "cloud service", and the resident expert IT rockstar gets away with it scotch free.
I agree, it's a good idea to let them hang themselves early on. Help them along with some complicated questions they will be unable to answer, and know more about their product than they do. (A nice shotgun is the best form of seagull management.) It's not just about job security, it's about making sure people (your customers) don't get brought along for a ride, raped, and then left in a ditch somewhere to die...
It's not just iPad that has wireless issues. It's all Apple wireless devices, from what I've seen. They've got poor connectivity due to the software stack, largely. They poison the spectrum with noise and prevent everyone from getting online. You need a much higher ratio of APs to devices with Apple products than with anything else. Even cheap phones do better.
The problem with BYOD/DIY IT is multi-fold, and it's strongly related to users being unwilling (and unable) to take responsibility for their own decisions.
* With a myriad of Cloud services, everyone using something different. Massive datasets of information end up in a disparate group of services, suitable for only one person's use. It makes the employee irreplaceable until the data is migrated to something else that others are able to access.
* Security. I really shouldn't have to expound on this, on Slashdot of all places. At issue is not only the security of what individual users are working with, but the security of the network as a whole as each individual uses
* Information management/security. This is similar to the previous point, but goes further. Who owns the data? Who has access to the data when the employee leaves? It's difficult (if not impossible) to gain access to important business information which is on an employee's personal device or cloud service associated with a non-work mail address.
* Service reliability. In-house IT may have a history of fucking things up and making a mess of things, but at least someone competent can come along later and, even in many of the worst situations, retrieve it. With Cloud services, there is no such possibility, and there are no backups (in all likelihood). What happens when a Cloud service (god, I hate that word) eats an important document? I've seen it happen, and the user comes crying to IT anyway; the burden falls on us to 'recover' the document, because that's what they're used to. They have no ability to discern why it's not possible.
* Device reliability and employee productivity. I'm not going to be able to do anything consistent if I'm hamstrung on both sides when a user's device breaks. I can't replace it with another machine/device from stock (because I haven't been given the budget or time to provide such things). In all likelihood, even if I had such a device I couldn't restore the data to it that needs to be restored, because there's no consistent means of providing those backups.
* Time. IT is going to spend a lot more time per-issue and spend a lot more time doing absolutely nothing - also known as sitting on the phone, on hold, waiting for support. Sure, less time will be spent on implementation projects in the medium term, but long term this will be problematic.
* Professional degradation. This plays heavily on the "time" issue previously mentioned. I can hardly make a career in IT if the things I'm supporting are fleeting and not exactly technical, just another stupid UI to dig through. This is a short-sighted approach, and is as bad for organizations as it is for me. You won't have people considering IT if all they can do is generalize in 100 different closed and locked product UIs, with their biggest technical skill being knowing how to call support. This will eat into user's time, eventually, as people stop going into IT. When companies eventually want a turnaround, competent IT for in-house maintenance (or MSP) will be fewer and far between, costing quite a bit more than previously.
In short, Cloud services look appealing to users because IT is unappealing to them. IT gets in the way and prevents them from doing things; IT does not provide them with the tools they (think) they need. They look elsewhere, which makes IT look bad. When that backfires, IT then looks bad again when we're unable to recover their data from a proprietary service we have absolutely no ability to reverse engineer.
*** Let me make a pointed warning about a very specific "cloud" service: AutoTask. This is the biggest steaming pile of shit I have ever seen, and it's about as bad as it gets for vendor lock-in. Managers love it, it's got all the right sales words to describe it. It doesn't work, however. Not only are the use fees fairly high, but the product doesn't work. I've seen it display wrong numbers, lose records, display different data depending on which person is logged in (erroneously, regardless of supposed credentials), and i
I'm sorry, 50% isn't that impressive or "progressive".
Making $50k a year (high on the average), I'm going to pay 28% in taxes to the Federal government, give or take. Then there's state tax, about 10% if you're in a more populated state (9.3% in California). Then I've got another 17% of that eaten away by sales/use tax, and of course we have things like additional taxes on utilities and pre-existing property.
