The cloud is much more than just a place to store files. IaaS is more like virtual web hosting than it is like Bittorrent/Freenet/Dropbox. You don't just buy storage space, you buy CPU time and bandwidth. It sounds like you and the parent poster are both thinking of something very different from what RedHat/OpenStack are building...
I don't really see Gnome Shell as dumbed down. Sure, lots of things have been removed, but this is more about being clean and minimalist than being dumbed down.
To use your analogy, Windows 95 is like a first bicycle. The task bar is like training wheels. Why would you want a task bar (or a dock) when you have the activities overview? It's so much faster to flick your mouse into the top corner and click the window you want.
Why would you want a start menu when you've got super+first few letters of the app? And the way Gnome Shell automatically creates and destroys workspaces is brilliant and beautiful.
Gnome Shell *is* like a bike with the training wheels removed. They picked the one fastest way to switch windows (Expose-style) and removed the other methods (task bar, dock). They picked the fastest way to start an app (press super and start typing) and removed the others (navigating a start menu, or one of the many start menu clones that you'll find in XFCE/GNOME2/KDE).
What Gnome Shell ends up being is an interface that is devoid of all the cruft left over from 1995 and 1984. It's ironic that the "power users" who are in love with their Windows 95 clones are actually the ones who are unwilling to put in the effort to learn something that is faster and better.
It is pretty much accepted that it is unusable on a standard desktop with a mouse
When I watch new users use Gnome Shell, I often see them moving their mouse slowly over to the "Activities" menu, clicking it, then slowly move their mouse back and clicking a window in the overview. I can see how some people might think that this is slow.
However all you have to do is learn how to flick your mouse over to the top-left hot corner and back. You don't need to click, and so you don't need to pause. It's a very simple motion and once you realize this, it makes changing windows really really fast.
That's why I like Gnome Shell - changing windows using the overview is very fast, as is starting apps by pressing super and typing the first few characters. I don't think there are any other desktops that are faster than Gnome Shell in the hands of a power user. Not Windows, not Gnome 2, not even Mac OS X.
The problem is that Gnome Shell was shoved down the throats of a lot of unsuspecting Gnome 2 users. When people switch from Windows to a Mac, they often do it by choice and so they accept that things will be different and make an effort to keep an open mind. But the way Gnome 3 was released made all the Gnome 2 users get really defensive about the status quo, and elicited a knee-jerk reaction in most users. It's sad that this might mean that people refuse to consider what is a really innovative desktop environment.
When companies like Facebook have an IPO, there is a lot of hype surrounding it. Naturally, a lot of people get excited and some bad decisions are made. If you look at most tech IPOs, the price shoots up in early trading, before coming back down to more realistic levels.
So when a company decides to set the initial price, they have a few options. They could:
1) take advantage of the fanboys and sell the shares at an inflated price (i.e. $38) 2) or sell it at what the price will eventually fall back to (i.e. $25).
If they sell at the inflated price, they extract more money out of their initial investors. But as everyone is seeing right now, the problem with doing this is that everyone starts complaining about how their shares tanked, and they start questioning how much FB is really worth. The negative publicity means that when Zuckerberg wants to sell more shares in the future, it will be difficult for him to get a good price.
If they sell at the more reasonable price, or even at a lower price, then their stock will rise and everyone will be happy. FB doesn't get bad publicity, and when Zuckerberg decides that FB is worthless and wants to jump ship, he can do so more easily.
Saying that $38 was a good initial price is a bit short sighted, because the negative publicity hurts Facebook in the long term. It is not uncommon for companies (especially tech companies) to undervalue their IPO shares, in order to take advantage of the good publicity that comes with having a massive opening day gain.
Google is in the process of releasing Jelly bean but cyanogenmod haven't even finished their ice cream sandwich release. I'm not sure I'd consider cyanogenmod an equivalent option...
I've got a nexus s running ics and I've checked for updates, but it just says that the system is up to date. Does anyone know how Google decides the order in which to send out the ota updates?
In fact, it's more like asking: Which is better, a sports car or something that's not a sports car?
There are so many non-relational databases out there that lumping them all together with an umbrella term like "NoSQL" makes little sense. Each of them have different features and serve different use cases. For example DynamoDB doesn't support storing large documents like MongoDB.
