On my Nexus 7 tablet, I *never* want the mobile version of a Web site. Best solution to this is to use Firefox and the Phony extension (set to be the desktop Firefox agent string) and your surfing will be exactly like your desktop browsing is.
Mobile data plans in the UK have always been a running joke with me (too little data for far too much), but Everything Everywhere in the UK have taken this to a new art form recently. They have a monopoly on 4G/LTE for a while and have decided to *start* their data plans at 36 pounds ($57) for 500 MB (yes, that's megabytes folks) per month. Yep, that's lower data and a much higher price than most 3G data plans.
So let me see, if say I get a 10Mbits/sec connection on 4G (and that's pretty conservative) and use it for a large download or a continuous stream at that rate, I will exhaust my expensive monthly 4G plan in under 7 minutes. Way to go, EE - let's make 4G utterly useless in the UK by underquotaing and overpricing it. Geniuses!
Why is that the article jumps from "Linux for Steam" to "Valve will design and maybe license a Linux-based games console"? Surely the obvious step inbetween is a customised Linux distro for a live bootable USB stick (with a decent capacity to hold a few games) that can do the following:
* Check the PC meets the minimum hardware specs that Valve require. Anything below the specs is highlighted and suitable upgrade alternatives listed (Valve could have sponsored links here to hardware sites). No games can be played until the minimum specs are met.
* Login into a Valve steam account and downloads any updates to the live USB setup.
* Download any new games to the USB stick.
* Play the downloaded games.
* Shutdown and reboot back to their normal Windows/Linux setup.
This way a user doesn't have to worry about partitioning, dual boot etc. and can just take their USB stick to a friend's house and play it on whatever PCs they have that meet the minimum spec (which could even include a Mac machine?!). The only issue might trying to prevent cloing of the stick and letting it be run on two machines at once - not sure if that's doable (and some games might have more liberal licensing to let you do that anyway).
Once the whole live USB experience is refined, only *then* do Valve commission a gaming console with the (upgradeable) live image shipped in flash storage - they'll want to optimise boot times too so that it's not 1 min+ to start up.
Whilst I can see that Valve will port their games natively to Linux, how many other big dev houses will do the same by the time Steam goes gold on Linux? Without other houses involved, Steam surely will fail on Linux, so could some sort of WINE layer help matters? Valve devs would be ideally placed to fix issues with non-Valve games under WINE and once a game passes testing under Linux+WINE+Windows version of game, it could be added to the Steam store on Linux (though each game update would have to be re-tested too of course).
I'm also a little surprised about how only one exact version of one exact Linux distro (OK, Ubuntu 12.10 too when that's out next month) is supported, yet Windows Steam supports three (about to be four) different versions of Windows. No love for Fedora or openSuSE then? Perhaps providing a statically linked.tar.bz2 binary package for non-Ubuntu distros as well would be a nice thing to provide?
I used to use every Fedora release (multi-boot between the "stable" version and the next alpha or beta), but the last time I did that was Fedora 14. Once GNOME 3 came out with F15, I clung onto F14 as long as I could and then did the jump to CentOS 6 (aka F12/13-like).
CentOS 6 gives you these advantages:
* System V Init rather than upstart or systemd. * GNOME 2 - massively better than GNOME 3. * 10 years of updates - more than any other Linux distro anywhere. * Ability to run the exactly same distro (no special server edition) at home and work on servers and desktops. * If I don't want to wait 10 years for a major upgrade, CentOS 7 will be out within the next year or so, though you'll lose the first two advantages with 7 I suspect.
The disadvantages:
* Most packages never get a major upgrade - tends to be minor upgrades and some backported fixes. Means you may have to manually version chase some stuff (e.g. Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice). * Pre-built binaries don't ever care about CentOS - Firefox hasn't worked on CentOS 5 for quite a while despite it still having more than 5 years of updates to go! Firefox OS is also guilty about ignoring even CentOS 6 - the pre-built stuff doesn't work on it either.
If you want a stable desktop to do serious work on Linux, CentOS 6 is a clear winner for me. If I need to see how stuff like Fedora 18 Alpha is going, I just fire up VirtualBox and test it out (turns out it's utter rubbish at the moment - they've even made the Anaconda installer less useful and more dumbed down). As for Ubuntu, I've got 12.04 on a few Acer Revos purely to run XBMC, but the Unity interface is so awful, I just have it auto-booting straight into XBMC to avoid it!
The game uses Adobe AIR, which is a bad cross-platform choice because Adobe discontinued it in June 2011 on the Linux platform. They also ludicrously never released a Linux 64-bit version of Adobe AIR, so trying to install a dead 32-bit package on a 64-bit clean Linux system is such a nightmare that I gave up and never got to see the game on Linux after all. Even the instructions to do so mention Fedora Core 11, which is a 3-year-old distro 6 releases out of date, ho hum.
I'm not convinced about external worknotes at all, because they're probably stored completely separately from the code itself. What's wrong with saying "Further details in the'"Main Menu design' section of README.txt in this directory" in a comment if you don't want to include a large swathe of comments in a source file?
If worknotes.scripting.com goes down for any period of time or goes bust, then this guy's links to external worknotes aren't going to look too clever. Never mind that the example he did use has just 5 bullet points that could easily have gone into a comment surely?
I suspect one of the few useful things an editor or IDE could warn you about is if you've gone more than a screenful of code (or perhaps let the warning level be set in terms of lines of code) without a comment, though no doubt some programmers would turn this feature off anyway:-)
I set up two high spec PCs to record the entire Olympics from 24 HD satellite channels (and some terrestrial SD/HD channels too). No need for a Net connection and I have 15TB of recordings to sift through (edits, deletes etc) at my leisure. It should be noted that the HD TV broadcasts were around 10-11 Mbits/sec, which is approximately twice the rate of the HD Net streams the BBC have up on their site.
The 24 satellite/cable HD channels (free apart from the TV licence fee of course - and no ads!) were by far the best thing w.r.t. the BBC broadcasts, IMHO. I could list quite a few annoyances with the terrestrial coverage ranging from ludicrous studio yabbering whilst actual live sports were visibly/audibly going on behind the presenters (cycling, swimming and athletics were the worst offenders), failure to air Jason Kenny's cycling gold medal win and medal ceremony on terrestrial HD and a surprisingly weak Olympics Tonight highlights show that often failed to air sub-5-minute events in full (colorised, edited out, blaring background music and hardly any of the original comms).
I think what worries me about Rio 2016 is that the UK won't see the equivalent of the 24 HD channels from the BBC again (hopefully via both satellite and cable like London 2012). It might mean that London 2012 will remain the largest TV event in the UK for quite some time to come.
