Sure Mint seems to be fairly popular at the moment, but given that it is based on Ubuntu, it might not be wise to assume that down the track Mint won't follow the same pattern.
I'm not sure that Gnome 3 is actually ugly, as such. I just found it totally unusable. Given that I had been a more or less loyal Gnome user since pre-1.0 days, I thought that was a bit sad, but since the developers knew what was best for me, I too went to xfce before I finally got to like KDE.
If Ubuntu represents the future of Linux i want none of it, I'll go back to BSD.
Who says Ubuntu is the future of Linux? It is merely one distribution among dozens. The fact that it is the most popular at the moment is neither here nor there; during the years I have been using Linux, the previous most popular distributions have been Slackware, RedHat, Debian (and possibly Mandrake). In a year's time, the crown could pass on to some other distribution I've never heard of. (For the record, my preference is now for Arch.)
But if BSD fits your requirements, then by all means use it.
Nobody but the submitter wants a dedicated email client anymore. Submitter is over a barrel; he should prepare to shell out cash for an email client, because that's the only way he's going go get what he wants. The rest of us have moved on.
Rubbish. There are lots of reasons why one might want to use a dedicated mail client. The submitter maybe just hasn't really thought about what he wants an email client to do. Most of the clients mentioned in the OP haven't changed much recently because they have reached a level of maturity where there's little to improve on or take away.
FWIW, my personal preference is for Thunderbird, which does everything required and with appropriate extensions can be made to look congruous with most of the more common desktop UIs. Most of us these days don't live in a text-only world, otherwise I'd say use mutt or emacs.
I would pay that kind of money to travel like a human being rather than be shoe-horned into one of those so-called seats on passenger planes. I'm not fat (or even tall) and flying is such an unpleasant experience, I avoid it as much as possible.
By your standards planes are far more efficient at sending hundreds of tourists to their deaths.
Well, they are by any standards. If the parent poster was referring to the Hindenberg, the famous prang only killed 35 of the 97 people on board. If a 747 hits anything while it's in the air, it's pretty much goodnight nurse if you happen to be on the plane.
Seems to me a simple enough matter to configure your machine to lock you out and (re-)encrypt your hard drives after a small number of failed attempts. (Like my bank does with its ATMs.) Or an arbitrarily long interval between password entries would throw a spanner in the works of the fanciest brute-forcing machine. End of story.
Oh, be honest. Nothing will make you switch from your HP48.
Not in my case. Although I still much prefer RPN, my HP48GX proved to be just too unreliable. It kept throwing tantrums during examinations and other assessments through my first year at university, and I didn't need the stress, so I ended up getting rid of it in favour of a TI-89 which is faster, more powerful and 100% reliable.
However, since I no longer usually need to carry a calculator around, I have the RealCalc app on my phone which gives me RPN again, though I have to do without the nice clicky keys and the big fat "Enter" button positioned just where the index finger can find it...
Well, if the patent system is not broken, then something else isn't working. Apple hasn't done any innovation for years (endless slimming-down of the same product doesn't really count). While it would appear that Apple is in no danger of going belly-up, its business model of devoting increased resources to litigation as its relevance declines is all too reminiscent of the SCO debacle.
Even in countries where everything has been stipulated in metric terms for a long time, Imperial measures sometimes die hard. The area of a property I recently sold in Western Australia was listed on the title as 10 perches (i.e. 1/16 acre, or ~253 m^2).
I have one of the devices referred to in TFA (since I now live out in the sticks and can't get anything better) and discovered this flaw straight away. Telstra supplies a unique SSID/WPA password on a printed card, but the device also has a generic username/password combo for its own login page.
The good news here is that this login profile doesn't have sufficient privilege to change much in the way of settings, but it's an ugly situation nonetheless.
Just as devil's advocate for the moment, since my preference is for the Sony readers, but...
You can download content from all sorts of places, and if you use Calibre (a great program, BTW) to manage your library, I understand you can use pretty much whatever device you want, and it will convert the format (if required) to whatever device you have. There are ways to strip any DRM if you have to. (Who cares if that's legal? If you've paid for a book, it's yours, just the same as if it's printed on paper.)
