I was an ardent supporter and user of Desktop Linux for over 10 years, before finally throwing in the towel and using MacOS.
Every other year, back when magazines were still popular, you'd have a 'headline' "Is this the year for Linux on the Desktop?".
Then, just like now, the problem is not so much the desktop itself - there's a plethora of high quality options.
The problem is 'big software' and, to a lesser extent, but still a problem, hardware driver support.
I worked in a software department that was a 50/50 mix of Linux and MacOs, but the company was still mainly Windows based, so all the corporate software was mainly windows based - Microsoft Office, Webex etc. On MacOS, this worked just fine, but the Linux Desktop users were constantly having issues with corporate communications. The various Web Based offerings for the corporate software were all feature poor. Couple that with a lack of knowledge in the IT department responsible for maintenance and problem solving and it was pretty much down to the developer to maintain their own computer.
Over 5 years, I witnessed all but the most diehard Linux Desktop users switch over to MacOs.
Then we get to the lesser, but still important issue of hardware drivers. I have some fond memories of kernel hacking to get things working back in the day, but mostly it was sheer frustration. Things did improve substantially over the years, thanks to the help of countless developers donating their time and skills to make things work.
This issue was once a numbers game - the amount of Linux Desktop users was not substantial enough to warrant support. It's gone beyond that now, as mobile operating systems dominate home usage and browser based webapps gain wider adoption and become more sophisticated.
Sadly, this will lead to a lack of control, even though, ironically, the software Linux Desktop users were once locked out of (whether they cared or not), starts to become available through the browser.
This is the direction all Desktop computers seem to be heading in, with the ultimate price being a monoculture where everything the end user does is SaaS and all their data is 'in the cloud'.
... unless it's as useful as vscode, or sublime, or atom.
I'm not sure of the history, but for me, sublime was a game changer and then I adopted VSCode and haven't looked back.
I'm unconvinced BBEdit will ever be able to catch up to editors such as this, as there's such a vast ecosystem of quality third party plugins to cover pretty much every need.
I'll give it a whirl again though, for old times sake...
This article is meaningless without statistics to back it up and if those stats are any less than 1%, then it would be fairly "normal" abnormal behaviour.
FFS, when I was 13, I pawned my watch & my bicycle and used the proceeds at the local arcade. (Yeah, I'm old). My folks held back my allowance for six months after going to the pawn shop to get them back. That solved the problem.
I remember the keyboards that came with the first iMacs, with the fancy coloured plastic. Just a tiny splash of liquid would render keys permanently inoperable most of the time.
Nothing improved from that time onward. In my hardware graveyard, I have 6 Mac keyboards, suffering from missing keys, keys that don't work and just from good old shit to type on reasons.
In contrast, I have a logitech wireless mac keyboard that's been going strong for 8 years, along with a few mechanical keyboards far older.
Screw how it looks, it's how it TYPES that matters - and how robust it is. If I spill liquid on it, I expect it to work after it dries.
This is not going to work that well, unless, like Netflix, they have exclusivity to NEW content or create their own. This puts the BBC, at least, in an interesting space. Would they have exclusive content on 'britbox' for UK viewers which wouldn't be released to BBC channels, or iPlayer?
Old content only gets you so far. For instance, Disney with Star Wars - I mean, so what? Everyone has seen them. But should Disney release exclusive new content, based on the Star Wars universe, that's something worth thinking about.
It's obviously all about exclusivity and original new content - that's how both Netflix and Prime have managed to have such wide success.
I gave up on the critic reviews on RT years ago and started relying on the audience reviews, as they more accurately reflected my actual enjoyment of the film.
Having said that, reviews on release have, for a long time, been manipulated - the immediacy of the internet lends itself to manipulation, it's all too easy to game the system, so perhaps this is a kick-back from users?
I have lost count of the number of movies rated highly by critics on RT that are either just 'OK' or a pile of steaming turd - but that's my subjective opinion.
Some people like piles of steaming turd, they may find diamonds in said turd I wasn't able to discover.
And then we get the so called 'cult classic' - the movie that was slated by the critics, that turned out to be an all time favourite, neatly slotted into the 'cult' category, usually years after release.
Fact is, these days, you are better off getting an opinion from likeminded friends than trust anything you read on a review site.
This is all about treating employees as adults, it's all about trust.
Shock/Horror - when you entrust employees they respond favourably, who would've thought?/s
The other ways to accomplish work/home life balance is to allow working from home where feasible, with no limits at all. If someone wants to work from home for two weeks straight and they are still accomplishing the tasks they have been assigned, or the tasks they have assigned themselves, then surely this is a positive?