Another US-centric story I see. Here in the UK, the story reads to me as "unreleased Kindle Fire and unreleased Nook Color vs. rumoured unreleased iPad Mini and unreleased MS Surface and - shock horror - released Nexus 7". In other words, a pretty useless story for non-US citizens - please try harder next time. Oh, and yes, I have a Nexus 7 because that *has* been released outside the US and is therefore the default 7" tablet winner in my books.
In the UK, Google are selling the 8GB model for 169 GBP (inc. postage and tax), whereas Tesco in the UK did the 16GB model briefly (like for half a day until they realised that the money off voucher code was wrongly applied!) for 179 GBP inc tax. You had to use a 20 GBP discount voucher that was posted on the Net fairly rapidly and also collect it from your local store (Tesco is massive w.r.t. the number of UK stores, so that's no big deal). It's why I have a Nexus 7 16GB on my desk for only 10 GBP (about $15.50) more than the 8GB model - a no-brainer purchase to get the 16GB model in this case.
Yes, it's already unlocked, rooted, has Flash (side-loaded), Camera Launcher for Nexus 7, Firefox beta + Phony = iPlayer (side-loading the iPlayer app doesn't work) and it'll be the Modaco ROM next in a few days' time probably.
* A steel wriststrap. If you're buying a Casio, do *not* get the black resin strap versions of their watches because they always break within 6 months of use. They may be up to 10 pounds cheaper, but the straps aren't replaceable and I learned this to my cost with two broken-strap resin versions of the watch before I switched to the steel strap.
* A huge amount of info on the default display: - Day of the week - Time (including seconds) - switchable between 12 and 24 hour display - Full date and, critically, switchable between "wrong" American format (MMDDYYYY) and the far more correct "everyone else" format (DDMMYYYY) - most Casios don't allow you to switch and leave the watch in American format, which is frankly incorrect. - An indicator to tell you that you've turned off all the annoying beeps when you press buttons (yes, I turn them off) - A "DST" indicator to tell you that you're in daytime savings time or not - A "satellite icon" to tell you if the watch correctly radio-synced overnight or not
* Usual countdown timer (I set mine to 25 mins for oven chips:-) ) and stopwatch as you'd expect (useful functions missing from most analogue watches)
* Daily alarm and optional hourly chime (I've never seen the point of the latter, but Casio always seem to include it)
* Press a button to find out the time and date when the watch last successfully radio synced.
* Hold the same button for about 5 secs to initiate an immediate radio sync (best to take the watch off or at least hold it very still when syncing).
* Luminescent backlight button - nice light blue background hue when you press it.
* Dual time zone option - can select the city and it will time sync to the "local" radio time service on 5 continents.
I've had a lot of cheap Casio digital watches in my time and this is the best one I've ever had.
When I got my first "digital teletext" TV set years ago, I was appalled at how slow it was to load pages up compared to the fairly fast analogue teletext. Of course, later analogue teletext sets had "tricks" like large page caches that would save almost every page that was transmitted (including sub-pages) so it would feel near-instant, but even ones without a cache were quite fast and you could see the page cycling counter progress so you knew roughly when it would turn up.
One neat trick analogue teletext pages had was a "overlay page number on top-right of live TV screen if the page changes", so you could put it on the main news or sports pages, go back to your live TV feed and if a new article broke, you'd be flagged of a page update and one button press got you straight to the index page you'd left it on. Sadly, it was ruined by sub-pages which changed every 30 secs, so I had to give up on that:-(
Having had 2 digital teletext sets with equally slow navigation/display of pages, I was despairing at how rotten the new "replacement" service for analogue teletext was. However, I picked up a Technika Smartbox 8320HD from Tesco (company who make it are in administration - shows you how popular it was!) and it *flies* through every single page - literally instant navigation, which is presumably with a clever cache system. It now actually makes digital teletext a bit more bearable, but there's still snags with BBC's digital teletext:
* It seems to only be on selected digital BBC SD channels. It's not on channel 301 ("red button") and not on their two HD channels either! Not sure why.
* It seems to have far less content than the old Ceefax system.
* It's often slower to update live sports scores than the old Ceefax system.
* There's no option to go fullscreen teletext (and back to a right-hand column overlay with picture-in-picture in the top-left or if it's an article, the fullscreen live TV feed underneath), so news articles are squashed in a narrow column and needlessly go over 2 or more sub-pages.
* Some pages go fullscreen and cut the picture-in-picture out completely, whilst others stick to the narrow column version - it seems quite inconsistent and should really be up to the viewer to pick their display layout.
* It still only transmits plain text (with the occasional, but rare, coloured text) and is actually less "graphical" than the old analogue teletext!
I originally thought it was a downgrade myself and still do.
We use CentOS 6 on work desktops and, apart from an issue with the Atheros network interface ("alx" driver just came out to fix the badness we've had with "atl1e"), it works very well indeed. It comes with GNOME 2 (hooray!), the old-style Sys V init (double hooray!) and has *10 years* of updates now (was 7 years, but just bumped up another 3). If you're looking for a free business Linux desktop with very long term support, it's almost a no-brainer.
Not sure why the first commenter in this thread "despises Linux on the desktop at home" (but then likes it at work - go figure). Maybe they installed a different distro at home vs. work? It should be noted that maintaining CentOS 6 requires a bit of extra work if you want to keep up with the latest LibreOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Oracle Java, Adobe Reader and Opera, but these are available either as RPM downloads or you can roll your own RPM (I have a script I wrote that does Firefox/Thunderbird).
Yes, I know most Linux distros ship LibreOffice now, but has anyone running Linux ever actually tried to install LibreOffice recently via the RPM downloads from the libreoffice.org? It's excrutiatingly packaged with so many flaws that it's embarrassing. Here's the list of what I have to put up with (at work, we use CentOS 6, which doesn't include LibreOffice):
1. There are *three* separate.tar.gz downloads (one for the core package, one for the main language pack and one for the help language pack (hmm...shouldn't the help language pack be merged into the main language pack)? Each of these.tar.gz's unpack into separate top-level sub-directories, just to inflame the awkwardness (I manually move what I want into the core package's RPMS sub-directory, but it's crazy to have to mess around like that). It should also be noted that the core package is dubiously labelled "en_US" but I'll get into that later on.
2. The RPM set has a major.major number *in the package name* (i.e. not in the version field where it should be). The lame official excuse for this is that you can install two LibreOffice versions side-by-side. How many normal end-users would *ever* do that, especially for two minor releases? Virtually no-one and yet this stupidity means that I can't upgrade any previous version easily. I have to manually uninstall all the old RPMs and then freshly install the new ones - completely maddening! Note that the developer version is named "LODev", so developers already have a completely differently named set of ("lodev"-prefixed) RPMs that can co-exist with the production release RPMs without the latter needing the version number embedded in the package name.
