Generally those pans turn out jerky rather than blurry, probably because they're often outdoor and using a faster shutter speed. But I rather like them:)
For that matter, when was the last time you heard anyone come out of a film saying, "Man, I loved the plot line, but I wish they'd shot in higher fps so that those pans weren't jerky!" Very few people even notice the jerky pans, and of those that do, I suspect a fair proportion rather enjoy them and would choose to watch a film in 24fps preferentially.
I'm really glad The Hobbit is being critically panned; if it had been a success I think a lot of studios would have latched onto 48fps in the same way as they latched onto 3D post-Avatar.
Personally I don't mind the jerky pans -- I actually quite like them. But it's fascinating that very few people have ever complained about 24fps before. One argument that's come up lately is that 24fps is slow enough to create an "otherworldly" look about films, whilst being sufficiently fast to not disrupt action sequences.
Whatever the reason, if you can get away with shooting in 24fps without people minding, isn't that argument enough to keep using it? The lower the frame rate, the smaller the data files, after all. It's a bit like bluray -- the resolution increase made no difference to most people, so nobody rushed out to adopt it and very few people care about it (current bluray disc sales are about one third of DVD sales).
Everything else Jackson's done with The Hobbit has had a mercenary motive, so I suspect that his choice of 48fps was similarly driven.
I really don't get why people are so attached to 24fps. Can you imagine this with computer games?
Because 24fps in a movie has no relation whatsoever to 24fps to computer games. In a movie, 24fps is shot with cameras and you get motion blur (just as you would if you take photos at a film speed of 1/24th of a second). Your brain is an amazing thing, and happily interpolates the motion blur to give a concept of smoothness. What I'd like to know is whether 48fps looks "soap opera" simply because we've conditioned ourselves to equating high fps video with the crap shows that always used it on TV, or whether there really is something magical about 24fps. I can't really see any inherrent reason why 48fps should look bad per se, even if it probably doesn't add anything much.
I do know, however, that there is no way I want to go anywhere near The Hobbit. Forget the whole 24 vs 48fps thing -- Jackson sold out big time in making three stodgy films out of one tiny, light-hearted children's book, presumably for no other reason than to rake in the extra cash. He ought to be ashamed of himself.
I think you're missing the point of Android -- it's almost certainly not a profit-making exercise. It'd be a bit difficult to suddenly start charging heaps for it, too, since it's open source and there are some huge development communities actively working on AOSP (the Cyanogenmod group being one, AOKP being another...)
Rather, the argument goes that Android is a moat protecting Google's search castle. The revenue Google gets from its search advertising far outweighs anything else, and they want to keep their stranglehold of the market with as many different strategies as possible (G+ is another moat in this paradigm).
Google's recent ventures into hardware have been primarily aimed at kickstarting the languishing Android tablet market -- with their most recent Nexus phone, the Nexus 4, they were so unprepared for any popular demand that the thing sold out in 15 minutes around the world.
Remember that Android is just a defensive moat around Google's search empire, and Google maps is another. Google would love you to use Android, where they have more control, but what they really don't want to do is lose customers on another major platform. This way they caused maximum damage to the iPhone5 launch and the Apple brand (especially the "Apple does everything best" mentality) but probably won't lose too many users.
Nevertheless, I'm sure they'd have much rather been the default Apple mapping software on iOS, rather than have gone down this route. That they've come out OK in the end is more due to Apple's incompetence than any Googlian master stroke...
I would more say this was a win-win for Google. They made demands of Apple, Apple said 'no, we can do this without you', Apple took a huge PR hit for pushing out a sub-par application that did not have Google's data anymore... and now Google has swept in to save the day with their own branded application instead...
Also, Google managed to inflict the maximum damage on the iphone5 launch and during that time launched their own sell-out phone. Seems to have all worked out very well for Google, and very poorly for Apple.
What I'd really like to know is which company held-up the release of the new Google Maps -- was it Google seeking to maximise damages, or Apple in an attempt to crash-or-crash-through? I'm sure Google could have had the app released much sooner if both parties were willing...