This is one aspect from science fiction that is now entirely possible and is, in fact, very prevalent in the tech sector - that you can work effectively from anywhere, that physical location should never be a barrier.
Obviously this isn't going to work for every sector, but 4 day weeks will for pretty much all industry.
There's so many other hidden benefits from this looser work/home life balance approach - less traffic for instance.
So, one of my first websites survives on the quake wiki & whilst it wasn't exactly popular, the code and the graphics reflects what sites were like back then.
This marvel site is just a poor reflection of the reality, as the code behind it, the reliance on javascript, the sheer weight of all the assets, is totally out of place with the era.
I was looking back at some photos of New York City in the 30's - the Chrysler building. It struck me just how modern it still looks today. Photo's of gleaming cars in the show room lobby, the art deco style - it still inspires modernity. And lest we forget, the USA from the 20's saw an unprecedented rapidity of invention and innovation.
The future had already started, long before I was born and a ton of cool stuff was being produced and would be produced in the following decades.
I was born in the UK in 1968 and when I was a kid, it struck me just how advanced the USA was when compared to our very troubled country. There was the future, that was where all the cool stuff came from. But the UK was catching up and we got our first home brewed mass produced personal computer - the ZX80. The library up the road from me switched from paper cards to swipe cards in 1978. I had sci-fi comics and TV shows that promised an amazing future.
Sadly, the arms race seemed to be overtaking the space race and all thoughts of a cool technological future were put abruptly on hold, as we contemplated a 3rd world war.
But back then, I expected we'd see flying cars, jet packs, a moon base and androids. Maybe even world peace.
The reality is, incredible marvels of technology have been produced, but they have become mostly invisible and ubiquitous. A great deal of it is just a series of continued improvements on existing technology.
The single most amazing thing that was somewhat predicted in science fiction, has been the internet.
In the grand scheme of things, 50 years is a very short time and most of the technology we have today, existed when I was born.
I'm willing to bet that in the vast majority of cases, people create a linkedIn account because there's an expectation you need to have an account.
You'll upload your resume and likely only ever visit again when you are changing jobs or when someone in your network starts a new job. I guess it's also useful if you get a job offer and you want more insight into those who will be interviewing you.
Perhaps it also depends on the work sector you are in?
I'm lucky enough to be in a sector, software development, on the right side of the supply/demand - an employee. Every job I've landed over the last 10 years has been through word of mouth.
If the work dries up, then I'm sure I'd make far more use of linkedIn as one of the tools at my disposal, but right now, it's about as useful as a recruitment agency = not very.
I'm sure it would also be super useful if I was relocating outside of my immediate network.
and at some pubs in the U.K., you can no longer get a pint with pound notes.
You haven't been able to get a pint with pound notes since 1988, so that would be ALL the pubs in the U.K.
You can still get pints with pound coins, although contactless is the norm these days.
It will be a very sad day when physical currency is no longer legal tender, all anonymity of payment will be lost - which kinda makes the idea of cryptocurrency payments suddenly more relevant, except for that tricky issue of volatility...
The world is going to hell, there's a madman in the white house, global warming is out of control, the stock markets are crashing, but dammit, don't fuck with my UI!
I think this article may be a case of exaggeration, but if not, there's certainly more important things to be angry about...
This year, streaming music surpassed the revenue of CD's, it's surprising HMV held on for so long.
Aside from job losses, there is a bright side to this. HMV and its ilk were responsible, indirectly, for putting thousands of small record shops out of business. We ended up with a narrow selection of choice, dictated by record labels.
Specialist record shops are on the rise again, serving niche markets and online music has never been stronger - I'm not just talking about the obvious players, there's also services like Bandcamp and numerous online radio stations.
Whilst it's still exceptionally difficult to make a living making music, there are more opportunities for artists to make a decent living. Artists that don't expect to be mega-stars making millions, but rather, to make an honest buck doing what they love.
HMV never supported artists such as this, but independent record stores and online services do, so arguably, this is a good thing.
Good riddance HMV, but good luck to those out of a job - that part of it sucks.
Slashdot Mirror
I was an ardent supporter and user of Desktop Linux for over 10 years, before finally throwing in the towel and using MacOS.
Every other year, back when magazines were still popular, you'd have a 'headline' "Is this the year for Linux on the Desktop?".
Then, just like now, the problem is not so much the desktop itself - there's a plethora of high quality options.
