I'm still using good old xterms when on Unix. They're super stupid fast, they use basically no memory
Memory usage by a terminal emulator can hardly be a deciding factor these days, can it? Just checked my work box, and gnome terminal is using ~45Mb out of 32Gb, even with god-knows-how-many terminal tabs open. It's not going to break the bank...
Come to think of it -- does anyone know of a terminal emulator with Tree Style Tabs?? That would be a true killer feature for me.
Although the official response seems to be along the lines of -- well, we'll add an API that would kinda allow the same thing, more or less. Whether or not that actually encourages a dev to rewrite their entire, very mature, extension from scratch again remains to be seen. My guess on the latter is that it won't happen:(
They keep copying Chrome anyway so what’s the point of using a bloated browser that tries to mimic Chrome?
For me, it's the amazing Tree Style Tab extension that keeps me on Firefox more than anything else. Chrome seems to have no intention to ever implement this.
As for getting rid of theme support... from my perspective I'm all for it. I remember the original Phoenix 0.1 release, when the aim was to completely gut the Mozilla codebase of all bloat. It's about time that happened again.
Interesting! Maybe it's worth trying to get someone out to our place, too. I've long suspected that the quality of the copper wiring in the UK is pretty shoddy, but hadn't realised that BT would actually do something about it!
"Rights" aren't something given by a government, they are something we all have, simply by existing.
... as determined by...? You? Me? Everybody as they see fit?
The UN universal declaration of human rights would be as close as you're going to get to consensus. But I'm afraid the right to bear arms didn't make the cut.
Yeah, it's annoying that the only >1920x1080 options for the Dell XPSes are the touchscreen options. On the plus side, though, by buying the lower-res screens you apparently gain massively in battery life.
What kind of power-work do you need to do on-the-go that 1. needs more than 16G of RAM, and 2. can actually get some work done on before your batteries are drained.
Can't speak for the OP, but some of the bioinformatics analyses I do would fit into that category. The battery life on these things is pretty good (Dell claims "up to 17 hours") so I'd guess even with all cores running at full speed you'd have a bit of time to do stuff.
It seems a bit crazy that you can't get a 32Gb equipped laptop at least as a high-end option.
I think if Dell or Asus would release a high end laptop with a matte screen option for say $300 extra on top of the regular price, they would probably find a nice niche market.
They already do. Dell's XPS 13 (non-touch) is in fact a matte screen (IPS, 1920x1080, and one of the best I've seen). I'd assume that the non-touch version of this XPS 15 laptop will also be a matte screen (but you'd want to check this). (Having a touch screen obviously requires a glossy overlay for the digitiser, so you'll always be limited to the non-touch variants.)
It looks like a standard US keyboard's enter to me or were they retarded enough to put that small enter on non-US layouts as well?
It's a standard US layout. The source of confusion is that the UK has it's own, rather special layout in which enter is a 180-rotated L shape that is smushed to the very far right of the keyboard.
I've been living in the UK for nearly four years, and the UK layout really drives me nuts (even with the software layout switched back to US, the physical key shapes mean that enter often requires a physical hand movement to reach and I find the shift keys are way too small -- it's not optimum for touch typing!)
Ubuntu was always little more than Debian with a few tweaks. They are a little bit more "desktop centric" but that about it. This persistent myth that Ubuntu was the first distribution to be "easy" is just bullshit. Most of what Ubuntu interesting was cribbed wholesale from Debian.
"easy" != "interesting". What made Ubuntu popular was that it was all the Debian goodness of apt, combined with all the useful goodness of software that wasn't three years out of date, and a mature, elegant theme wrapping the whole thing up. To me, Ubuntu has been the only distro I could recommend to newbies without any doubt that everything would work, and work well. And these days, when I no longer have time to build everything by hand, Ubuntu is the OS that gets out of the way and just lets me do my work.
I don't think Ubuntu would ever demure on the debt they owe Debian. But if you think the Debian installer had anything on Ubuntu's installer back in Warty Warthog days, you're kidding yourself. It was way easier to install, and that in and of itself was probably the reason for its popularity. (And, you know, up-to-date software. Stable Debian releases... well, they were rock solid, but almost completely useless in a desktop context.)
(I suspect that ease of install has always been a prime mover in distro popularity -- before Ubuntu, I seem to recall it was Mandrake that was the easiest to install and top-of-the-pops.)
For desktops or laptops? GNU/Linux seems to support desktop hardware fine, but lately, Windows supports small (10.1" or 11.6") laptop hardware better. I've been having trouble finding an 11.6 inch or smaller laptop that works well with GNU/Linux.*
You mentioned chromebooks with crouton, but I've got perfect hardware support for two chromebooks (Dell Chromebook 11 and Toshiba Chromebook 2 13") running Ubuntu natively (no useless ChromeOS is present on either chromebook). (The great John Lewis has a simple script to rewrite the bios and bootloader; I highly recommend it). Hardware support was flaky a year ago, but since 15.04 it's been pretty much native support out of the box (the only exception being the Toshiba's microphone, which should be fixed in 15.10 with kernel 4.2).
