They're targeting everyone with USB 2.0 ports now. People with laptops (which is becoming the largest segment of computer users) have USB ports. If they can buy their next external drive as USB 3.0, they can plug it into the computer they currently have, and when they upgrade to a new laptop with USB 3.0, they'll have an instant speed boost. The power-saving nature of 3.0 will also make it attractive to laptop manufacturers looking to boost battery time. Also, once USB 3.0 controllers end up in the major vendor stack of chips, it'll be hard NOT to get it, just like it's tough to buy a computer without sound (or even superIO).
USB isn't the fastest or least CPU-intensive, but it it by far the most pervasive hook-up on computers. The fact that the same port hooks up everything from humping dog toys to harddrives makes it difficult to knock out of the market.
I think there's probably going to be a bit of a fight between esata and firewire, though. Those seem to be in the same niche -- high-speed data transfer for video et al. Pros and hobbyists will determine the winner there. I still think firewire has more going for it (chaining and a nicer connector), but it's more expensive than esata (or so I heard).
But wireless USB... yeah. I don't get that at all. USB is all about one connector with backwards compatibility. Take away the connector and... what's left? I guess if it is cheaper than bluetooth, it might end up in the market.
Strange what small things they left off: * no microphone jack, so no voip * no extra usb jack, so no uploading pictures, printing, scanning, using a thumb drive, or loading your ipod
Those things would have hardly added to the size or cost and would greatly increase the usability of this thing.
Oh yeah, it'll be a pain to replace the "all firefox" interface with a more familiar linux desktop as you'll have to do the installation over the wire.
But I think the small size and pared down power are not so bad. It could be cool... one day.
I do think the touchpad (and the thumb joystick on consoles) are bad interfaces. Something better will come to displace them. It'll be tough to displace the keyboard. People can type very fast, and hotkeys are a great way to control a computer:)
Mousing is pretty good. You're right that the current acceleration algorithms feel good and allow great control.
But I could see voice recognition and touch screens making in-roads on smaller devices that can't have full-sized keys or real mice. They ain't bad at that, and they have already started to show up in the market.
KDE4 will get better. There's a lot of promise in plasma. Until then, 3.5 is totally usable (I'm using it now). KDE has often put forward a lot of wacky ideas just to see what sticks to the wall. Good on 'em, I say.
Look about the full KDE3 installation, you can find all sorts of ideas that never really made it. Drag and drop stuff, little file servers, and so on. Some of these things are probably in use by someone now. It's all part of KDE's great flexibility.
Google makes their money on advertising, but more to the point, identifying which demographics are interested in what ideas. This data is very valuable to their customers. It's a big part of selling ads.
Not that I'm not pissed that now viacom gets to see it all. I wonder if this will make the Daily Show (owned by viacom).
It's good to put the price into perspective, but you also have to put the business move into perspective too.
Microsoft bucked the trend when they started selling rather than renting software. That was back when they were a young, agile, and hungry company. They argued that a service contract with IBM et al. didn't motivate IBM to improve their product. With pay-per-package software, you could choose if the upgrade was worth-while.
Fast forward to now, when some have said that several MS upgrades aren't worth it (and several businesses stopped buying office after 97 and/or don't want to upgrade to Vista) and MS now wants to rent software. The circle is complete!
P.S. There are a number of quite reasonable arguments for the renting of software. I'm not dissing that. But an ounce of history really makes the irony of this move by Microsoft pop in your mouth like an exploding frog.
Rubbish. That's only true if (a) There are lots of suppliers (limit as number of suppliers goes to infinity) (b) There are lots of buyers (c) There's perfect information (about the value of goods, and about all options) (d) All goods are equivalent (e) The market is "free" of regulation (but there's a dodge here -- regulation constraining theft, murder, or the threat of one of those is allowed)
The mobile market fails on many of these. Certainly it fails on (a). (c) is also a failure -- all of the services advertise to distort their brand worth, use confusing contracts, and so on. (d) is of course not true, since each network has different coverage (and small networks that may be interested in cheap prices suffer here). (e) doesn't hold either, with the FCC et al. involved in the game.