Sometimes two different NoSQL solutions are more different from each other than they are different from MySQL. Grouping them all together really doesn't make sense in a lot of circumstances.
The Atlantic is a joke, just look at their business pages. They try to be provoxative , but are in general universally poorly researched, and inane.
Not only that, but The Atlantic also has an unnattractive website with a gridded layout! I'm not sure why she's complaining about Wikipedia.
It's not like the article page has any more "mind-calming images" than a typical Wikipedia article (unless you count a screenshot of Wikipedia, and all the ads:P).
I think the problem these days is that an entire generation of coders think that the language, rather than the algorithm, determines whether a piece of software is going to be fast or slow. If we're talking about UIs, compare Unity and Gnome Shell. Unity and Compiz are written in C++ and can be incredibly unresponsive. Gnome Shell is largely written in JavaScript, and is very responsive.
A lot of the higher level languages have slower GUIs because their GUI frameworks are designed more for modularity than responsiveness. They tend to have a lot of layers of indirection, which cause increased latency and slower responsiveness. Compare XUL to GTK+, for example.
When people say they are using C for performance, what they usually mean is predictable performance, not necessarily higher performance. This is very important in real-time applications, and is why C is used heavily there even though a Java application running on a hotspot JIT can outperform it most of the time.
That's true, but it only really applies if your project is on the leaf node of the dependency graph (i.e. you're a library writer). Most applications depend on third-party libraries, and sometimes your only choices are to turn on RTTI, or to reimplement a huge library yourself.
The reason it is considered a watershed device is because it was leaps and bounds ahead of anything that was out at the time (and for a while after). Apologies to everyone else for stating the bleeding obvious, but for your benefit, here's what made the iPhone revolutionary:
It had a screen big enough that web browsing was possible. Compare that with the crappy browsers that the old Nokia E90s and other smartphones had, where you had to scroll around using arrow keys and navigate through menus to enter text in a text box.
The touchscreen interface and gestures made apps like Google Maps possible. There is no way this could've been implemented on the smartphones that came before the iPhone.
The software was designed and integrated well with the new hardware (the capacitative touchscreen). The UI was smooth and wasn't clunky and annoying to use.
Sure, Google and Apple have been incrementally improving the design, but their steps haven't been as big as the one Apple took in 2007. You must have your head deep, deep in the sand to think that it is considered revolutionary just because 1) it had an Apple logo on it or 2) it was just an incremental improvement and somehow everyone's pain threshold magically happened to be just below where the iPhone was.
I think wealthy people still do think in terms of dynasties and legacy. You've got people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet doing a lot of work to leave their legacy on the world. And people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson have set up companies with ambitious plans to get into space.
I hope that what we're seeing is just a low point in history, where we're making the transition from government-funded space exploration to private funding.
This may be a good thing. While I think it's great that China is investing in space, we've seen with the United States that governments can quickly lose interest in space and stop funding exploration. Having private companies might be the only sustainable way to fund space exploration.
In order for an Indian worker to qualify for a B-1 visa, the company needs to provide a "welcome letter" as proof that they are required to be in the US.
According to his suit, Mr. Palmer was being asked to write these welcome letters even though he knew that the workers were not going to be following the rules for B-1 visa holders.
So yes, he could have reported it anonymously, but then he would have had to have written false welcome letters. This is what he was not willing to do.
Pirates of Silicon Valley ends with Steve Jobs' return to Apple in 1997. Are you aware that Apple under Steve Jobs have done a lot of things since 1997?
This is *not* controversial! Look up the term "engineering" in a dictionary or Wikipedia if you don't believe me.
For some reason, a lot of people have the mindset that engineers have to do everything as per the waterfall model, and that software engineering is all about process, methodology and code maintainability. This sort of thinking is really just cargo cult engineering.
Other branches of engineering often do things in a waterfall-like process. For example, a bridge has to be designed before it can be constructed; you can't build a bridge incrementally, and construction takes a long time. But there's no such requirement for software. Software can be developed incrementally, and compilation is very quick compared to construction/manufacturing.
There are other engineering fields where things are engineered incrementally. As an example, take a look at how an F1 car evolves over a season. You'd have to be crazy to claim that the people who design F1 cars are not automotive engineers because they don't do waterfall.