I'd never heard of the F2 shortcut until you just mentioned it (I've always been frustrated that you can't click again on a selected filename to rename, so thanks!) But on whichever Nautilus is running on Ubuntu 12.10, pressing F2 in list view does in fact only select the filename without selecting the extension... very neat.
The thing I love about Unity is the ability to click on the dock icon of the program you're in and get an expose (well, Compiz would call it scale, but you know what I mean) of just the open windows of that app, which you can then individually switch to or close (right-clicking on an icon to get a new instance of the app is also rather nice). The other thing I love is the automatic Super+[1-9] application hotkeys that get assigned to the first nine apps as they appear in your dock -- it's easy enough to set up hotkeys manually, but knowing that Super+1 will switch to a terminal, Super+2 my text editor and Super+3 to the browser (all set up just by moving around the dock icons once) just makes things so easy. And of course the dash is awesome -- it learns the files I use frequently, and bringing them up with a press of the Super key followed by starting to type the name is much easier than hunting around in a file manager.
I do think that Unity was hideous until 12.04 (I switched to Mint for a year myself; I only switched back to Ubuntu because I didn't like the fugly defaults of Mint and I got sick of spending half a day making the desktop look half-decent everytime I installed Mint on a new box). Thankfully, in the year I'd been gone, Unity had changed from bastard-child to a mature power-user interface. I use the mouse a lot less and the keyboard a lot more with Unity, and that's a good thing in my eyes.
Not missing much - it's a pretty crapy movie over all.
I dunno... I really enjoyed the film and I found it a lot more nuanced than you did. In particular, I thought that while effectively conveying that war is all hell (and certainly not being in any way sympathetic to the continued presence of America in Iraq), it helped me understand why some people find conflict an intoxicating drug -- and it did so in a much more subtle way than your quote from Apocalypse Now. I found the central characters surprisingly engaging, and the tension in the film was created as much by the internal conflict between them as by their external conflict with unpredictable death. I was even more caught up in the film on a rewatch. FWIW (which may not be much), rottentomatoes seems to have agreed, giving it 97%.
What I don't understand, though, is why the studio's going after the pirates now. I understand that there was a lot of resentment from the studio that people were downloading the Hurt Locker rather than seeing it in cinemas, and I sympathise to some degree. But they're just about to release another Kathryn Bigelow film which, if it proves to be a box office success, will be so precisely because so many people downloaded the Hurt Locker and decided that they liked it. They're biting the hand that was potentially about to feed them big-time, and it seems a dumb decision commercially to attack your fan base.
If they bundle Nvidia's proprietary drivers, they are basically telling Nvidia that millions of GNU/Linux users can be Nvidia's customers without Nvidia having to change their practices or release one iota of information about their hardware
I'm pretty sure any proprietary drivers have to be manually installed via the "Additional drivers" dialogue, and are not installed by default. And, let's face it -- by buying a computer with an Nvidia GPU, you were already making a statement that you didn't care about driver/hardware openness.
I let him try out Unity via 12.04 LiveCD, it's unusable to him. He'd have bought a new computer rather than cope with that shit... What do new computers come pre-installed with? Not Linux.
Just a thought -- maybe your neighbour would be better off with Windows? Linux isn't for everyone -- it's for the coders, the hackers, the tinkerers and the idealists. If you don't fit into any of those categories, then you're probably better off with something more mainstream.
The fact that Unity wouldn't let me move their dock, or change the hotkeys to ones that I'd been using for years, is what put me off.
You can customise the hotkeys to whatever you like in System Settings --> Keyboard --> Shortcuts, fwiw. (CCSM will also let you do that too, if you don't like Unity's interface, but it's just doing the same thing...)
Not moving the dock does seem a little unfriendly, although I would guess that most people would want it on the left anyway (it's the side where the sidebars, etc, of apps go, so it makes for UI consistency). Personally, I really like the Unity interface (it somehow just works for my brain); but for anyone that doesn't like it, it's thankfully not a choice between Ubuntu and Windows 7, but between Ubuntu and Kubuntu (or Xubuntu), or Linux Mint, or whichever random distro you prefer.
That's the great thing about Linux -- there's always more choices.
