Yes a car anology, on slashdot, I am that original!
Imagine a car, they replace the brake with a handle on the dashboard. The gas pedal is a set of buttons, one for each 10km/h speed range on the dashboard. To drive you always need your foot on a pedal on the floor. Sound silly? Trains are like that. It works perfectly well. So would you want this arrangement in your car?
The steering wheel you say? The need for the steering wheel in your car would make the train controls unusable?
EX-FUCKING-ACTLY.
That is the entire problem with both Unity and Gnome 3. ALL the controls in your car are not just there because of how they would be best implemented but because they have to work together with the other controls. And that can create some interesting designs. Take the UPS trucks. Where is your stick shift? Why is it not in the same place in cars like that? Because it would get in the way of the driver crossing the center to get out on the other side of the car. Most busses got an entiry set of control on the left hand side of the driver because they can because the door is not there. But this means the driver has to get out through the counter area for the passengers. British double deckers did not have the driver interact with the passengers, and he was in his own cabin, excitting through his own door, making it impossible to put controls like the handbrake in there. Function dictates design.
Changing the interface we are all familiar with can be done, if there is a need but you got to be careful you don't upset all the other needs.
What are my needs in a desktop? To manipulate windows, to arrange them to according to my need to look BETWEEN them. I am a developer, a common need there is to have one window to read data from, another to put data into and a third to test the effect. Normally you do this by having a sufficiently large screen and arranging at least two of them side by side and maybe the third with a shade effect or overlap. Alt-tab in fullscreen mode is often not functional especially if there are other windows active. These windows can typically be quickly accessed from a bar at the bottom or top where all windows have a link side by side.
So, what does Unity and Gnome3 and Windows 7 do? HIDE things behind multiple clicks.
Unity and Gnome3 especially seem aimed at smaller screens operating in full screen for applications. That is great for an author who writes uninterrupted in the same writer. It works when you are watching movies and only have a file browser open in full screen and then launch a single player from that. It is possibly great for the casual user.
But for me? I have a very large screen area, switching the pointer to the top every single time I want to do something, that is NOT efficient. If I have multiple windows over of the same app, I have that for a reason, I do NOT want them treated as one. I do NOT want to click more then is absolutely necessary to get things done.
Unity and Gnome3 feel like they were optimized for a very specific use case, tablets and other small screen setups, that just ain't the norm for PC's especially PC's that are running Linux. And they changed EVERYTHING. Nothing works anymore as it did before. All the apps in your task bar? Gone, especially in unity. Customization? Gone. Stability? Gone!
It is like they took your old reliable volvo car interface and replaced it with a new one that you hate with the build quality of a trabant painted in an exciting mix of puss and shit.
Unity and Gnome3 should have been kept as an option for a long time until the kinks had been ironed out, a very clear and fun to watch tutorial had been out to show EVERY single current use case redone in the new style and until it absolutely worked smoothly, stable AND without taking loads of functions away.
Instead Gnome and Ubuntu tried to emulate MS by pulling a Vista. They redesigned things people didn't want redesigned, and removed functionality and replaced it with instability.
Evil enough for anyone. You don't get two products taken away from you if you don't suck to high heaven (Turbine took both DDO and Lotro back from Codemasters inept handling).
Groupon has a simple mechanism it tries to sell: Get people in your store at any cost, then make a profit when they return.
Normal advertising with discounts works differently, take for instance the special deals from your local super-market: We buy a larger amount then normal, at a discount, then pass this discount on to you, making less on the individual sale but more real sales.
3 for the price of 2 is a typical format.
Any side affect of attracting more customers is welcome BUT the supermarket owner will NOT think that customers who come in specially for that deal will convert to regular customers at any significant rate.
Some other forms of discount are: We have to much stock and keeping it costs more then selling it with a smaller profit or even at cost. We want to shift a lot in a small time frame so we "pretend" to give you a discount but really we are not. And We need the sales so we give a massive discount to be able to close the books of a period with mass amount of revenue (In holland large chains holding "no sales tax" days.)
Most of these discounts are aimed purely at selling an item, the discount is a way to make a sale that delivers a profit then and there. NOT some mythical future increase in your customer base.
Groupon therefor is based on a rarely successful attempt of advertising, getting the cheap who look for deals and convert them into full paying customers. Contradiction in terms? What can possibly convert a bargain hunter into a loyal customer? Amazing service? Sure, if your amazing service is worth a 50% increase in price. Lets not forget that groupon discounts are also often insanely high. And on top of the discount, you also got to pay groupon a premium rate well above any other form of advertising.
And then it is aimed not at large companies that can make long term investments but mom&pop shops that struggle to reach the end of the month in the black.
It is a scam and Groupon will fail soon enough because it has decided to go world wide where the laws are a bit more protective of people and small businesses. In the meantime, if you own a small business and get contacted by Groupon. Don't.
The pizza place mentioned in the story? A success because they did it twice? I wouldn't assume that. Lots of small business owner have no real way to track costs and benefits. They just know there is X in the register at the end of the day and that is a LOT more then normal. The real costs of making the X amount of revenue comes later.
Simple example, from personal experience. Had a guy very happy who was selling power tools over the internet he had made a small fortune in revenue in the first week. And the cost of ordering the powertools was even LESS then the revenue, even with shipping costs substracted... pure profit!!! He forgot about returns, and warranties and etc etc etc. Do you know just how much a single customer complaining and needing to be talked to for an hour costs? Why do you think companies want as little customer support time as possible? Because it costs are high and it all comes out of the tiny amount of profit you thought you made on the sale.
In business, you can make a ton of cash and still go bankrupt. Groupon is the perfect way to do this. Stay well clear.
You can't "explain" fiction by adding your own fiction. IF you want to play the game of debating a fictional universe, you got to accept that universe as it is.
Lightsabers are for most of the lore of Star Wars ordinary weapons that anyone can use. However, since blasters do exist ONLY someone skilled enough to deflect incoming blaster shots (not laser shots) would survive long enough to make any use of it.
Once you can make use of the lightsaber to deflect incoming shots it becomes a valuable weapon with some sense behind it. It is supposed to be far less energy consuming then blasters, can be used in more ways, and a blaster doesn't help you deal with incoming fire.
Respect the lore or don't bother.
Retconning the grand-parents gibberish is called and it lead to mideclorians or whatever they were called. I
You are debating this tiny kids silly answer of there being a metal rod inside when there can't be one inside from the fiction that came up with the idea.
This kid think he is so smart but forgets to actually read the material where the lightsaber originated. Whatever the lightsaber is, it is a "X" that is focussed through crystals, uses very little if any power if the blade is not used in combat, behaves as a solid with immense heat on contact but no radiation. That is what the fiction of the movies have created. Books and games have added on to it but regarless of what lore you use, if you want to explain fiction, you got to respect the lore.
It don't matter how you could create something LIKE a lightsaber, unless you replicate that, it is not a lightsaber.
This kid basically thinks Falco the Dragon is an open plane, sure you can sit on an open plane and fly but that is not what Falco is.
When a kid fails comprehensive reading of a trashy "sci-fi" story, you know a career flipping burgers is just going to be a dream forever as he sweaps out astrays at restaurants... oh wait, you can't smoke in restaurants any more? Oh well, so much for this kids future.
Apple is smart. If you think that their customer base has any members among those who still run XP, you are mistaken. Oh a few iPod nano's might be owned by XP users, a few of them got iPhones "second hand" but nobody with the cash that Apple needs customers to have still runs XP.
You are basically selling that a seller of top end sports cars makes a bad business decision by not choosing a location near a bus stop.
That is why the US has invasion plans for Holland ready and had them ready for a long time.
Nothing to scare the US like a country that isn't following US doctrine all the way. Note there are no invasion plans for say North-Korea or other places that are blot on humanity but they do have invasion plans to "liberate" Americans from the International Court in The Hague by invading a friendly country.
Dear US voter, if you want your country to stop sucking, stop voting for the kind of people that let this pass. Ergo, on the voting ballot: None of the above.