What separates software engineers from hackers is that software engineers analyze the systems they work on, using computer science and mathematics. They reason about performance and computational complexity, they reason statistically about reliability and fault-tolerance, or they use mathematical models of real-time systems to schedule real-time tasks.
They don't spend all of their time writing documents and talking about maintainability.
Documentation, maintainability and process are all important things, but they're not the defining traits of an engineer. What makes an engineer an engineer is their application of science to solve a problem.
If you want to make the transition from a hacker to an engineer, learn the maths and computer science that underpins the software that you'll be working on. Not all software needs to be engineered; a lot of internal corporate web apps don't need to be engineered, but sites like Amazon, Facebook and Google do. A lot of real-time and embedded software needs to be developed by software engineers too. If you want to be a software engineer, make sure you go to work at an engineering firm.
Or don't. There's nothing wrong with being a hacker. Just make sure you don't become a cargo cult engineer.
All I'm saying is that I doubt India's military/police will suddenly be fighting against anti-Internet-censorship revolutionaries, as the previous poster suggested. I'm as against Internet censorship as anyone but let's be realistic here.
In China there's a Great Firewall and it's really annoying but if you have some basic technical knowledge you can find a proxy or tunnel around the problem. Some people have started local clones of sites like Google, Facebook and Youtube (Baidu, Renren and YouKu). For nearly all of the middle class, this is a "good enough" compromise.
As you said, Indians are more likely to work around the laws like the Chinese have. The smarter 100 million aren't going to revolt and risk their relatively comfortable lifestyles for more Internet freedom.
If India continues on this path to censorship it will probably end up like China. It's not a great outcome, but realistically it's probably what will happen.
Are you serious? Less than 10% of Indians are online; most of their population lives in poverty. Indians aren't going to start a revolution because a small percentage of them can't poke each other on Facebook.
And a nice thing about the NeXT/Apple way of keyboard shortcuts is when you're in a terminal. Pressing Ctrl+C stops the current program, as it should in Unix. Option+C copies the selected text. There's no conflict between the GUI and CLI.
What exactly stops you from using GNOME Shell for "real, productive work"? I use it and I have no problems getting things done.
And exactly what "failed web design techniques" have been applied? Can you name one web interface, failed or otherwise, that looks and feels like GNOME Shell?
After using GNOME 3 for a couple of months, I'm finding that I struggle when I have to go back to a GNOME 2 machine and use it. My problem with GNOME 2, KDE and even Mint's new desktop environment, is that they all look and feel like Windows 95 clones. This is fine if you like Windows, but if you do then why not just use the real thing?
Something that a lot of people seem to complain about is switching tasks in GNOME 3. I'm pretty sure that these people are just complaining about change without trying it first to understand the reasons behind the change.
Let's compare switching tasks in GNOME 2 and 3. In GNOME 3 I can move my mouse over to the hot corner just as quickly, if not more quickly, than I can move my eyes there. The corner of the screen is a very easy target to hit. This brings up the overview where I get a thumbnail of every window on my virtual desktop. The animation is fast enough that I don't have to sit there waiting, and smooth enough so that I don't lose context of which windows are where. Each window is as big as it can be, while still fitting everything on the screen. Because of their size they're extremely easy targets to click.
So that's just one click on a very big target. Not really that hard.
In GNOME 2, I have to use a Windows-style taskbar at the bottom of the screen. When I've got enough windows open, each task becomes tiny! The only information I get is an application icon and a truncated window title, which is useless if window titles have common prefixes. This is harder and slower than GNOME 3.
After having used both methods for a while, I'd much rather use an Expose-like task switcher than a Windows-like taskbar.
As for Firefox, the the reason it's losing users because everyone is migrating to Chrome. And GNOME Shell is based on one of the same UI design principle as Chrome: "less chrome, more content". Chrome gets out of the way and gives maximum space to the website, and GNOME Shell gives maximum space to your apps.
I'd encourage you to try GNOME Shell for a few weeks before deciding whether it's good or bad. I had to spend this time to unlearn some old habits, but once I did I found I was actually much more productive, not less.
Slashdot Mirror
The cloud is much more than just a place to store files. IaaS is more like virtual web hosting than it is like Bittorrent/Freenet/Dropbox. You don't just buy storage space, you buy CPU time and bandwidth. It sounds like you and the parent poster are both thinking of something very different from what RedHat/OpenStack are building...