No crocodiles in that part of the country but Mildura is hardly the middle of a residential area, it is a medium sized town (about 30k or so pop) in the north west corner of Victoria in a country region that is farely sparsely populated if you stray from the main roads, with plenty of dirt roads around the area (though admittedly all the main roads there are definitely paved). It would be exceedingly easy to find yourself lost in the middle of nowhere before you realised if you strayed out of the farm areas into a national park.
I'm sorry, but if you strayed off the Sturt, the Mallee or the Calder Hwy and headed into Murray Sunset, you'd know about it. I love the Murray Sunset NP, and yes, there are a lot of dirt roads leading into it. But... here's the thing... they're all tiny dirt roads! You would have to have a ridiculous amount of blind faith to think you were on the road to Mildura if your GPS headed you down one of them...
Well, sort-of... but there are good roads (sealed, with decent shoulders) going to it and it's a fairly important regional town. If you were driving there, you wouldn't expect to be taken down a sandy track and into a National Park... and if you were taken that way by your GPS, you should stop and think as soon as you've turned off the main highway.
I'm still amazed that Apple Maps didn't know where Mildura was, though...
The map shows the city in the wrong location. Should they have consulted two maps to verify the coordinates of their destination, or is there other in-context information that should have made it obvious the route was wrong?
Unless they've been living under a rock, they probably should have known Mildura was on the Murray...
You obviously haven't driven in Australia much.. Google maps
See how you are driving through national parks and farmland before getting back to an urban area?
I'm from Victoria and know the area around Mildura and Murray Sunset fairly well, and there's no way you could mistake the Sturt Hwy for anything other than a major road. On top of that, there's huge green signs along the road telling you the way to Mildura for miles around. Anyone who deviates from the one major sealed road in the area and instead heads down one of the dirt tracks that leads into Murray Sunset is not thinking very straight.
In fact, the lack of openness probably keeps some of the riffraff out by presenting a slightly higher barrier to entry.
Wow. I really have no idea how to respond to that, except to say that I never thought anyone on/. would want to actively discourage people from coding. Extraordinary.
What I've noticed about most iPhone/Android comparisons is that people will present minor features that most users will never touch as their reasons for their preferred device being "superior".
How about platform openness? Just sayin'...
Seriously, though. The reason I went with Android rather than iPhone back in the day was because Apple made it so difficult to jailbreak their new devices. With a Nexus phone, rooting and installing a custom ROM is actively encouraged by Google. For someone who loves coding like myself, it's a no-brainer.
If you've unlocked your bootloader and have a custom recovery (and I can't really see why you'd have a Nexus S if you didn't want an unlocked bootloader -- it's not like they were mainstream phones), it's as easy as doing a Titanium backup, making a full backup in recovery, and then wiping and flashing and ICS ROM (i.e. CM9).
If you don't have an unlocked bootloader, you're going to have to unlock the bootloader in order to downgrade. it's still very easy but making a full backup of all your apps is more difficult and you may lose data. (It wouldn't be a problem, except that unlocking the bootloader causes the entire contents of your phone to be wiped for security reasons -- beware!) You can in theory backup the system via adb and restore it after unlock, but I have found this to be at least partially unreliable the one time I've tried it and I would make other backups first. (Unlocking the bootloader itself requires no special skills -- it's just "fastboot oem unlock"; note also that you can relock the bootloader after installing a new ROM if you really want to secure your data with "fastboot oem lock", but you'll have to go through the data wipe process every time. Note also that you'll have to download a custom recovery (eg CWM) and flash it before you can install new ROMs easily.)
Either way, as a fellow Nexus S user, I'd strongly recommend trying the latest CM10 nightlies before you give up on JellyBean. Using these and r_data's Air Kernel with its increased screen framerate, your phone should fly -- mine does. It's much, much smoother than ICS (and you keep your expanded notifications, etc, which I'd really miss if I downgraded.) I do sympathise -- I at first felt that JB was slower than ICS also; but the Cyanogenmod team put in a lot of early work optimising things for the Nexus S in particular and JB in general, and it's incredibly smooth now. (As an anecdotal illustration of this, a friend watching me use my phone the other day wanted to know where he could buy one, since he assumed it was a new release high-end phone. He couldn't believe it when I told him it was over two years old!) I've put off getting a Nexus 4 both times it's been on sale here in the UK just because my Nexus S still works so well...
