Tyranny? Really? Equating this to tyranny is an insult to anyone who has ever lived under true oppression.
All they're doing is limiting the sizes of soda cups. You've still got the freedom to order as many cups as you like, but most people probably won't bother.
The cost of rebooting isn't just in wait times. You also have to shut down all your applications before you reboot, and this is probably the greater inconvenience.
But anyway, I'm not trying to say that you're doing the wrong thing. Under the circumstances I don't think there's anything else you could do. But think about it from the point of view of Microsoft.
Ideally, you would have an OS that provides games support that is as good as Windows, and do everything else as well as Mac OS X. Since no such OS is currently available, you have to compromise by dual booting, but OS makers like Apple and Microsoft should be trying to build a single OS that would suit your needs.
Yes, most games are written to a Windows-specific API. But they can be ported to a Mac-compatible API if the developers were willing to put the time and effort into it. Alternatively, Apple could somehow work to implement DirectX on OS X.
I'm not saying that would be easy; it's not, and that's why it hasn't been done. But dual booting is a compromise, not the way things should to be.
That's not a single platform, that's a single kernel, which is not the same thing.
You can't run an Ubuntu app on Android or vice versa. However you can run Microsoft Office on both a tablet and a desktop PC.
I kind of see Windows 8 as Microsoft's version of the Motorola Atrix - i.e. a dockable tablet. This might not appeal to everyone, but I'm sure there are users out there who would appreciate it, particularly in office settings.
Imagine you're editing an Excel spreadsheet at your desk. Outlook reminds you that you have a meeting, so you undock and walk over to the meeting room. Then you discuss the contents of the spreadsheet during the meeting, and make some small changes. After the meeting, you decide you want to make some bigger changes, so you go back to your desk and dock your tablet so that you can take advantage of the mouse, keyboard and bigger monitor.
Don't you think it is a bit silly that you have to reboot just to run a different application? OS X isn't weak on games, its the games that are weak on OS X! There's no technical reason why all your games couldn't run on your Mac. The reason is purely a business one (not enough gamers use Macs) which doesn't apply to you (you clearly have a Mac).
Having a single OS on your desktop would save you time. What you've described is a compromise, not an ideal state.
C++ is still big, and the jobs that require it pay really well. C++ is an incredibly hard language to learn properly, and most of the Java/C# generation can't quite do it due to all the little gotchas of the language. If you've got the experience and skills then you should be able to earn big bucks doing C++. And if you decide you prefer Java, the step from C++ to Java is an easy one (much less so the other way around).
Also the embedded world still has strong demand for programmers, and pays well. It sounds like you've got experience with two different assembly languages and C, which is plenty.
iOS is cool and fun but IMO the market is saturated. If you get into it, not only will you have to start from scratch, but you'll be competing with low-paid graduate programmers. If you're finding it "tough going", then not only will you not be able to compete, but you'll be putting in a high amount of effort for relatively low pay.
Having a good selling tablet makes you an leader in computing?
No. Amazon is there because of AWS, not because of the Kindle Fire.
This is basically a list of companies that Eric Schmidt sees as direct competitors to Google. Each one established and now dominates a field that Google desperately wants to get into: the cloud (AWS vs GCE), mobile (iOS vs Android) and social media (Google+ vs Facebook).
The reason Microsoft is not mentioned is because it does not pose a serious threat to Google in any of these markets.
Comic Book Guy: Last night's Itchy & Scratchy was, without a doubt, the worst episode ever. Rest assured I was on the Internet within minutes registering my disgust throughout the world. Bart: Hey, I know it wasn’t great, but what right do you have to complain? Comic Book Guy: As a loyal viewer, I feel they owe me. Bart: For what? They’re giving you thousands of hours of entertainment for free. What could they possibly owe you? If anything, you owe them. Comic Book Guy: Worst episode ever.
I'd probably say RedHat. Unfortunately their desktop isn't quite as nice as Ubuntu's. They do things like run SELinux by default, exclude certain drivers/codecs, and have really ugly fonts!