But even supposing that the big BIG assumptions of the free market held, why do you think the "equilibrium" delivered by the intersection of supply and demand is stable? It seems obvious to me that it's an equilibrium because no player in the market is happy with the price, but the forces pulling the price each direction are perfectly balanced. That sounds like an unstable equilibrium to me.
Here's a good one: "3. Provide that the presumption of ownership may be rebutted only if the defendant is able to provide concrete evidence to the contrary."
Yeah, that's right. Claimants own whatever they claim unless the defendant proves otherwise. Oh, and don't put up a fight if they sue you for having copyrighted material because:
"4. As a deterrent to groundless defenses, award plaintiffs full costs and fees for overcoming frivolous challenges to titles."
I propose a modest fifth bullet point. Anyone with a copyright may punch those damned ordinaries not in the "creative class" in the stomach at any time, without fear of reprisal. Genius!
Well, Kennedy gets off with a doctor's note. He's got brain tumors. The others have all tacitly supported immunity by not voting.
It shows a distinct lack of character, but more importantly a total lack of patriotism and also oathbreaking.
They swore an oath to enter the senate to the constitution. This bill tears apart a critical piece of the bill of rights because someone somewhere is afraid of crazy men with beards halfway around the world.
The republicans keep their fascism out front, which embarrasses the hell out the the anti-fascist Paul camp. Hence all the money and whatnot raised by that group. The Democrats court the civil libertarian wing of the party, but always dodge the hard fights. When will the two anti-fascist wings come together for their own party? The EFF already shows that "left" and "right" wing libertarians can work together on some issues.
Yes, I think that prediction without explanation is fascinating, but I don't know if it's what I like about science:) Have you ever heard Lenard Smith speak? I saw him at SAMSI, but his MSRI talk is online and is roughly the same. He's a statistician who works in exactly this.
Some fancy-pants technique he has is better at predicting the future behavior of chaotic systems (like van der Pol circuits or the weather) than physical models. But he also points out that these predictions don't tell you what type of data to collect to make better predictions, and that they don't generalize. One nice "model" he has can predict the weather at Heathrow better than physical weather models (from the same inputs: wind speed, temperature, pressure, etc), but it's useless for predicting the weather in Kinshasa until the model is re-trained.
I think these types of data analysis tools will be very important in the future, but they won't replace the explanatory power of models. Just like how scientific computing is useful, but never replaced actual experiments.
I'd say that the models are the science. They're how you explain your data. They provide evidence that the experiments make sense, and they guide you by making predictions you can test.
Moreover, SIMPLIFIED MODELS are good science. Understanding which details can be omitted without impacting the predictive ability of your model shows you know which effects are important and which aren't.
I must admit, as an applied mathematician who makes models of physical things for a living, this sort of research threatens to steal my bread and butter. It may be self-centered, but I think modeling is, beside experiment, half of science.
Simplified models are so valuable to our understanding because they tell us what information we can remove, which parts of a problem are important and which parts may be ignored. They allow us to not just make predictions, but they guide future experimentalists as to what sorts of changes will impact the system and which won't.
To be fair, it's more of a cycle: experiments generate data, models are constructed to explain the data. These models make predictions (and hopefully useful simplifications) that can be checked by further experiments to validate them. At the end of the process, we've produced a clearer picture of how a system works. Enough information maybe for someone building something slightly different to not have to test the aspects covered by the model.
I view these data-mining techniques like the scientific computing techniques of the last 30 years or so, only the inverse. Sci Comp nerds wanted to do away with experiments. They thought they could numerically simulate (relatively) exact models (like Navier-Stokes for fluid motion rather than one of its more tractable, understandable simplifications) and use the generated data instead of experimental data. The trouble was that no one will believe that the crazy new phenomenon discovered by your program is real until they see it in the lab, until they construct a simplified model that has the same behavior -- i.e. the same science as before.
