To each his own - I've found Arch to be really surprisingly stable given how bleeding edge it is. And the speed compared to more desktop-oriented distributions is noticeable even on contemporary hardware (and Kubuntu is a poor implementation of KDE in my opinion, which is what I prefer on my desktop). And before you go all "get off my lawn" on me, I've used Linux since mid-90s, and very seldom compile my own packages (other than taking something from AUR, but that's quite automated as well with yaourt).
But yes, the nature of Arch does cause some breakage every now and then. I've found a solution that works quite well - I run Apper on my desktop as a frontend to Pacman, it notifies me whenever there are updates. If the update doesn't require any intervention keeping yourself up to date is simply a matter of clicking "Apply". If there is something that needs prompting, like "replace libfoobar with libbarfoo?", the update fails; then I check the Arch homepage if there have been some major changes. Usually not though, so it's simply a matter of running "sudo pacman -Su" and clicking enter a few times.
Is this more complicated than running *buntu? Certainly. But I've found *buntu to be quite buggy. I don't know if my hardware is very exotic, I think not, but that has been my experience. While initially setting up Arch does take longer, I've found that when something goes wrong (and something always will at some point) with Arch it's much easier to figure out where the problem is. YMMV, HAND.
Probably not, but I don't think Skyrim succeeds in it. Now, this might contain some spoilers - but really, I don't think there are anyone here interested in playing it who already haven't done so, so here goes.
Bethesda excel at the sandbox-thingy they do, and it's really fun just to explore the vast outdoor environment. Quite often I found myself when going to a new location just walking there, even though I could just "jump" to a nearby location I had visited before and get there faster. But the world kind of falls flat with the characters. Apart from the main quest, one of the major quests is the civil war, which you can take part in and make it go either way. But after you do, pretty much nothing happens. Very many NPCs still refer to the war as ongoing, some people in some locations are replaced with other generic characters. It seems the world doesn't really change, although one would assume such event would have a major impact on the setting. Even more ridiculous is the option to marry someone. There's a person who asks as her "companion quest" to test a spell on you. It goes wrong, so you have to wait a bit, after which she tests it again and it's a success. After that, she's willing to follow you indefinitely and even marry you. And should you choose the latter option, you can ask "hun, what's for supper?" or "how's our finances?" - and that's pretty much it. You don't get any more conversation options, no more depth out of the NPC.
Now I do realize the above describes quite a few marriages, but I play RPGs to escape reality, not to be reminded of it. For all their flaws (and as of late there certainly has been those, see DA2 and ME3) Bioware does characters much better. Then again, it's easier for them to do so, as their games are much more limited in terms of what one can do. I'm not saying Skyrim is a bad game, I find it very enjoyable. I'm just saying that characters have never been Bethesdas forté, and given the vast size of Skyrim, I don't see how that could be improved, the game is buggy enough as it is. That's why I'm hoping for their next game (which hopefully will be Fallout 4) they'll tone down the size and focus more on the characters and interactions with them, as that would increase realism.
While I'm not worried about this exploit, I'm surprised they got it to work in the first place across multiple platforms. NFC seems to be not-so-standardized at the moment - recently when visiting my brother I tried to pair my S3 with a Nokia NFC speaker he has. All I got was the S3 to say it had spotted an unknown tag, something about Bluetooth (which is what the speaker ultimately uses for transmission), but nothing useful.
Slight correction - Nexus 7 is manufactured by Asus, not Samsung. But yes, TF700 (aka "Transformer Infinity") rocks, got mine last week. I use a tablet quite frequently as a PMP when traveling, and 1080p content looks simply stunning on it (and with the IPS+ mode it doesn't matter if you're sitting next to a window, or are outdoors even).
We don't have TGI Fridays here, but that idea seems like worth googling. For me it's usually whiskey followed by a burger the next day - while that works the hangover is not that nice, combining the two seems more healthy.