But they do a solid server distribution, and (unlike Canonical) have a good reputation of pushing their changes back upstream. They employ a lot of developers to work on open source projects such as the kernel, and generally speaking they are a good open source community member.
You might not like Apple's products (and neither do I), but that doesn't mean that we're not in the post-PC era. Just look at the numbers. Apple's iPhone/iPad revenue dwarfs their Mac revenue. In fact, the iPhone brings in more revenue to Apple than the entirety of what Microsoft sells.
Yes, part of that is due to high profit margins. But it's also due to the fact that a significant amount of computing is now done on iDevices and their clones, including Android devices. This is exactly what Jobs was predicting with his idea of the post-PC era, and he was right.
The concept of a post-PC era is a useful one, and Apple demonstrated its usefulness by making tens of billions of dollars from the idea. But so what if there is always going to be a non-zero number of traditional PCs? It's a pointless argument and doesn't have any useful implications.
And no one said it would. This is a really dumb article which totally misses the point of what the term "post-PC" means. If you click the first link in the article, it says it in black and white:
It started last year...when (Steve Jobs) said that PCs are going to be "like trucks" in that they'll still be around and useful for certain work, but only a smaller percentage of the users will need one
Somehow the author (and submitter) have taken that to mean a world "without desktop computers".
Sure, desktops will have their place for a long time. But we're living in a post-PC world right now.
I went through primary school in the early-to-mid nineties, and here's what I learned back then:
- Touch typing - Programming (with Logowriter) - Word processing (with Microsoft Creative Writer) - Spreadsheets (can't even remember what the program was called)
I remember that the teachers back then specifically pointed out that they weren't going to teach us Word or Excel, because the concepts were the same regardless of whatever actual word processor or spreadsheet package we ended up using in the future. I really disagreed with them at the time, but now I can see that they were right. Office 2010 looks nothing like Office 95 but the concepts are exactly the same. Office 2025 will probably look completely different again.
However in high school, everyone came from somewhere different, and had a different level of computing under their belt. Unfortunately for me, this meant that I had to re-learn everything from primary school again. Word processors, spreadsheets, Logo.
My hope in the future is that the computing cirriculum for students can become more standardised so that high schools can build upon what was learned earlier. What really holds back computing education is that every level of schooling has to assume that students are starting with nothing. Primary schools, middle schools, high schools, and even some trade schools and colleges have to assume that their incoming students don't know how to use a computer.
If kids could start learning early, and never have to backtrack, it would be easy to fit the following into the K12 curriculum:
- Touch typing - Basic OS concepts like directories and files, networks, applications - How to use an office suite, including a word processor, spreadsheet and database program (including doing simple SQL queries) - Basic programming constructs like if/while loops, functions - Basic computer science, including searching, sorting, trees, hash tables, etc.
Maybe not everyone would understand the last one, but so what? Not everyone who graduates high school fully understands calculus either.
You can't really compare gas prices around the world like that. In the United States, high gas prices are a much bigger problem due to car dependence and suburban sprawl.
But Edison didn't invent or discover DC current himself, and Ford want the first to build a car. He was "just" the first to build it on a mass scale, with a lot of innovation on the manufacturing side.
What Edison, Ford and Jobs share is that they entered a marketplace that was new but already existing, and really pushed it forward.
I used to work in a job where I had to wear a button up shirt and tie every day, but recently moved to a tech company where everyone dresses casually. It was interesting when techies would say things like "I'd hate to have to dress up in a certain way every day".
I guess a lot of people like to "express themselves" through what they wear, which is fine. But for someone who couldn't care less about fashion, the decision about what to wear in the morning is an incredibly tedious one. Not to mention the effort you have to put in to shopping.
The great thing about formal attire is that it's relatively standard, so you just follow a few simple rules and you end up looking good without having to think to much.