The problem is 'big software' and, to a lesser extent, but still a problem, hardware driver support.
I worked in a software department that was a 50/50 mix of Linux and MacOs, but the company was still mainly Windows based, so all the corporate software was mainly windows based - Microsoft Office, Webex etc.
On MacOS, this worked just fine, but the Linux Desktop users were constantly having issues with corporate communications.
The various Web Based offerings for the corporate software were all feature poor.
Couple that with a lack of knowledge in the IT department responsible for maintenance and problem solving and it was pretty much down to the developer to maintain their own computer.
Over 5 years, I witnessed all but the most diehard Linux Desktop users switch over to MacOs.
Then we get to the lesser, but still important issue of hardware drivers.
I have some fond memories of kernel hacking to get things working back in the day, but mostly it was sheer frustration.
Things did improve substantially over the years, thanks to the help of countless developers donating their time and skills to make things work.
This issue was once a numbers game - the amount of Linux Desktop users was not substantial enough to warrant support.
It's gone beyond that now, as mobile operating systems dominate home usage and browser based webapps gain wider adoption and become more sophisticated.
Sadly, this will lead to a lack of control, even though, ironically, the software Linux Desktop users were once locked out of (whether they cared or not), starts to become available through the browser.
This is the direction all Desktop computers seem to be heading in, with the ultimate price being a monoculture where everything the end user does is SaaS and all their data is 'in the cloud'.
Sad times.
... unless it's as useful as vscode, or sublime, or atom.
I'm not sure of the history, but for me, sublime was a game changer and then I adopted VSCode and haven't looked back.
I'm unconvinced BBEdit will ever be able to catch up to editors such as this, as there's such a vast ecosystem of quality third party plugins to cover pretty much every need.
I'll give it a whirl again though, for old times sake...
This article is meaningless without statistics to back it up and if those stats are any less than 1%, then it would be fairly "normal" abnormal behaviour.
FFS, when I was 13, I pawned my watch & my bicycle and used the proceeds at the local arcade. (Yeah, I'm old).
My folks held back my allowance for six months after going to the pawn shop to get them back.
That solved the problem.
... over two decades.
I remember the keyboards that came with the first iMacs, with the fancy coloured plastic.
Just a tiny splash of liquid would render keys permanently inoperable most of the time.
Nothing improved from that time onward. In my hardware graveyard, I have 6 Mac keyboards, suffering from missing keys, keys that don't work and just from good old shit to type on reasons.
In contrast, I have a logitech wireless mac keyboard that's been going strong for 8 years, along with a few mechanical keyboards far older.
Screw how it looks, it's how it TYPES that matters - and how robust it is.
If I spill liquid on it, I expect it to work after it dries.
This is not going to work that well, unless, like Netflix, they have exclusivity to NEW content or create their own.
This puts the BBC, at least, in an interesting space. Would they have exclusive content on 'britbox' for UK viewers which wouldn't be released to BBC channels, or iPlayer?
Old content only gets you so far. For instance, Disney with Star Wars - I mean, so what? Everyone has seen them.
But should Disney release exclusive new content, based on the Star Wars universe, that's something worth thinking about.
It's obviously all about exclusivity and original new content - that's how both Netflix and Prime have managed to have such wide success.
I gave up on the critic reviews on RT years ago and started relying on the audience reviews, as they more accurately reflected my actual enjoyment of the film.
Having said that, reviews on release have, for a long time, been manipulated - the immediacy of the internet lends itself to manipulation, it's all too easy to game the system, so perhaps this is a kick-back from users?
I have lost count of the number of movies rated highly by critics on RT that are either just 'OK' or a pile of steaming turd - but that's my subjective opinion.
Some people like piles of steaming turd, they may find diamonds in said turd I wasn't able to discover.
And then we get the so called 'cult classic' - the movie that was slated by the critics, that turned out to be an all time favourite, neatly slotted into the 'cult' category, usually years after release.
Fact is, these days, you are better off getting an opinion from likeminded friends than trust anything you read on a review site.
Sad times...
This is all about treating employees as adults, it's all about trust.
Shock/Horror - when you entrust employees they respond favourably, who would've thought? /s
The other ways to accomplish work/home life balance is to allow working from home where feasible, with no limits at all.
If someone wants to work from home for two weeks straight and they are still accomplishing the tasks they have been assigned, or the tasks they have assigned themselves, then surely this is a positive?
This is one aspect from science fiction that is now entirely possible and is, in fact, very prevalent in the tech sector - that you can work effectively from anywhere, that physical location should never be a barrier.