Oh yes, forgot about the Tabs, was just thinking about phones. However, Samsung is hardly unique in this respect; pretty much every tablet with HC or ICS skips the traditional Android HW buttons.
not sure where Arch keeps theirs (despite using it for 3 years)
/var/lib/pacman/local - each package is a directory containing two files, "desc" (metadata and dependencies of the package) and "files" (unsurprisingly, the files the package contains). HTH
I can sort of understand your frustration - then again, I always have my mobile with me, and can tether easily, so on the other hand I don't. I prefer paying only for one data package at a time (better yet, it's paid for by my employer) - however, many people seem to agree with you so ASUS should have the option available. WRT battery life I've found tethering to have quite a minimal impact on my phone, the screen is always the largest culprit. Having said that, those of you considering this option with an Android tablet, be aware that your phone should support Bluetooth PAN (or be able to function as a WLAN AP). The fact that Android still doesn't support Bluetooth DUN is quite unbelievable.
Somewhat completely offtopic, but I was pleasantly surprised when I tried the official XBMC remote for Android on my S3 - not only does it work very well as a remote, it automatically added a "stream to XBMC" option to the OS when playing video. With Youtube this is pretty much a non-issue as I've already a Youtube addon for XBMC, but there are other erm... video sites that were very quick to embrace HTML5 on their mobile sites. So you can browse "videos" on your phone and have them display on your telly automatically. Which is kinda awesome and pointless at the same time.
(on a related and even more offtopic note, anyone know how to set preferred applications only for certain sites?:)
Same here - recently got a Galaxy S3 (a terrific phone, not so keen on the Samsung "enhancements" to ICS) which also has a pentile display with the same resolution as Galaxy Nexus (physically a bit larger, so the pixels are ever so slightly bigger). The fact that the display is pentile is only really evident when the text is so small it's pretty much illegible already. This seems to be very much on the font though, some look fine in tiny sizes.
Funny that, while using Caustic on my TF101 the latency is about 90ms. Which, while not ideal, is acceptable for what it is. (having said that though, I wish Google would work more on the latency, Linux + JACK can achieve sub-10ms latency on commodity hardware)
The only counter example I can think of is what we call Soccar... huge money and popularity everywhere else, not so big here (but I love it, fwiw).
Apparently you don't love it enough to know how to spell it (and it's football, you play handegg over there). Besides, you've yet to address another point in this thread. You maintain that "WiFi + 4G" is just a name. So if the device wouldn't include working WiFi, would that be a-ok too?
You do realize that the "distinctive rows of colourful icons" is not what you see on Android unless you start the app launcher (which is not that different from Windows 3)? There are these things called widgets which populate the home screen(s). I know this sounds unbelievable from appleland.
You know, like giving options for "WindowShade" where users can roll up the window to just the title bar, having a title bar that doesn't take up the whole honky window width (BeOS did this perfect with "tab'd window titles), etc.
I'm not sure if I understand what you're asking - KWin has supported shading windows just as you described since like forever, I personally have it mapped to the mouse wheel. And it also has featured window grouping (similar to the "tab'd window titles" you refer to) since 4.5 as far as I remember (although, it seems at some point the feature did become disabled by default). Most of the themes do feature a full width title bar, but I'm sure more BeOS-like ones exist if you're so inclined.
And: Everything. Just. Worked. Always. Hardware settings (back when sound cards still had configurable analog sections(!)) were deterministic and reliable, and getting excellent sound from *random_app* was a foregone conclusion.
Oh yeah, the OSS driver just worked. That is, unless you had more than a single program that wanted to output audio. There was a reason why we had ESD / aRts / etc at the time being. I'm glad we have ALSA now (PulseAudio I loathe, JACK is useful if you really need low latency, most users will not).
I have to say K3B is pretty darn good. Maybe someone can provide a longer list of Desktop Linux only apps that are better than Windows alternatives.
This is coming from a KDE perspective, and IMHO, YMMV, etc, but - when it comes to pointy-clicky text editors Kate > Notepad++ by a wide margin. The built-in editors in Windows are not even worth mentioning. Kioslaves is teh awsum. Using something like WinSCP seem so archaic, when one can simply open a location via SFTP anywhere. Further, Dolphin > Explorer (the file manager). If you want more control, Konqueror still exists, but I haven't felt the need to use it in a few years, KDE 4 is maturing quite nicely (yes, the initial release was a major clusterfuck, but that was years ago). Windows still lacks a decent window manager. Or even basic window management. And virtual desktops. And the built-in shell in Windows is just laughable. Hell, even xterm is better. This is just from the top of my head, I'm sure someone else can continue the list further.