The new data-mining idea is the same, but for the modeling end of things. "No models, please," they say. They'll just data-mine the experimental results and "discover" whatever the model missed. Except people will want to do experiments to verify the discovery. They'll want to build models so they can know they're doing the right experiments, and so on.
At the end, I think Sci Comp and data-mining are fantastic new tools that have a lot to offer science, but I don't think either eliminates the need for old fashioned modeling.
Because they're monitoring everyone's phone. FISA allows the feds to sneak a peak at someone's phone and apply for a warrent to tap THAT phone after the fact. It doesn't allow for wholesale surveillance of the nation.
The White House plan was exactly that, so FISA wasn't enough.
Moving away from facts to opinions, it makes me want to puke that this bill is called a "compromise". The things that are compromised are our civil liberties and the law. It busts me up inside. I'm a progressive minded guy, but I have to rank my priorities. The rule of law has to come before other things I'd like to see politically -- like national healthcare and so on.
The Democrats like to promise both, but when it comes to the fight, they say to their civil libertarian base, "Hang on, children. It's just not viable to investigate that or impeach that guy. Not in an election year!" As if I care if you get elected if you're not holding some feet to the fire.
The real tragedy is that there's a consensus on civil liberties that's divided across the party lines. The libertarian wing of the Republicans and the (civil) libertarian wing of the Dems are always left out in the cold by their party leadership. We just get fucked on both ends, don't we?
If there was room for third and fourth and fifth parties, we wouldn't have to sit in the back of our respective conventions, holding our hats and pleading that this year they take our platform seriously. Instead, we vote along each year based on BS wedge issues like gun rights, gay marriage, and abortion when the truth is the real decisions on these issues matters so very little compared to nationwide surveillance.
Screw it. I say make guns illegal for those over 18, but require minors to carry machine guns by law (and no nambly-pambly assault rifles either). Break up all heterosexual marriages and assign everyone a new gay spouse. No abortions during the first three trimesters, but free abortions during the first year after birth... just VOTE TO STOP THE PHONE TAPPING.
AI is our generation's flying car. It's what we see in the future, not what will be. Instead of the flying car, we got the internet. It isn't very picturesque (especially over at goatse.cx), but it is cool.
The future will be like that: something people aren't really predicting. Something neat, but not flashy.
Alternatively, the future will be the "inverse singularity" -- you know, instead of the Vinge godlike AI future singularity of knowledge, there could be a singular event that wipes out civilization. We certainly have the tools to do that today.
I think it's perfectly reasonable that such a face cam could flag some terrorists, even if it doesn't flag them all. From that limited perspective, it's an effective tool.
But I think it's shit for two other reasons that often don't enter into the analysis of the buerocrats:
1) It dehumanizes the passengers. I'm willing to accept some risks so that I'm not monitored by computers. I think many people feel the same.
2) It will CERTAINLY generate many false positives. Then some functionary will have to check out each false positive. That person's time will be spent tending the bad-face-machine instead of being more intelligent about watching for threats. This sort of thing ultimately makes me less safe.
And for a good example of (2) in action right now: the liquid and gel restrictions. I was flying to meet some friends for a hiking trip. I checked by big pack, but decided to carry on my daypack since it was just a small backpack like I usually carry-on. But I had previously packed my daypack with usual hiking stuff, including a 3" knife and a tube of sunscreen. When they pulled me aside at the xray, I immediately realized I had inadvertently taken my nice knife to the x-ray... but my fear was for nothing. They were so worried about my 8 oz tube of sunscreen that they completely missed the knife. I threw out the tube and carried my knife on board. Needless to say, I checked everything on the flight back:)
Ah, but set the rules for what happens when you close the laptop lid in Gnome, then fire up KDE and close the lid... the result is the default for KDE.
Likewise, log in to a VT rather than an X session. NetworkManager won't associate with any known basepoint around at login. nmtool doesn't even have the ability to force a connection.
I use KDE, but I don't think Gnome has fallen behind. I'd say both are about at the same level.