Obviously this isn't going to work for every sector, but 4 day weeks will for pretty much all industry.
There's so many other hidden benefits from this looser work/home life balance approach - less traffic for instance.
Bring it on.
So, one of my first websites survives on the quake wiki & whilst it wasn't exactly popular, the code and the graphics reflects what sites were like back then.
https://www.quakewiki.net/arch...
This marvel site is just a poor reflection of the reality, as the code behind it, the reliance on javascript, the sheer weight of all the assets, is totally out of place with the era.
... that some people just failed to see the obvious.
It was clear 12 months after launch the service was more or less DOA - it was a ghost town.
"You pays your money and you takes your choice."
I was looking back at some photos of New York City in the 30's - the Chrysler building. It struck me just how modern it still looks today. Photo's of gleaming cars in the show room lobby, the art deco style - it still inspires modernity. And lest we forget, the USA from the 20's saw an unprecedented rapidity of invention and innovation.
The future had already started, long before I was born and a ton of cool stuff was being produced and would be produced in the following decades.
I was born in the UK in 1968 and when I was a kid, it struck me just how advanced the USA was when compared to our very troubled country. There was the future, that was where all the cool stuff came from. But the UK was catching up and we got our first home brewed mass produced personal computer - the ZX80. The library up the road from me switched from paper cards to swipe cards in 1978. I had sci-fi comics and TV shows that promised an amazing future.
Sadly, the arms race seemed to be overtaking the space race and all thoughts of a cool technological future were put abruptly on hold, as we contemplated a 3rd world war.
But back then, I expected we'd see flying cars, jet packs, a moon base and androids. Maybe even world peace.
The reality is, incredible marvels of technology have been produced, but they have become mostly invisible and ubiquitous.
A great deal of it is just a series of continued improvements on existing technology.
The single most amazing thing that was somewhat predicted in science fiction, has been the internet.
In the grand scheme of things, 50 years is a very short time and most of the technology we have today, existed when I was born.
I'm willing to bet that in the vast majority of cases, people create a linkedIn account because there's an expectation you need to have an account.
You'll upload your resume and likely only ever visit again when you are changing jobs or when someone in your network starts a new job. I guess it's also useful if you get a job offer and you want more insight into those who will be interviewing you.
Perhaps it also depends on the work sector you are in?
I'm lucky enough to be in a sector, software development, on the right side of the supply/demand - an employee. Every job I've landed over the last 10 years has been through word of mouth.
If the work dries up, then I'm sure I'd make far more use of linkedIn as one of the tools at my disposal, but right now, it's about as useful as a recruitment agency = not very.
I'm sure it would also be super useful if I was relocating outside of my immediate network.
The biggest 'weapon' Apple have in their arsenal, is loyalty to the OS.
It's hard to convince users to switch to Android, even in the same household.
The battle is on though, there's so many high quality flagship phones far cheaper than iPhones, users will eventually vote with their wallets.
When you can get the same level of quality for almost half the price, I'm pretty sure users could stomach a move from iOS to Android.
I picked up the Galaxy S9 for $500 with discounts and whilst I'm no big fan of touchwiz, I don't like iOS either, with it's walled garden.
You haven't been able to get a pint with pound notes since 1988, so that would be ALL the pubs in the U.K. You can still get pints with pound coins, although contactless is the norm these days. It will be a very sad day when physical currency is no longer legal tender, all anonymity of payment will be lost - which kinda makes the idea of cryptocurrency payments suddenly more relevant, except for that tricky issue of volatility ...
The world is going to hell, there's a madman in the white house, global warming is out of control, the stock markets are crashing, but dammit, don't fuck with my UI!
I think this article may be a case of exaggeration, but if not, there's certainly more important things to be angry about...
This year, streaming music surpassed the revenue of CD's, it's surprising HMV held on for so long. Aside from job losses, there is a bright side to this. HMV and its ilk were responsible, indirectly, for putting thousands of small record shops out of business. We ended up with a narrow selection of choice, dictated by record labels. Specialist record shops are on the rise again, serving niche markets and online music has never been stronger - I'm not just talking about the obvious players, there's also services like Bandcamp and numerous online radio stations. Whilst it's still exceptionally difficult to make a living making music, there are more opportunities for artists to make a decent living. Artists that don't expect to be mega-stars making millions, but rather, to make an honest buck doing what they love. HMV never supported artists such as this, but independent record stores and online services do, so arguably, this is a good thing. Good riddance HMV, but good luck to those out of a job - that part of it sucks.