That ends up a bit over 50% of total income if you're spending your entire income to survive (as many are), or a bit less if you're investing and making money. States like New York and New Jersey are very similar (I believe state income tax is about 6% there, and sales is around 4-8% depending on the locality).
For all that, we get mangy street people and illiterate immigrants who do shittier work than the natives.
The Greeks are not an example of socialist malpractice, they're an example of corruption, mismanagement and overspending.
One may argue thta socialist malpractice is, in fact, corruption, mismanagement, and overspending. Where there are palms to grease and few morals, palms will be greased and your trifecta will start taking hold of the society as a whole. No, it's not singularly endemic to socialism, though socialism certainly makes it more possible through large government and limited accountability.
50% is "quite high"? Imagine my chagrin at reading that, paying roughly that at what might be considered a low middle class income.
We don't get any such vacation periods (unheard of), work 60 hours a week (because it's required and we can be fired for it not happening), and so-called welfare doesn't even cover what it claims to cover, only paying enough to keep the people from leaving the ghettos or seeking jobs, but not enough in the right places to actually pay for anything if you work for a living.
Every attempt to add such a "bonus" to our social welfare ends up in more government pork, more taxes, more national debt, and more "welfare".
With a government like this, is it a surprise that we have a Tea Party?
I work in IT as a sysadmin. I love my job - the people I work with directly, the people I support, and the systems I work with.
I'm also a bit a workaholic. I expect to have to do some work after-hours; however ,the expectation of management is that I work all the time. "You work until the job is done" is their expectation, based on the fact that I'm salaried. All the while, they're not understanding of personal obligations outside of work, and fully expect me to work (literally) all the time. It's little things like not providing sufficient support for the environment when key people are on vacation, not allowing flex time and not paying anything but "approved" overtime (for those who get paid hourly). OT is never approved, but it's always required. "Such and such had a problem last night at 7pm, why did you not call her immediately?" kind of bullshit.
This is, of course, on top of the normal IT "weekend" work to do upgrades, migrations, and installs so as to not disrupt the users. Four 9's of availability during work hours, and all that.
That's why it pisses us off. We're expected to do it, with no additional compensation. Our income does not usually reflect the added responsibilities. We're paid for 40, and work 60. Unlike most jobs with defined tasks and responsibilities, our's are broad and amorphous: "keep the systems running optimally", "fix problems as they arise", "perform upgrades and equipment replacement" and so on. Often, we've got no control over when or what happens, such as the environment we're inheriting or when something dies in the middle of the night.
Unfortunately, they're not designed to survive the idiots in sales, executive, and accounting.
"This isn't needed, we can make another 15% on the project by cutting this. And we can upsell the product as not needing this over here if we just add a pretty ribbon. And then we can retire."
So what does this have to do with using new, safe(r) reactor designs, exactly?
Better to get them in place ASAP and replace the ancient ones, yes? Or do you propose using coal to blot out the sun, or some alternative (like fascist restriction of power production and use)?
You're like my kids. "I had a meatball with an onion in it once, and I don't like onions, so I'm never going to try anyone's meatballs ever again."
Everything would be better if humans weren't involved. However, things that were obscenely dangerous just a decade ago are ridiculously safe now. They're not just safer because we've regulated mostly everything out of existence, but they're safer because of engineering improvements. Farm machinery is a good example of this: farmers are now frequently fat due to inactivity, having machines do all their work. Tractor cabs are as luxurious as BMWs and Mercendes with heated leather seats and widescreen LCD TVs. "Industrial accidents" become more rare as time goes on not only because fewer people are needed (more efficient) but because things have become ridiculously, ridiculously safe.
When it comes down to it, things are dangerous when humans have to be directly involved. Servers run for decades without being touched. Some vehicles can run a very, very long time without more than having their fluids/filters changed due to good engineering. I imagine large chip fabrication plants are almost entirely automated, because it's safer and more efficient than using humans. These were all engineered well. Modern reactors are designed to not only need human intervention to fail safely; they're designed to fail passively without an auxiliary backup for safety - like safety glass.