3. There are *two* core parts of the RPM package names: "libreoffice" and the bizarre "libobasis", so bang goes any chance to specify all the RPMs with a single wildcard.
4. I unpack the core package.tar.gz for, say, 3.4.4 and what do I see? Apart from confusingly having "rc2" in the unpacked dir name (yes, I know that the last RC = final, but it's still disconcerting), there's a shocking huge number of RPMs - 57 in all! For no reason at all, there's 7 "core" RPMs (core01-core07) when clearly they could put all that code into a single RPM. There are plenty of other RPMs that you suspect could also go into that single core RPM too.
5. Even worse, there are actually language-specific RPMs in the core package that make a mockery of having separate language pack downloads. Examples including *8* en-US RPMs (which I have to delete because I'm a British user and the en-GB versions are in the en-GB lang pack) and, even more astonishing than this is the inclusion of American English, Spanish and French dictionary RPMs, which I also have to delete.
6. There's also a "desktop-integration" directory in the core package, from which I'm supposed to install one of the RPMs ("redhat-menus" in my case) to get any sort of desktop menu entries, but shouldn't conditional code for this be included in one of the core RPMs and not as manually selected separate RPMs? I move the redhat-menu RPM up a level and continue...
7. Why is there a "testtool" RPM in the core package of a production release? I delete it and don't install it - normal end-users will never need it.
8. I then unpack the language pack download (en-GB for me) and have to manual move 9 en-GB-specific RPMs over to the core package directory (having had to delete the en-US equivalents first as I said earlier). Ditto for the help language pack (only one en-GB RPM this time).
9. I then have to run: rpm -e `rpm -qa | egrep '(libobasis|libreoffice)'` to remove the previous LibreOffice release manually.
10. Finally, I get to install the new release with 'rpm -ivh libobasis*.rpm libreoffice*.rpm
No wonder almost all Linux users just used their distro's release of LibreOffice - the manual install is like having electrodes attached to your nether regions. I have never seen RPM packaging abused in such a significant way and it's especially galling when this is one of the most important apps - particularly for businesses - on Linux.
Apart from the fact that Microsoft isn't restricting the secure boot loader for Intel Windows 8 machines, but *is* for ARM equivalents (no logic to that and also blows any security reasons out of the water), there is the question as to what happens if the end-user wants to either repair the OS via a boot disk or upgrade to Windows 9.
I'm presuming that no-one other than Microsoft can make a ARM bootable CD image for ARM Windows 8 machines any more (so no more live ARM GParted etc.). My guess is that OEMs will have to provide a boot disk (or some burnable.iso file equivalent) to repair ARM Windows 8 should it fail to boot (that's something that - ironically - has gone out of fashion with most OEMs now for Intel Windows machines).
Also, will the secure boot keys for ARM Windows 9 or later be identical to the keys for ARM Windows 8 (or will MS insist on keys for 8, 9, 10 and 11 are included in all ARM Windows 8 machines?). If they're not, then no-one can boot an upgrade disc any more (i.e. upgrades would have to be done via a booted Windows 8 machine only). Even worse, no-one would be able to install a fresh retail copy of Windows 9 on an ARM Windows 8 machine either (or will it be signed with the Windows 8 key to confuse matters?). I do suspect that MS will just have one key to cover all the Windows stuff (Windows 8, Windows 9 etc and maybe the same for both Intel and ARM), otherwise it could get very messy as new releases come out.
This move by Microsoft will, I suspect, hurt them more than help them - I will never buy a machine that can only run Windows (which is the worst of all mainstream OS'es, IMHO of course) and I will actively dissuade anyone else from doing so.
The PDF list is by far the most interesting thing of this article and you'd expect it to be all media/software companies (since it's online piracy that the bill is concerned with). Surprisingly, there's a fair number of non-media/sofware companies who don't seem to have anything to do with online piracy at all - here's some:
Concerned Women for America (is there a Concerned Men for America too?) Congressional Fire Services Institute Coty / Estee Lauder Companies / L'Oreal / Revlon (why so many cosmetics companies?!) International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Pharmeceutical Research and Manufacturers of America Pfizer, Inc. Tiffany & Co.
Not to mention a slew of slimebag lawyers who might stand to profit from any future legal action taken as a result of SOPA. About a third of the list includes conpanies that don't produce anything online to pirate and therefore, should never have been on the list on the first place (their presence is simply lobbying and not actually justified). I wonder how many boycotts we're going to see other than the frankly awful Go Daddy (who were terrible even before supposedly briefly supporting SOPA).
Being based in the UK, I wonder if a UK version of SOPA would result in a list of companies being released that supported the act - I don't know if companies in the UK publicly admit their support for legislation (or at least admitted in a way that a Freedom of Information Act request could reveal).
I bought a Dell Mini 9 a few years back for 149 pounds and I still use it regularly - more than I use my last purchase, a firesale HP TouchPad. In fact, my Xmas present this year is to be a replacement battery for the Mini 9 because it's only charging to less than half its original capacity.
What seemed to happen after my Mini 9 purchase was that netbooks with 9/10" screens started to get rarer, solid state drives (essential for a netbook surely?) disappeared, netbooks got more expensive (barely cheaper than a low-end laptop) and then tablets turned up (though I personally think the netbook form is far more productive than a tablet).
What I'd like to see is the original netbook spec come back. but beefed up a bit:
* A low price (must be lower than a cheap laptop). * Dual core 64-bit processor. * Upgradeable to at least 4GB RAM. * Solid state drive (32GB isn't that expensive now). * Either a normal 9/10" screen or a touchscreen variant (for Windows 8/Android/whatever). * No fan! The entire netbook must be solid state - no moving parts. * Linux pre-installed so at least we know there's Linux drivers for it.
Bring that in at under 200 pounds/$300 and I'm interested. A shame Dell isn't an option now because they got it right with the Mini 9, IMHO.
Paying advances allows the author to actually pay their bills whilst working on the book. However, you'd expect publishers to offer authors other models that might result in a bigger overall payout for the author if the book is really successful (e.g. smaller advance/higher royalties or even no advance/even higher royalties) if the author is already wealthy enough not to need the money right away. It's also not clear what happens if the book doesn't sell enough to cover the advance - does the publisher swallow that or does the author have to pay it back? I guess it depends on the contract.
As for e-books, it's clear to anyone that e-books should cost less than the physical version - it *must* be cheaper to distribute the electronic version than the physical one. How much less is up to debate, but even a nominal amount (e.g. 10%) would at least encourage more e-book sales if nothing else. A good example of publishing greed this year is that the #1 Amazon book of 2011 was the Steve Jobs biography. amazon.com has the hardback at a decent $17.87 (basically half price) - the Kindle version is $20.67 - WTF! It's price-gouging on e-books lke that which puts people off buying them and they end up pirating them.