Well it depends. The newest runs like crap on a two year old phone. Some of the early Android phones didn't have enough memory.
Hmmm... most of the early crop of Android phones had 512Mb of RAM, and that's more than enough to happily run JellyBean. I have 4.1.2 running on both my HTC Desire (getting on to three years old now; 576Mb RAM; using a CM10 kang) and my Nexus S (over two years old; 512 Mb RAM; official CM10 nightlies), and on both phones jellybean is faster and smoother than any previous Android version. Furthermore, the amount of memory being used by the OS across versions hasn't noticeably changed as far as I can tell, and is more than enough for effective multitasking (although of course I'd love to have more RAM if I could!)
In many ways, JB is actually a noticeable improvement in user experience through the hardware overlays used in graphics rendering. Many older phones had strong processors but crap GPUs (HTC Desire being a case in point), and JB's hardware overlays help to even the balance.
I wouldn't have said Linux users rejected Loki. The problem with Loki was that they were more than 10 years too early -- there just wasn't the user base for linux gaming back in the early noughties. (And if you think back to what linux was like around 2001, it's hardly surprising! Man, but those early linux desktops were seriously ugly...)
Hell, there still probably isn't the user base to make serious gaming software development viable for linux. We're talking about a user base of less than 1%... it's never going to rake the cash in.
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Generally those pans turn out jerky rather than blurry, probably because they're often outdoor and using a faster shutter speed. But I rather like them :)
For that matter, when was the last time you heard anyone come out of a film saying, "Man, I loved the plot line, but I wish they'd shot in higher fps so that those pans weren't jerky!" Very few people even notice the jerky pans, and of those that do, I suspect a fair proportion rather enjoy them and would choose to watch a film in 24fps preferentially.
I'm really glad The Hobbit is being critically panned; if it had been a success I think a lot of studios would have latched onto 48fps in the same way as they latched onto 3D post-Avatar.
Personally I don't mind the jerky pans -- I actually quite like them. But it's fascinating that very few people have ever complained about 24fps before. One argument that's come up lately is that 24fps is slow enough to create an "otherworldly" look about films, whilst being sufficiently fast to not disrupt action sequences.
Whatever the reason, if you can get away with shooting in 24fps without people minding, isn't that argument enough to keep using it? The lower the frame rate, the smaller the data files, after all. It's a bit like bluray -- the resolution increase made no difference to most people, so nobody rushed out to adopt it and very few people care about it (current bluray disc sales are about one third of DVD sales).
Everything else Jackson's done with The Hobbit has had a mercenary motive, so I suspect that his choice of 48fps was similarly driven.
I really don't get why people are so attached to 24fps. Can you imagine this with computer games?
Because 24fps in a movie has no relation whatsoever to 24fps to computer games. In a movie, 24fps is shot with cameras and you get motion blur (just as you would if you take photos at a film speed of 1/24th of a second). Your brain is an amazing thing, and happily interpolates the motion blur to give a concept of smoothness. What I'd like to know is whether 48fps looks "soap opera" simply because we've conditioned ourselves to equating high fps video with the crap shows that always used it on TV, or whether there really is something magical about 24fps. I can't really see any inherrent reason why 48fps should look bad per se, even if it probably doesn't add anything much.
I do know, however, that there is no way I want to go anywhere near The Hobbit. Forget the whole 24 vs 48fps thing -- Jackson sold out big time in making three stodgy films out of one tiny, light-hearted children's book, presumably for no other reason than to rake in the extra cash. He ought to be ashamed of himself.
I think you're missing the point of Android -- it's almost certainly not a profit-making exercise. It'd be a bit difficult to suddenly start charging heaps for it, too, since it's open source and there are some huge development communities actively working on AOSP (the Cyanogenmod group being one, AOKP being another ...)