It doesn't do to spit on Amazon here. Sure they may have ulterior motives, but there was nothing forcing them to make these donations, and they're certainly not hurting you or me.
Although I am no longer very active in programming, I can sort of cope with people in modern-day shops with their toytown programming languages and IDEs being a bit sniffy about my assembly, Fortran or C skills, because I can easily prove my ability to code rings around them. What really gets on my nerves are the kiddies whose tech skills run no deeper than an ability to interact with Facebook and Twitter, but who seem to imagine that an old fart like me is clueless about the internet. I usually find it satisfying to rub their noses in it by reminding them that it was old farts like me who built the net in the first place.
Facebook, like any other tool, can be used to improve your life or destroy it.
Agreed. Which is sort of why I don't bother with a Facebook account at all, while my wife, who does, seems to be quite good at keeping only real friends as FB friends.
Getting back to the googling of friends, it seems to me that the usual rule applies: if there's something you don't want to appear on the internet, then keep it offline. And, of course, be very careful to make sure any Facebook users of your acquaintance are suitably discreet about your taste for ostrich pornography.:)
Sounds like a plan. A change of discipline is as good as a rest...
What I did in 1990 after 20 years in programming (Fortran, assembly, COBOL and C on assorted "big iron" mainframes) was a complete change. Management was not an option, since that's a job for someone who doesn't have the skills for anything more worthwhile. So I went back to school and did a double degree in biochemistry and biotechnology, which for a tired old fart like me was fucking hard work, but it's way out there enough on the geek scale to be interesting, even if the pay isn't always quite as good as in IT.
If I were doing it all over again, I would possibly choose analytical chemistry or mathematics, but no regrets...
...because there is nothing special about the product
Pretty much true, up to a point. I have owned 2 iPods, of which the second, one of the now ageing 6G 160GB models looks good for a few years yet, and I quite like the fact that the independent device isn't draining the battery of my phone. In its defence, I would claim that as a standalone music player (and certainly as an audiobook player), the machine was pretty much ideal for its purpose for the couple of years I was using a hand-me-down MacBook as my primary computer.
Unfortunately, the experience is soured by Apple's predatory lock-in approach with iTunes and DRM, since I have returned to Linux as my primary OS. While most of the content I use is ripped from CDs (and is therefore DRM-free), the bulk of my audiobooks (available only from Audible) are a PITA to transfer to other platforms However, that doesn't mean I won't make the effort. If (rather, when) my current iPod breaks, I won't bother replacing it, I'll just use my phone.
Far be it from me to be cynical (!) but it seems to me that the reason for dropped calls might be a deliberate policy on the part of our telcos to generate more revenue from connection fees. A brief perusal of my bills shows that this is working very nicely for Telstra, since I almost always have to make a minimum of two calls for any one phone conversation.
I'm with you. Indeed, as a now expat Brit, I find it a sore trial to have to sort out my coins in an attempt to work out what constitutes legal tender. Since the currency was decimalised in 1970-something, the coinage has gone on a diet. Seems to me that the Mint has decreed that any coin large enough to be able to extract from a corner in your wallet is no longer spendable. That is, with the exception of that damnable 50p coin, which for some reason retains a bulk and mass entirely disproportionate to its value.
but in mine we don't force everybody to help less fortunate country dwellers get broadband where they live, especially since they don't help us, city dwellers, pay our rent and other higher costs of living.
I think it scares the crap out of pretty much everyone but the sitting government
Ditto the Opposition. Remember it was they, under Howard, who enacted some of the most insidious and invidious intrusions on civil liberties post-9/11. However, the Liberal Party only has to keep quiet and allow the sitting government to do their work for them and take the flak accordingly.
The Labor Party used to include social justice issues in their manifesto, but nowadays the two major parties' policies are almost indistinguishable from each other.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure Mint seems to be fairly popular at the moment, but given that it is based on Ubuntu, it might not be wise to assume that down the track Mint won't follow the same pattern.
I'm not sure that Gnome 3 is actually ugly, as such. I just found it totally unusable. Given that I had been a more or less loyal Gnome user since pre-1.0 days, I thought that was a bit sad, but since the developers knew what was best for me, I too went to xfce before I finally got to like KDE.