I guess some people find a formal dress code to be staid and boring but for me, picking clothes is even more boring!
I think it's pretty safe to assume that he's living there because he prefers the city to the country, and that moving to the countryside is not an option for him. Why else would he have moved there? No offense but you telling him "maybe you should move to the countryside" isn't insightful, it's a bit patronising IMO.
It depends if he's talking about the population of the city proper, or the entire metropolitan area. For example, Seattle proper only has a population of about 600,000, but the Seattle metropolitan area has about 3.5 million people. Commuting from say Everett into central Seattle every day would be a nightmare.
There are plenty of reasons to prefer a central city environment to the countryside/suburbs. It's much easier to bring peace and quiet to a city apartment than to bring great food, nightlife, jobs and shops to the countryside or suburbs.
Initially this thread was about maximized Windows so I'm not sure why we started with modal dialogs...
But anyway, doesn't gnome handle modal dialogs in the same way as every other desktop? the only difference I've noticed is that it connects dialogs to the patent windows, which actually makes it better for the non maximized workflow.
I agree with you that modal dialogs should be used sparingly but what does that have to do with gnome 3?
Modal dialogs are forced on you no matter what desktop you're using. Sometimes it is a useful thing. If one comes up in an application when it shouldn't, that's more of a problem with the app than the desktop.
"Porn is very personal," he said. "You may have been looking for Brazilian midget transsexuals, and you're sitting there at home with your kid or your wife saying, 'Let's go on a holiday to Brazil,' and the next thing, it's suggesting Brazilian midget transsexuals from your previous Google search history."
I guess that's still better than having your family accidentally bump into the midget transsexuals during the family trip to Brazil:)
Slashdot Mirror
Tyranny? Really? Equating this to tyranny is an insult to anyone who has ever lived under true oppression.
All they're doing is limiting the sizes of soda cups. You've still got the freedom to order as many cups as you like, but most people probably won't bother.
The cost of rebooting isn't just in wait times. You also have to shut down all your applications before you reboot, and this is probably the greater inconvenience.
But anyway, I'm not trying to say that you're doing the wrong thing. Under the circumstances I don't think there's anything else you could do. But think about it from the point of view of Microsoft.
Ideally, you would have an OS that provides games support that is as good as Windows, and do everything else as well as Mac OS X. Since no such OS is currently available, you have to compromise by dual booting, but OS makers like Apple and Microsoft should be trying to build a single OS that would suit your needs.
Yes, most games are written to a Windows-specific API. But they can be ported to a Mac-compatible API if the developers were willing to put the time and effort into it. Alternatively, Apple could somehow work to implement DirectX on OS X.
I'm not saying that would be easy; it's not, and that's why it hasn't been done. But dual booting is a compromise, not the way things should to be.
That's not a single platform, that's a single kernel, which is not the same thing.
You can't run an Ubuntu app on Android or vice versa. However you can run Microsoft Office on both a tablet and a desktop PC.
I kind of see Windows 8 as Microsoft's version of the Motorola Atrix - i.e. a dockable tablet. This might not appeal to everyone, but I'm sure there are users out there who would appreciate it, particularly in office settings.
Imagine you're editing an Excel spreadsheet at your desk. Outlook reminds you that you have a meeting, so you undock and walk over to the meeting room. Then you discuss the contents of the spreadsheet during the meeting, and make some small changes. After the meeting, you decide you want to make some bigger changes, so you go back to your desk and dock your tablet so that you can take advantage of the mouse, keyboard and bigger monitor.
Don't you think it is a bit silly that you have to reboot just to run a different application? OS X isn't weak on games, its the games that are weak on OS X! There's no technical reason why all your games couldn't run on your Mac. The reason is purely a business one (not enough gamers use Macs) which doesn't apply to you (you clearly have a Mac).
Having a single OS on your desktop would save you time. What you've described is a compromise, not an ideal state.