This will work in most countries, most election systems require a certain percentage of the VOTERS to actually vote, enough people invalidate their vote, the elections would have to be held again rather then just going on as if legit with a majority NOT voting because non-voters are rare counted.
You won't like it you yank. Our beer got taste, our cheese is not just a barely edible plastic, our food isn't genetically manipulated, the soda contains real sugar, the women are the easiest in the world, the pot is so cheap just anyone can smoke it... eh... oh wait, I got it. We are SOCIALIST. You got to pay taxes here. Sales tax? 21%. (might 20% they keep on raising it recently).
That should scare of the Americans... well apart from the beer having taste etc etc. America is an interesting place to visit, just don't eat or drink anything that wasn't prepared by a first generation immigrant.
So, basically Intel is saying, fuck Online with its 100ms lag times! We can go for SECONDS! No MINUTES even. Infinite lag! We can do it!
All you need is to run an old game on hardware that can easily run the real game with an insane data plan.
The bubble is indeed back, remember all those ideas of sites that wanted 100kb avatar images on real time updating forum posting sites with 500kb flash animated signatures? When most people were happy with a 56kb modem? Served from Sun hardware? Well this is the same thing.
I am quite willing to accept that you can render a game beautifully on a server. I am quite willing to believe tablet can be a lot cheaper if they only got to show a movie. I am even willing to believe that response time over the internet can in theory be fast enough not to produce outlandish lag in ideal circumstances.
In real life?
ISP's and especially mobile ISP's have been trying to cut back on that amount of data consumed. Can you imagine their reaction to the demands of an UNBUFFERED HD video stream during peak hours on a MOBILE device? Most of them can barely stand you downloading a low rez youtube video of a couple of minutes. How long is the average game level?
Latency. It is already bad enough on the wired internet were with multiplayer your computer only has to transmit the data not the actual screen itself. On 3G or even 4G? Forget about it. For web pages the latency can easy reach a minute. In chess game that would be to slow.
Hardware. It just keeps on getting more powerful, my netbook can now play some of the older games just fine. I recently replaced my Linux desktop with a amd cpu on motherboard setup because I realized that for desktop and movie watching, I don't need anymore (game machine is properly silly overpowered). Tablets are getting more powerful all the time, someone for fun sake report how wolvenstein runs on an atom CPU.
It is interesting geek stuff but the same thing that killed so many "great" ideas during the last bubble still is there. Bandwidth and latency are still not solved enough for this. We now finally can do the instant messaging people had dreamed up around 2000. 10 years later. (Check how long it has been since your mobile phone became truly capable of doing IM without endless waiting or insanely high prices)
Another piece of proof? Slashdot itself. Take the new "ajax" method of posting. No feedback, endless lag, errors, missing posts. It is clear what they wanted but the tech just ain't there yet. For the instant feel to work you need servers that can process a request in a handful of miliseconds, not seconds Mr Slashdot.
Nice idea Mr Intel, now get out your mobile phone and make a post on slashdot. Then you will know how unrealistic your dream is.
There is a reason we carry crotch burning CPU's and insane amounts of storage with us. Moore's law doesn't apply to the internet. AT&T won't allow it.
Lets take another event in history, the holocaust. Everyone knows Anne Frank but where did she die? Now lets assume that the average person answers Auschwitz. You would the argue, let it be. Since the horror of that place is well known it can't hurt in convincing people how horrible it was right by giving the millions a human face in the form of a young girl?
But there are evil people in this world who would use your convenient lie to cast doubt on everything. Holocaust deniers take any tiny little detail they can and manipulate it until it fits their twisted agenda.
The truth of the tianamen square masacre is that violence happened but not a mass killing on the square itself (the article says no bloodshed wrongly, no bloodshed means not a single drop of blood was shed) but rather outside it once the students had started to flee and afterwards as countless disappeared.
If the lie becomes truth then it can be disproven and with it ALL the facts brought into doubt. ONLY the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth can set you free.
Your feelings are dead on, the evil will use this to cast doubt on what happened but you can't fight their lies with more lies.
It is not meant to be facebook. Not everyone think social means getting pissed, that you do... well that says a lot about you.
I don't think LinkedIn has the capacity to reach the full potential of the idea which by itself is simple:
A global public job board.
Facebook for you social profile, LinkedIn for your professional one. There are a LOT of companies in need of skilled people but only really recruiting in a very small section of the world. Despite airtravel making the entire world a single day away and lot of skilled people willing to relocate for a job, actually global job hunting is in its infancy.
In theory it would be useful to able to find jobs and positions on a public site with perhaps some exchange of information thrown into the bargain. Sadly that is not what LinkedIn as about. At least the web development sections are overrun by Indians asking newbie questions with an attitude that shows they are just looking to get into the outsourcing business as in the "promise cheap crap, deliver first class quality crap, charge more to polish the turd". There are no doubt highly skilled Indian developers out there but they seem like me to avoid LinkedIn. Yes, I have a profile on LinkedIn, I keep it up to date because it might be useful but have long since given up actually taking part in any discussions. What is the point when any discussion will just get flooded by me-too posts by Indians building up their post count?
If the forums are to mean anything, they got to be policed far more strongly to keep the quality up. Else it will just become the next AOL overrun discussion area.
And as a job board. Well, people can find you but so what? The professional recruiters already find you on pro-boards where they know for certain you are looking and who wants to be contacted by a non-professional? It would need to dig far deeper especially in regards to its world wide nature. Stop jobs showing up for people in areas outside the recruitment zone.
LinkedIn at the moment is little more then a place to have your CV out there and a discussion board for those who have not yet learned there are better places for them. It has potential but it had that potential years ago and they failed to act upon it. This IPO will give them cash but also pressure to start delivering on the promise.
I must be visiting the wrong parts. At least the web development sections of it are filled with Indians showing exactly why outsourcing web development is a bad idea. The skill level is appalling.
I tried to use it for a while but there seems little point. The jobs offered are often "we post on a world wide forum but only want people within walking distance".
The tech discussion are often some Indian guy asking "what quickest way to do X without understanding anything". The bits of India that do space development are not on LinkedIn.
There is a lot of hype around the site but what is it delivering? At best it could become some kind of global job board with all of the problems of advertisers not properly restricting their ads from reaching everyone. Already think it is annoying that ads from other parts of the country come up? How about other continents?
It is big but what is its actual use? That is what has killed previous bubble companies. Not a lack of size but a lack of actual real world use that people want to pay for. Take the old one of home delivery. I got a home, I work during the day, so a delivery service that comes by would be useful. Useful but not economical. Lot of companies tried the
Almost a year ago now I installed Ubuntu for a neighbor who is nice enough but whose IQ is below average. And she had NO problem with it. Icons switched? Not an issue. She just dealt with it rather then throw a hissy fit like most of Slashdot.
She managed her updates nicely, just clicking them BUT unfortunately that also included the 11.04 upgrade... and since then she can't find anything. Yes, she is stupid but wasn't Unity supposed to be easier for people like her? The average Jean? The people who clean for a living? Well, I now have to install something else this weekend because of Unity. Probably use xubuntu.
The switch to Linux from Windows just meant no more viruses and spy-ware. Everything else she needs, which is just IM and the web, worked the same.
Unity broke that. There is your usability test right there.
You have a fair point. Really this is the same thing MS got blasted for for loading to much of Windows in memory that people didn't like.
Memory is fast, HD is slow (especially on low memory devices like cheap Intel netbooks (AMD delivers netbooks without artificial memory limits)) so load up the memory.
But people are used to thinking of memory as a precious resource and want to have a nice big un-used chunk all the time... some have a point in that they then will use it later, most don't. I seen people rant about a computer using all their memory when all they do is browse the net... So? It is using your resources fully. What exactly is the issue?
I think Unity and Gnome3 have issues in basic usability and stability. Memory usage? I could care less.
But for some it matters. A few of them are right, most are wrong or should simply buy their PC's a little smarter.
Just saying. People didn't pick Ubunutu for the G, they picked it because it is the easiest, most "stable" (it just works), most friendly out there.