Sadly, what we think or want has no relevance. It doesn't matter what party I vote for in my country, and it probably won't matter for the party you vote for in your country.
Also sadly, I have to concur. Having said that, I'll be voting for the pirates in the next MEP elections - they don't stand a chance currently in the national elections, but hopefully they'll be able to score a seat or two in Brussels. While the party here is also filled with some libertarian loonies I find very hard to tolerate, they seem to be the only party that has any grasp on things digital, which is "relevant to my interests".
What about member states being able to devalue themselves to recoup from economic crisis issues (a recent example of this exact scenario working working would be Iceland)... Greece prior to EU legislation could do this, when it's government attempted to do so under the EU, the EU removed the government power of Greece and replaced it with a puppet - The country that created democracy.
They would have been free to do so, had they not joined the moneytary union (via outright deception and forgery, might I add). As it is, I'm all for giving them the boot from the Euro, hell the union even; IMHO we should limit the EU to the Alps as it seems corruption and bad finances are rampant everywhere south from there. But "unjoining" the Euro seems to be difficult, so as they themselves put them in the mess they are in, and they seem to be perfectly incapable of handling the situation themselves, then by all means they should be forced to do so from the outside. There's a saying that would be fitting, but as my English is not native I can't recall the exact wording. It involved reaping and sowing anyhow.
Slashdot Mirror
To each his own - I've found Arch to be really surprisingly stable given how bleeding edge it is. And the speed compared to more desktop-oriented distributions is noticeable even on contemporary hardware (and Kubuntu is a poor implementation of KDE in my opinion, which is what I prefer on my desktop). And before you go all "get off my lawn" on me, I've used Linux since mid-90s, and very seldom compile my own packages (other than taking something from AUR, but that's quite automated as well with yaourt).
But yes, the nature of Arch does cause some breakage every now and then. I've found a solution that works quite well - I run Apper on my desktop as a frontend to Pacman, it notifies me whenever there are updates. If the update doesn't require any intervention keeping yourself up to date is simply a matter of clicking "Apply". If there is something that needs prompting, like "replace libfoobar with libbarfoo?", the update fails; then I check the Arch homepage if there have been some major changes. Usually not though, so it's simply a matter of running "sudo pacman -Su" and clicking enter a few times.
Is this more complicated than running *buntu? Certainly. But I've found *buntu to be quite buggy. I don't know if my hardware is very exotic, I think not, but that has been my experience. While initially setting up Arch does take longer, I've found that when something goes wrong (and something always will at some point) with Arch it's much easier to figure out where the problem is. YMMV, HAND.
Probably not, but I don't think Skyrim succeeds in it. Now, this might contain some spoilers - but really, I don't think there are anyone here interested in playing it who already haven't done so, so here goes.
Bethesda excel at the sandbox-thingy they do, and it's really fun just to explore the vast outdoor environment. Quite often I found myself when going to a new location just walking there, even though I could just "jump" to a nearby location I had visited before and get there faster. But the world kind of falls flat with the characters. Apart from the main quest, one of the major quests is the civil war, which you can take part in and make it go either way. But after you do, pretty much nothing happens. Very many NPCs still refer to the war as ongoing, some people in some locations are replaced with other generic characters. It seems the world doesn't really change, although one would assume such event would have a major impact on the setting. Even more ridiculous is the option to marry someone. There's a person who asks as her "companion quest" to test a spell on you. It goes wrong, so you have to wait a bit, after which she tests it again and it's a success. After that, she's willing to follow you indefinitely and even marry you. And should you choose the latter option, you can ask "hun, what's for supper?" or "how's our finances?" - and that's pretty much it. You don't get any more conversation options, no more depth out of the NPC.