Example man /etc would talk about that directory where no such entry was in Linux.
Maybe it just isn't necessary. Even BSDs get some things completely wrong:
$ man woman
No manual entry for woman
$
If Ubuntu represents the future of Linux i want none of it, I'll go back to BSD.
Who says Ubuntu is the future of Linux? It is merely one distribution among dozens. The fact that it is the most popular at the moment is neither here nor there; during the years I have been using Linux, the previous most popular distributions have been Slackware, RedHat, Debian (and possibly Mandrake). In a year's time, the crown could pass on to some other distribution I've never heard of. (For the record, my preference is now for Arch.)
But if BSD fits your requirements, then by all means use it.
Nobody but the submitter wants a dedicated email client anymore. Submitter is over a barrel; he should prepare to shell out cash for an email client, because that's the only way he's going go get what he wants. The rest of us have moved on.
Rubbish. There are lots of reasons why one might want to use a dedicated mail client. The submitter maybe just hasn't really thought about what he wants an email client to do. Most of the clients mentioned in the OP haven't changed much recently because they have reached a level of maturity where there's little to improve on or take away.
FWIW, my personal preference is for Thunderbird, which does everything required and with appropriate extensions can be made to look congruous with most of the more common desktop UIs. Most of us these days don't live in a text-only world, otherwise I'd say use mutt or emacs.
I would pay that kind of money to travel like a human being rather than be shoe-horned into one of those so-called seats on passenger planes. I'm not fat (or even tall) and flying is such an unpleasant experience, I avoid it as much as possible.
By your standards planes are far more efficient at sending hundreds of tourists to their deaths.
Well, they are by any standards. If the parent poster was referring to the Hindenberg, the famous prang only killed 35 of the 97 people on board. If a 747 hits anything while it's in the air, it's pretty much goodnight nurse if you happen to be on the plane.
Seems to me a simple enough matter to configure your machine to lock you out and (re-)encrypt your hard drives after a small number of failed attempts. (Like my bank does with its ATMs.) Or an arbitrarily long interval between password entries would throw a spanner in the works of the fanciest brute-forcing machine. End of story.
Oh, be honest. Nothing will make you switch from your HP48.
Not in my case. Although I still much prefer RPN, my HP48GX proved to be just too unreliable. It kept throwing tantrums during examinations and other assessments through my first year at university, and I didn't need the stress, so I ended up getting rid of it in favour of a TI-89 which is faster, more powerful and 100% reliable.
However, since I no longer usually need to carry a calculator around, I have the RealCalc app on my phone which gives me RPN again, though I have to do without the nice clicky keys and the big fat "Enter" button positioned just where the index finger can find it...
Well, if the patent system is not broken, then something else isn't working. Apple hasn't done any innovation for years (endless slimming-down of the same product doesn't really count). While it would appear that Apple is in no danger of going belly-up, its business model of devoting increased resources to litigation as its relevance declines is all too reminiscent of the SCO debacle.
Even in countries where everything has been stipulated in metric terms for a long time, Imperial measures sometimes die hard. The area of a property I recently sold in Western Australia was listed on the title as 10 perches (i.e. 1/16 acre, or ~253 m^2).
What the article doesn't say, though, is how the crew avoid spilling their gin & tonic... ;)
I have one of the devices referred to in TFA (since I now live out in the sticks and can't get anything better) and discovered this flaw straight away. Telstra supplies a unique SSID/WPA password on a printed card, but the device also has a generic username/password combo for its own login page.
The good news here is that this login profile doesn't have sufficient privilege to change much in the way of settings, but it's an ugly situation nonetheless.
Just as devil's advocate for the moment, since my preference is for the Sony readers, but...
You can download content from all sorts of places, and if you use Calibre (a great program, BTW) to manage your library, I understand you can use pretty much whatever device you want, and it will convert the format (if required) to whatever device you have. There are ways to strip any DRM if you have to. (Who cares if that's legal? If you've paid for a book, it's yours, just the same as if it's printed on paper.)