The end result is a very cheap, light and functional linux laptop. I'd especially recommend the Chromebook 2 -- the screen on that thing is amazing.
I prefer Windows 10. It fully supports any hardware and it offers free updates. It's rock solid and all my software just works. The amount of time horsing around with teh OS I've saved would pay the cost of the OS 50x over.
That's funny -- I prefer Ubuntu. It fully supports any hardware and it offers free updates. It's rock solid and all my software just works. The amount of time horsing around with teh OS I've saved would pay the cost of the OS 50x over.
It's clear that you're a time traveller from 2002, so you may not realise that everything "just works" under linux these days too.
Not sure about that -- if you look closely at the pics of the Huawei watch you'll see that the body extends out towards the lugs quite a bit. I suspect the extra tech is hidden in those chunky bits. The G watch R has the same styling; and whilst that could just indicate that Huawei and LG have no design smarts (which is often true) I'd be a little surprised that the two companies independently hit on the exact same ugliness by chance.
I suspect that at the moment some compromise has to be made: you can have a flat tyre, you can have a giant bezel, you can have chunky bits-that-aren't-lugs. One thing I'd be pretty certain about, though, is that Motorola didn't go with the flat tyre look just for kicks.
Yes, well, KITT with a flat-tyre would be a bad combo...
But having seen the watch in the flesh (it, with the apple watch, are the only two smartwatches I've ever seen in the wild) I can only say I didn't notice the flat-tyre look at all when coupled with a dark watch face. Horses for courses, naturally, but I liked the watch in person a whole lot more than in the renders.
From the pictures, it seems the screen still isn't really round, but has a straight section at the bottom just like the old version.
This was discussed with the release of the original 360. IIRC, current display tech necessitates some non-display area, and Motorola decided (rightly, in my opinion) to go with the flat-tyre approach rather than the chunky-bezels approach. The LG G-watch R is an example of the latter approach, with bezels blown out of all proportion (although LG clearly don't understand watch design so I suspect that one looks worse than it had to).
Then again, I don't wear watches anyway, and if I did, it'd be a classic, not some smart toy.
I do wear watches, and I wear classic ones; there's something about mechanical movements that strongly appeals to my steampunk side. Like you, I wouldn't buy a smartwatch; I have no need for notifications on my wrist and it would go against my personal grain. But I have to say that so far Motorola has understood the "watch" concept better than any of the other smartwatch players -- the Moto360 actually looks great on the wrist.
I'm not Hasselhoff, I don't need to talk to my car.
Hey, if it came with KITT I might seriously consider it...:)
Sorry to hear that... my N5 that was one of the first batch ever made (purchased in the first minute after launch) has never had a mic issue. I know it's one of the problems that got reported on forums, but all the other N5 owners I know (all five of them -- it's not a huge sample!) haven't had any issues with the phone and I suspect the batch of phones affected was relatively small. At least you got a refund!
In the almost-year I've owned the N5, I've been pretty happy with the build quality of the phone. The buttons still work and don't wobble, the case doesn't creak, and the soft-touch backing hasn't worn off. The screen's stayed scratch-free, too, and I'm still getting great battery life. The only issue I've got is that the USB port has become a bit temperamental for charging over the last month (it now seems to work reliably with only one particular cable -- I should probably get it replaced while I still can!)
I still think it's one of the best phones available -- right up there with the iPhone6, Sony Z3/Z3c and the Moto X; and for the price, the Z3c is really the only competition I can think of.
I assume you had it replaced free-of-charge under warranty, and ended up with a perfectly good replacement? Google are very good with replacing Nexus phones bought through the play store -- you get sent a replacement phone before you ship your old phone off.
And if you didn't, you're still at least two weeks within the warranty period... it's not too late:)
Slashdot Mirror
that's nice, but the point is that there's a company that *is* trying to us linux for that, and it's failing (in comparison).
Hopefully the point is that with a significant commercial interest at stake, linux drivers will actually receive more development and will improve.
I'm still using good old xterms when on Unix. They're super stupid fast, they use basically no memory
Memory usage by a terminal emulator can hardly be a deciding factor these days, can it? Just checked my work box, and gnome terminal is using ~45Mb out of 32Gb, even with god-knows-how-many terminal tabs open. It's not going to break the bank ...
Come to think of it -- does anyone know of a terminal emulator with Tree Style Tabs?? That would be a true killer feature for me.
All excellent points!
But, you know, maybe these latest changes to Firefox will invite a Phoenix-style fork after all?