I don't really see Gnome Shell as dumbed down. Sure, lots of things have been removed, but this is more about being clean and minimalist than being dumbed down.
To use your analogy, Windows 95 is like a first bicycle. The task bar is like training wheels. Why would you want a task bar (or a dock) when you have the activities overview? It's so much faster to flick your mouse into the top corner and click the window you want.
Why would you want a start menu when you've got super+first few letters of the app? And the way Gnome Shell automatically creates and destroys workspaces is brilliant and beautiful.
Gnome Shell *is* like a bike with the training wheels removed. They picked the one fastest way to switch windows (Expose-style) and removed the other methods (task bar, dock). They picked the fastest way to start an app (press super and start typing) and removed the others (navigating a start menu, or one of the many start menu clones that you'll find in XFCE/GNOME2/KDE).
What Gnome Shell ends up being is an interface that is devoid of all the cruft left over from 1995 and 1984. It's ironic that the "power users" who are in love with their Windows 95 clones are actually the ones who are unwilling to put in the effort to learn something that is faster and better.
It is pretty much accepted that it is unusable on a standard desktop with a mouse
When I watch new users use Gnome Shell, I often see them moving their mouse slowly over to the "Activities" menu, clicking it, then slowly move their mouse back and clicking a window in the overview. I can see how some people might think that this is slow.
However all you have to do is learn how to flick your mouse over to the top-left hot corner and back. You don't need to click, and so you don't need to pause. It's a very simple motion and once you realize this, it makes changing windows really really fast.
That's why I like Gnome Shell - changing windows using the overview is very fast, as is starting apps by pressing super and typing the first few characters. I don't think there are any other desktops that are faster than Gnome Shell in the hands of a power user. Not Windows, not Gnome 2, not even Mac OS X.
The problem is that Gnome Shell was shoved down the throats of a lot of unsuspecting Gnome 2 users. When people switch from Windows to a Mac, they often do it by choice and so they accept that things will be different and make an effort to keep an open mind. But the way Gnome 3 was released made all the Gnome 2 users get really defensive about the status quo, and elicited a knee-jerk reaction in most users. It's sad that this might mean that people refuse to consider what is a really innovative desktop environment.
When companies like Facebook have an IPO, there is a lot of hype surrounding it. Naturally, a lot of people get excited and some bad decisions are made. If you look at most tech IPOs, the price shoots up in early trading, before coming back down to more realistic levels.
So when a company decides to set the initial price, they have a few options. They could:
1) take advantage of the fanboys and sell the shares at an inflated price (i.e. $38)
2) or sell it at what the price will eventually fall back to (i.e. $25).
If they sell at the inflated price, they extract more money out of their initial investors. But as everyone is seeing right now, the problem with doing this is that everyone starts complaining about how their shares tanked, and they start questioning how much FB is really worth. The negative publicity means that when Zuckerberg wants to sell more shares in the future, it will be difficult for him to get a good price.
If they sell at the more reasonable price, or even at a lower price, then their stock will rise and everyone will be happy. FB doesn't get bad publicity, and when Zuckerberg decides that FB is worthless and wants to jump ship, he can do so more easily.
Saying that $38 was a good initial price is a bit short sighted, because the negative publicity hurts Facebook in the long term. It is not uncommon for companies (especially tech companies) to undervalue their IPO shares, in order to take advantage of the good publicity that comes with having a massive opening day gain.
Google is in the process of releasing Jelly bean but cyanogenmod haven't even finished their ice cream sandwich release. I'm not sure I'd consider cyanogenmod an equivalent option...
I've got a nexus s running ics and I've checked for updates, but it just says that the system is up to date. Does anyone know how Google decides the order in which to send out the ota updates?
In fact, it's more like asking: Which is better, a sports car or something that's not a sports car?
There are so many non-relational databases out there that lumping them all together with an umbrella term like "NoSQL" makes little sense. Each of them have different features and serve different use cases. For example DynamoDB doesn't support storing large documents like MongoDB.
Sometimes two different NoSQL solutions are more different from each other than they are different from MySQL. Grouping them all together really doesn't make sense in a lot of circumstances.
The Atlantic is a joke, just look at their business pages. They try to be provoxative , but are in general universally poorly researched, and inane.