Nothing wrong with CentOS 6 for work desktops
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Fedora 16 Released
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· Score: 1
Now that there's a continuous repository for CentOS 6, it's a pretty obvious Linux desktop to use in a work environment. It means GNOME 2, Sys V init scripts (i.e. stuff that works!) and updates for 7 years. If you're like me, you'll maintain a handful of packages manually (I have scripts to create RPMs of the latest Firefox and Thunderbird, plus I install the latest LibreOffice too), but with useful repos like EPEL, RPMforge and ELrepo filling in the remaining gaps, it's a pretty stable setup and a much more sensible choice than Fedora for a work desktop.
Bonus point: You can run the exactly the same OS on your desktop and servers! Even Windows can't do that...
DVD burners have been out for many years and now cost the same as CD burners (if you can even find the latter!). Blank DVDs also cost the same as blank CDs, so that cost advantage has gone now. DVDs hold more than 6 times the data than CDs and both read *and* write many times faster than CDs.
Given all of the above, even if a distro provides a 700MB "CD" ISO, you're still hugely better off writing that image to a DVD. You'll create the image faster, you'll boot it faster and you'll install your packages faster - all for the same price as if you burned the ISO to a CD instead.
The *only* benefit to a 700MB image is that takes less time to download than a multi-GB DVD image, but with broadband speeds getting faster, this advantage is dwindling rapidly. The same thing should have applied already to the "scene" w.r.t. movie downloads (my suggestion: standardise on 25% of the size of a single layer DVD for non-720p downloads instead of the current 700MB), but it sadly hasn't - we still see nonsense like 2-CD releases for movies - again, who on *earth* burns movies to 2 CDs nowadays (along with the ludicrous disc swapping that would be needed half way through)?
I got my UK TouchPad in the firesale (116 pounds for 32GB model - yes, rip-off Britain strikes again) and whilst webOS is OK, it's not as stunning as people make out. The card model isn't the greatest thing since sliced bread - your "flick to minimise" has to be precisely co-ordinated otherwise you end up having to use the bezel button instead (the number of times I've just scrolled instead of minimising is annoying). The lack of a close button on the windows mean two actions instead of one (flick+flick or bezel button+flick) to get finally close an app.
However, it's the lack of apps that's the real killer of WebOS - whilst software written for the various Pre mobile phone models had slowly increased, the ones that are TouchPad compatible (i.e. didn't run in a small Pre phone emulator) were building up even more slowly. So much so, there was an embarrassing trumpeting by HP recently that they'd hit 1,000 apps for the TouchPad, a mark that I suspect Android and iPad tablets exceeded within a week of their release (and that was a couple of years ago too!).
For example, I can't find a decent free fullscreen webOS chess or Sudoku for the TouchPad (they are either for the Palm Pre phone or cost money), whereas there are dozens of each on Android. It's why I'm now mostly using CyanogenMod 7 on my TouchPad - there's loads of apps on my Android TouchPad now don't have webOS equivalents (even with Preware installed, which I do have).
Whilst an msi would be better than an exe installer, at least Windows users get the latter. Mozilla has never provided a natively-packaged (.deb or.rpm) Firefox of any sort for Linux, never mind any official 64-bit builds. Yes, distros can and do provide both, but they aren't always updated timely, particularly if you're on an LTS release.
Mozilla should, if they're trying to catch any Linux admins, provide repos for the most common Linux distros (Ubuntu and Fedora to start, maybe others later) - it can't be too hard to automate the process? And to solve the "enterprise" angle, simply have an LTS repo that's updated infrequently and only for security/critical bug fixes. At the moment, I actually have a straightforward shell script to create RPMs of Firefox, Thunderbird and Seamonkey from the downloadable.tar.bz2's because apparently it's too tricky for the Mozilla dev to write such a script:-(
By all means change the GNOME UI - drop whatever you want - but please give it as much configurability as possble (even if these are hidden as "advanced options"). Firefox 4 makes the blunder of removing the status bar (which is fine if they want that as a default) but has no way of configuring it back without an extension (bad move). It sounds like GNOME 3 are going the same way - removing stuff and not letting users configure it back.
Also, make configurability obvious - one late-in-the-day GNOME 2 change was to make GNOME Terminal flash its cursor by default (which I hate because it's very distracting) and then remove the "flashing cursor" option from the preferences of GNOME Terminal! GNOME devs claim it was because they intro'ed a global config option for flashing carets/cursors so where is that config? It's in the *Keyboard* config tool would you believe it - nutty beyond belief.
BTW, drag to top of screen to maximise is an *appalling* UI decision 'borrowed" from Windows (whenever I'm in Windows, I keep accidentally maximising dragged windows because of this brain-dead default action). Next we'll see the "jump to top or bottom of document if you drift left or right when dragging a vertical scrollbar button" (another disastrous UI feature of Windows that I always get hit by when in Windows).
Not dissimilar to CentralNic's "country" .com/.co
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The Ascendancy of .co
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· Score: 1
15 years ago, CentralNic pulled a similar stunt with the.com domains - they went around and registered domains like uk.com, us.com, cn.com and ru.com and then brazenly sold subdomains off of those as if they were "top-level domains", completely with hefty charges (32.50 GBP per year for something.uk.com for example).
It ties in with this story too, because CentralNic have indeed registered uk.co and us.co as well, so I wonder when they'll try to "persuade" the publc that something.uk.co is a legit top-level domain (clue stick: like something.uk.com, it isn't).
It seems bizarre that someone would complain that an enterprise level OS has to version chase packages and is therefore "crusty". Remember that it's newer than Windows Serever 2003 and less than a year older than Windows Server 2008 and yet does anyone complain that either of those OS'es are "crusty"?! The poster also conveniently forgets:
* RHEL 5 is now on version 5.5 (March 2010) with a 5.6 release just gone into beta, so it's not like it hasn't moved on version-wise and isn't stuck on what was released 3.5 years ago (though - because of its enterprise nature - only minor updates tend to be applied).
* If you run the CentOS 5 equivalent, you can enable the "CentOS-testing" repo if you want even newer versions of packages - they won't be as stable though, but it will update packages like PHP, MySQL and PostgreSQL.
* You can enable EPEL and third-party repos like RPMforge to get hold of packages that aren't in the core release.
* You can roll your own RPMs - I do this for Firefox, Thunderbird and Seamonkey for example to keep our CentOS desktops up to date (not needed on the server side of course).
We run CentOS 5 on both servers and desktops - it's really nice to have the same OS across all your equipment - CentOS is one of the few OS'es where you can pull this off. It can't be done in Windows or Mac OS X!
