The alt-` thing is better than the standard Windows alt-tab behaviour... the alt-tab behaviour is alas, different to Windows, which is why it "feels wrong" to those of us who have laboured there a long time.
But yes, the main reason people hate on it, as far as I can make out, is that it's different.
They moaned soooo much about it when the close / minimize buttons were moved to the top left. But you think about it - it's the most efficient placement. What's the first thing you want to do when you close an app? Most of the time, open another one.
Windows : Close button top right, start button bottom left OSX : Close button top left, start button bottom edge Unity : Close button top left, start button (Dash) top left
On the other hand, most people don't think twice about using a search engine (regardless of whether you log in or not, they can and do track your preferences), email (a plaintext postcard that any SMTP server on the transfer path can read), or even just the normal web (cross-site advertising cookies, etc).
You can turn it off. The desktop environment makes a point of telling you about it, and explains how to turn it off. You can even uninstall the components that do it, without breaking anything (except of course, the integrated shopping lens). It provides a settings panel dedicated to turning it off - no CLI required.
I had a look at Google and nowhere obvious does it have a "stop tracking and analyzing everything I do" button.
I find it reassuring that out of all the people who are aggregating and monetizing your habit data (ie - almost everything with an online presence), Canonical actually goes out of their way to tell you about it and that you can stop them doing it.
Yes, I'd be more comfortable if they just didn't do it. But I'm happy that my preferred Linux distro will be more viable as a result of them gaining a revenue stream. And for those of us that care enough to post about it on a forum, it's laughably simple to spend a few seconds with a search engine and just disable it.
Or didn't you know about that, because you avoid everything like search engines that might track your habits?
"Oh shit, a large company will just steal it anyway and use their huge legal fund to squash me into the dirt. I guess I'd better just go french kiss a shotgun."
This is probably among the reasons why software has seen so much more innovation from little guys than physical engineering has recently, and not just any software, software as a service (e.g. social networks, search engines). What really matters in that space is getting into the market early and impressing people. The serious R&D in that space is mostly about scaling the service and not producing a product - so you CAN keep it a trade secret, because it's stuck behind your firewall and not in the hands of your competitors for a few dollars.
His real breakthrough was the constant-force spring mechanism for the clockwork. Which was genuinely innovative, but became obsolete, because it replaced the impractical "dynamos charging crap batteries" approach, and then it was replaced in turn by the practical "dynamo charging good batteries". Because a dynamo charging batteries is obviously not novel, this approach probably shouldn't be patentable (although possibly someone has a patent for "dynamo charging batteries, only with batteries that aren't crap").
He didn't make any further money from the company that sold his clockwork radios because he sold his stock - the clockwork models haven't been in production since 2000, so no licensing fees.
Joel is a bonehead. Amongst the things I do to every Windows machine I use....
* Install a notepad that isn't crap * Copy the notepad shortcut to the "SendTo" folder * Edit the default terminal size to be larger and have nicer fonts * Turn off hiding file extensions (hiding them is a security risk) * Turn off the WinXP Tellytubbies interface and go back to Win2k Classic (less space consumed with window chrome, more productivity) * Install Powershell
Linux is doing freaking fantastic - it's under the bonnet in every Android phone and tablet, every Smart TV, many set top boxes, virtually every domestic piece of network gear, the majority of web servers, a large number of application servers, etc, etc, etc.
It's not doing so well on the desktop, but the desktop, as we are constantly reminded, is becoming a niche item.
A user environment that manages to offer a coherent - but not stupidly consistent [1] - experience on the three big devices - phone, tablet, desktop - will have what it needs to do well.
[1] Stupid consistency would be keeping the same swipe UI for the desktop as well as the tablet, like I'm told Windows 8 does. Tablets have a touch screen. Even if you're plugging a tablet into a keyboard and mouse, you don't want to have to gorilla arm the screen to use the UI, or worse, have to use a touch UI with a mouse.
There are even people who make a nice margin testing them and selling them as guaranteed no dead pixels on eBay. I think some of them are the original sellers.
Pretty much this. I got given one (attached to the laptop) for my first programming gig. I think it was an accident and they handed me an "executive" class laptop, but I just hemmed and hawed about having so many tools set up on it that it would probably cost them more in terms of time to take it back. Which was true anyway.
