I've had at least one Linux-based system at all times since 1996, and I'm typing this on a Mint system. In my opinion, fragmentation isn't the issue - it's applications. Gaming is a lot better lately, with Steam pushing pretty hard, but it's not even close to the state on Windows. Office and creativity applications exist, but are lacking compared to Windows and MacOS. The lack of strong entities pushing excellent applications hurts usability.
I'd love to be able to put Linux or FreeBSD on my main system and just leave it at that, but unless you're working on the web or within Linux, it's hard to make the jump away from Windows or MacOS. If applications start becoming purely web-based, it may render the base operating systems less relevant.
Four hours? When I was 19 I worked at a 50s themed McDonald's and we cycled the same seven songs over and over non-stop. I asked the manager about it and she said it was meant to drive customers out quickly - once they had paid they just cost us money by being there. Unfortunately they played the music in the grill area *and* outside. Que Sera Sera, To Sir With Love, King of the Road, Queen of the House, My Dad, Afternoon Delight... I forget the last one. I totally sympathize with these folks.
I'm either an old Millennial or young X-er depending on which metric you use, so I've spent time with Boomers, X, and Millennials and I have to say that most Millennials I've come across have been hard working. This goes against the stereotype, but they generally work at least as hard as anyone else. What they're less likely to do is put up with nonsense and meaningless ritual at work. They don't seem to feel as strongly about "paying dues" - they want to be paid for what they actually do. Many of them are automators and innovators and they expect to be paid well to automate away hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of labor, and I think they should be.
Institutional knowledge and experience are tremendously important, and I think we can all agree that in general people tend to slow down a little as their career progresses. Older workers can better see though hype and understand that not everything needs to be a twenty level stacked microservice written in Haskell. I really can't see a huge difference in drive and quality overall simply based on age.
Millennials do have a harder time affording life in general, and I can completely understand why someone who is an entry-level employee making just enough to get by would want to switch to a better paying job with perhaps less bureaucracy.
I used to work in cartography years ago and we used to use Photoshop for certain parts of our workflow. At some point I
was tasked to look into Photoshop alternatives because management wanted to save the ~$700 per seat cost. Being a Linux user since the mid-90s,
I looked at The GIMP. I don't remember exactly why it wasn't as good as Photoshop - I believe it was slower and either didn't support CMYK or
had poor support for it. Anyway, I compiled my report and said this was a possible replacement, though not as good for our workflow.
I then had to have the conversation:
--Me: This is the GNU Image Manipulation Program or GIMP
--Boss: What?
--Me: GIMP
--Boss: Why the hell would they call it that?
--Me: Well, it stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program
--Boss: Yeah, but do they know what gimp means?
--Me: Yeah, they'd have to at this point
--Boss: Why don't they change it?
--Me: Hubris or they're trying to be cute
--Boss: We're not using software called GIMP
So it goes. It's a bad name that they use just to be cute and then get defensive over when people don't like it. I'm not a fan of the UI and it had
problems back in the day (I haven't had a reason to use it in a long time), but I can give you at least one anecdote where the name directly
stopped an organization from using it. It's got nothing to do with snowflakes or SJWs, it's just a bad name in a lot of people's minds.
Only if the OS or software don't support high DPI displays. Last year I was using Ubuntu in a VM on a Microsoft Surface Book (3000x2000 13" display) and everything worked fine. Debian? Not so much. Could be fixed by now though. I'm definitely ready for 8K to start becoming mainstream:P
I do find it interesting that they didn't collect information on physical and logical cores. I don't really understand the value of only collecting information on number of populated sockets. I'm generally in the more information is better crowd, though I do wonder if business and government users and use cases are mostly absent from these results - I would imagine that most organizations wouldn't like metrics on their systems being given out even if they're anonymized.
There are still quite a few programs which are Windows only, one of which is ArcGIS, used for mapping and spatial data. Other options like QGIS are out there, but they're still lacking in a few key features which make ArcGIS worth the cost of entry. As to the post a few levels above, firing someone for proposing a reasonable MS solution sounds like a terrible way to run an organization - maybe they've thought of something you missed. I can't imagine getting rid of someone who is legitimately trying to propose solutions, even if I didn't like what they were proposing.
Since this is likely to turn into a discussion of our favorite text editors, I have to say that I really like Notepadqq (http://notepadqq.altervista.org/wp/). It's inspired by Notepad++ and it feels very similar for those of us who do most of our work in Windows. Combine it with the Inconsolata font (http://levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html) and you can't go wrong.