It doesn't do to spit on Amazon here. Sure they may have ulterior motives, but there was nothing forcing them to make these donations, and they're certainly not hurting you or me.
Although I am no longer very active in programming, I can sort of cope with people in modern-day shops with their toytown programming languages and IDEs being a bit sniffy about my assembly, Fortran or C skills, because I can easily prove my ability to code rings around them. What really gets on my nerves are the kiddies whose tech skills run no deeper than an ability to interact with Facebook and Twitter, but who seem to imagine that an old fart like me is clueless about the internet. I usually find it satisfying to rub their noses in it by reminding them that it was old farts like me who built the net in the first place.
Facebook, like any other tool, can be used to improve your life or destroy it.
Agreed. Which is sort of why I don't bother with a Facebook account at all, while my wife, who does, seems to be quite good at keeping only real friends as FB friends.
:)
Getting back to the googling of friends, it seems to me that the usual rule applies: if there's something you don't want to appear on the internet, then keep it offline. And, of course, be very careful to make sure any Facebook users of your acquaintance are suitably discreet about your taste for ostrich pornography.
On a more serious note...
On a (perhaps) less serious (but probably more insightful) note, I would recommend The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff
Switch to hardware. Do chip design.
Sounds like a plan. A change of discipline is as good as a rest...
What I did in 1990 after 20 years in programming (Fortran, assembly, COBOL and C on assorted "big iron" mainframes) was a complete change. Management was not an option, since that's a job for someone who doesn't have the skills for anything more worthwhile. So I went back to school and did a double degree in biochemistry and biotechnology, which for a tired old fart like me was fucking hard work, but it's way out there enough on the geek scale to be interesting, even if the pay isn't always quite as good as in IT.
If I were doing it all over again, I would possibly choose analytical chemistry or mathematics, but no regrets...
I get paid to write scientifical papers...
Scientifical?
I wonder if anyone reads them.
...because there is nothing special about the product
Pretty much true, up to a point. I have owned 2 iPods, of which the second, one of the now ageing 6G 160GB models looks good for a few years yet, and I quite like the fact that the independent device isn't draining the battery of my phone. In its defence, I would claim that as a standalone music player (and certainly as an audiobook player), the machine was pretty much ideal for its purpose for the couple of years I was using a hand-me-down MacBook as my primary computer.
Unfortunately, the experience is soured by Apple's predatory lock-in approach with iTunes and DRM, since I have returned to Linux as my primary OS. While most of the content I use is ripped from CDs (and is therefore DRM-free), the bulk of my audiobooks (available only from Audible) are a PITA to transfer to other platforms However, that doesn't mean I won't make the effort. If (rather, when) my current iPod breaks, I won't bother replacing it, I'll just use my phone.
Far be it from me to be cynical (!) but it seems to me that the reason for dropped calls might be a deliberate policy on the part of our telcos to generate more revenue from connection fees. A brief perusal of my bills shows that this is working very nicely for Telstra, since I almost always have to make a minimum of two calls for any one phone conversation.
A "Tiddler" was the old, old half-penny.
I'm with you. Indeed, as a now expat Brit, I find it a sore trial to have to sort out my coins in an attempt to work out what constitutes legal tender. Since the currency was decimalised in 1970-something, the coinage has gone on a diet. Seems to me that the Mint has decreed that any coin large enough to be able to extract from a corner in your wallet is no longer spendable. That is, with the exception of that damnable 50p coin, which for some reason retains a bulk and mass entirely disproportionate to its value.
I don't think you know what Christian Science is.
Sounds like an oxymoron to me.
but in mine we don't force everybody to help less fortunate country dwellers get broadband where they live, especially since they don't help us, city dwellers, pay our rent and other higher costs of living.
Who do you think produces the food you eat?
Fool.
I think it scares the crap out of pretty much everyone but the sitting government
Ditto the Opposition. Remember it was they, under Howard, who enacted some of the most insidious and invidious intrusions on civil liberties post-9/11. However, the Liberal Party only has to keep quiet and allow the sitting government to do their work for them and take the flak accordingly.
The Labor Party used to include social justice issues in their manifesto, but nowadays the two major parties' policies are almost indistinguishable from each other.