Since then, all the screens I've worked on have had fewer vertical pixels, which to me has been like progress in reverse.
One of the few facts I've seen with almost universal agreement on Slashdot is that HFCS soda tastes worse than sucrose soda. The only reason sucrose is more expensive in the USA is the trade blockade designed to favour the Florida sugar growers.
Other countries manage to survive on foods that are not packed full of HFCS. The corn lobby has given rise to an unnatural spiral of growth in its use in the USA.
What you will notice the most is the increased price of meat. 70% of corn grown in the USA goes to be feed for livestock, and you need 10 times the weight of corn for one weight of meat.
Yes, it's creepy. But I guarantee that Microsoft are parsing your Hotmail - if only to spam filter it.
And Google explicitly admit they are doing it - have always told you they are doing it, since the early days of GMail. And I've always been OK with it because my mail isn't exactly thrilling.
What's even creepier is that email is no more secure than a postcode - and you don't even know who your mailmen are. Anyone can read it, at any of the SMTP relays it passes through. Google have made inroads into this by making encrypted connections to their server the default - so at least if you email another GMail account, you can be sure that ONLY Google and it's intended recipient are reading it.
You want privacy, you use encryption. Email is not private - it never has been. If people are getting creeped out by that - good, maybe they'll take some responsibility. But blaming Google for this isn't productive, getting off your butt and downloading Enigmail is.
It used to be that publishers were enlightened enough to realise that playing with your friends increased the fun, and made it more likely that your friend might want to buy the game for the single-player campaign.
I remember several PC games that allowed you to make "slave" copies of the game that were ONLY good for playing multiplayer ; this was in the days of disk-based DRM. Some of them needed you to lend one of your disks to that friend (on multi-disk games), some of them would just only allow as many "slaves" in a game as there were "masters". But these were in the days when internet play was a heady pipe-dream and most games were played over LAN or null-modem cables.
The three of those have different value propositions though.
A vacuum cleaner or a car retain their utility after a single use.
For many people, a book or a game loses it's utility after one run through. If you read a book that you were lent and fall into this group, you are unlikely to buy yourself another copy just because you thought it was so good the author / publisher deserved an extra chunk of money. In short, the act of lending may have prevented a sale.
Whether you think this is right or wrong, it's different to lending a car or a vacuum cleaner.
It was entertaining, mostly because you were keenly anticipating the moment that Liam Neeson kicks Taylor Kitsch so hard in the balls that they form a coherent plasma burst that destroys the alien invasion.
"Total Complete Douche Saves the World" is probably a reasonable summary of the plot.
It's a different operating space ; pharma patents the molecule. Medicines only have a few components. Patents are narrow - a molecule is a molecule and can't be interpreted as anything else.
Software has a multiplicity of components, it's virtually impossible to write any new software without infringing existing patents, since the ones we have are ridiculously broad. The scenario you describe is easy to encounter in the software world.
The best way to avoid this issue, as far as I can tell, is base your company value on brand and service rather than patented technology. As you say - a big patent holder can almost certainly torpedo any new software project if they want to. But they can't torpedo your brand or reputation in the same way. Which is probably one of the reasons for the whole Software As A Service fad - if you hide it behind a firewall and don't show the innards off, you're less likely to get sued for patented tech in those innards.
Better still, stop granting software patents. What constitutes "obvious to an ordinary practitioner" changes with such rapidity that the 20 year lifespan is just mental.
I always think a PGP style web-of-trust would be useful in the sphere of trading opinions, whether that be reviews on academic papers or posts on a forum.
One such form of trust would be that, yes, you are Alexander Hamilton, and these 2,000 people have signed your public key to acknowledge this.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a bid for immortality. Young rich guys sponsoring biotech research? They want to live forever.
But only for the libraries ; not for things that depend on the libraries.
The alt-` thing is better than the standard Windows alt-tab behaviour... the alt-tab behaviour is alas, different to Windows, which is why it "feels wrong" to those of us who have laboured there a long time.
But yes, the main reason people hate on it, as far as I can make out, is that it's different.
They moaned soooo much about it when the close / minimize buttons were moved to the top left. But you think about it - it's the most efficient placement. What's the first thing you want to do when you close an app? Most of the time, open another one.