For what it's worth, that's been discussed here:
https://billmccloskey.wordpres...
Although the official response seems to be along the lines of -- well, we'll add an API that would kinda allow the same thing, more or less. Whether or not that actually encourages a dev to rewrite their entire, very mature, extension from scratch again remains to be seen. My guess on the latter is that it won't happen :(
Yeah, getting rid of XUL is sad times. I'm still hoping it won't happen -- there's been a pretty major developer backlash about that one.
(Obviously, when I said "get rid of the bloat", I meant only the bloat that wasn't useful to me ... :)
While I agree Pocket is pointless, was it really bloating up the codebase that much? Genuinely curious ...
They keep copying Chrome anyway so what’s the point of using a bloated browser that tries to mimic Chrome?
For me, it's the amazing Tree Style Tab extension that keeps me on Firefox more than anything else. Chrome seems to have no intention to ever implement this.
As for getting rid of theme support ... from my perspective I'm all for it. I remember the original Phoenix 0.1 release, when the aim was to completely gut the Mozilla codebase of all bloat. It's about time that happened again.
Interesting! Maybe it's worth trying to get someone out to our place, too. I've long suspected that the quality of the copper wiring in the UK is pretty shoddy, but hadn't realised that BT would actually do something about it!
Hmmm ... not limited to uploads, methinks. With my BT FTTC, the download speeds are all over the place as well :(
"Rights" aren't something given by a government, they are something we all have, simply by existing.
... as determined by ...? You? Me? Everybody as they see fit?
The UN universal declaration of human rights would be as close as you're going to get to consensus. But I'm afraid the right to bear arms didn't make the cut.
Yeah, it's annoying that the only >1920x1080 options for the Dell XPSes are the touchscreen options. On the plus side, though, by buying the lower-res screens you apparently gain massively in battery life.
What kind of power-work do you need to do on-the-go that 1. needs more than 16G of RAM, and 2. can actually get some work done on before your batteries are drained.
Can't speak for the OP, but some of the bioinformatics analyses I do would fit into that category. The battery life on these things is pretty good (Dell claims "up to 17 hours") so I'd guess even with all cores running at full speed you'd have a bit of time to do stuff.
It seems a bit crazy that you can't get a 32Gb equipped laptop at least as a high-end option.
I think if Dell or Asus would release a high end laptop with a matte screen option for say $300 extra on top of the regular price, they would probably find a nice niche market.
They already do. Dell's XPS 13 (non-touch) is in fact a matte screen (IPS, 1920x1080, and one of the best I've seen). I'd assume that the non-touch version of this XPS 15 laptop will also be a matte screen (but you'd want to check this). (Having a touch screen obviously requires a glossy overlay for the digitiser, so you'll always be limited to the non-touch variants.)
It looks like a standard US keyboard's enter to me or were they retarded enough to put that small enter on non-US layouts as well?
It's a standard US layout. The source of confusion is that the UK has it's own, rather special layout in which enter is a 180-rotated L shape that is smushed to the very far right of the keyboard.
I've been living in the UK for nearly four years, and the UK layout really drives me nuts (even with the software layout switched back to US, the physical key shapes mean that enter often requires a physical hand movement to reach and I find the shift keys are way too small -- it's not optimum for touch typing!)
The single best feature of Ubuntu is apt-get and that's something that Ubuntu stole from Debian.
I'm pretty sure apt was and still is GPL'd open source. Quite how that amounts to "stealing" is beyond me ...
he's probably talking about other distros like Red Hat
Heh, RH 7.0, anyone? Probably the most upsetting distro experience ever, and one that turned me off RedHat for life.
Meh.
Ubuntu was always little more than Debian with a few tweaks. They are a little bit more "desktop centric" but that about it. This persistent myth that Ubuntu was the first distribution to be "easy" is just bullshit. Most of what Ubuntu interesting was cribbed wholesale from Debian.
"easy" != "interesting". What made Ubuntu popular was that it was all the Debian goodness of apt, combined with all the useful goodness of software that wasn't three years out of date, and a mature, elegant theme wrapping the whole thing up. To me, Ubuntu has been the only distro I could recommend to newbies without any doubt that everything would work, and work well. And these days, when I no longer have time to build everything by hand, Ubuntu is the OS that gets out of the way and just lets me do my work.
I don't think Ubuntu would ever demure on the debt they owe Debian. But if you think the Debian installer had anything on Ubuntu's installer back in Warty Warthog days, you're kidding yourself. It was way easier to install, and that in and of itself was probably the reason for its popularity. (And, you know, up-to-date software. Stable Debian releases ... well, they were rock solid, but almost completely useless in a desktop context.)
(I suspect that ease of install has always been a prime mover in distro popularity -- before Ubuntu, I seem to recall it was Mandrake that was the easiest to install and top-of-the-pops.)