Now I do realize the above describes quite a few marriages, but I play RPGs to escape reality, not to be reminded of it. For all their flaws (and as of late there certainly has been those, see DA2 and ME3) Bioware does characters much better. Then again, it's easier for them to do so, as their games are much more limited in terms of what one can do. I'm not saying Skyrim is a bad game, I find it very enjoyable. I'm just saying that characters have never been Bethesdas forté, and given the vast size of Skyrim, I don't see how that could be improved, the game is buggy enough as it is. That's why I'm hoping for their next game (which hopefully will be Fallout 4) they'll tone down the size and focus more on the characters and interactions with them, as that would increase realism.
While I'm not worried about this exploit, I'm surprised they got it to work in the first place across multiple platforms. NFC seems to be not-so-standardized at the moment - recently when visiting my brother I tried to pair my S3 with a Nokia NFC speaker he has. All I got was the S3 to say it had spotted an unknown tag, something about Bluetooth (which is what the speaker ultimately uses for transmission), but nothing useful.
Slight correction - Nexus 7 is manufactured by Asus, not Samsung. But yes, TF700 (aka "Transformer Infinity") rocks, got mine last week. I use a tablet quite frequently as a PMP when traveling, and 1080p content looks simply stunning on it (and with the IPS+ mode it doesn't matter if you're sitting next to a window, or are outdoors even).
Spotify + offline mode when wandering outside the civilization. It's 2012.
We don't have TGI Fridays here, but that idea seems like worth googling. For me it's usually whiskey followed by a burger the next day - while that works the hangover is not that nice, combining the two seems more healthy.
Offtopic, but... whiskey burgers? Please elaborate, I'm intrigued.
Oh yes, forgot about the Tabs, was just thinking about phones. However, Samsung is hardly unique in this respect; pretty much every tablet with HC or ICS skips the traditional Android HW buttons.
Uhh, no. Galaxy Nexus doesn't have one. Rest of the Galaxy line has, like the recent S3.
not sure where Arch keeps theirs (despite using it for 3 years)
/var/lib/pacman/local - each package is a directory containing two files, "desc" (metadata and dependencies of the package) and "files" (unsurprisingly, the files the package contains). HTH
I can sort of understand your frustration - then again, I always have my mobile with me, and can tether easily, so on the other hand I don't. I prefer paying only for one data package at a time (better yet, it's paid for by my employer) - however, many people seem to agree with you so ASUS should have the option available. WRT battery life I've found tethering to have quite a minimal impact on my phone, the screen is always the largest culprit. Having said that, those of you considering this option with an Android tablet, be aware that your phone should support Bluetooth PAN (or be able to function as a WLAN AP). The fact that Android still doesn't support Bluetooth DUN is quite unbelievable.
Somewhat completely offtopic, but I was pleasantly surprised when I tried the official XBMC remote for Android on my S3 - not only does it work very well as a remote, it automatically added a "stream to XBMC" option to the OS when playing video. With Youtube this is pretty much a non-issue as I've already a Youtube addon for XBMC, but there are other erm... video sites that were very quick to embrace HTML5 on their mobile sites. So you can browse "videos" on your phone and have them display on your telly automatically. Which is kinda awesome and pointless at the same time.
(on a related and even more offtopic note, anyone know how to set preferred applications only for certain sites? :)
No, it's here. That's just a "first impressions" kind of article. But using Ars as a reference for Android reviews is nuts, try Anandtech for example.
Same here - recently got a Galaxy S3 (a terrific phone, not so keen on the Samsung "enhancements" to ICS) which also has a pentile display with the same resolution as Galaxy Nexus (physically a bit larger, so the pixels are ever so slightly bigger). The fact that the display is pentile is only really evident when the text is so small it's pretty much illegible already. This seems to be very much on the font though, some look fine in tiny sizes.
Funny that, while using Caustic on my TF101 the latency is about 90ms. Which, while not ideal, is acceptable for what it is. (having said that though, I wish Google would work more on the latency, Linux + JACK can achieve sub-10ms latency on commodity hardware)
The only counter example I can think of is what we call Soccar... huge money and popularity everywhere else, not so big here (but I love it, fwiw).