Lets give the distro's you mention a quick review shall we for the average Ubuntu user:
Debian... the official base for Ubuntu, as the T-ford is the basis of all modern mass produced cars. If you want software versions everyone has been using for a decade, try "experimental" branch. Cat is still under review for inclusion in stable.
Mint... Do you like companies that hijack your browser to generate extra income? Well, then you will LOVE Mint. Say bye bye to the default Google search page and instead get some crappy branded version with all usefull options misisng (quick how often do you use the "more search options" to restrict a tech question from giving you answers from the previous century? All this in return for not having to manually install restricted packages under Ubuntu and a rather nice menu (which is nice but available under Ubuntu).
Arch... ARGH! They named it right. Sorta helpful community if overly reliant on RTFM that have been outdated. Remember we are reviewing this from a UBUNUTU user perspective. Pacman is no Aptitude. It is not as bad as Yum but things will break. Also you better hope your package is someones favorite or don't could on the latest version being in the stable releases. Going unstable means exactly what it says.
Puppy... your kidding right?
Pardus... you are now just hitting the keyboard at random in the fairly safe bet that you will get a linux distro name by chance.
Mandriva... once known for smooth, they gambled on the making the linux desktop a commercial reality and lost. Selling linux desktop to the consumer is not yet, might never be, a viable business model. Does it work? Probably but again, Ubuntu users have gone from Ubuntu FROM all the old ones. Why would they go back?
Fedora... and back to dependency hell. Also using GNOME3 as the default from version 15 on. Yum and RPM might have improved since the days of old but it is still not an Aptitude. People look at Ubuntu and see a Linux for kids but forget that sometimes you just want software to work. You can't call a distro hardcore just because it puts you in a mess every month.
FreeBSD... right
Gentoo... The world is ending tomorrow, not that the exact date matters, however long it will take for the world to end, the compile time of Gentoo is longer. Since their leader left it has lost all focus. It was once an intresting distro with a unique approach but computer speeds have increased minimizing the need for that tiny speed improvement a finely tuned system brings. Also, a full desktop just contains to many components especially with all the choice Linux brings to ever optimize it truly for everyones needs (is memory optimization to be as small as possible to fit on low memory machines, or use full memory on high memory machines)
Sabayon... how dare you, my mother was a saint!
PCLinux-OS wake me up when they do a 64bit release (they might have by now).
PC-BSD... Hehe, you are a funny guy.
Mepis? Who?
Gnome3 and Unity are a foul thing and Canonical sees to have swallowed them whole but the sad fact is that NOBODY else has caught up to Ubuntu or even realized what makes them the most used Linux distro by miles. It would not be unfair to say there are more Ubuntu users then other distro's combined. To then say that Ubunutu users can, will or even WANT to flee to another distro over a mere desktop is silly.
You forget just how many Ubuntu users can just install another desktop. XFCE and LXCD are near perfect Gnome2 copies and then you keep all the goodness that is Ubuntu without the horrid desktops.
Trust me, I am a nerd and HAVE tried all of the above in the past. But as I got older I also realize that I have more fun coding stuff and breaking my head over problems then than in how to get java running or a new version of some utility.
Ubuntu MIGHT be replaced but it will NOT be by one of the old companies that bled users when they switched to Ubuntu. People left them for a reason.
Tried CentOS, installer quits hard if you select at the end the wrong packages together, no warning or anything.
Fedora? Can't accept a HD formatted without partitions. Ubuntu can and under Linux it is perfectly valid. Why use MS-DOS partitions on a modern system?
Like it or hate it, Ubuntu is the mover and Shaker. Red Hat has gone corporate. Mandrake (or whatever its name is) has tried going commercial and is limping.
Countless others are gone or near gone.
Is Ubuntu next now it has gone for Unity? Maybe. As said, others have fallen from the leader of the pack before. Ubuntu for now remains the easiests to install for, the onewith the most active user base. Don't like Unity? 11.04 ain't a LTS so you don't have to switch yet. And KUbunutu is an easy switch as well as a switch to Gnome3 or any of the other options.
But Unity I think shows a worrying sign. What does it solve? One of the powers of linux is the ton of "add-ons" that are available for free and all of a sudden you have a desktop that can do nothing. Gnome3 ain't a solution, that piece of software seems determined to remove all options until nothing is left. Here is a hint Gnome team, when Unity is the more capable and customizable compared to Gnome3, YOU SCREWED UP!
KDE4? Don't even get me started.
Yes, there is room for improvement but you make it a LOT easier if you give us at least the basics. Alt-tab, was it such a horrific solution? Task bar? Why do you hate it such? App panel, what did it ever do to you?
200 million users? sure, if there are 200 million people for who a iPhone is just to complex and they want an interface with ZERO buttons, no touch screen, no interaction.
Don't get me wrong, I like Ubuntu Server edition but their desktop took a massive nosedive. aptitude is the best package management but what is the point if the package is unity or gnome3?
Stop fucking around with the desktop. Realize that a LOT of users switch of Aero on windows and have the same desktop they had 10 or more years ago. It works. Some improvements are possible but for god sakes, make sure the old proven and working elements still work.
Really, we went from a time applet that no longer can display the weather, no any weather option (both unity and gnome3) and needing to hold a key to turn off the computer. (Alt turns suspend into power off).
STOP REDUCING THE USABILITY!
But at its core, Ubuntu still is the most capable, see the earlier HD install option.
Just the desktop is pants but that is pants on Fedora 15 as well (Gnome3).
The real secret to developing a popular system is to remember that newbies are a very transient audience. A newbie won't be a newbie for long. It would be like marketing a condom for virgins. There are a lot of virgins in the world, especially here on slashdot, and they are bound to have sex sooner or later, except here on slashdot, but once they had sex they will need far more condoms then that one time "virgin" branded one.
Your OS user won't remain a newbie for long. You don't see many motor cycle companies aiming high at the learner market do you? Despite that a learner bike can be far more fun, the money is in the "experienced rider" market (the succors who think bigger is better)
Damn, guess motor cycle analogies aren't as good as car analogies.
Anyway, once the newbie linux user has started using it and figured out how to setup a dual monitor, he is going to be disappointed he can't set to different ones. That the login screen can no longer be themed.
It would be like Fisher Price deciding that their "My first XXX" line sells so well it will be easy to sell to adults and partner with Sony for a range of electronic devices. Nope.
Newbies becomes experienced users and then don't want anything to do anymore with a newbie only product.
I got an android phone and that of course gives me google maps with GPS. So, do I blindly follow its route advice? No.
Instead I now got a map++. I installed an off-line map for when the 3G is doing and so I can still locate myself on the map by looking at landmarks, shapes of the roads and find them on the map to see where I am.
The GPS is not all that accurate for a reason, typically showming me to be a few meters off. That does not man I drive in the ditch. Instead I use the added feature of satallite imagery to help me find the building I am looking for.
The gadget has enabled me to do more, not less by giving my brain more information it can use.
Yes, some people are stupid and follow the GPS blindly. Some people also followed maps blindly or written instructions blindly. So? It is called evolution, someday women will only breed with really smart men (we all pray for that day on slashdot) and stupid people will die out.
And then we have nobody to buy the gadgets we build.
Al Queda was not just at war with the west but with many Muslim nations as well. But it is NOT Al Queda (no matter what fox says) that is behind the overthrowing of the corrupt dictatorships in the middle east. Those uprisings have the potential to change the world far more then 9/11 ever did AND for the better. All 9/11 brought the Muslim world was Iraq and Afghanistan on fire and a spreading hatred of Muslims (imagine ten years ago it being MAINSTREAM policy in Europe to close the borders to immigrants AND have headscarf bans in effect or going through legislation in a lot of countries).
But in less then a year, peaceful protests mercilessly cut down by Muslims leaders have resulted in more change then we have seen in a long time and it is far from over. If Syria errupts (so far there seems to be no sign of armed resistance despite some soldiers having defected) then the turmoil is complete. Saudia Arabia and Iran are far from save then (Saudia has send troops to support an allied dictator in an other region, tying itself to the fate of said dictator, Iran uses Syria as a puppet to support Hamas in its push to destroy Israel).