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On my Nexus 7 tablet, I *never* want the mobile version of a Web site. Best solution to this is to use Firefox and the Phony extension (set to be the desktop Firefox agent string) and your surfing will be exactly like your desktop browsing is.
Mobile data plans in the UK have always been a running joke with me (too little data for far too much), but Everything Everywhere in the UK have taken this to a new art form recently. They have a monopoly on 4G/LTE for a while and have decided to *start* their data plans at 36 pounds ($57) for 500 MB (yes, that's megabytes folks) per month. Yep, that's lower data and a much higher price than most 3G data plans.
So let me see, if say I get a 10Mbits/sec connection on 4G (and that's pretty conservative) and use it for a large download or a continuous stream at that rate, I will exhaust my expensive monthly 4G plan in under 7 minutes. Way to go, EE - let's make 4G utterly useless in the UK by underquotaing and overpricing it. Geniuses!
Why is that the article jumps from "Linux for Steam" to "Valve will design and maybe license a Linux-based games console"? Surely the obvious step inbetween is a customised Linux distro for a live bootable USB stick (with a decent capacity to hold a few games) that can do the following:
* Check the PC meets the minimum hardware specs that Valve require. Anything below the specs is highlighted and suitable upgrade alternatives listed (Valve could have sponsored links here to hardware sites). No games can be played until the minimum specs are met.
* Login into a Valve steam account and downloads any updates to the live USB setup.
* Download any new games to the USB stick.
* Play the downloaded games.
* Shutdown and reboot back to their normal Windows/Linux setup.
This way a user doesn't have to worry about partitioning, dual boot etc. and can just take their USB stick to a friend's house and play it on whatever PCs they have that meet the minimum spec (which could even include a Mac machine?!). The only issue might trying to prevent cloing of the stick and letting it be run on two machines at once - not sure if that's doable (and some games might have more liberal licensing to let you do that anyway).
Once the whole live USB experience is refined, only *then* do Valve commission a gaming console with the (upgradeable) live image shipped in flash storage - they'll want to optimise boot times too so that it's not 1 min+ to start up.
Whilst I can see that Valve will port their games natively to Linux, how many other big dev houses will do the same by the time Steam goes gold on Linux? Without other houses involved, Steam surely will fail on Linux, so could some sort of WINE layer help matters? Valve devs would be ideally placed to fix issues with non-Valve games under WINE and once a game passes testing under Linux+WINE+Windows version of game, it could be added to the Steam store on Linux (though each game update would have to be re-tested too of course).
I'm also a little surprised about how only one exact version of one exact Linux distro (OK, Ubuntu 12.10 too when that's out next month) is supported, yet Windows Steam supports three (about to be four) different versions of Windows. No love for Fedora or openSuSE then? Perhaps providing a statically linked .tar.bz2 binary package for non-Ubuntu distros as well would be a nice thing to provide?
I used to use every Fedora release (multi-boot between the "stable" version and the next alpha or beta), but the last time I did that was Fedora 14. Once GNOME 3 came out with F15, I clung onto F14 as long as I could and then did the jump to CentOS 6 (aka F12/13-like).
CentOS 6 gives you these advantages:
* System V Init rather than upstart or systemd.
* GNOME 2 - massively better than GNOME 3.
* 10 years of updates - more than any other Linux distro anywhere.
* Ability to run the exactly same distro (no special server edition) at home and work on servers and desktops.
* If I don't want to wait 10 years for a major upgrade, CentOS 7 will be out within the next year or so, though you'll lose the first two advantages with 7 I suspect.
The disadvantages:
* Most packages never get a major upgrade - tends to be minor upgrades and some backported fixes. Means you may have to manually version chase some stuff (e.g. Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice).
* Pre-built binaries don't ever care about CentOS - Firefox hasn't worked on CentOS 5 for quite a while despite it still having more than 5 years of updates to go! Firefox OS is also guilty about ignoring even CentOS 6 - the pre-built stuff doesn't work on it either.
If you want a stable desktop to do serious work on Linux, CentOS 6 is a clear winner for me. If I need to see how stuff like Fedora 18 Alpha is going, I just fire up VirtualBox and test it out (turns out it's utter rubbish at the moment - they've even made the Anaconda installer less useful and more dumbed down). As for Ubuntu, I've got 12.04 on a few Acer Revos purely to run XBMC, but the Unity interface is so awful, I just have it auto-booting straight into XBMC to avoid it!
The game uses Adobe AIR, which is a bad cross-platform choice because Adobe discontinued it in June 2011 on the Linux platform. They also ludicrously never released a Linux 64-bit version of Adobe AIR, so trying to install a dead 32-bit package on a 64-bit clean Linux system is such a nightmare that I gave up and never got to see the game on Linux after all. Even the instructions to do so mention Fedora Core 11, which is a 3-year-old distro 6 releases out of date, ho hum.
I'm not convinced about external worknotes at all, because they're probably stored completely separately from the code itself. What's wrong with saying "Further details in the'"Main Menu design' section of README.txt in this directory" in a comment if you don't want to include a large swathe of comments in a source file?
If worknotes.scripting.com goes down for any period of time or goes bust, then this guy's links to external worknotes aren't going to look too clever. Never mind that the example he did use has just 5 bullet points that could easily have gone into a comment surely?
I suspect one of the few useful things an editor or IDE could warn you about is if you've gone more than a screenful of code (or perhaps let the warning level be set in terms of lines of code) without a comment, though no doubt some programmers would turn this feature off anyway :-)
I set up two high spec PCs to record the entire Olympics from 24 HD satellite channels (and some terrestrial SD/HD channels too). No need for a Net connection and I have 15TB of recordings to sift through (edits, deletes etc) at my leisure. It should be noted that the HD TV broadcasts were around 10-11 Mbits/sec, which is approximately twice the rate of the HD Net streams the BBC have up on their site.
The 24 satellite/cable HD channels (free apart from the TV licence fee of course - and no ads!) were by far the best thing w.r.t. the BBC broadcasts, IMHO. I could list quite a few annoyances with the terrestrial coverage ranging from ludicrous studio yabbering whilst actual live sports were visibly/audibly going on behind the presenters (cycling, swimming and athletics were the worst offenders), failure to air Jason Kenny's cycling gold medal win and medal ceremony on terrestrial HD and a surprisingly weak Olympics Tonight highlights show that often failed to air sub-5-minute events in full (colorised, edited out, blaring background music and hardly any of the original comms).
I think what worries me about Rio 2016 is that the UK won't see the equivalent of the 24 HD channels from the BBC again (hopefully via both satellite and cable like London 2012). It might mean that London 2012 will remain the largest TV event in the UK for quite some time to come.