Apparently you don't love it enough to know how to spell it (and it's football, you play handegg over there). Besides, you've yet to address another point in this thread. You maintain that "WiFi + 4G" is just a name. So if the device wouldn't include working WiFi, would that be a-ok too?
You do realize that the "distinctive rows of colourful icons" is not what you see on Android unless you start the app launcher (which is not that different from Windows 3)? There are these things called widgets which populate the home screen(s). I know this sounds unbelievable from appleland.
The phone you are linking to is not the S III. Here. If you confuse that with an iPhone you need to get your eyes and/or brain checked.
You know, like giving options for "WindowShade" where users can roll up the window to just the title bar, having a title bar that doesn't take up the whole honky window width (BeOS did this perfect with "tab'd window titles), etc.
I'm not sure if I understand what you're asking - KWin has supported shading windows just as you described since like forever, I personally have it mapped to the mouse wheel. And it also has featured window grouping (similar to the "tab'd window titles" you refer to) since 4.5 as far as I remember (although, it seems at some point the feature did become disabled by default). Most of the themes do feature a full width title bar, but I'm sure more BeOS-like ones exist if you're so inclined.
Right, which is why there is no such thing as mobile version of Firefox or Opera?
(no, not posted from my N900, but it has Opera, which beats the built-in browser)
And: Everything. Just. Worked. Always. Hardware settings (back when sound cards still had configurable analog sections(!)) were deterministic and reliable, and getting excellent sound from *random_app* was a foregone conclusion.
Oh yeah, the OSS driver just worked. That is, unless you had more than a single program that wanted to output audio. There was a reason why we had ESD / aRts / etc at the time being. I'm glad we have ALSA now (PulseAudio I loathe, JACK is useful if you really need low latency, most users will not).
I have to say K3B is pretty darn good. Maybe someone can provide a longer list of Desktop Linux only apps that are better than Windows alternatives.
This is coming from a KDE perspective, and IMHO, YMMV, etc, but - when it comes to pointy-clicky text editors Kate > Notepad++ by a wide margin. The built-in editors in Windows are not even worth mentioning. Kioslaves is teh awsum. Using something like WinSCP seem so archaic, when one can simply open a location via SFTP anywhere. Further, Dolphin > Explorer (the file manager). If you want more control, Konqueror still exists, but I haven't felt the need to use it in a few years, KDE 4 is maturing quite nicely (yes, the initial release was a major clusterfuck, but that was years ago). Windows still lacks a decent window manager. Or even basic window management. And virtual desktops. And the built-in shell in Windows is just laughable. Hell, even xterm is better. This is just from the top of my head, I'm sure someone else can continue the list further.
FYI since ICS most of the UI is hardware accelerated. Having said that, I don't find the performance to be that different than Honeycomb on my TF101.
Sadly, what we think or want has no relevance. It doesn't matter what party I vote for in my country, and it probably won't matter for the party you vote for in your country.
Also sadly, I have to concur. Having said that, I'll be voting for the pirates in the next MEP elections - they don't stand a chance currently in the national elections, but hopefully they'll be able to score a seat or two in Brussels. While the party here is also filled with some libertarian loonies I find very hard to tolerate, they seem to be the only party that has any grasp on things digital, which is "relevant to my interests".
What about member states being able to devalue themselves to recoup from economic crisis issues (a recent example of this exact scenario working working would be Iceland)... Greece prior to EU legislation could do this, when it's government attempted to do so under the EU, the EU removed the government power of Greece and replaced it with a puppet - The country that created democracy.
They would have been free to do so, had they not joined the moneytary union (via outright deception and forgery, might I add). As it is, I'm all for giving them the boot from the Euro, hell the union even; IMHO we should limit the EU to the Alps as it seems corruption and bad finances are rampant everywhere south from there. But "unjoining" the Euro seems to be difficult, so as they themselves put them in the mess they are in, and they seem to be perfectly incapable of handling the situation themselves, then by all means they should be forced to do so from the outside. There's a saying that would be fitting, but as my English is not native I can't recall the exact wording. It involved reaping and sowing anyhow.