This is changing the world. Without Syria, Iran stands very much alone, Hamas would lose its support (why do you think they have changed their tune so fast recently). Saudia Arabia might face some though questioning of not outright revolt... the middle east might never be the same. Of course, it could also turn very very bad (if you believe fox) but lets hope not shall we (so far Egypt is stable and shows no sign of sliding into a muslim extremist nation despite what fox claimed).
I think it is very significant that all of this happened without Al Queda at all. Bloody attacks, no change. Peaceful uprisings, the world may never be the same.
Bin Laden is dead, the path of Martin Luther King jr and Gandhi seem to get the best results. Who would have thought.
While Osama has been hard to track down, lower echolon leaders have been killed left and right. Didn't change a thing. Partly because the US managed to always find a way to kill a lot of civilians (by accident they claim) to fuel new hatred.
Thinking the death of Bin Laden will change anything is like thinking the death of Roosevelt in 1945 meant the end of WW2. (For those lacking in history, it didn't).
The world has changed massively after 9/11 but it also has continued to change. Take the current unrest in North Africa and the middle east. Ghaddafi (however you spell it) went from terrorist leader to friend to target in less then a decade. Now there are calls from the left to watch the bombings in Libya but ALSO to interfere in Syria... wtf? I am sure Israel is wondering just what the hell is going to happen next. Do you think it is an accident Hamas is changing its tune now its allies are burning from within?
If anything this shows how silly the idea of control is in the world. Bin Laden became a symbol but had little control. He achieved next to nothing. The uprising against the oppressors in muslim nations is instead against both religious AND secular leaders (Syria is secular, its Iranian ally is strongly religious) and the uprisings are both religious and secular. About the only prediction that stands is that nobody predicted any of this.
What will happen now Bin Laden is death? A symbol is dead but the things that made him a symbol are not. There is severe dissatisfaction in the world and people seem more ready then ever to use violence to made their dissatisfaction known. You might hail this is a fight for freedom or extremists wanting to force their view on the rest of the world, but the fact remains that right now more struggles are happening then in a long time in history.
A leader of a decade ago is dead, few will mourn him but he is a relic. There are new struggles to overcome. Iraq is still a mess, Afghanistan is a war zone. Pakistan is on the verge of collapse. North Korea is facing collapse and won't go queitly, Libya is in civil war. Syria is about to erupt in war. The list goes on and on. Wikileaks Assange has disappeared of the radar of news but that is still far from finished.
No, I don't think we can breath a sigh of relieve just yet.
And that in a way is a good thing. The world has NEVER been a safe place. Better we are aware of it not being safe and work to make it safe even if we make mistakes then to live in false security.
But in the future, it will be humans doing all the menial boring jobs for our robotic masters anyway... oh wait the future? Who is building cars and who is mopping floors?
Come on a 150GB download limit, that is okay. If you need your porn faster then 150GB per second then... wait, it is NOT per second? Oh well, 150GB per day is still... not per day either?
Oh dear. You poor Americans... thank god in mainland Europe we have evil state sponsored businesses and no free market so we have a lot of choice of ISP's. But who will I now download my porn from at 100mbit and no bandwidth limit? Oh wait, Japan! Country of un-limitted porn AND bandwidth and now thanks to Fukushima, tentacle porn without special effects!
But I know the perfect way to get the Americans to shit up and enjoy the AT&T dick going up their ass for the thousand time. Here is it. Are you ready for it? Brace yourself:
The way to fix this, is government regulation.
Whoa, see? All the complainers now switched their energy to frothing at the mouth about the free market, small government etc etc and they stopped complaining about the ass raping they are getting. Always works.
While probably meant as a joke, this is a work in progress and this flight in fact as far as I know did send some messages home before the crash.
But we are forgetting that aircraft are VERY old things. Some of the aircraft you fly in are themselves older then the modern internet and might well have been designed before even the foundations of the internet were laid down.
Even so called modern aircraft are quite old and the aviation industry is not for one for rapid chance. See McDonald Douglas building the DC-10 with OUTWARD opening doors, an aircraft almost crashing because of it, then the same thing happening again because the aircraft company preferred profits over peoples lives. Boeing and Airbus are exactly the same. All aircraft companies have ignored safety advice from air crashes for the sake of more crash.
So, while an aircraft could nowaways be in constant communication with the ground entirely independent from the rest of the aircraft, it won't happen for a long time because they just don't care. Each safety feature introduced requires state intervention and you know how Americans hate that.
I wonder if the iPhone and Android buyers simply aren't very different people.
And I can only look to myself and the people around me for that but lets see. I have an Android phone (Nexus S), I know people that got an N900 (Nokia linux phone) and some iPhone users.
The iPhone users, some have iPads. Me and the N900 users have NO tablet, iPad or otherwise. Why?
I got a net book for my mobile computing needs (Yes, with linux) and the N900 users got it on their phone. I didn't buy the N900 myself because while it is an awesome piece of hardware I already have a netbook. So what would be the point.
Neither do I have a need for a tablet. I watch movies on my netbook straight from the net in whatever codec and container some anime freak has decided to use for this weeks release. A tablet would have to offer a real advantage to the full flexibility of a my overpowered netbook (8gig ram, fastest SSD available on the market) that can do blu-ray encodes encoded by a drunk encoder. The iPad? Fail city. Sorry but I need flac and xvid and god knows what else because I am used to it.
Doesn't mean the iPad is useless to others but I have notice that the people that have iPads tend to have LARGE laptops. Macbooks often, not properly outfitted with real software but just the standard stuff. So, they got to choose, do I watch only vids that work on it on a very large machine that can easily play them but is unwieldy or do I watch it on the iPad?
Different market, different expectations, different starting position. I would never again buy a big laptop. My needs are met by my phone (which is barely used as a computing device, more as an information terminal, I consume information on it I need right now), my netbook and my PC.
I am a gadget freak, got a PSP and all the gameboys, yes even the 3D (nice effect pity the games are so expensive) but right now I just can justify a tablet. And that is from a guy for who "I want it" is a perfectly just justification.
What I could really use is a tablet that has a real keyboard and a NON-shiny screen. A screen that is perfectly visible in direct sunlight would be a killer feature. But the tablets I seen are closer to mirrors.
The BBC, yesterday. One side showing "the wedding". The only way I watch that if they made it interactive and I could enact my republican fantasies. Once thing about the French, they know how to deal with royalty. Russians too. Nice job guys, want to helps the rest of the world out?
The other side, snooker. The most boring thing ever to be televised apart from hurdling. That is it! On a friday! Prime time TV? Must watch TV? Not on the beeb.
Have I Got News For You is still funny although this weeks episode seems to have been cancelled and the previous one was more about "The wedding" then the middle east being on fire. Gosh they have plenty to say if Israel defends itself by killing a single muslim in a week but if muslims kill hundreds of muslims that is apparently not fit to discuss in a satirical news program. Am I so wrong in finding it all funny?
The rest of the time, cooking shows. Now don't get me wrong. I like food and I am actually quite good as a cook but how many master chefs can one stomach? According to the BBC dual and even triple episodes in a row.
Okay, so to discovery, geographic channel and animal planet. If anyone in America is bored, then you please go and shoot that mexican dog licker? My god that show is on 24/7. If I want to train a bad dog I kill its owner, then eat the dog. Just because a single program does well does NOT make it a good idea to replace your entire schedule with it. Diversity, it is the spice of live. For instance I would like some cat sprinkled on my chow.
Discovery? Come on, Cake Boss? Are you serious? And you thought American Chopper was gaying it up as much as possible. (come on and entire show with butch men in leather making shiny stuff). I get tired of the same formula. "Oh shit, we are running out of time, yet again, we do so every single time but never learn to start a bike, cake build a tiny bit earlier because thatwould deprive us of fake tension only the most gullible would believe". Even if some of the programs are interesting, the commercials kill it. Not just to long, to loud and to stupid, they repeat the same ones over and over in the same show AND then run ads for the very show I am trying to watch. That is like ordering a burger and then being told about that very burger instead of serving it.