Not only that, but The Atlantic also has an unnattractive website with a gridded layout! I'm not sure why she's complaining about Wikipedia.
It's not like the article page has any more "mind-calming images" than a typical Wikipedia article (unless you count a screenshot of Wikipedia, and all the ads :P).
I think the problem these days is that an entire generation of coders think that the language, rather than the algorithm, determines whether a piece of software is going to be fast or slow. If we're talking about UIs, compare Unity and Gnome Shell. Unity and Compiz are written in C++ and can be incredibly unresponsive. Gnome Shell is largely written in JavaScript, and is very responsive.
A lot of the higher level languages have slower GUIs because their GUI frameworks are designed more for modularity than responsiveness. They tend to have a lot of layers of indirection, which cause increased latency and slower responsiveness. Compare XUL to GTK+, for example.
When people say they are using C for performance, what they usually mean is predictable performance, not necessarily higher performance. This is very important in real-time applications, and is why C is used heavily there even though a Java application running on a hotspot JIT can outperform it most of the time.
That's true, but it only really applies if your project is on the leaf node of the dependency graph (i.e. you're a library writer). Most applications depend on third-party libraries, and sometimes your only choices are to turn on RTTI, or to reimplement a huge library yourself.
The reason it is considered a watershed device is because it was leaps and bounds ahead of anything that was out at the time (and for a while after). Apologies to everyone else for stating the bleeding obvious, but for your benefit, here's what made the iPhone revolutionary:
It had a screen big enough that web browsing was possible. Compare that with the crappy browsers that the old Nokia E90s and other smartphones had, where you had to scroll around using arrow keys and navigate through menus to enter text in a text box.
The touchscreen interface and gestures made apps like Google Maps possible. There is no way this could've been implemented on the smartphones that came before the iPhone.
The software was designed and integrated well with the new hardware (the capacitative touchscreen). The UI was smooth and wasn't clunky and annoying to use.
Sure, Google and Apple have been incrementally improving the design, but their steps haven't been as big as the one Apple took in 2007. You must have your head deep, deep in the sand to think that it is considered revolutionary just because 1) it had an Apple logo on it or 2) it was just an incremental improvement and somehow everyone's pain threshold magically happened to be just below where the iPhone was.
I think wealthy people still do think in terms of dynasties and legacy. You've got people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet doing a lot of work to leave their legacy on the world. And people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson have set up companies with ambitious plans to get into space.
I hope that what we're seeing is just a low point in history, where we're making the transition from government-funded space exploration to private funding.
This may be a good thing. While I think it's great that China is investing in space, we've seen with the United States that governments can quickly lose interest in space and stop funding exploration. Having private companies might be the only sustainable way to fund space exploration.
In order for an Indian worker to qualify for a B-1 visa, the company needs to provide a "welcome letter" as proof that they are required to be in the US.
According to his suit, Mr. Palmer was being asked to write these welcome letters even though he knew that the workers were not going to be following the rules for B-1 visa holders.
So yes, he could have reported it anonymously, but then he would have had to have written false welcome letters. This is what he was not willing to do.
Actually it's the other way around; B1 is the business visa, and B2 is the tourist visa.
Their stories always seem to have a pro-Microsoft angle to them. Here are a few examples:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2017860635_microsoftmundie01.html
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2017932842_inpersonkrumm09.html
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/microsoftpri0/2017939774_microsoft_starts_its_marketing_for_the_nokia_lumia.html
It's nothing to do with supporting a local company either, because they've been doing a round of very anti-Amazon articles too...
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2017883596_amazonintro25.html
Pirates of Silicon Valley ends with Steve Jobs' return to Apple in 1997. Are you aware that Apple under Steve Jobs have done a lot of things since 1997?
...not the use of the waterfall model.
This is *not* controversial! Look up the term "engineering" in a dictionary or Wikipedia if you don't believe me.
For some reason, a lot of people have the mindset that engineers have to do everything as per the waterfall model, and that software engineering is all about process, methodology and code maintainability. This sort of thinking is really just cargo cult engineering.
Other branches of engineering often do things in a waterfall-like process. For example, a bridge has to be designed before it can be constructed; you can't build a bridge incrementally, and construction takes a long time. But there's no such requirement for software. Software can be developed incrementally, and compilation is very quick compared to construction/manufacturing.