If anything, the big tragedy is all of the stuff that's now done by KDE/Gnome that should be done by non-X related systems. Wifi association, laptop power stuff, suspend/resume functionality, and so on... all of these things are now handled through Gnome and KDE subsystems to some degree, rather than handled by a non-X related program that communicates to some graphical widget.
There's been a big loss of separation between parts. It's a shame.
Yeah, that's really interesting. I think they shifted gears toward the real money-making consumer electronics from the PC market. They certainly do both well (though I'm no fanboy, I don't own any apple products).
I'm not sure Apple will be well served by not competing actively for the PC, though. DRM and convergence devices may make it too difficult for their consumers to use things like Apple TV, etc. That's a shame from my end, because I think they're done good work to shape the market place and force innovation.
I disagree that MS hasn't hired creative people. They were the home of the "Cowboy Coder" who would do anything to make code faster. This was a big advantage in the 1990's, when MS products tended to be faster than 3rd party code. But these hack-fest programs are a bitch to maintain, cowboy code is littered with side effects someone else has to find and eliminate, and (worse for MS) compilers and computers have gotten better.
Good, maintainable, understandable code is now perfectly fast. MS's competitors now have the advantage from a good code bas. Meanwhile, the development process at MS as stagnated. (Remember the story of the shutdown dialog in Vista. Twelve people all working on code various degrees away from the trunk. Not good.)
But I agree with your assessment that MS hasn't delivered on the cool. Apple is eating their lunch in the good looking and working camps. Linux is still king of the UNIX-like environment that seems to be in a Renaissance now. Still, MS has a big install base. They've worked hard to use incompatible file types to build lock-in. The aren't going anywhere for a while.
Slashdot Mirror
They're targeting everyone with USB 2.0 ports now. People with laptops (which is becoming the largest segment of computer users) have USB ports. If they can buy their next external drive as USB 3.0, they can plug it into the computer they currently have, and when they upgrade to a new laptop with USB 3.0, they'll have an instant speed boost. The power-saving nature of 3.0 will also make it attractive to laptop manufacturers looking to boost battery time. Also, once USB 3.0 controllers end up in the major vendor stack of chips, it'll be hard NOT to get it, just like it's tough to buy a computer without sound (or even superIO).
USB isn't the fastest or least CPU-intensive, but it it by far the most pervasive hook-up on computers. The fact that the same port hooks up everything from humping dog toys to harddrives makes it difficult to knock out of the market.
I think there's probably going to be a bit of a fight between esata and firewire, though. Those seem to be in the same niche -- high-speed data transfer for video et al. Pros and hobbyists will determine the winner there. I still think firewire has more going for it (chaining and a nicer connector), but it's more expensive than esata (or so I heard).
But wireless USB ... yeah. I don't get that at all. USB is all about one connector with backwards compatibility. Take away the connector and ... what's left? I guess if it is cheaper than bluetooth, it might end up in the market.
"The United States can, should, and will BLOW UP THE MOON!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHpX5aa5Lz4
Strange what small things they left off:
* no microphone jack, so no voip
* no extra usb jack, so no uploading pictures, printing, scanning, using a thumb drive, or loading your ipod
Those things would have hardly added to the size or cost and would greatly increase the usability of this thing.
Oh yeah, it'll be a pain to replace the "all firefox" interface with a more familiar linux desktop as you'll have to do the installation over the wire.
But I think the small size and pared down power are not so bad. It could be cool ... one day.
I do think the touchpad (and the thumb joystick on consoles) are bad interfaces. Something better will come to displace them. It'll be tough to displace the keyboard. People can type very fast, and hotkeys are a great way to control a computer :)
Mousing is pretty good. You're right that the current acceleration algorithms feel good and allow great control.
But I could see voice recognition and touch screens making in-roads on smaller devices that can't have full-sized keys or real mice. They ain't bad at that, and they have already started to show up in the market.
Wait ... Rasp ... Snow White's trench ... Mars is getting a pap smear! She's really into preventative medicine.
Dear Louisiana,
Please do not slip anything through my child's back door. Intelligent design or otherwise.