Comedy Central? Thank you, I seen the Simpsons a dozen times over and Family Guy and such are simply not funny to anyone who isn't 12.
There is simply nothing to watch. Now I don't hate TV, I am as ready as the next guy to sit in front of the idiot tube after a day at work and let my mind rot. I like it, just there is absolutely nothing on or if it is it gets interrupted by a 5 minute commercial block. That causes me to look away and when I look back, the NEXT commercial block is on.
Instead, I simply download the few things I want to see (since I am in europe often the entire season is available already by the time I hear about it) and watch them in HD with no commercials blocks and no re-scheduling because some jack-booting asshole wants to get married to a slut.
TV has a problem. People like mindless entertainment but for millenia they had to create it themselves. Once every household had a musical instrument because that was the only thing to do at in the evening hours. Theathers were everywhere filled with crap actors for when people got fed up with the same song every day. Then movies came and made entertainment for the masses for the first time. TV made it even easier, just pump a production straight into everyones home. The perfect way to spend those hours between work and going to bed. Don't deny it and claim you read a book, statistics prove you didn't.
But that was in the days when we had no choice. Either you watched it on the TV stations terms or you didn't. And because they controlled us (don't deny it, I seen the empty streets when something special happened in TV land) they thought they would always control us and added longer and longer commericial blocks, now even showing ads over the programs
Slashdot Mirror
Yes a car anology, on slashdot, I am that original!
Imagine a car, they replace the brake with a handle on the dashboard. The gas pedal is a set of buttons, one for each 10km/h speed range on the dashboard. To drive you always need your foot on a pedal on the floor. Sound silly? Trains are like that. It works perfectly well. So would you want this arrangement in your car?
The steering wheel you say? The need for the steering wheel in your car would make the train controls unusable?
EX-FUCKING-ACTLY.
That is the entire problem with both Unity and Gnome 3. ALL the controls in your car are not just there because of how they would be best implemented but because they have to work together with the other controls. And that can create some interesting designs. Take the UPS trucks. Where is your stick shift? Why is it not in the same place in cars like that? Because it would get in the way of the driver crossing the center to get out on the other side of the car. Most busses got an entiry set of control on the left hand side of the driver because they can because the door is not there. But this means the driver has to get out through the counter area for the passengers. British double deckers did not have the driver interact with the passengers, and he was in his own cabin, excitting through his own door, making it impossible to put controls like the handbrake in there. Function dictates design.
Changing the interface we are all familiar with can be done, if there is a need but you got to be careful you don't upset all the other needs.
What are my needs in a desktop? To manipulate windows, to arrange them to according to my need to look BETWEEN them. I am a developer, a common need there is to have one window to read data from, another to put data into and a third to test the effect. Normally you do this by having a sufficiently large screen and arranging at least two of them side by side and maybe the third with a shade effect or overlap. Alt-tab in fullscreen mode is often not functional especially if there are other windows active. These windows can typically be quickly accessed from a bar at the bottom or top where all windows have a link side by side.
So, what does Unity and Gnome3 and Windows 7 do? HIDE things behind multiple clicks.
Unity and Gnome3 especially seem aimed at smaller screens operating in full screen for applications. That is great for an author who writes uninterrupted in the same writer. It works when you are watching movies and only have a file browser open in full screen and then launch a single player from that. It is possibly great for the casual user.
But for me? I have a very large screen area, switching the pointer to the top every single time I want to do something, that is NOT efficient. If I have multiple windows over of the same app, I have that for a reason, I do NOT want them treated as one. I do NOT want to click more then is absolutely necessary to get things done.
Unity and Gnome3 feel like they were optimized for a very specific use case, tablets and other small screen setups, that just ain't the norm for PC's especially PC's that are running Linux. And they changed EVERYTHING. Nothing works anymore as it did before. All the apps in your task bar? Gone, especially in unity. Customization? Gone. Stability? Gone!
It is like they took your old reliable volvo car interface and replaced it with a new one that you hate with the build quality of a trabant painted in an exciting mix of puss and shit.
Unity and Gnome3 should have been kept as an option for a long time until the kinks had been ironed out, a very clear and fun to watch tutorial had been out to show EVERY single current use case redone in the new style and until it absolutely worked smoothly, stable AND without taking loads of functions away.
Instead Gnome and Ubuntu tried to emulate MS by pulling a Vista. They redesigned things people didn't want redesigned, and removed functionality and replaced it with instability.
Do not WANT.
I tried it,
Evil enough for anyone. You don't get two products taken away from you if you don't suck to high heaven (Turbine took both DDO and Lotro back from Codemasters inept handling).
Groupon has a simple mechanism it tries to sell: Get people in your store at any cost, then make a profit when they return.
Normal advertising with discounts works differently, take for instance the special deals from your local super-market: We buy a larger amount then normal, at a discount, then pass this discount on to you, making less on the individual sale but more real sales.
3 for the price of 2 is a typical format.
Any side affect of attracting more customers is welcome BUT the supermarket owner will NOT think that customers who come in specially for that deal will convert to regular customers at any significant rate.
Some other forms of discount are: We have to much stock and keeping it costs more then selling it with a smaller profit or even at cost. We want to shift a lot in a small time frame so we "pretend" to give you a discount but really we are not. And We need the sales so we give a massive discount to be able to close the books of a period with mass amount of revenue (In holland large chains holding "no sales tax" days.)
Most of these discounts are aimed purely at selling an item, the discount is a way to make a sale that delivers a profit then and there. NOT some mythical future increase in your customer base.
Groupon therefor is based on a rarely successful attempt of advertising, getting the cheap who look for deals and convert them into full paying customers. Contradiction in terms? What can possibly convert a bargain hunter into a loyal customer? Amazing service? Sure, if your amazing service is worth a 50% increase in price. Lets not forget that groupon discounts are also often insanely high. And on top of the discount, you also got to pay groupon a premium rate well above any other form of advertising.
And then it is aimed not at large companies that can make long term investments but mom&pop shops that struggle to reach the end of the month in the black.
It is a scam and Groupon will fail soon enough because it has decided to go world wide where the laws are a bit more protective of people and small businesses. In the meantime, if you own a small business and get contacted by Groupon. Don't.
The pizza place mentioned in the story? A success because they did it twice? I wouldn't assume that. Lots of small business owner have no real way to track costs and benefits. They just know there is X in the register at the end of the day and that is a LOT more then normal. The real costs of making the X amount of revenue comes later.
Simple example, from personal experience. Had a guy very happy who was selling power tools over the internet he had made a small fortune in revenue in the first week. And the cost of ordering the powertools was even LESS then the revenue, even with shipping costs substracted... pure profit!!! He forgot about returns, and warranties and etc etc etc. Do you know just how much a single customer complaining and needing to be talked to for an hour costs? Why do you think companies want as little customer support time as possible? Because it costs are high and it all comes out of the tiny amount of profit you thought you made on the sale.
In business, you can make a ton of cash and still go bankrupt. Groupon is the perfect way to do this. Stay well clear.
You can't "explain" fiction by adding your own fiction. IF you want to play the game of debating a fictional universe, you got to accept that universe as it is.
Lightsabers are for most of the lore of Star Wars ordinary weapons that anyone can use. However, since blasters do exist ONLY someone skilled enough to deflect incoming blaster shots (not laser shots) would survive long enough to make any use of it.
Once you can make use of the lightsaber to deflect incoming shots it becomes a valuable weapon with some sense behind it. It is supposed to be far less energy consuming then blasters, can be used in more ways, and a blaster doesn't help you deal with incoming fire.
Respect the lore or don't bother.
Retconning the grand-parents gibberish is called and it lead to mideclorians or whatever they were called. I
You are debating this tiny kids silly answer of there being a metal rod inside when there can't be one inside from the fiction that came up with the idea.