Here here, I'm only a couple months from that mark myself.
from what i've seen, the average site, as developed by india, is about 2-3 times that large. a single javascript for the page (of several) might be about 1Mb, though. From what i've seen, it's not uncommon for a page to have more than 5Mb of non-reusable elements. You can thank outsourcing, cut-and-paste programmers, and easily themeable click-to-install frameworks for this.
Don't waste your time on solving problems that were already solved in a thousand ways 10 years ago.
ORLY.
If everyone still had that mindset, we'd be using fvwm or fvwm95, or maybe icwm. Remember GNOME 1? Talk about uncomfortable - the latest gnome incarnations are actually better. :)
Or worse still, we'd be using Windows 9x and NT.
The recent Linux DEs and WMs are drastically better than what came before, regardless of whether you're talking about KDE, fluxbox, awesome, lxde, or even Unity. There isn't even a comparison.
On the earlier awesomewm versions, configuration was a bit of a bear, but only because it was unfamiliar. I tried to fix the wm into my concept instead of learning the concept (never a good idea). Since then, they've changed the defaults quite a bit (at least on Ubuntu/Debian, which is what most of the devs use, IIRC), and the only thing I have had to do is set CapsLock to be my "Mod4" key. The defaults are quite sane and intuitive.
See my earlier posts on this thread, if you'd like more of my thoughts/config info.
Configuration is in lua (which looks a bit like python to me in syntax), which is used for most game UIs, as I understand it. I've not had to mess with it. It just works.
Replying to myself, again. Yay?
A big part of my environment is the keyboard I use. I started using Awesome on an X30 Thinkpad, which has a clit mouse. I set the cursor acceleration fairly high (but not so high I'm frustrated on other computers - xset r rate 450 80) so that I'm able to basically 'throw' the cursor to a tiled app or different monitor instead of relying 100% on the keyboard. With sloppy focus (default in awesome) this works very well. Sloppy focus and tiling were made to be wed, IMO.
I'm an ardent supporter of Awesome.
That said, awesome is one of those things you either love to death immediately, or hate forever. You've got to be wed to a keyboard or willing to divorce yourself from "Windows-isms" to jump in head first, because it isn't -well- suited for mouse use, IMO.
I've run awesome on everything from an ancient NEC MobilePro 780 (32Mb RAM, 184MHz MIPSIII CPU, 4" 640x240 or such LCD) - it barely ran, and took about a month to build - but it did run!) to my current i7 workstations. It performs admirably on both very small, awkward input devices to full workstations with multiple heads.
Yay, replying to myself.
Re: awesome: it's written in Lua, and quite easily customizable as a result. I don't really touch it from the defaults, however, aside to set CapsLock to be "mod4" with xmodmap, or modify the rc.lua config to do the same:
$ cat .Xmodmap
remove Lock = Caps_Lock
add mod4 = Caps_Lock
Other than that, I use xfce4-terminal, as its been the most 'stable' in terms of development changes over the last couple years, low on memory (a good thing, since I've usually got about 50 of them open at any one time) and quick to set up/already there, usually. I'll run all this on two displays on Ubuntu, usually, with most tiles (what awesome calls a virtual desktop, basically) with terminals segregated by work task, chromium/chrome, etc. and virtualbox for work-required Windows apps.
You guys both have a point, but you're also being assholes.
I've known people who have "20 years in the business", with resumes and 'experience' to match who are insufferable, incompetent idiots. I know people who have only been working on computers for 10 months (in any practical fashion aside from basic end user stuff) and are more capable and intelligent than said 20-year veterans.
There was no reason to jump on him for his claims. 10 years of 60-hour-week computing isn't necessarily impressive, but it does mean he uses a computer quite a bit. There's been a lot of time for concepts and principles to leech into his brain, regardless of his efforts. Everybody's different.
I'd sorta agree, KDE is uniquely polished and clean compared to the other "full" DEs. If I've got to pick between something 'major and current', KDE is it. The biggest disadvantage it has, IMO, is all the dbus etc. subsystems which are required to be running for any of the KDE-related stuff to also be running. (I'm sure you'll find that, in piecing together your desktops, you've got to run some complementary/competitive background processes to keep it all tied together. I don't find this preferable.)