Yours,
A Parent.
PS: I look forward to a pirate-based global warming curriculum.
Hey. Don't rub it in our faces that you got to see the pictures before the server flamed out.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080702-the-critics-are-wrong-kde-4-doesnt-need-a-fork.html
KDE4 will get better. There's a lot of promise in plasma. Until then, 3.5 is totally usable (I'm using it now). KDE has often put forward a lot of wacky ideas just to see what sticks to the wall. Good on 'em, I say.
Look about the full KDE3 installation, you can find all sorts of ideas that never really made it. Drag and drop stuff, little file servers, and so on. Some of these things are probably in use by someone now. It's all part of KDE's great flexibility.
Google makes their money on advertising, but more to the point, identifying which demographics are interested in what ideas. This data is very valuable to their customers. It's a big part of selling ads.
Not that I'm not pissed that now viacom gets to see it all. I wonder if this will make the Daily Show (owned by viacom).
It's good to put the price into perspective, but you also have to put the business move into perspective too.
Microsoft bucked the trend when they started selling rather than renting software. That was back when they were a young, agile, and hungry company. They argued that a service contract with IBM et al. didn't motivate IBM to improve their product. With pay-per-package software, you could choose if the upgrade was worth-while.
Fast forward to now, when some have said that several MS upgrades aren't worth it (and several businesses stopped buying office after 97 and/or don't want to upgrade to Vista) and MS now wants to rent software. The circle is complete!
P.S. There are a number of quite reasonable arguments for the renting of software. I'm not dissing that. But an ounce of history really makes the irony of this move by Microsoft pop in your mouth like an exploding frog.
Rubbish. That's only true if
(a) There are lots of suppliers (limit as number of suppliers goes to infinity)
(b) There are lots of buyers
(c) There's perfect information (about the value of goods, and about all options)
(d) All goods are equivalent
(e) The market is "free" of regulation (but there's a dodge here -- regulation constraining theft, murder, or the threat of one of those is allowed)
The mobile market fails on many of these. Certainly it fails on (a). (c) is also a failure -- all of the services advertise to distort their brand worth, use confusing contracts, and so on. (d) is of course not true, since each network has different coverage (and small networks that may be interested in cheap prices suffer here). (e) doesn't hold either, with the FCC et al. involved in the game.
But even supposing that the big BIG assumptions of the free market held, why do you think the "equilibrium" delivered by the intersection of supply and demand is stable? It seems obvious to me that it's an equilibrium because no player in the market is happy with the price, but the forces pulling the price each direction are perfectly balanced. That sounds like an unstable equilibrium to me.
Here's a good one:
"3. Provide that the presumption of ownership may be rebutted only if the defendant is able to provide concrete evidence to the contrary."
Yeah, that's right. Claimants own whatever they claim unless the defendant proves otherwise. Oh, and don't put up a fight if they sue you for having copyrighted material because:
"4. As a deterrent to groundless defenses, award plaintiffs full costs and fees for overcoming frivolous challenges to titles."
I propose a modest fifth bullet point. Anyone with a copyright may punch those damned ordinaries not in the "creative class" in the stomach at any time, without fear of reprisal. Genius!
Well, Kennedy gets off with a doctor's note. He's got brain tumors. The others have all tacitly supported immunity by not voting.
It shows a distinct lack of character, but more importantly a total lack of patriotism and also oathbreaking.
They swore an oath to enter the senate to the constitution. This bill tears apart a critical piece of the bill of rights because someone somewhere is afraid of crazy men with beards halfway around the world.
The republicans keep their fascism out front, which embarrasses the hell out the the anti-fascist Paul camp. Hence all the money and whatnot raised by that group. The Democrats court the civil libertarian wing of the party, but always dodge the hard fights. When will the two anti-fascist wings come together for their own party? The EFF already shows that "left" and "right" wing libertarians can work together on some issues.
Yes, I think that prediction without explanation is fascinating, but I don't know if it's what I like about science :) Have you ever heard Lenard Smith speak? I saw him at SAMSI, but his MSRI talk is online and is roughly the same. He's a statistician who works in exactly this.