This kid think he is so smart but forgets to actually read the material where the lightsaber originated. Whatever the lightsaber is, it is a "X" that is focussed through crystals, uses very little if any power if the blade is not used in combat, behaves as a solid with immense heat on contact but no radiation. That is what the fiction of the movies have created. Books and games have added on to it but regarless of what lore you use, if you want to explain fiction, you got to respect the lore.
It don't matter how you could create something LIKE a lightsaber, unless you replicate that, it is not a lightsaber.
This kid basically thinks Falco the Dragon is an open plane, sure you can sit on an open plane and fly but that is not what Falco is.
When a kid fails comprehensive reading of a trashy "sci-fi" story, you know a career flipping burgers is just going to be a dream forever as he sweaps out astrays at restaurants... oh wait, you can't smoke in restaurants any more? Oh well, so much for this kids future.
Apple is smart. If you think that their customer base has any members among those who still run XP, you are mistaken. Oh a few iPod nano's might be owned by XP users, a few of them got iPhones "second hand" but nobody with the cash that Apple needs customers to have still runs XP.
You are basically selling that a seller of top end sports cars makes a bad business decision by not choosing a location near a bus stop.
Know your audience, it is business 101.
That is why the US has invasion plans for Holland ready and had them ready for a long time.
Nothing to scare the US like a country that isn't following US doctrine all the way. Note there are no invasion plans for say North-Korea or other places that are blot on humanity but they do have invasion plans to "liberate" Americans from the International Court in The Hague by invading a friendly country.
Dear US voter, if you want your country to stop sucking, stop voting for the kind of people that let this pass. Ergo, on the voting ballot: None of the above.
This will work in most countries, most election systems require a certain percentage of the VOTERS to actually vote, enough people invalidate their vote, the elections would have to be held again rather then just going on as if legit with a majority NOT voting because non-voters are rare counted.
You won't like it you yank. Our beer got taste, our cheese is not just a barely edible plastic, our food isn't genetically manipulated, the soda contains real sugar, the women are the easiest in the world, the pot is so cheap just anyone can smoke it... eh... oh wait, I got it. We are SOCIALIST. You got to pay taxes here. Sales tax? 21%. (might 20% they keep on raising it recently).
That should scare of the Americans... well apart from the beer having taste etc etc. America is an interesting place to visit, just don't eat or drink anything that wasn't prepared by a first generation immigrant.
So, basically Intel is saying, fuck Online with its 100ms lag times! We can go for SECONDS! No MINUTES even. Infinite lag! We can do it!
All you need is to run an old game on hardware that can easily run the real game with an insane data plan.
The bubble is indeed back, remember all those ideas of sites that wanted 100kb avatar images on real time updating forum posting sites with 500kb flash animated signatures? When most people were happy with a 56kb modem? Served from Sun hardware? Well this is the same thing.
I am quite willing to accept that you can render a game beautifully on a server. I am quite willing to believe tablet can be a lot cheaper if they only got to show a movie. I am even willing to believe that response time over the internet can in theory be fast enough not to produce outlandish lag in ideal circumstances.
In real life?
It is interesting geek stuff but the same thing that killed so many "great" ideas during the last bubble still is there. Bandwidth and latency are still not solved enough for this. We now finally can do the instant messaging people had dreamed up around 2000. 10 years later. (Check how long it has been since your mobile phone became truly capable of doing IM without endless waiting or insanely high prices)
Another piece of proof? Slashdot itself. Take the new "ajax" method of posting. No feedback, endless lag, errors, missing posts. It is clear what they wanted but the tech just ain't there yet. For the instant feel to work you need servers that can process a request in a handful of miliseconds, not seconds Mr Slashdot.
Nice idea Mr Intel, now get out your mobile phone and make a post on slashdot. Then you will know how unrealistic your dream is.
There is a reason we carry crotch burning CPU's and insane amounts of storage with us. Moore's law doesn't apply to the internet. AT&T won't allow it.
Lets take another event in history, the holocaust. Everyone knows Anne Frank but where did she die? Now lets assume that the average person answers Auschwitz. You would the argue, let it be. Since the horror of that place is well known it can't hurt in convincing people how horrible it was right by giving the millions a human face in the form of a young girl?
But there are evil people in this world who would use your convenient lie to cast doubt on everything. Holocaust deniers take any tiny little detail they can and manipulate it until it fits their twisted agenda.
The truth of the tianamen square masacre is that violence happened but not a mass killing on the square itself (the article says no bloodshed wrongly, no bloodshed means not a single drop of blood was shed) but rather outside it once the students had started to flee and afterwards as countless disappeared.
If the lie becomes truth then it can be disproven and with it ALL the facts brought into doubt. ONLY the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth can set you free.
Your feelings are dead on, the evil will use this to cast doubt on what happened but you can't fight their lies with more lies.
It is not meant to be facebook. Not everyone think social means getting pissed, that you do... well that says a lot about you.
I don't think LinkedIn has the capacity to reach the full potential of the idea which by itself is simple:
A global public job board.
Facebook for you social profile, LinkedIn for your professional one. There are a LOT of companies in need of skilled people but only really recruiting in a very small section of the world. Despite airtravel making the entire world a single day away and lot of skilled people willing to relocate for a job, actually global job hunting is in its infancy.
In theory it would be useful to able to find jobs and positions on a public site with perhaps some exchange of information thrown into the bargain. Sadly that is not what LinkedIn as about. At least the web development sections are overrun by Indians asking newbie questions with an attitude that shows they are just looking to get into the outsourcing business as in the "promise cheap crap, deliver first class quality crap, charge more to polish the turd". There are no doubt highly skilled Indian developers out there but they seem like me to avoid LinkedIn. Yes, I have a profile on LinkedIn, I keep it up to date because it might be useful but have long since given up actually taking part in any discussions. What is the point when any discussion will just get flooded by me-too posts by Indians building up their post count?
If the forums are to mean anything, they got to be policed far more strongly to keep the quality up. Else it will just become the next AOL overrun discussion area.
And as a job board. Well, people can find you but so what? The professional recruiters already find you on pro-boards where they know for certain you are looking and who wants to be contacted by a non-professional? It would need to dig far deeper especially in regards to its world wide nature. Stop jobs showing up for people in areas outside the recruitment zone.
LinkedIn at the moment is little more then a place to have your CV out there and a discussion board for those who have not yet learned there are better places for them. It has potential but it had that potential years ago and they failed to act upon it. This IPO will give them cash but also pressure to start delivering on the promise.
It will be intresting to see what happens.
I must be visiting the wrong parts. At least the web development sections of it are filled with Indians showing exactly why outsourcing web development is a bad idea. The skill level is appalling.
I tried to use it for a while but there seems little point. The jobs offered are often "we post on a world wide forum but only want people within walking distance".
The tech discussion are often some Indian guy asking "what quickest way to do X without understanding anything". The bits of India that do space development are not on LinkedIn.
There is a lot of hype around the site but what is it delivering? At best it could become some kind of global job board with all of the problems of advertisers not properly restricting their ads from reaching everyone. Already think it is annoying that ads from other parts of the country come up? How about other continents?
It is big but what is its actual use? That is what has killed previous bubble companies. Not a lack of size but a lack of actual real world use that people want to pay for. Take the old one of home delivery. I got a home, I work during the day, so a delivery service that comes by would be useful. Useful but not economical. Lot of companies tried the
Almost a year ago now I installed Ubuntu for a neighbor who is nice enough but whose IQ is below average. And she had NO problem with it. Icons switched? Not an issue. She just dealt with it rather then throw a hissy fit like most of Slashdot.
She managed her updates nicely, just clicking them BUT unfortunately that also included the 11.04 upgrade... and since then she can't find anything. Yes, she is stupid but wasn't Unity supposed to be easier for people like her? The average Jean? The people who clean for a living? Well, I now have to install something else this weekend because of Unity. Probably use xubuntu.
The switch to Linux from Windows just meant no more viruses and spy-ware. Everything else she needs, which is just IM and the web, worked the same.
Unity broke that. There is your usability test right there.
You have a fair point. Really this is the same thing MS got blasted for for loading to much of Windows in memory that people didn't like.