I know that true Computer Science is a branch of mathematics and that an actual computer isn't necessary for its study, but let's be honest - the overwhelming majority of these folks are going to try and become developers. Given that, I really hope that university programs start focusing on software security, documentation, technical writing, and peer review. The trend today seems to be using whatever hot new modules and stacks are floating out there, assuming (or perhaps not caring) that their authors have made everything secure. Software Engineering is really difficult to do properly in the best of circumstances, let alone when the boss is breathing down your neck and all of your expensive veterans have been run off to be replaced with green employees.
I do write software, but I'm an engineer who just codes to get things done quickly. I've done some work as a Software Engineer when my normal work dried up for a while. The attitudes toward documentation I've seen at work and in the open source community are quite worrying. A lot of emerging technologies are going to be hamstrung by insecure development - smart grids, self-driving cars, Internet of Things, etc.
I know I'm kind of an outsider looking in, but it just feels like we're building our house on a really shaky foundation and everyone is too busy talking about six-figure salaries and massages at work to care.
I've got a four core, eight thread 4790K, which is one of the fastest stock CPUs around. I routinely use most of the cores while gaming. A lot of games are threaded in some way, and there's always the OS doing stuff in the background to consider.
That said, Threadripper isn't for glorified internet appliances. These will be great for workstations and low-cost simulation/computation/VM systems for your office desk or home development environment. Personally I'm going to use these for some POV-Ray stuff unless they benchmark really poorly in it. Epyc is more targeted toward servers. This is pure workstation/gaming gear and I'm (finally) excited about AMD again.
Okay, thank you. I was wondering why the hell anyone would heat their homes with that clear white wax (which is what paraffin is in the US):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Properly calibrated monitors do make whites quite bright, as they should be. Personally, a wall of white with black text, like on Slashdot, is quite hard on my eyes. I wish more sites had grey backgrounds or at least gave us the capability to choose themes.
I'm completely ready for 8K. Having several completely readable terminal/text editing windows open along with documentation and other media or doing cartography/other visual media creation would be awesome at 8K. Right now I'm using a 34" 3440x1440 monitor and it's still somewhat grainy. I welcome displays so fine that I can't see the pixels.
Once I can get an 8K @ 60Hz display for $1500, I'm going on a spending spree and replacing all of my monitors at home.
Slashdot won't let me insert Russian characters since it's 1987, but it seems like it translates to "They'll catch and castrate you then tell you you're free to go since you aren't a camel"
Absolutely agree - I wish I had mod points. I loathe the telephone for those reasons. Not only is it slower to process, but the messages take up far more space. Text can be easily stored for future use/documentation.
The whole "building up infrastructure at home, work, and shopping centers" is a lot of hand waving. Aside from the lack of capacity in our power grid in general, how will older cities add this functionality in without having to tear everything apart? Are we going to have charging stations along the street everywhere? That's a lot of power infrastructure.
I live really close to work and school, and an EV would be perfect for me, except there is no where for me to charge. The nearest Tesla SuperCharger is about 45 minutes away. There's no assigned parking at work, home, or school, and none of those has an electric charger nor is there any hope of getting them in the foreseeable future.
My city can barely keep the roads driveable in summer. There's simply no money to dig everything up and put in an upgraded power infrastructure. If it's left in the hands of private industry, how will we deal with cost, maintenance, compatibility, liability, etc? I really want this stuff to happen, I just don't see a lot of practical answers anywhere. Hoping it will just happen means it probably won't. At least no soon.
Linus Tech Tips did a video review (YouTube Link) and it sounds like the RX480 is a much better value. I'm surprised, but pleased to see AMD doing well. It would be nice if nvidia had some competition at all price points.
"the months leading up to this year's phenomenal reboot of Doom"
By that they mean the new Doom game which just came out, which is what I was referring to.
More like Halo with demons and a terrible map editor. Doom was a serious disappointment for me. I used to love using stuff like DoomCAD to make levels and this new release was honestly kind of an insult. Fortunately Steam let me return it.
Maybe they won't screw up the new Quake?
Slashdot Mirror
I've had at least one Linux-based system at all times since 1996, and I'm typing this on a Mint system. In my opinion, fragmentation isn't the issue - it's applications. Gaming is a lot better lately, with Steam pushing pretty hard, but it's not even close to the state on Windows. Office and creativity applications exist, but are lacking compared to Windows and MacOS. The lack of strong entities pushing excellent applications hurts usability.
I'd love to be able to put Linux or FreeBSD on my main system and just leave it at that, but unless you're working on the web or within Linux, it's hard to make the jump away from Windows or MacOS. If applications start becoming purely web-based, it may render the base operating systems less relevant.
This is pretty neat and all, but the people talking over the music makes it totally uninteresting. I can't find a way to turn them off.