Another US-centric story I see. Here in the UK, the story reads to me as "unreleased Kindle Fire and unreleased Nook Color vs. rumoured unreleased iPad Mini and unreleased MS Surface and - shock horror - released Nexus 7". In other words, a pretty useless story for non-US citizens - please try harder next time. Oh, and yes, I have a Nexus 7 because that *has* been released outside the US and is therefore the default 7" tablet winner in my books.
In the UK, Google are selling the 8GB model for 169 GBP (inc. postage and tax), whereas Tesco in the UK did the 16GB model briefly (like for half a day until they realised that the money off voucher code was wrongly applied!) for 179 GBP inc tax. You had to use a 20 GBP discount voucher that was posted on the Net fairly rapidly and also collect it from your local store (Tesco is massive w.r.t. the number of UK stores, so that's no big deal). It's why I have a Nexus 7 16GB on my desk for only 10 GBP (about $15.50) more than the 8GB model - a no-brainer purchase to get the 16GB model in this case.
Yes, it's already unlocked, rooted, has Flash (side-loaded), Camera Launcher for Nexus 7, Firefox beta + Phony = iPlayer (side-loading the iPlayer app doesn't work) and it'll be the Modaco ROM next in a few days' time probably.
I love my Casio WV-58DU-1AVEF - see http://www.amazon.co.uk/Casio-WV-58DU-1AVEF-Ceptor-Bracelet-Digital/dp/B000MMCPKO/ - a huge amount. It's a cheap (30 pounds in the UK) Casio watch with the following major features:
* A steel wriststrap. If you're buying a Casio, do *not* get the black resin strap versions of their watches because they always break within 6 months of use. They may be up to 10 pounds cheaper, but the straps aren't replaceable and I learned this to my cost with two broken-strap resin versions of the watch before I switched to the steel strap.
* A huge amount of info on the default display:
- Day of the week
- Time (including seconds) - switchable between 12 and 24 hour display
- Full date and, critically, switchable between "wrong" American format (MMDDYYYY) and the far more correct "everyone else" format (DDMMYYYY) - most Casios don't allow you to switch and leave the watch in American format, which is frankly incorrect.
- An indicator to tell you that you've turned off all the annoying beeps when you press buttons (yes, I turn them off)
- A "DST" indicator to tell you that you're in daytime savings time or not
- A "satellite icon" to tell you if the watch correctly radio-synced overnight or not
* Usual countdown timer (I set mine to 25 mins for oven chips :-) ) and stopwatch as you'd expect (useful functions missing from most analogue watches)
* Daily alarm and optional hourly chime (I've never seen the point of the latter, but Casio always seem to include it)
* Press a button to find out the time and date when the watch last successfully radio synced.
* Hold the same button for about 5 secs to initiate an immediate radio sync (best to take the watch off or at least hold it very still when syncing).
* Luminescent backlight button - nice light blue background hue when you press it.
* Dual time zone option - can select the city and it will time sync to the "local" radio time service on 5 continents.
I've had a lot of cheap Casio digital watches in my time and this is the best one I've ever had.
When I got my first "digital teletext" TV set years ago, I was appalled at how slow it was to load pages up compared to the fairly fast analogue teletext. Of course, later analogue teletext sets had "tricks" like large page caches that would save almost every page that was transmitted (including sub-pages) so it would feel near-instant, but even ones without a cache were quite fast and you could see the page cycling counter progress so you knew roughly when it would turn up.
One neat trick analogue teletext pages had was a "overlay page number on top-right of live TV screen if the page changes", so you could put it on the main news or sports pages, go back to your live TV feed and if a new article broke, you'd be flagged of a page update and one button press got you straight to the index page you'd left it on. Sadly, it was ruined by sub-pages which changed every 30 secs, so I had to give up on that :-(
Having had 2 digital teletext sets with equally slow navigation/display of pages, I was despairing at how rotten the new "replacement" service for analogue teletext was. However, I picked up a Technika Smartbox 8320HD from Tesco (company who make it are in administration - shows you how popular it was!) and it *flies* through every single page - literally instant navigation, which is presumably with a clever cache system. It now actually makes digital teletext a bit more bearable, but there's still snags with BBC's digital teletext:
* It seems to only be on selected digital BBC SD channels. It's not on channel 301 ("red button") and not on their two HD channels either! Not sure why.
* It seems to have far less content than the old Ceefax system.
* It's often slower to update live sports scores than the old Ceefax system.
* There's no option to go fullscreen teletext (and back to a right-hand column overlay with picture-in-picture in the top-left or if it's an article, the fullscreen live TV feed underneath), so news articles are squashed in a narrow column and needlessly go over 2 or more sub-pages.
* Some pages go fullscreen and cut the picture-in-picture out completely, whilst others stick to the narrow column version - it seems quite inconsistent and should really be up to the viewer to pick their display layout.
* It still only transmits plain text (with the occasional, but rare, coloured text) and is actually less "graphical" than the old analogue teletext!
I originally thought it was a downgrade myself and still do.
We use CentOS 6 on work desktops and, apart from an issue with the Atheros network interface ("alx" driver just came out to fix the badness we've had with "atl1e"), it works very well indeed. It comes with GNOME 2 (hooray!), the old-style Sys V init (double hooray!) and has *10 years* of updates now (was 7 years, but just bumped up another 3). If you're looking for a free business Linux desktop with very long term support, it's almost a no-brainer.
Not sure why the first commenter in this thread "despises Linux on the desktop at home" (but then likes it at work - go figure). Maybe they installed a different distro at home vs. work? It should be noted that maintaining CentOS 6 requires a bit of extra work if you want to keep up with the latest LibreOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Oracle Java, Adobe Reader and Opera, but these are available either as RPM downloads or you can roll your own RPM (I have a script I wrote that does Firefox/Thunderbird).
Yes, I know most Linux distros ship LibreOffice now, but has anyone running Linux ever actually tried to install LibreOffice recently via the RPM downloads from the libreoffice.org? It's excrutiatingly packaged with so many flaws that it's embarrassing. Here's the list of what I have to put up with (at work, we use CentOS 6, which doesn't include LibreOffice):
1. There are *three* separate .tar.gz downloads (one for the core package, one for the main language pack and one for the help language pack (hmm...shouldn't the help language pack be merged into the main language pack)? Each of these .tar.gz's unpack into separate top-level sub-directories, just to inflame the awkwardness (I manually move what I want into the core package's RPMS sub-directory, but it's crazy to have to mess around like that). It should also be noted that the core package is dubiously labelled "en_US" but I'll get into that later on.
2. The RPM set has a major.major number *in the package name* (i.e. not in the version field where it should be). The lame official excuse for this is that you can install two LibreOffice versions side-by-side. How many normal end-users would *ever* do that, especially for two minor releases? Virtually no-one and yet this stupidity means that I can't upgrade any previous version easily. I have to manually uninstall all the old RPMs and then freshly install the new ones - completely maddening! Note that the developer version is named "LODev", so developers already have a completely differently named set of ("lodev"-prefixed) RPMs that can co-exist with the production release RPMs without the latter needing the version number embedded in the package name.