Some fancy-pants technique he has is better at predicting the future behavior of chaotic systems (like van der Pol circuits or the weather) than physical models. But he also points out that these predictions don't tell you what type of data to collect to make better predictions, and that they don't generalize. One nice "model" he has can predict the weather at Heathrow better than physical weather models (from the same inputs: wind speed, temperature, pressure, etc), but it's useless for predicting the weather in Kinshasa until the model is re-trained.
I think these types of data analysis tools will be very important in the future, but they won't replace the explanatory power of models. Just like how scientific computing is useful, but never replaced actual experiments.
I'd say that the models are the science. They're how you explain your data. They provide evidence that the experiments make sense, and they guide you by making predictions you can test.
Moreover, SIMPLIFIED MODELS are good science. Understanding which details can be omitted without impacting the predictive ability of your model shows you know which effects are important and which aren't.
I must admit, as an applied mathematician who makes models of physical things for a living, this sort of research threatens to steal my bread and butter. It may be self-centered, but I think modeling is, beside experiment, half of science.
Simplified models are so valuable to our understanding because they tell us what information we can remove, which parts of a problem are important and which parts may be ignored. They allow us to not just make predictions, but they guide future experimentalists as to what sorts of changes will impact the system and which won't.
To be fair, it's more of a cycle: experiments generate data, models are constructed to explain the data. These models make predictions (and hopefully useful simplifications) that can be checked by further experiments to validate them. At the end of the process, we've produced a clearer picture of how a system works. Enough information maybe for someone building something slightly different to not have to test the aspects covered by the model.
I view these data-mining techniques like the scientific computing techniques of the last 30 years or so, only the inverse. Sci Comp nerds wanted to do away with experiments. They thought they could numerically simulate (relatively) exact models (like Navier-Stokes for fluid motion rather than one of its more tractable, understandable simplifications) and use the generated data instead of experimental data. The trouble was that no one will believe that the crazy new phenomenon discovered by your program is real until they see it in the lab, until they construct a simplified model that has the same behavior -- i.e. the same science as before.
The new data-mining idea is the same, but for the modeling end of things. "No models, please," they say. They'll just data-mine the experimental results and "discover" whatever the model missed. Except people will want to do experiments to verify the discovery. They'll want to build models so they can know they're doing the right experiments, and so on.
At the end, I think Sci Comp and data-mining are fantastic new tools that have a lot to offer science, but I don't think either eliminates the need for old fashioned modeling.
Because they're monitoring everyone's phone. FISA allows the feds to sneak a peak at someone's phone and apply for a warrent to tap THAT phone after the fact. It doesn't allow for wholesale surveillance of the nation.
The White House plan was exactly that, so FISA wasn't enough.
Moving away from facts to opinions, it makes me want to puke that this bill is called a "compromise". The things that are compromised are our civil liberties and the law. It busts me up inside. I'm a progressive minded guy, but I have to rank my priorities. The rule of law has to come before other things I'd like to see politically -- like national healthcare and so on.
The Democrats like to promise both, but when it comes to the fight, they say to their civil libertarian base, "Hang on, children. It's just not viable to investigate that or impeach that guy. Not in an election year!" As if I care if you get elected if you're not holding some feet to the fire.
The real tragedy is that there's a consensus on civil liberties that's divided across the party lines. The libertarian wing of the Republicans and the (civil) libertarian wing of the Dems are always left out in the cold by their party leadership. We just get fucked on both ends, don't we?
If there was room for third and fourth and fifth parties, we wouldn't have to sit in the back of our respective conventions, holding our hats and pleading that this year they take our platform seriously. Instead, we vote along each year based on BS wedge issues like gun rights, gay marriage, and abortion when the truth is the real decisions on these issues matters so very little compared to nationwide surveillance.