For desktops or laptops? GNU/Linux seems to support desktop hardware fine, but lately, Windows supports small (10.1" or 11.6") laptop hardware better. I've been having trouble finding an 11.6 inch or smaller laptop that works well with GNU/Linux.*
You mentioned chromebooks with crouton, but I've got perfect hardware support for two chromebooks (Dell Chromebook 11 and Toshiba Chromebook 2 13") running Ubuntu natively (no useless ChromeOS is present on either chromebook). (The great John Lewis has a simple script to rewrite the bios and bootloader; I highly recommend it). Hardware support was flaky a year ago, but since 15.04 it's been pretty much native support out of the box (the only exception being the Toshiba's microphone, which should be fixed in 15.10 with kernel 4.2).
The end result is a very cheap, light and functional linux laptop. I'd especially recommend the Chromebook 2 -- the screen on that thing is amazing.
I prefer Windows 10. It fully supports any hardware and it offers free updates. It's rock solid and all my software just works. The amount of time horsing around with teh OS I've saved would pay the cost of the OS 50x over.
That's funny -- I prefer Ubuntu. It fully supports any hardware and it offers free updates. It's rock solid and all my software just works. The amount of time horsing around with teh OS I've saved would pay the cost of the OS 50x over.
It's clear that you're a time traveller from 2002, so you may not realise that everything "just works" under linux these days too.
I know, it's crazy. Welcome to the future.
They should use ext4.
As of Marshmallow, SD cards can finally be formatted as ext4 by the OS and used as "internal" storage.
Pity Google didn't actually put a card reader in their Nexii to demonstrate the potential ...
Not sure about that -- if you look closely at the pics of the Huawei watch you'll see that the body extends out towards the lugs quite a bit. I suspect the extra tech is hidden in those chunky bits. The G watch R has the same styling; and whilst that could just indicate that Huawei and LG have no design smarts (which is often true) I'd be a little surprised that the two companies independently hit on the exact same ugliness by chance.
I suspect that at the moment some compromise has to be made: you can have a flat tyre, you can have a giant bezel, you can have chunky bits-that-aren't-lugs. One thing I'd be pretty certain about, though, is that Motorola didn't go with the flat tyre look just for kicks.
Here's an old article about Moto's design choices if you're interested.
Yes, well, KITT with a flat-tyre would be a bad combo ...
But having seen the watch in the flesh (it, with the apple watch, are the only two smartwatches I've ever seen in the wild) I can only say I didn't notice the flat-tyre look at all when coupled with a dark watch face. Horses for courses, naturally, but I liked the watch in person a whole lot more than in the renders.
From the pictures, it seems the screen still isn't really round, but has a straight section at the bottom just like the old version.
This was discussed with the release of the original 360. IIRC, current display tech necessitates some non-display area, and Motorola decided (rightly, in my opinion) to go with the flat-tyre approach rather than the chunky-bezels approach. The LG G-watch R is an example of the latter approach, with bezels blown out of all proportion (although LG clearly don't understand watch design so I suspect that one looks worse than it had to).
Then again, I don't wear watches anyway, and if I did, it'd be a classic, not some smart toy.
I do wear watches, and I wear classic ones; there's something about mechanical movements that strongly appeals to my steampunk side. Like you, I wouldn't buy a smartwatch; I have no need for notifications on my wrist and it would go against my personal grain. But I have to say that so far Motorola has understood the "watch" concept better than any of the other smartwatch players -- the Moto360 actually looks great on the wrist.
I'm not Hasselhoff, I don't need to talk to my car.
Hey, if it came with KITT I might seriously consider it ... :)
Sorry to hear that ... my N5 that was one of the first batch ever made (purchased in the first minute after launch) has never had a mic issue. I know it's one of the problems that got reported on forums, but all the other N5 owners I know (all five of them -- it's not a huge sample!) haven't had any issues with the phone and I suspect the batch of phones affected was relatively small. At least you got a refund!
In the almost-year I've owned the N5, I've been pretty happy with the build quality of the phone. The buttons still work and don't wobble, the case doesn't creak, and the soft-touch backing hasn't worn off. The screen's stayed scratch-free, too, and I'm still getting great battery life. The only issue I've got is that the USB port has become a bit temperamental for charging over the last month (it now seems to work reliably with only one particular cable -- I should probably get it replaced while I still can!)
I still think it's one of the best phones available -- right up there with the iPhone6, Sony Z3/Z3c and the Moto X; and for the price, the Z3c is really the only competition I can think of.
I assume you had it replaced free-of-charge under warranty, and ended up with a perfectly good replacement? Google are very good with replacing Nexus phones bought through the play store -- you get sent a replacement phone before you ship your old phone off.
And if you didn't, you're still at least two weeks within the warranty period ... it's not too late :)