3. There are *two* core parts of the RPM package names: "libreoffice" and the bizarre "libobasis", so bang goes any chance to specify all the RPMs with a single wildcard.
4. I unpack the core package .tar.gz for, say, 3.4.4 and what do I see? Apart from confusingly having "rc2" in the unpacked dir name (yes, I know that the last RC = final, but it's still disconcerting), there's a shocking huge number of RPMs - 57 in all! For no reason at all, there's 7 "core" RPMs (core01-core07) when clearly they could put all that code into a single RPM. There are plenty of other RPMs that you suspect could also go into that single core RPM too.
5. Even worse, there are actually language-specific RPMs in the core package that make a mockery of having separate language pack downloads. Examples including *8* en-US RPMs (which I have to delete because I'm a British user and the en-GB versions are in the en-GB lang pack) and, even more astonishing than this is the inclusion of American English, Spanish and French dictionary RPMs, which I also have to delete.
6. There's also a "desktop-integration" directory in the core package, from which I'm supposed to install one of the RPMs ("redhat-menus" in my case) to get any sort of desktop menu entries, but shouldn't conditional code for this be included in one of the core RPMs and not as manually selected separate RPMs? I move the redhat-menu RPM up a level and continue...
7. Why is there a "testtool" RPM in the core package of a production release? I delete it and don't install it - normal end-users will never need it.
8. I then unpack the language pack download (en-GB for me) and have to manual move 9 en-GB-specific RPMs over to the core package directory (having had to delete the en-US equivalents first as I said earlier). Ditto for the help language pack (only one en-GB RPM this time).
9. I then have to run:
rpm -e `rpm -qa | egrep '(libobasis|libreoffice)'` to remove the previous LibreOffice release manually.
10. Finally, I get to install the new release with 'rpm -ivh libobasis*.rpm libreoffice*.rpm
No wonder almost all Linux users just used their distro's release of LibreOffice - the manual install is like having electrodes attached to your nether regions. I have never seen RPM packaging abused in such a significant way and it's especially galling when this is one of the most important apps - particularly for businesses - on Linux.
Apart from the fact that Microsoft isn't restricting the secure boot loader for Intel Windows 8 machines, but *is* for ARM equivalents (no logic to that and also blows any security reasons out of the water), there is the question as to what happens if the end-user wants to either repair the OS via a boot disk or upgrade to Windows 9.
I'm presuming that no-one other than Microsoft can make a ARM bootable CD image for ARM Windows 8 machines any more (so no more live ARM GParted etc.). My guess is that OEMs will have to provide a boot disk (or some burnable .iso file equivalent) to repair ARM Windows 8 should it fail to boot (that's something that - ironically - has gone out of fashion with most OEMs now for Intel Windows machines).
Also, will the secure boot keys for ARM Windows 9 or later be identical to the keys for ARM Windows 8 (or will MS insist on keys for 8, 9, 10 and 11 are included in all ARM Windows 8 machines?). If they're not, then no-one can boot an upgrade disc any more (i.e. upgrades would have to be done via a booted Windows 8 machine only). Even worse, no-one would be able to install a fresh retail copy of Windows 9 on an ARM Windows 8 machine either (or will it be signed with the Windows 8 key to confuse matters?). I do suspect that MS will just have one key to cover all the Windows stuff (Windows 8, Windows 9 etc and maybe the same for both Intel and ARM), otherwise it could get very messy as new releases come out.
This move by Microsoft will, I suspect, hurt them more than help them - I will never buy a machine that can only run Windows (which is the worst of all mainstream OS'es, IMHO of course) and I will actively dissuade anyone else from doing so.
The PDF list is by far the most interesting thing of this article and you'd expect it to be all media/software companies (since it's online piracy that the bill is concerned with). Surprisingly, there's a fair number of non-media/sofware companies who don't seem to have anything to do with online piracy at all - here's some:
Concerned Women for America (is there a Concerned Men for America too?)
Congressional Fire Services Institute
Coty / Estee Lauder Companies / L'Oreal / Revlon (why so many cosmetics companies?!)
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers
Pharmeceutical Research and Manufacturers of America
Pfizer, Inc.
Tiffany & Co.
Not to mention a slew of slimebag lawyers who might stand to profit from any future legal action taken as a result of SOPA. About a third of the list includes conpanies that don't produce anything online to pirate and therefore, should never have been on the list on the first place (their presence is simply lobbying and not actually justified). I wonder how many boycotts we're going to see other than the frankly awful Go Daddy (who were terrible even before supposedly briefly supporting SOPA).
Being based in the UK, I wonder if a UK version of SOPA would result in a list of companies being released that supported the act - I don't know if companies in the UK publicly admit their support for legislation (or at least admitted in a way that a Freedom of Information Act request could reveal).
I bought a Dell Mini 9 a few years back for 149 pounds and I still use it regularly - more than I use my last purchase, a firesale HP TouchPad. In fact, my Xmas present this year is to be a replacement battery for the Mini 9 because it's only charging to less than half its original capacity.
What seemed to happen after my Mini 9 purchase was that netbooks with 9/10" screens started to get rarer, solid state drives (essential for a netbook surely?) disappeared, netbooks got more expensive (barely cheaper than a low-end laptop) and then tablets turned up (though I personally think the netbook form is far more productive than a tablet).
What I'd like to see is the original netbook spec come back. but beefed up a bit:
* A low price (must be lower than a cheap laptop).
* Dual core 64-bit processor.
* Upgradeable to at least 4GB RAM.
* Solid state drive (32GB isn't that expensive now).
* Either a normal 9/10" screen or a touchscreen variant (for Windows 8/Android/whatever).
* No fan! The entire netbook must be solid state - no moving parts.
* Linux pre-installed so at least we know there's Linux drivers for it.
Bring that in at under 200 pounds/$300 and I'm interested. A shame Dell isn't an option now because they got it right with the Mini 9, IMHO.
Paying advances allows the author to actually pay their bills whilst working on the book. However, you'd expect publishers to offer authors other models that might result in a bigger overall payout for the author if the book is really successful (e.g. smaller advance/higher royalties or even no advance/even higher royalties) if the author is already wealthy enough not to need the money right away. It's also not clear what happens if the book doesn't sell enough to cover the advance - does the publisher swallow that or does the author have to pay it back? I guess it depends on the contract.