There are other engineering fields where things are engineered incrementally. As an example, take a look at how an F1 car evolves over a season. You'd have to be crazy to claim that the people who design F1 cars are not automotive engineers because they don't do waterfall.
What separates software engineers from hackers is that software engineers analyze the systems they work on, using computer science and mathematics. They reason about performance and computational complexity, they reason statistically about reliability and fault-tolerance, or they use mathematical models of real-time systems to schedule real-time tasks.
They don't spend all of their time writing documents and talking about maintainability.
Documentation, maintainability and process are all important things, but they're not the defining traits of an engineer. What makes an engineer an engineer is their application of science to solve a problem.
If you want to make the transition from a hacker to an engineer, learn the maths and computer science that underpins the software that you'll be working on. Not all software needs to be engineered; a lot of internal corporate web apps don't need to be engineered, but sites like Amazon, Facebook and Google do. A lot of real-time and embedded software needs to be developed by software engineers too. If you want to be a software engineer, make sure you go to work at an engineering firm.
Or don't. There's nothing wrong with being a hacker. Just make sure you don't become a cargo cult engineer.
All I'm saying is that I doubt India's military/police will suddenly be fighting against anti-Internet-censorship revolutionaries, as the previous poster suggested. I'm as against Internet censorship as anyone but let's be realistic here.
In China there's a Great Firewall and it's really annoying but if you have some basic technical knowledge you can find a proxy or tunnel around the problem. Some people have started local clones of sites like Google, Facebook and Youtube (Baidu, Renren and YouKu). For nearly all of the middle class, this is a "good enough" compromise.
As you said, Indians are more likely to work around the laws like the Chinese have. The smarter 100 million aren't going to revolt and risk their relatively comfortable lifestyles for more Internet freedom.
If India continues on this path to censorship it will probably end up like China. It's not a great outcome, but realistically it's probably what will happen.
Are you serious? Less than 10% of Indians are online; most of their population lives in poverty. Indians aren't going to start a revolution because a small percentage of them can't poke each other on Facebook.
And a nice thing about the NeXT/Apple way of keyboard shortcuts is when you're in a terminal. Pressing Ctrl+C stops the current program, as it should in Unix. Option+C copies the selected text. There's no conflict between the GUI and CLI.
What exactly stops you from using GNOME Shell for "real, productive work"? I use it and I have no problems getting things done.
And exactly what "failed web design techniques" have been applied? Can you name one web interface, failed or otherwise, that looks and feels like GNOME Shell?
After using GNOME 3 for a couple of months, I'm finding that I struggle when I have to go back to a GNOME 2 machine and use it. My problem with GNOME 2, KDE and even Mint's new desktop environment, is that they all look and feel like Windows 95 clones. This is fine if you like Windows, but if you do then why not just use the real thing?
Something that a lot of people seem to complain about is switching tasks in GNOME 3. I'm pretty sure that these people are just complaining about change without trying it first to understand the reasons behind the change.
Let's compare switching tasks in GNOME 2 and 3. In GNOME 3 I can move my mouse over to the hot corner just as quickly, if not more quickly, than I can move my eyes there. The corner of the screen is a very easy target to hit. This brings up the overview where I get a thumbnail of every window on my virtual desktop. The animation is fast enough that I don't have to sit there waiting, and smooth enough so that I don't lose context of which windows are where. Each window is as big as it can be, while still fitting everything on the screen. Because of their size they're extremely easy targets to click.
So that's just one click on a very big target. Not really that hard.
In GNOME 2, I have to use a Windows-style taskbar at the bottom of the screen. When I've got enough windows open, each task becomes tiny! The only information I get is an application icon and a truncated window title, which is useless if window titles have common prefixes. This is harder and slower than GNOME 3.
After having used both methods for a while, I'd much rather use an Expose-like task switcher than a Windows-like taskbar.
As for Firefox, the the reason it's losing users because everyone is migrating to Chrome. And GNOME Shell is based on one of the same UI design principle as Chrome: "less chrome, more content". Chrome gets out of the way and gives maximum space to the website, and GNOME Shell gives maximum space to your apps.
I'd encourage you to try GNOME Shell for a few weeks before deciding whether it's good or bad. I had to spend this time to unlearn some old habits, but once I did I found I was actually much more productive, not less.