Four hours? When I was 19 I worked at a 50s themed McDonald's and we cycled the same seven songs over and over non-stop. I asked the manager about it and she said it was meant to drive customers out quickly - once they had paid they just cost us money by being there. Unfortunately they played the music in the grill area *and* outside. Que Sera Sera, To Sir With Love, King of the Road, Queen of the House, My Dad, Afternoon Delight... I forget the last one. I totally sympathize with these folks.
We're waiting.
Sorry to burst your bubble :P
Of course, if it's below 0K outside, you'd probably want to just stay in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I'm either an old Millennial or young X-er depending on which metric you use, so I've spent time with Boomers, X, and Millennials and I have to say that most Millennials I've come across have been hard working. This goes against the stereotype, but they generally work at least as hard as anyone else. What they're less likely to do is put up with nonsense and meaningless ritual at work. They don't seem to feel as strongly about "paying dues" - they want to be paid for what they actually do. Many of them are automators and innovators and they expect to be paid well to automate away hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of labor, and I think they should be.
Institutional knowledge and experience are tremendously important, and I think we can all agree that in general people tend to slow down a little as their career progresses. Older workers can better see though hype and understand that not everything needs to be a twenty level stacked microservice written in Haskell. I really can't see a huge difference in drive and quality overall simply based on age.
Millennials do have a harder time affording life in general, and I can completely understand why someone who is an entry-level employee making just enough to get by would want to switch to a better paying job with perhaps less bureaucracy.
I used to work in cartography years ago and we used to use Photoshop for certain parts of our workflow. At some point I was tasked to look into Photoshop alternatives because management wanted to save the ~$700 per seat cost. Being a Linux user since the mid-90s, I looked at The GIMP. I don't remember exactly why it wasn't as good as Photoshop - I believe it was slower and either didn't support CMYK or had poor support for it. Anyway, I compiled my report and said this was a possible replacement, though not as good for our workflow.
I then had to have the conversation:
--Me: This is the GNU Image Manipulation Program or GIMP
--Boss: What?
--Me: GIMP
--Boss: Why the hell would they call it that?
--Me: Well, it stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program
--Boss: Yeah, but do they know what gimp means?
--Me: Yeah, they'd have to at this point
--Boss: Why don't they change it?
--Me: Hubris or they're trying to be cute
--Boss: We're not using software called GIMP
So it goes. It's a bad name that they use just to be cute and then get defensive over when people don't like it. I'm not a fan of the UI and it had problems back in the day (I haven't had a reason to use it in a long time), but I can give you at least one anecdote where the name directly stopped an organization from using it. It's got nothing to do with snowflakes or SJWs, it's just a bad name in a lot of people's minds.
I need way more TV tie-ins like they did for Mr. Robot. If I can't have those, I have to ask myself, what's the point in even using Firefox?
Only if the OS or software don't support high DPI displays. Last year I was using Ubuntu in a VM on a Microsoft Surface Book (3000x2000 13" display) and everything worked fine. Debian? Not so much. Could be fixed by now though. I'm definitely ready for 8K to start becoming mainstream :P
I do find it interesting that they didn't collect information on physical and logical cores. I don't really understand the value of only collecting information on number of populated sockets. I'm generally in the more information is better crowd, though I do wonder if business and government users and use cases are mostly absent from these results - I would imagine that most organizations wouldn't like metrics on their systems being given out even if they're anonymized.
There are still quite a few programs which are Windows only, one of which is ArcGIS, used for mapping and spatial data. Other options like QGIS are out there, but they're still lacking in a few key features which make ArcGIS worth the cost of entry. As to the post a few levels above, firing someone for proposing a reasonable MS solution sounds like a terrible way to run an organization - maybe they've thought of something you missed. I can't imagine getting rid of someone who is legitimately trying to propose solutions, even if I didn't like what they were proposing.
Since this is likely to turn into a discussion of our favorite text editors, I have to say that I really like Notepadqq (http://notepadqq.altervista.org/wp/). It's inspired by Notepad++ and it feels very similar for those of us who do most of our work in Windows. Combine it with the Inconsolata font (http://levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html) and you can't go wrong.
I know that true Computer Science is a branch of mathematics and that an actual computer isn't necessary for its study, but let's be honest - the overwhelming majority of these folks are going to try and become developers. Given that, I really hope that university programs start focusing on software security, documentation, technical writing, and peer review. The trend today seems to be using whatever hot new modules and stacks are floating out there, assuming (or perhaps not caring) that their authors have made everything secure. Software Engineering is really difficult to do properly in the best of circumstances, let alone when the boss is breathing down your neck and all of your expensive veterans have been run off to be replaced with green employees.