As for e-books, it's clear to anyone that e-books should cost less than the physical version - it *must* be cheaper to distribute the electronic version than the physical one. How much less is up to debate, but even a nominal amount (e.g. 10%) would at least encourage more e-book sales if nothing else. A good example of publishing greed this year is that the #1 Amazon book of 2011 was the Steve Jobs biography. amazon.com has the hardback at a decent $17.87 (basically half price) - the Kindle version is $20.67 - WTF! It's price-gouging on e-books lke that which puts people off buying them and they end up pirating them.
Now that there's a continuous repository for CentOS 6, it's a pretty obvious Linux desktop to use in a work environment. It means GNOME 2, Sys V init scripts (i.e. stuff that works!) and updates for 7 years. If you're like me, you'll maintain a handful of packages manually (I have scripts to create RPMs of the latest Firefox and Thunderbird, plus I install the latest LibreOffice too), but with useful repos like EPEL, RPMforge and ELrepo filling in the remaining gaps, it's a pretty stable setup and a much more sensible choice than Fedora for a work desktop.
Bonus point: You can run the exactly the same OS on your desktop and servers! Even Windows can't do that...
DVD burners have been out for many years and now cost the same as CD burners (if you can even find the latter!). Blank DVDs also cost the same as blank CDs, so that cost advantage has gone now. DVDs hold more than 6 times the data than CDs and both read *and* write many times faster than CDs.
Given all of the above, even if a distro provides a 700MB "CD" ISO, you're still hugely better off writing that image to a DVD. You'll create the image faster, you'll boot it faster and you'll install your packages faster - all for the same price as if you burned the ISO to a CD instead.
The *only* benefit to a 700MB image is that takes less time to download than a multi-GB DVD image, but with broadband speeds getting faster, this advantage is dwindling rapidly. The same thing should have applied already to the "scene" w.r.t. movie downloads (my suggestion: standardise on 25% of the size of a single layer DVD for non-720p downloads instead of the current 700MB), but it sadly hasn't - we still see nonsense like 2-CD releases for movies - again, who on *earth* burns movies to 2 CDs nowadays (along with the ludicrous disc swapping that would be needed half way through)?
I got my UK TouchPad in the firesale (116 pounds for 32GB model - yes, rip-off Britain strikes again) and whilst webOS is OK, it's not as stunning as people make out. The card model isn't the greatest thing since sliced bread - your "flick to minimise" has to be precisely co-ordinated otherwise you end up having to use the bezel button instead (the number of times I've just scrolled instead of minimising is annoying). The lack of a close button on the windows mean two actions instead of one (flick+flick or bezel button+flick) to get finally close an app.
However, it's the lack of apps that's the real killer of WebOS - whilst software written for the various Pre mobile phone models had slowly increased, the ones that are TouchPad compatible (i.e. didn't run in a small Pre phone emulator) were building up even more slowly. So much so, there was an embarrassing trumpeting by HP recently that they'd hit 1,000 apps for the TouchPad, a mark that I suspect Android and iPad tablets exceeded within a week of their release (and that was a couple of years ago too!).
For example, I can't find a decent free fullscreen webOS chess or Sudoku for the TouchPad (they are either for the Palm Pre phone or cost money), whereas there are dozens of each on Android. It's why I'm now mostly using CyanogenMod 7 on my TouchPad - there's loads of apps on my Android TouchPad now don't have webOS equivalents (even with Preware installed, which I do have).
Whilst an msi would be better than an exe installer, at least Windows users get the latter. Mozilla has never provided a natively-packaged (.deb or .rpm) Firefox of any sort for Linux, never mind any official 64-bit builds. Yes, distros can and do provide both, but they aren't always updated timely, particularly if you're on an LTS release.
Mozilla should, if they're trying to catch any Linux admins, provide repos for the most common Linux distros (Ubuntu and Fedora to start, maybe others later) - it can't be too hard to automate the process? And to solve the "enterprise" angle, simply have an LTS repo that's updated infrequently and only for security/critical bug fixes. At the moment, I actually have a straightforward shell script to create RPMs of Firefox, Thunderbird and Seamonkey from the downloadable .tar.bz2's because apparently it's too tricky for the Mozilla dev to write such a script :-(
By all means change the GNOME UI - drop whatever you want - but please give it as much configurability as possble (even if these are hidden as "advanced options"). Firefox 4 makes the blunder of removing the status bar (which is fine if they want that as a default) but has no way of configuring it back without an extension (bad move). It sounds like GNOME 3 are going the same way - removing stuff and not letting users configure it back.
Also, make configurability obvious - one late-in-the-day GNOME 2 change was to make GNOME Terminal flash its cursor by default (which I hate because it's very distracting) and then remove the "flashing cursor" option from the preferences of GNOME Terminal! GNOME devs claim it was because they intro'ed a global config option for flashing carets/cursors so where is that config? It's in the *Keyboard* config tool would you believe it - nutty beyond belief.
BTW, drag to top of screen to maximise is an *appalling* UI decision 'borrowed" from Windows (whenever I'm in Windows, I keep accidentally maximising dragged windows because of this brain-dead default action). Next we'll see the "jump to top or bottom of document if you drift left or right when dragging a vertical scrollbar button" (another disastrous UI feature of Windows that I always get hit by when in Windows).
15 years ago, CentralNic pulled a similar stunt with the .com domains - they went around and registered domains like uk.com, us.com, cn.com and ru.com and then brazenly sold subdomains off of those as if they were "top-level domains", completely with hefty charges (32.50 GBP per year for something.uk.com for example).
It ties in with this story too, because CentralNic have indeed registered uk.co and us.co as well, so I wonder when they'll try to "persuade" the publc that something.uk.co is a legit top-level domain (clue stick: like something.uk.com, it isn't).
It seems bizarre that someone would complain that an enterprise level OS has to version chase packages and is therefore "crusty". Remember that it's newer than Windows Serever 2003 and less than a year older than Windows Server 2008 and yet does anyone complain that either of those OS'es are "crusty"?! The poster also conveniently forgets:
* RHEL 5 is now on version 5.5 (March 2010) with a 5.6 release just gone into beta, so it's not like it hasn't moved on version-wise and isn't stuck on what was released 3.5 years ago (though - because of its enterprise nature - only minor updates tend to be applied).
* If you run the CentOS 5 equivalent, you can enable the "CentOS-testing" repo if you want even newer versions of packages - they won't be as stable though, but it will update packages like PHP, MySQL and PostgreSQL.
* You can enable EPEL and third-party repos like RPMforge to get hold of packages that aren't in the core release.
* You can roll your own RPMs - I do this for Firefox, Thunderbird and Seamonkey for example to keep our CentOS desktops up to date (not needed on the server side of course).
We run CentOS 5 on both servers and desktops - it's really nice to have the same OS across all your equipment - CentOS is one of the few OS'es where you can pull this off. It can't be done in Windows or Mac OS X!