Memory is fast, HD is slow (especially on low memory devices like cheap Intel netbooks (AMD delivers netbooks without artificial memory limits)) so load up the memory.
But people are used to thinking of memory as a precious resource and want to have a nice big un-used chunk all the time... some have a point in that they then will use it later, most don't. I seen people rant about a computer using all their memory when all they do is browse the net... So? It is using your resources fully. What exactly is the issue?
I think Unity and Gnome3 have issues in basic usability and stability. Memory usage? I could care less.
But for some it matters. A few of them are right, most are wrong or should simply buy their PC's a little smarter.
Just saying. People didn't pick Ubunutu for the G, they picked it because it is the easiest, most "stable" (it just works), most friendly out there.
Lets give the distro's you mention a quick review shall we for the average Ubuntu user:
Gnome3 and Unity are a foul thing and Canonical sees to have swallowed them whole but the sad fact is that NOBODY else has caught up to Ubuntu or even realized what makes them the most used Linux distro by miles. It would not be unfair to say there are more Ubuntu users then other distro's combined. To then say that Ubunutu users can, will or even WANT to flee to another distro over a mere desktop is silly.
You forget just how many Ubuntu users can just install another desktop. XFCE and LXCD are near perfect Gnome2 copies and then you keep all the goodness that is Ubuntu without the horrid desktops.
Trust me, I am a nerd and HAVE tried all of the above in the past. But as I got older I also realize that I have more fun coding stuff and breaking my head over problems then than in how to get java running or a new version of some utility.
Ubuntu MIGHT be replaced but it will NOT be by one of the old companies that bled users when they switched to Ubuntu. People left them for a reason.
The UK will get right on it. The moment the US sorts out its insane patent laws, its copyright laws, respects international law on war crimes etc etc.
Pot calling Kettle, come in Kettle!
Tried CentOS, installer quits hard if you select at the end the wrong packages together, no warning or anything.
Fedora? Can't accept a HD formatted without partitions. Ubuntu can and under Linux it is perfectly valid. Why use MS-DOS partitions on a modern system?
Like it or hate it, Ubuntu is the mover and Shaker. Red Hat has gone corporate. Mandrake (or whatever its name is) has tried going commercial and is limping.
Countless others are gone or near gone.
Is Ubuntu next now it has gone for Unity? Maybe. As said, others have fallen from the leader of the pack before. Ubuntu for now remains the easiests to install for, the onewith the most active user base. Don't like Unity? 11.04 ain't a LTS so you don't have to switch yet. And KUbunutu is an easy switch as well as a switch to Gnome3 or any of the other options.
But Unity I think shows a worrying sign. What does it solve? One of the powers of linux is the ton of "add-ons" that are available for free and all of a sudden you have a desktop that can do nothing. Gnome3 ain't a solution, that piece of software seems determined to remove all options until nothing is left. Here is a hint Gnome team, when Unity is the more capable and customizable compared to Gnome3, YOU SCREWED UP!
KDE4? Don't even get me started.
Yes, there is room for improvement but you make it a LOT easier if you give us at least the basics. Alt-tab, was it such a horrific solution? Task bar? Why do you hate it such? App panel, what did it ever do to you?
200 million users? sure, if there are 200 million people for who a iPhone is just to complex and they want an interface with ZERO buttons, no touch screen, no interaction.
Don't get me wrong, I like Ubuntu Server edition but their desktop took a massive nosedive. aptitude is the best package management but what is the point if the package is unity or gnome3?
Stop fucking around with the desktop. Realize that a LOT of users switch of Aero on windows and have the same desktop they had 10 or more years ago. It works. Some improvements are possible but for god sakes, make sure the old proven and working elements still work.
Really, we went from a time applet that no longer can display the weather, no any weather option (both unity and gnome3) and needing to hold a key to turn off the computer. (Alt turns suspend into power off).
STOP REDUCING THE USABILITY!
But at its core, Ubuntu still is the most capable, see the earlier HD install option.
Just the desktop is pants but that is pants on Fedora 15 as well (Gnome3).
The real secret to developing a popular system is to remember that newbies are a very transient audience. A newbie won't be a newbie for long. It would be like marketing a condom for virgins. There are a lot of virgins in the world, especially here on slashdot, and they are bound to have sex sooner or later, except here on slashdot, but once they had sex they will need far more condoms then that one time "virgin" branded one.
Your OS user won't remain a newbie for long. You don't see many motor cycle companies aiming high at the learner market do you? Despite that a learner bike can be far more fun, the money is in the "experienced rider" market (the succors who think bigger is better)
Damn, guess motor cycle analogies aren't as good as car analogies.
Anyway, once the newbie linux user has started using it and figured out how to setup a dual monitor, he is going to be disappointed he can't set to different ones. That the login screen can no longer be themed.
It would be like Fisher Price deciding that their "My first XXX" line sells so well it will be easy to sell to adults and partner with Sony for a range of electronic devices. Nope.
Newbies becomes experienced users and then don't want anything to do anymore with a newbie only product.
I got an android phone and that of course gives me google maps with GPS. So, do I blindly follow its route advice? No.
Instead I now got a map++. I installed an off-line map for when the 3G is doing and so I can still locate myself on the map by looking at landmarks, shapes of the roads and find them on the map to see where I am.
The GPS is not all that accurate for a reason, typically showming me to be a few meters off. That does not man I drive in the ditch. Instead I use the added feature of satallite imagery to help me find the building I am looking for.
The gadget has enabled me to do more, not less by giving my brain more information it can use.
Yes, some people are stupid and follow the GPS blindly. Some people also followed maps blindly or written instructions blindly. So? It is called evolution, someday women will only breed with really smart men (we all pray for that day on slashdot) and stupid people will die out.
And then we have nobody to buy the gadgets we build.
Al Queda was not just at war with the west but with many Muslim nations as well. But it is NOT Al Queda (no matter what fox says) that is behind the overthrowing of the corrupt dictatorships in the middle east. Those uprisings have the potential to change the world far more then 9/11 ever did AND for the better. All 9/11 brought the Muslim world was Iraq and Afghanistan on fire and a spreading hatred of Muslims (imagine ten years ago it being MAINSTREAM policy in Europe to close the borders to immigrants AND have headscarf bans in effect or going through legislation in a lot of countries).
But in less then a year, peaceful protests mercilessly cut down by Muslims leaders have resulted in more change then we have seen in a long time and it is far from over. If Syria errupts (so far there seems to be no sign of armed resistance despite some soldiers having defected) then the turmoil is complete. Saudia Arabia and Iran are far from save then (Saudia has send troops to support an allied dictator in an other region, tying itself to the fate of said dictator, Iran uses Syria as a puppet to support Hamas in its push to destroy Israel).
This is changing the world. Without Syria, Iran stands very much alone, Hamas would lose its support (why do you think they have changed their tune so fast recently). Saudia Arabia might face some though questioning of not outright revolt... the middle east might never be the same. Of course, it could also turn very very bad (if you believe fox) but lets hope not shall we (so far Egypt is stable and shows no sign of sliding into a muslim extremist nation despite what fox claimed).
I think it is very significant that all of this happened without Al Queda at all. Bloody attacks, no change. Peaceful uprisings, the world may never be the same.
Bin Laden is dead, the path of Martin Luther King jr and Gandhi seem to get the best results. Who would have thought.
While Osama has been hard to track down, lower echolon leaders have been killed left and right. Didn't change a thing. Partly because the US managed to always find a way to kill a lot of civilians (by accident they claim) to fuel new hatred.
Thinking the death of Bin Laden will change anything is like thinking the death of Roosevelt in 1945 meant the end of WW2. (For those lacking in history, it didn't).
The world has changed massively after 9/11 but it also has continued to change. Take the current unrest in North Africa and the middle east. Ghaddafi (however you spell it) went from terrorist leader to friend to target in less then a decade. Now there are calls from the left to watch the bombings in Libya but ALSO to interfere in Syria... wtf? I am sure Israel is wondering just what the hell is going to happen next. Do you think it is an accident Hamas is changing its tune now its allies are burning from within?