I do write software, but I'm an engineer who just codes to get things done quickly. I've done some work as a Software Engineer when my normal work dried up for a while. The attitudes toward documentation I've seen at work and in the open source community are quite worrying. A lot of emerging technologies are going to be hamstrung by insecure development - smart grids, self-driving cars, Internet of Things, etc.
I know I'm kind of an outsider looking in, but it just feels like we're building our house on a really shaky foundation and everyone is too busy talking about six-figure salaries and massages at work to care.
I've got a four core, eight thread 4790K, which is one of the fastest stock CPUs around. I routinely use most of the cores while gaming. A lot of games are threaded in some way, and there's always the OS doing stuff in the background to consider. That said, Threadripper isn't for glorified internet appliances. These will be great for workstations and low-cost simulation/computation/VM systems for your office desk or home development environment. Personally I'm going to use these for some POV-Ray stuff unless they benchmark really poorly in it. Epyc is more targeted toward servers. This is pure workstation/gaming gear and I'm (finally) excited about AMD again.
Okay, thank you. I was wondering why the hell anyone would heat their homes with that clear white wax (which is what paraffin is in the US): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Properly calibrated monitors do make whites quite bright, as they should be. Personally, a wall of white with black text, like on Slashdot, is quite hard on my eyes. I wish more sites had grey backgrounds or at least gave us the capability to choose themes.
I'm completely ready for 8K. Having several completely readable terminal/text editing windows open along with documentation and other media or doing cartography/other visual media creation would be awesome at 8K. Right now I'm using a 34" 3440x1440 monitor and it's still somewhat grainy. I welcome displays so fine that I can't see the pixels. Once I can get an 8K @ 60Hz display for $1500, I'm going on a spending spree and replacing all of my monitors at home.
The best version of this joke I can find is at http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:AuW0jGrLm08J:www.berkovich-zametki.com/Nomer31/Kigel1.htm+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us.
Slashdot won't let me insert Russian characters since it's 1987, but it seems like it translates to "They'll catch and castrate you then tell you you're free to go since you aren't a camel"
Absolutely agree - I wish I had mod points. I loathe the telephone for those reasons. Not only is it slower to process, but the messages take up far more space. Text can be easily stored for future use/documentation.
The whole "building up infrastructure at home, work, and shopping centers" is a lot of hand waving. Aside from the lack of capacity in our power grid in general, how will older cities add this functionality in without having to tear everything apart? Are we going to have charging stations along the street everywhere? That's a lot of power infrastructure. I live really close to work and school, and an EV would be perfect for me, except there is no where for me to charge. The nearest Tesla SuperCharger is about 45 minutes away. There's no assigned parking at work, home, or school, and none of those has an electric charger nor is there any hope of getting them in the foreseeable future. My city can barely keep the roads driveable in summer. There's simply no money to dig everything up and put in an upgraded power infrastructure. If it's left in the hands of private industry, how will we deal with cost, maintenance, compatibility, liability, etc? I really want this stuff to happen, I just don't see a lot of practical answers anywhere. Hoping it will just happen means it probably won't. At least no soon.
Man, I'm glad we don't have any of that craziness here in the US...
...damn
Linus Tech Tips did a video review (YouTube Link) and it sounds like the RX480 is a much better value. I'm surprised, but pleased to see AMD doing well. It would be nice if nvidia had some competition at all price points.
I'll list my two "main" systems:
Gaming:
CPU: Intel Core i7 4790k
Memory: 32GB DDR3
GPUs: NVidia GeForce 980Ti and Quadro K1200
Storage: 480GB Samsung 950 NVMe + 120GB Samsung 850 EVO SSD + 800GB Western Digital Hard Disk
OS: Windows 10 Pro
Displays: 2x 3440x1440 + 2x 1600x2560 (portrait mode)
Productivity:
CPU: Intel Core i5 6600k
Memory: 32GB DDR4
GPU: NVidia Quadro K1200
Storage: 2x 250GB Samsung 850 EVO SSD + 2TB Western Digital Hard Disk
OS: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
Display: 1x 3440x1440
I'm moving this week and I'm going to move more monitors over to the Productivity system. I really do love that 3440x1440 form factor.
"the months leading up to this year's phenomenal reboot of Doom" By that they mean the new Doom game which just came out, which is what I was referring to.
More like Halo with demons and a terrible map editor. Doom was a serious disappointment for me. I used to love using stuff like DoomCAD to make levels and this new release was honestly kind of an insult. Fortunately Steam let me return it. Maybe they won't screw up the new Quake?
Those aren't that intrusive. A stationary sidebar ad on the home screen doesn't really bother me. Commercials or banner ads would cross the line.