Windows : Close button top right, start button bottom left
OSX : Close button top left, start button bottom edge
Unity : Close button top left, start button (Dash) top left
Unity has the lowest mouse travel.
On the other hand, most people don't think twice about using a search engine (regardless of whether you log in or not, they can and do track your preferences), email (a plaintext postcard that any SMTP server on the transfer path can read), or even just the normal web (cross-site advertising cookies, etc).
You can turn it off. The desktop environment makes a point of telling you about it, and explains how to turn it off. You can even uninstall the components that do it, without breaking anything (except of course, the integrated shopping lens). It provides a settings panel dedicated to turning it off - no CLI required.
I had a look at Google and nowhere obvious does it have a "stop tracking and analyzing everything I do" button.
I find it reassuring that out of all the people who are aggregating and monetizing your habit data (ie - almost everything with an online presence), Canonical actually goes out of their way to tell you about it and that you can stop them doing it.
Yes, I'd be more comfortable if they just didn't do it. But I'm happy that my preferred Linux distro will be more viable as a result of them gaining a revenue stream. And for those of us that care enough to post about it on a forum, it's laughably simple to spend a few seconds with a search engine and just disable it.
Or didn't you know about that, because you avoid everything like search engines that might track your habits?
That's one plugin, for which there is a clear legal notice displayed, which also explains how to switch it off.
I just uninstalled the thing. If I want Amazon seeing my searches, I'll go browse their website.
"Oh shit, a large company will just steal it anyway and use their huge legal fund to squash me into the dirt. I guess I'd better just go french kiss a shotgun."
This is probably among the reasons why software has seen so much more innovation from little guys than physical engineering has recently, and not just any software, software as a service (e.g. social networks, search engines). What really matters in that space is getting into the market early and impressing people. The serious R&D in that space is mostly about scaling the service and not producing a product - so you CAN keep it a trade secret, because it's stuck behind your firewall and not in the hands of your competitors for a few dollars.
His real breakthrough was the constant-force spring mechanism for the clockwork. Which was genuinely innovative, but became obsolete, because it replaced the impractical "dynamos charging crap batteries" approach, and then it was replaced in turn by the practical "dynamo charging good batteries". Because a dynamo charging batteries is obviously not novel, this approach probably shouldn't be patentable (although possibly someone has a patent for "dynamo charging batteries, only with batteries that aren't crap").
He didn't make any further money from the company that sold his clockwork radios because he sold his stock - the clockwork models haven't been in production since 2000, so no licensing fees.
Joel is a bonehead. Amongst the things I do to every Windows machine I use ....
* Install a notepad that isn't crap
* Copy the notepad shortcut to the "SendTo" folder
* Edit the default terminal size to be larger and have nicer fonts
* Turn off hiding file extensions (hiding them is a security risk)
* Turn off the WinXP Tellytubbies interface and go back to Win2k Classic (less space consumed with window chrome, more productivity)
* Install Powershell
and many more ...
Linux is doing freaking fantastic - it's under the bonnet in every Android phone and tablet, every Smart TV, many set top boxes, virtually every domestic piece of network gear, the majority of web servers, a large number of application servers, etc, etc, etc.
It's not doing so well on the desktop, but the desktop, as we are constantly reminded, is becoming a niche item.
A user environment that manages to offer a coherent - but not stupidly consistent [1] - experience on the three big devices - phone, tablet, desktop - will have what it needs to do well.
[1] Stupid consistency would be keeping the same swipe UI for the desktop as well as the tablet, like I'm told Windows 8 does. Tablets have a touch screen. Even if you're plugging a tablet into a keyboard and mouse, you don't want to have to gorilla arm the screen to use the UI, or worse, have to use a touch UI with a mouse.
Break a crappy old window that doesn't fit it's frame and has a draught all the way around the edge, get a new piece of glass that fits? Bargain.
There are even people who make a nice margin testing them and selling them as guaranteed no dead pixels on eBay. I think some of them are the original sellers.
Pretty much this. I got given one (attached to the laptop) for my first programming gig. I think it was an accident and they handed me an "executive" class laptop, but I just hemmed and hawed about having so many tools set up on it that it would probably cost them more in terms of time to take it back. Which was true anyway.