If anything this shows how silly the idea of control is in the world. Bin Laden became a symbol but had little control. He achieved next to nothing. The uprising against the oppressors in muslim nations is instead against both religious AND secular leaders (Syria is secular, its Iranian ally is strongly religious) and the uprisings are both religious and secular. About the only prediction that stands is that nobody predicted any of this.
What will happen now Bin Laden is death? A symbol is dead but the things that made him a symbol are not. There is severe dissatisfaction in the world and people seem more ready then ever to use violence to made their dissatisfaction known. You might hail this is a fight for freedom or extremists wanting to force their view on the rest of the world, but the fact remains that right now more struggles are happening then in a long time in history.
A leader of a decade ago is dead, few will mourn him but he is a relic. There are new struggles to overcome. Iraq is still a mess, Afghanistan is a war zone. Pakistan is on the verge of collapse. North Korea is facing collapse and won't go queitly, Libya is in civil war. Syria is about to erupt in war. The list goes on and on. Wikileaks Assange has disappeared of the radar of news but that is still far from finished.
No, I don't think we can breath a sigh of relieve just yet.
And that in a way is a good thing. The world has NEVER been a safe place. Better we are aware of it not being safe and work to make it safe even if we make mistakes then to live in false security.
But in the future, it will be humans doing all the menial boring jobs for our robotic masters anyway... oh wait the future? Who is building cars and who is mopping floors?
The future is here. And it got balls.
Come on a 150GB download limit, that is okay. If you need your porn faster then 150GB per second then... wait, it is NOT per second? Oh well, 150GB per day is still... not per day either?
Oh dear. You poor Americans... thank god in mainland Europe we have evil state sponsored businesses and no free market so we have a lot of choice of ISP's. But who will I now download my porn from at 100mbit and no bandwidth limit? Oh wait, Japan! Country of un-limitted porn AND bandwidth and now thanks to Fukushima, tentacle porn without special effects!
But I know the perfect way to get the Americans to shit up and enjoy the AT&T dick going up their ass for the thousand time. Here is it. Are you ready for it? Brace yourself:
The way to fix this, is government regulation.
Whoa, see? All the complainers now switched their energy to frothing at the mouth about the free market, small government etc etc and they stopped complaining about the ass raping they are getting. Always works.
While probably meant as a joke, this is a work in progress and this flight in fact as far as I know did send some messages home before the crash.
But we are forgetting that aircraft are VERY old things. Some of the aircraft you fly in are themselves older then the modern internet and might well have been designed before even the foundations of the internet were laid down.
Even so called modern aircraft are quite old and the aviation industry is not for one for rapid chance. See McDonald Douglas building the DC-10 with OUTWARD opening doors, an aircraft almost crashing because of it, then the same thing happening again because the aircraft company preferred profits over peoples lives. Boeing and Airbus are exactly the same. All aircraft companies have ignored safety advice from air crashes for the sake of more crash.
So, while an aircraft could nowaways be in constant communication with the ground entirely independent from the rest of the aircraft, it won't happen for a long time because they just don't care. Each safety feature introduced requires state intervention and you know how Americans hate that.
I wonder if the iPhone and Android buyers simply aren't very different people.
And I can only look to myself and the people around me for that but lets see. I have an Android phone (Nexus S), I know people that got an N900 (Nokia linux phone) and some iPhone users.
The iPhone users, some have iPads. Me and the N900 users have NO tablet, iPad or otherwise. Why?
I got a net book for my mobile computing needs (Yes, with linux) and the N900 users got it on their phone. I didn't buy the N900 myself because while it is an awesome piece of hardware I already have a netbook. So what would be the point.
Neither do I have a need for a tablet. I watch movies on my netbook straight from the net in whatever codec and container some anime freak has decided to use for this weeks release. A tablet would have to offer a real advantage to the full flexibility of a my overpowered netbook (8gig ram, fastest SSD available on the market) that can do blu-ray encodes encoded by a drunk encoder. The iPad? Fail city. Sorry but I need flac and xvid and god knows what else because I am used to it.
Doesn't mean the iPad is useless to others but I have notice that the people that have iPads tend to have LARGE laptops. Macbooks often, not properly outfitted with real software but just the standard stuff. So, they got to choose, do I watch only vids that work on it on a very large machine that can easily play them but is unwieldy or do I watch it on the iPad?
Different market, different expectations, different starting position. I would never again buy a big laptop. My needs are met by my phone (which is barely used as a computing device, more as an information terminal, I consume information on it I need right now), my netbook and my PC.
I am a gadget freak, got a PSP and all the gameboys, yes even the 3D (nice effect pity the games are so expensive) but right now I just can justify a tablet. And that is from a guy for who "I want it" is a perfectly just justification.
What I could really use is a tablet that has a real keyboard and a NON-shiny screen. A screen that is perfectly visible in direct sunlight would be a killer feature. But the tablets I seen are closer to mirrors.
The BBC, yesterday. One side showing "the wedding". The only way I watch that if they made it interactive and I could enact my republican fantasies. Once thing about the French, they know how to deal with royalty. Russians too. Nice job guys, want to helps the rest of the world out?
The other side, snooker. The most boring thing ever to be televised apart from hurdling. That is it! On a friday! Prime time TV? Must watch TV? Not on the beeb.
Have I Got News For You is still funny although this weeks episode seems to have been cancelled and the previous one was more about "The wedding" then the middle east being on fire. Gosh they have plenty to say if Israel defends itself by killing a single muslim in a week but if muslims kill hundreds of muslims that is apparently not fit to discuss in a satirical news program. Am I so wrong in finding it all funny?
The rest of the time, cooking shows. Now don't get me wrong. I like food and I am actually quite good as a cook but how many master chefs can one stomach? According to the BBC dual and even triple episodes in a row.
Okay, so to discovery, geographic channel and animal planet. If anyone in America is bored, then you please go and shoot that mexican dog licker? My god that show is on 24/7. If I want to train a bad dog I kill its owner, then eat the dog. Just because a single program does well does NOT make it a good idea to replace your entire schedule with it. Diversity, it is the spice of live. For instance I would like some cat sprinkled on my chow.
Discovery? Come on, Cake Boss? Are you serious? And you thought American Chopper was gaying it up as much as possible. (come on and entire show with butch men in leather making shiny stuff). I get tired of the same formula. "Oh shit, we are running out of time, yet again, we do so every single time but never learn to start a bike, cake build a tiny bit earlier because thatwould deprive us of fake tension only the most gullible would believe". Even if some of the programs are interesting, the commercials kill it. Not just to long, to loud and to stupid, they repeat the same ones over and over in the same show AND then run ads for the very show I am trying to watch. That is like ordering a burger and then being told about that very burger instead of serving it.
Comedy Central? Thank you, I seen the Simpsons a dozen times over and Family Guy and such are simply not funny to anyone who isn't 12.
There is simply nothing to watch. Now I don't hate TV, I am as ready as the next guy to sit in front of the idiot tube after a day at work and let my mind rot. I like it, just there is absolutely nothing on or if it is it gets interrupted by a 5 minute commercial block. That causes me to look away and when I look back, the NEXT commercial block is on.
Instead, I simply download the few things I want to see (since I am in europe often the entire season is available already by the time I hear about it) and watch them in HD with no commercials blocks and no re-scheduling because some jack-booting asshole wants to get married to a slut.
TV has a problem. People like mindless entertainment but for millenia they had to create it themselves. Once every household had a musical instrument because that was the only thing to do at in the evening hours. Theathers were everywhere filled with crap actors for when people got fed up with the same song every day. Then movies came and made entertainment for the masses for the first time. TV made it even easier, just pump a production straight into everyones home. The perfect way to spend those hours between work and going to bed. Don't deny it and claim you read a book, statistics prove you didn't.
But that was in the days when we had no choice. Either you watched it on the TV stations terms or you didn't. And because they controlled us (don't deny it, I seen the empty streets when something special happened in TV land) they thought they would always control us and added longer and longer commericial blocks, now even showing ads over the programs