Rather, the argument goes that Android is a moat protecting Google's search castle. The revenue Google gets from its search advertising far outweighs anything else, and they want to keep their stranglehold of the market with as many different strategies as possible (G+ is another moat in this paradigm).
Google's recent ventures into hardware have been primarily aimed at kickstarting the languishing Android tablet market -- with their most recent Nexus phone, the Nexus 4, they were so unprepared for any popular demand that the thing sold out in 15 minutes around the world.
Google doesn't outsell Apple 3:1 -- Google is barely involved in hardware at all. And the Android OS itself they give away for free.
Remember that Android is just a defensive moat around Google's search empire, and Google maps is another. Google would love you to use Android, where they have more control, but what they really don't want to do is lose customers on another major platform. This way they caused maximum damage to the iPhone5 launch and the Apple brand (especially the "Apple does everything best" mentality) but probably won't lose too many users.
Nevertheless, I'm sure they'd have much rather been the default Apple mapping software on iOS, rather than have gone down this route. That they've come out OK in the end is more due to Apple's incompetence than any Googlian master stroke ...
I would more say this was a win-win for Google. They made demands of Apple, Apple said 'no, we can do this without you', Apple took a huge PR hit for pushing out a sub-par application that did not have Google's data anymore... and now Google has swept in to save the day with their own branded application instead...
Also, Google managed to inflict the maximum damage on the iphone5 launch and during that time launched their own sell-out phone. Seems to have all worked out very well for Google, and very poorly for Apple.
What I'd really like to know is which company held-up the release of the new Google Maps -- was it Google seeking to maximise damages, or Apple in an attempt to crash-or-crash-through? I'm sure Google could have had the app released much sooner if both parties were willing ...
When it takes 15 minutes of watching the paper scroll to get to the good part, you learned to take your time ...
HQ printing, of course ... every line printed twice, but just think of all that extra contrast.
If only we'd had a daisy-wheel ...
I'd never heard of the F2 shortcut until you just mentioned it (I've always been frustrated that you can't click again on a selected filename to rename, so thanks!) But on whichever Nautilus is running on Ubuntu 12.10, pressing F2 in list view does in fact only select the filename without selecting the extension ... very neat.
The thing I love about Unity is the ability to click on the dock icon of the program you're in and get an expose (well, Compiz would call it scale, but you know what I mean) of just the open windows of that app, which you can then individually switch to or close (right-clicking on an icon to get a new instance of the app is also rather nice). The other thing I love is the automatic Super+[1-9] application hotkeys that get assigned to the first nine apps as they appear in your dock -- it's easy enough to set up hotkeys manually, but knowing that Super+1 will switch to a terminal, Super+2 my text editor and Super+3 to the browser (all set up just by moving around the dock icons once) just makes things so easy. And of course the dash is awesome -- it learns the files I use frequently, and bringing them up with a press of the Super key followed by starting to type the name is much easier than hunting around in a file manager.
I do think that Unity was hideous until 12.04 (I switched to Mint for a year myself; I only switched back to Ubuntu because I didn't like the fugly defaults of Mint and I got sick of spending half a day making the desktop look half-decent everytime I installed Mint on a new box). Thankfully, in the year I'd been gone, Unity had changed from bastard-child to a mature power-user interface. I use the mouse a lot less and the keyboard a lot more with Unity, and that's a good thing in my eyes.
Not missing much - it's a pretty crapy movie over all.
I dunno ... I really enjoyed the film and I found it a lot more nuanced than you did. In particular, I thought that while effectively conveying that war is all hell (and certainly not being in any way sympathetic to the continued presence of America in Iraq), it helped me understand why some people find conflict an intoxicating drug -- and it did so in a much more subtle way than your quote from Apocalypse Now. I found the central characters surprisingly engaging, and the tension in the film was created as much by the internal conflict between them as by their external conflict with unpredictable death. I was even more caught up in the film on a rewatch. FWIW (which may not be much), rottentomatoes seems to have agreed, giving it 97%.