Since then, all the screens I've worked on have had fewer vertical pixels, which to me has been like progress in reverse.
Hah, Google already had a Klingon option, they should definitely add a Marketroid Bullshit dialect as well.
Hell no. You might have to import it from those *shudder* socialist nations.
And that's a BAD thing?
One of the few facts I've seen with almost universal agreement on Slashdot is that HFCS soda tastes worse than sucrose soda. The only reason sucrose is more expensive in the USA is the trade blockade designed to favour the Florida sugar growers.
Other countries manage to survive on foods that are not packed full of HFCS. The corn lobby has given rise to an unnatural spiral of growth in its use in the USA.
What you will notice the most is the increased price of meat. 70% of corn grown in the USA goes to be feed for livestock, and you need 10 times the weight of corn for one weight of meat.
LibreOffice has mostly expunged the German now (or so they claim in their 4.0 changelogs).
duh, I meant postCARD not postCODE. I just type the latter a lot more.
Yes, it's creepy. But I guarantee that Microsoft are parsing your Hotmail - if only to spam filter it.
And Google explicitly admit they are doing it - have always told you they are doing it, since the early days of GMail. And I've always been OK with it because my mail isn't exactly thrilling.
What's even creepier is that email is no more secure than a postcode - and you don't even know who your mailmen are. Anyone can read it, at any of the SMTP relays it passes through. Google have made inroads into this by making encrypted connections to their server the default - so at least if you email another GMail account, you can be sure that ONLY Google and it's intended recipient are reading it.
You want privacy, you use encryption. Email is not private - it never has been. If people are getting creeped out by that - good, maybe they'll take some responsibility. But blaming Google for this isn't productive, getting off your butt and downloading Enigmail is.
Gmail does have two-factor authentication. You can even do it with an app and not have to purchase a dongle.
It used to be that publishers were enlightened enough to realise that playing with your friends increased the fun, and made it more likely that your friend might want to buy the game for the single-player campaign.
I remember several PC games that allowed you to make "slave" copies of the game that were ONLY good for playing multiplayer ; this was in the days of disk-based DRM. Some of them needed you to lend one of your disks to that friend (on multi-disk games), some of them would just only allow as many "slaves" in a game as there were "masters". But these were in the days when internet play was a heady pipe-dream and most games were played over LAN or null-modem cables.
The three of those have different value propositions though.
A vacuum cleaner or a car retain their utility after a single use.
For many people, a book or a game loses it's utility after one run through. If you read a book that you were lent and fall into this group, you are unlikely to buy yourself another copy just because you thought it was so good the author / publisher deserved an extra chunk of money. In short, the act of lending may have prevented a sale.
Whether you think this is right or wrong, it's different to lending a car or a vacuum cleaner.
It was entertaining, mostly because you were keenly anticipating the moment that Liam Neeson kicks Taylor Kitsch so hard in the balls that they form a coherent plasma burst that destroys the alien invasion.
"Total Complete Douche Saves the World" is probably a reasonable summary of the plot.
It's a different operating space ; pharma patents the molecule. Medicines only have a few components. Patents are narrow - a molecule is a molecule and can't be interpreted as anything else.
Software has a multiplicity of components, it's virtually impossible to write any new software without infringing existing patents, since the ones we have are ridiculously broad. The scenario you describe is easy to encounter in the software world.
The best way to avoid this issue, as far as I can tell, is base your company value on brand and service rather than patented technology. As you say - a big patent holder can almost certainly torpedo any new software project if they want to. But they can't torpedo your brand or reputation in the same way. Which is probably one of the reasons for the whole Software As A Service fad - if you hide it behind a firewall and don't show the innards off, you're less likely to get sued for patented tech in those innards.
Better still, stop granting software patents. What constitutes "obvious to an ordinary practitioner" changes with such rapidity that the 20 year lifespan is just mental.
At least he didn't wank on his own shit.
That would be disastrous.
I always think a PGP style web-of-trust would be useful in the sphere of trading opinions, whether that be reviews on academic papers or posts on a forum.
One such form of trust would be that, yes, you are Alexander Hamilton, and these 2,000 people have signed your public key to acknowledge this.