Screw it. I say make guns illegal for those over 18, but require minors to carry machine guns by law (and no nambly-pambly assault rifles either). Break up all heterosexual marriages and assign everyone a new gay spouse. No abortions during the first three trimesters, but free abortions during the first year after birth... just VOTE TO STOP THE PHONE TAPPING.
Hahahahaha!
Oh, it's June? Crap, and now fire is falling from the sky. I guess this is the apocalypse.
AI is our generation's flying car. It's what we see in the future, not what will be. Instead of the flying car, we got the internet. It isn't very picturesque (especially over at goatse.cx), but it is cool.
The future will be like that: something people aren't really predicting. Something neat, but not flashy.
Alternatively, the future will be the "inverse singularity" -- you know, instead of the Vinge godlike AI future singularity of knowledge, there could be a singular event that wipes out civilization. We certainly have the tools to do that today.
I think it's perfectly reasonable that such a face cam could flag some terrorists, even if it doesn't flag them all. From that limited perspective, it's an effective tool.
... but my fear was for nothing. They were so worried about my 8 oz tube of sunscreen that they completely missed the knife. I threw out the tube and carried my knife on board. Needless to say, I checked everything on the flight back :)
But I think it's shit for two other reasons that often don't enter into the analysis of the buerocrats:
1) It dehumanizes the passengers. I'm willing to accept some risks so that I'm not monitored by computers. I think many people feel the same.
2) It will CERTAINLY generate many false positives. Then some functionary will have to check out each false positive. That person's time will be spent tending the bad-face-machine instead of being more intelligent about watching for threats. This sort of thing ultimately makes me less safe.
And for a good example of (2) in action right now: the liquid and gel restrictions. I was flying to meet some friends for a hiking trip. I checked by big pack, but decided to carry on my daypack since it was just a small backpack like I usually carry-on. But I had previously packed my daypack with usual hiking stuff, including a 3" knife and a tube of sunscreen. When they pulled me aside at the xray, I immediately realized I had inadvertently taken my nice knife to the x-ray
Ah, but set the rules for what happens when you close the laptop lid in Gnome, then fire up KDE and close the lid ... the result is the default for KDE.
Likewise, log in to a VT rather than an X session. NetworkManager won't associate with any known basepoint around at login. nmtool doesn't even have the ability to force a connection.
I use KDE, but I don't think Gnome has fallen behind. I'd say both are about at the same level.
If anything, the big tragedy is all of the stuff that's now done by KDE/Gnome that should be done by non-X related systems. Wifi association, laptop power stuff, suspend/resume functionality, and so on... all of these things are now handled through Gnome and KDE subsystems to some degree, rather than handled by a non-X related program that communicates to some graphical widget.
There's been a big loss of separation between parts. It's a shame.
Yeah, that's really interesting. I think they shifted gears toward the real money-making consumer electronics from the PC market. They certainly do both well (though I'm no fanboy, I don't own any apple products).
I'm not sure Apple will be well served by not competing actively for the PC, though. DRM and convergence devices may make it too difficult for their consumers to use things like Apple TV, etc. That's a shame from my end, because I think they're done good work to shape the market place and force innovation.
I disagree that MS hasn't hired creative people. They were the home of the "Cowboy Coder" who would do anything to make code faster. This was a big advantage in the 1990's, when MS products tended to be faster than 3rd party code. But these hack-fest programs are a bitch to maintain, cowboy code is littered with side effects someone else has to find and eliminate, and (worse for MS) compilers and computers have gotten better.
Good, maintainable, understandable code is now perfectly fast. MS's competitors now have the advantage from a good code bas. Meanwhile, the development process at MS as stagnated. (Remember the story of the shutdown dialog in Vista. Twelve people all working on code various degrees away from the trunk. Not good.)
But I agree with your assessment that MS hasn't delivered on the cool. Apple is eating their lunch in the good looking and working camps. Linux is still king of the UNIX-like environment that seems to be in a Renaissance now. Still, MS has a big install base. They've worked hard to use incompatible file types to build lock-in. The aren't going anywhere for a while.
They can't ban WiFi because I'm allergic to stupid.
Now how will we decide whose needs trump whose?