What I don't understand, though, is why the studio's going after the pirates now. I understand that there was a lot of resentment from the studio that people were downloading the Hurt Locker rather than seeing it in cinemas, and I sympathise to some degree. But they're just about to release another Kathryn Bigelow film which, if it proves to be a box office success, will be so precisely because so many people downloaded the Hurt Locker and decided that they liked it. They're biting the hand that was potentially about to feed them big-time, and it seems a dumb decision commercially to attack your fan base.
If they bundle Nvidia's proprietary drivers, they are basically telling Nvidia that millions of GNU/Linux users can be Nvidia's customers without Nvidia having to change their practices or release one iota of information about their hardware
I'm pretty sure any proprietary drivers have to be manually installed via the "Additional drivers" dialogue, and are not installed by default. And, let's face it -- by buying a computer with an Nvidia GPU, you were already making a statement that you didn't care about driver/hardware openness.
He's an egotistical twat, always has been.
Yep, you sure demonstrated that there isn't any vitriol or paranoia being directed towards him ...
Will you make a stand or continue to be bleating sheep?
Presumably if Ubuntu's numbers are growing, then people are making a stand. It's just a pro-Unity stand rather than an anti-Unity stand.
Last time I looked, nobody was forced to use Ubuntu if they didn't want to ...
I let him try out Unity via 12.04 LiveCD, it's unusable to him. He'd have bought a new computer rather than cope with that shit... What do new computers come pre-installed with? Not Linux.
Just a thought -- maybe your neighbour would be better off with Windows? Linux isn't for everyone -- it's for the coders, the hackers, the tinkerers and the idealists. If you don't fit into any of those categories, then you're probably better off with something more mainstream.
The fact that Unity wouldn't let me move their dock, or change the hotkeys to ones that I'd been using for years, is what put me off.
You can customise the hotkeys to whatever you like in System Settings --> Keyboard --> Shortcuts, fwiw. (CCSM will also let you do that too, if you don't like Unity's interface, but it's just doing the same thing ...)
Not moving the dock does seem a little unfriendly, although I would guess that most people would want it on the left anyway (it's the side where the sidebars, etc, of apps go, so it makes for UI consistency). Personally, I really like the Unity interface (it somehow just works for my brain); but for anyone that doesn't like it, it's thankfully not a choice between Ubuntu and Windows 7, but between Ubuntu and Kubuntu (or Xubuntu), or Linux Mint, or whichever random distro you prefer.
That's the great thing about Linux -- there's always more choices.
No crocodiles in that part of the country but Mildura is hardly the middle of a residential area, it is a medium sized town (about 30k or so pop) in the north west corner of Victoria in a country region that is farely sparsely populated if you stray from the main roads, with plenty of dirt roads around the area (though admittedly all the main roads there are definitely paved). It would be exceedingly easy to find yourself lost in the middle of nowhere before you realised if you strayed out of the farm areas into a national park.
I'm sorry, but if you strayed off the Sturt, the Mallee or the Calder Hwy and headed into Murray Sunset, you'd know about it. I love the Murray Sunset NP, and yes, there are a lot of dirt roads leading into it. But ... here's the thing ... they're all tiny dirt roads! You would have to have a ridiculous amount of blind faith to think you were on the road to Mildura if your GPS headed you down one of them ...
Mildura is in the middle of a wilderness area.
Well, sort-of ... but there are good roads (sealed, with decent shoulders) going to it and it's a fairly important regional town. If you were driving there, you wouldn't expect to be taken down a sandy track and into a National Park ... and if you were taken that way by your GPS, you should stop and think as soon as you've turned off the main highway.
I'm still amazed that Apple Maps didn't know where Mildura was, though ...
The map shows the city in the wrong location. Should they have consulted two maps to verify the coordinates of their destination, or is there other in-context information that should have made it obvious the route was wrong?
Unless they've been living under a rock, they probably should have known Mildura was on the Murray ...
You obviously haven't driven in Australia much.. Google maps
See how you are driving through national parks and farmland before getting back to an urban area?
I'm from Victoria and know the area around Mildura and Murray Sunset fairly well, and there's no way you could mistake the Sturt Hwy for anything other than a major road. On top of that, there's huge green signs along the road telling you the way to Mildura for miles around. Anyone who deviates from the one major sealed road in the area and instead heads down one of the dirt tracks that leads into Murray Sunset is not thinking very straight.