I used to use XFCE4 and dabbled with lxde for a while. I'd jump back to something like these (or icewm, back in the day) when one of the others became too bloated/slow, consuming most resources.
Personally, I'm a fan of awesome. It's fairly lightweight (currently using 36Mb, 201 shared), blazingly fast, and minimalist. If I want to use the mouse (rarely), I can do so (as it has a task bar and a menu, etc.), behaving a bit like openbox (or similar). If I want to float my windows about like most DEs, I can do so, or I can (as I preference) tile the windows to use the most of my screen effectively. It's keyboard-centric (though the learning curve was negligible - I use similar default bindings in browsers already), and makes the best use of the the "virtual desktop" concept of any DE I've seen aside from Enlightenment DR16, back in the day. It's got x.org compliant status area implementation, a clock, and implemented using the newer xcb instead of the older (and crappier) xlib. Most importantly, I've been using it since the 0.2.0 days (3, 4, 5 years?) and haven't had any marked problems with it (other than Ubuntu fucking something up with 11.04's Xorg implementation, making xmodmap not work). I highly recommend it for anyone tired of standard fare.
After looking at port scans this morning, I have one thing to say: what goes around comes around. I have a hard time thinking such incompetence as would lead to so many exploited machines is possible without just a little bit of malice.
That's a real shame. I wonder if this applies to the Nook Simple Touch as well? It's the first e-ink reader I've found that has the physical controls I'd want in an ebook reader (touchscreen of sorts, , and also has a very nice form factor (perfect for "put it anywhrere").
Or, for those moments when you are peacfully protesting in sanfransico, and the police forcibly disperse you.
Will never happen. Staunch supporters of the people would never use the tools and very symbols of Western Capitalism and Corporate Greed.
That, and the Marxists would never be actually peaceful. Throw things, yell, and intimidate, then lie that they're being peaceful? Sure, that's another story.
Apple isn't the only one with a stupid patent portfolio. They're the only ones that are wielding it abusively, though (at this time).
Name one other large semi-monopolistic company which is suing anyone and everyone who implements something similar to their own largely successful product. There aren't any, currently. Predatory companies do this kind of thing when they think they're sufficiently larger than the other players to walk all over them, and their competition stands a good chance of pushing their product down in market revenue. That's what it comes down to: Apple has failed to innovate or improve enough to keep the iPhone notable (getting beaten by that 'linux thing', Android) in the past 5 years. The only thing Apple innovated was the cultural business concept that smartphones had a consumer market (pushing the "fuck you we're charging for every bit" behavior of carriers into panic mode).
Who does this "put off" other than techno-geeks that read sites like /.? I don't think the average consumer is taking Apple's heavy-handed patent tactics into account when they are picking out their next smartphone. This is a win-win for Apple
Is it?
Look back to Dell and the "Dude, you got a Dell!" advertising campaign era. Geeks didn't buy their shit because it was, well, shit. Their computers weren't very good, they broke and were poorly constructed.
This will happen to Apple, too. The "shiney smartphone" nature of iPhones has worn off, now that everyone sees there's nothing special about them, and that Android phones are actually nicer and more featureful. If you're an adult geek and not giving your geek friends shit for buying trendy Apple products, or more specifically, for spending all that money on something which doesn't even work well, if at all (GPS navigation and poor call quality come to mind), you're probably not discerning enough to do anything in IT but programming. (Common people are somewhat more able than geeks, I've noticed, at being able to determine "hey, that's better than this for my uses" when pressed with a functional use case. I don't get that, but it's oddly true.)
When nobody but the common layman is using Apple products, people will take note of the discrepancy. "Why do none of the mechanics drive Priuses?" It's the same line of reasoning, and will result in (IMO) fairly significant backlash.
Nevermind that people have been able to do it before the Blackberry became common, on Windows Mobile.
Apple is the absolute last player to come to this game.