C++ is still big, and the jobs that require it pay really well. C++ is an incredibly hard language to learn properly, and most of the Java/C# generation can't quite do it due to all the little gotchas of the language. If you've got the experience and skills then you should be able to earn big bucks doing C++. And if you decide you prefer Java, the step from C++ to Java is an easy one (much less so the other way around).
Also the embedded world still has strong demand for programmers, and pays well. It sounds like you've got experience with two different assembly languages and C, which is plenty.
iOS is cool and fun but IMO the market is saturated. If you get into it, not only will you have to start from scratch, but you'll be competing with low-paid graduate programmers. If you're finding it "tough going", then not only will you not be able to compete, but you'll be putting in a high amount of effort for relatively low pay.
Having a good selling tablet makes you an leader in computing?
No. Amazon is there because of AWS, not because of the Kindle Fire.
This is basically a list of companies that Eric Schmidt sees as direct competitors to Google. Each one established and now dominates a field that Google desperately wants to get into: the cloud (AWS vs GCE), mobile (iOS vs Android) and social media (Google+ vs Facebook).
The reason Microsoft is not mentioned is because it does not pose a serious threat to Google in any of these markets.
http://xkcd.com/903/
You remind me of the Comic Book Guy:
Comic Book Guy: Last night's Itchy & Scratchy was, without a doubt, the worst episode ever. Rest assured I was on the Internet within minutes registering my disgust throughout the world.
Bart: Hey, I know it wasn’t great, but what right do you have to complain?
Comic Book Guy: As a loyal viewer, I feel they owe me.
Bart: For what? They’re giving you thousands of hours of entertainment for free. What could they possibly owe you? If anything, you owe them.
Comic Book Guy: Worst episode ever.
I'd probably say RedHat. Unfortunately their desktop isn't quite as nice as Ubuntu's. They do things like run SELinux by default, exclude certain drivers/codecs, and have really ugly fonts!
But they do a solid server distribution, and (unlike Canonical) have a good reputation of pushing their changes back upstream. They employ a lot of developers to work on open source projects such as the kernel, and generally speaking they are a good open source community member.
You might not like Apple's products (and neither do I), but that doesn't mean that we're not in the post-PC era. Just look at the numbers. Apple's iPhone/iPad revenue dwarfs their Mac revenue. In fact, the iPhone brings in more revenue to Apple than the entirety of what Microsoft sells.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/08/19/apples-iphone-is-now-worth-more-than-all-of-microsoft/
Yes, part of that is due to high profit margins. But it's also due to the fact that a significant amount of computing is now done on iDevices and their clones, including Android devices. This is exactly what Jobs was predicting with his idea of the post-PC era, and he was right.
The concept of a post-PC era is a useful one, and Apple demonstrated its usefulness by making tens of billions of dollars from the idea. But so what if there is always going to be a non-zero number of traditional PCs? It's a pointless argument and doesn't have any useful implications.
No, he made a useful analogy and a very accurate prediction. Apple is now the most valuable company in the world due to its post PC devices.
Oh and in case you didn't notice, GM and Chrysler had to be bailed out because they focused to hard on trucks.
And no one said it would. This is a really dumb article which totally misses the point of what the term "post-PC" means. If you click the first link in the article, it says it in black and white:
It started last year...when (Steve Jobs) said that PCs are going to be "like trucks" in that they'll still be around and useful for certain work, but only a smaller percentage of the users will need one
Somehow the author (and submitter) have taken that to mean a world "without desktop computers".
Sure, desktops will have their place for a long time. But we're living in a post-PC world right now.
I went through primary school in the early-to-mid nineties, and here's what I learned back then:
- Touch typing
- Programming (with Logowriter)
- Word processing (with Microsoft Creative Writer)
- Spreadsheets (can't even remember what the program was called)
I remember that the teachers back then specifically pointed out that they weren't going to teach us Word or Excel, because the concepts were the same regardless of whatever actual word processor or spreadsheet package we ended up using in the future. I really disagreed with them at the time, but now I can see that they were right. Office 2010 looks nothing like Office 95 but the concepts are exactly the same. Office 2025 will probably look completely different again.