In fact, the lack of openness probably keeps some of the riffraff out by presenting a slightly higher barrier to entry.
Wow. I really have no idea how to respond to that, except to say that I never thought anyone on /. would want to actively discourage people from coding. Extraordinary.
12 pounds a month on Giffgaff gives you unlimited data, heaps of free calls and texts and no contract at all.
What I've noticed about most iPhone/Android comparisons is that people will present minor features that most users will never touch as their reasons for their preferred device being "superior".
How about platform openness? Just sayin' ...
Seriously, though. The reason I went with Android rather than iPhone back in the day was because Apple made it so difficult to jailbreak their new devices. With a Nexus phone, rooting and installing a custom ROM is actively encouraged by Google. For someone who loves coding like myself, it's a no-brainer.
If you've unlocked your bootloader and have a custom recovery (and I can't really see why you'd have a Nexus S if you didn't want an unlocked bootloader -- it's not like they were mainstream phones), it's as easy as doing a Titanium backup, making a full backup in recovery, and then wiping and flashing and ICS ROM (i.e. CM9).
If you don't have an unlocked bootloader, you're going to have to unlock the bootloader in order to downgrade. it's still very easy but making a full backup of all your apps is more difficult and you may lose data. (It wouldn't be a problem, except that unlocking the bootloader causes the entire contents of your phone to be wiped for security reasons -- beware!) You can in theory backup the system via adb and restore it after unlock, but I have found this to be at least partially unreliable the one time I've tried it and I would make other backups first. (Unlocking the bootloader itself requires no special skills -- it's just "fastboot oem unlock"; note also that you can relock the bootloader after installing a new ROM if you really want to secure your data with "fastboot oem lock", but you'll have to go through the data wipe process every time. Note also that you'll have to download a custom recovery (eg CWM) and flash it before you can install new ROMs easily.)
Either way, as a fellow Nexus S user, I'd strongly recommend trying the latest CM10 nightlies before you give up on JellyBean. Using these and r_data's Air Kernel with its increased screen framerate, your phone should fly -- mine does. It's much, much smoother than ICS (and you keep your expanded notifications, etc, which I'd really miss if I downgraded.) I do sympathise -- I at first felt that JB was slower than ICS also; but the Cyanogenmod team put in a lot of early work optimising things for the Nexus S in particular and JB in general, and it's incredibly smooth now. (As an anecdotal illustration of this, a friend watching me use my phone the other day wanted to know where he could buy one, since he assumed it was a new release high-end phone. He couldn't believe it when I told him it was over two years old!) I've put off getting a Nexus 4 both times it's been on sale here in the UK just because my Nexus S still works so well ...
Well it depends. The newest runs like crap on a two year old phone. Some of the early Android phones didn't have enough memory.
Hmmm ... most of the early crop of Android phones had 512Mb of RAM, and that's more than enough to happily run JellyBean. I have 4.1.2 running on both my HTC Desire (getting on to three years old now; 576Mb RAM; using a CM10 kang) and my Nexus S (over two years old; 512 Mb RAM; official CM10 nightlies), and on both phones jellybean is faster and smoother than any previous Android version. Furthermore, the amount of memory being used by the OS across versions hasn't noticeably changed as far as I can tell, and is more than enough for effective multitasking (although of course I'd love to have more RAM if I could!)
In many ways, JB is actually a noticeable improvement in user experience through the hardware overlays used in graphics rendering. Many older phones had strong processors but crap GPUs (HTC Desire being a case in point), and JB's hardware overlays help to even the balance.
I wouldn't have said Linux users rejected Loki. The problem with Loki was that they were more than 10 years too early -- there just wasn't the user base for linux gaming back in the early noughties. (And if you think back to what linux was like around 2001, it's hardly surprising! Man, but those early linux desktops were seriously ugly ...)
Hell, there still probably isn't the user base to make serious gaming software development viable for linux. We're talking about a user base of less than 1% ... it's never going to rake the cash in.