However in high school, everyone came from somewhere different, and had a different level of computing under their belt. Unfortunately for me, this meant that I had to re-learn everything from primary school again. Word processors, spreadsheets, Logo.
My hope in the future is that the computing cirriculum for students can become more standardised so that high schools can build upon what was learned earlier. What really holds back computing education is that every level of schooling has to assume that students are starting with nothing. Primary schools, middle schools, high schools, and even some trade schools and colleges have to assume that their incoming students don't know how to use a computer.
If kids could start learning early, and never have to backtrack, it would be easy to fit the following into the K12 curriculum:
- Touch typing
- Basic OS concepts like directories and files, networks, applications
- How to use an office suite, including a word processor, spreadsheet and database program (including doing simple SQL queries)
- Basic programming constructs like if/while loops, functions
- Basic computer science, including searching, sorting, trees, hash tables, etc.
Maybe not everyone would understand the last one, but so what? Not everyone who graduates high school fully understands calculus either.
You can't really compare gas prices around the world like that. In the United States, high gas prices are a much bigger problem due to car dependence and suburban sprawl.
Who would have thought that SkyNet's original application was to detect lol cats.
I've often wondered how "sucks" got to mean something bad.
It's short for "sucks cock", which is basically another way of calling something gay.
But Edison didn't invent or discover DC current himself, and Ford want the first to build a car. He was "just" the first to build it on a mass scale, with a lot of innovation on the manufacturing side.
What Edison, Ford and Jobs share is that they entered a marketplace that was new but already existing, and really pushed it forward.
I used to work in a job where I had to wear a button up shirt and tie every day, but recently moved to a tech company where everyone dresses casually. It was interesting when techies would say things like "I'd hate to have to dress up in a certain way every day".
I guess a lot of people like to "express themselves" through what they wear, which is fine. But for someone who couldn't care less about fashion, the decision about what to wear in the morning is an incredibly tedious one. Not to mention the effort you have to put in to shopping.
The great thing about formal attire is that it's relatively standard, so you just follow a few simple rules and you end up looking good without having to think to much.
I guess some people find a formal dress code to be staid and boring but for me, picking clothes is even more boring!
I think it's pretty safe to assume that he's living there because he prefers the city to the country, and that moving to the countryside is not an option for him. Why else would he have moved there? No offense but you telling him "maybe you should move to the countryside" isn't insightful, it's a bit patronising IMO.
It depends if he's talking about the population of the city proper, or the entire metropolitan area. For example, Seattle proper only has a population of about 600,000, but the Seattle metropolitan area has about 3.5 million people. Commuting from say Everett into central Seattle every day would be a nightmare.
There are plenty of reasons to prefer a central city environment to the countryside/suburbs. It's much easier to bring peace and quiet to a city apartment than to bring great food, nightlife, jobs and shops to the countryside or suburbs.
Initially this thread was about maximized Windows so I'm not sure why we started with modal dialogs...
But anyway, doesn't gnome handle modal dialogs in the same way as every other desktop? the only difference I've noticed is that it connects dialogs to the patent windows, which actually makes it better for the non maximized workflow.
I agree with you that modal dialogs should be used sparingly but what does that have to do with gnome 3?
Modal dialogs are forced on you no matter what desktop you're using. Sometimes it is a useful thing. If one comes up in an application when it shouldn't, that's more of a problem with the app than the desktop.
OK so don't maximize your windows then. How is it "forced on people"?
"Porn is very personal," he said. "You may have been looking for Brazilian midget transsexuals, and you're sitting there at home with your kid or your wife saying, 'Let's go on a holiday to Brazil,' and the next thing, it's suggesting Brazilian midget transsexuals from your previous Google search history."
I guess that's still better than having your family accidentally bump into the midget transsexuals during the family trip to Brazil :)