Thanks for the tips. I never considered using Xfwm with LXDE. I may give it a shot after experimenting with it myself first. In the past I've always found that the further I strayed from the main Ubuntu/RHEL distros, the quirkier and buggier the OS gets. The user was exited about trying Linux and I really wanted to give him a solid experience that rivaled XP. If Mint/Mate doesn't work, I'll give Xubuntu a shot.
This was exactly my experience when "upgrading" an old 512 MB CoreDuo laptop to Linux. GNOME 2 was too heavy and LXDE was lacking features. My first try was with LXDE, but OpenBox does not give the option to move windows without drawing the contents(Bug 3342). As a result windows operations are painfully slow and this was a major downgrade from XP's user experience.
After trying both the nouveau and proprietary drivers, I ended up using the much heavier Mate (GNOME 2) based Mint. Mate has the option to disable window contents while dragging but with Mint, just a few Firefox tabs gets the HD thrashing, which is worse than it was doing with XP and much worse than LXDE was doing. If the user complains, I'll give XFCE a shot.
It is ridiculous to put a such a high resolution display on a tiny screen. I just recently upgraded from a 720 Nexus 4 to a 1080 Nexus 5. I have great vision and side-by-side, I can't tell the difference between the two screens for fine text or pictures. While this phone is a great value, the battery life is terrible and the games run no better than their predecessor. If I had a choice, I'd much rather have the N5 with my old N4's 720p screen.
it is decisively beaten by pretty much every graphics card over $100. You can't game at 1080p or use MadVR with maximum settings on Iris Pro.
To be competitive on the desktop, Intel needs something about as powerful as a Radeon HD 7850 or GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost. As of now they aren't even close.
I built my desktop with a 3.4GHz Core i5-3570K Ivy Bridge. Anyone telling you the HD Graphics 4000 is "good enough" for gaming is full of shit. Even my low rez 1200x1080 monitor, most games struggled to get 30 FPS at anything about the lowest detail level. When I got into Dota 2, that was the final straw. I caved in and bought a Radeon HD 7850 for $150. The difference is night and day. Integrated graphics are still garbage, worthless for anything beyond angry birds.
I dual boot to Linux and have a decent steam library. The only thing I'll give Intel, is that they do make decent open source drivers that perform nearly as well in Linux as Windows. The AMD open source drivers are terrible for gaming. They get 30-80% of the proprietary drivers FPS and have major issues with micro stuttering. And yes, I use the dev drivers from the edgy PPA along with all the tweaks like SB backend. They still suck.
Apple doesn't need to cheat because the last phone that was slower than its predecessor was the iPhone 4. Ever since then, every successor has had a faster gpu while rendering the same number pixels and therefore outperforms on the benchmarks and battery life. Above 300 PPI, you are just wasting battery life and hurting performance to display pixels the human eye can't even resolve. I wish more android manufactures had the guts to follow Apple's engineering wisdom here.
As a 12+ year Linux users, I have to give Shuttleworth some rope to hang or prove himself. For example, back in Gnome 2x-3x transition days, Gnome panel was broken for widescreen devices like LCD monitors and netbooks.[1] Unity turned out a bloated for my taste, but I fully understand his frustration with Gnome. In the end, for heavy weight desktops, I prefer Unity over Gnome 3.
PulseAudiois fine for playing music, but a real PITA for many hardcore gamers[2][3] including myself. I found latency was terrible with Wine + PA and later saw the developers had an issue with PA too.[4] After countless hours lost trying to debug some PA issues, I lost all respect for Poettering. The only worse sound server that I’ve encountered is AudioFlinger, and at least that has the excuse of being optimized for battery life over latency. So like Shuttleworth, I'm skeptical about any of Poettering's work.
Now to the meat of the debate, Mir. It's clear X11 is fundamentally broken for modern desktop/GPUs. [5] It needs to die and I don't care if it is replaced by Mir or Wayland. I have been hearing about Wayland for years now, and only after Mir was announced did I start to hear about it actually reaching a usable state. I wish they'd work together but maybe a little competition will help us all to finally rid Linux of X11.
I'm deeply disappointed that this issue was decided over philosophical instead of technical merits. If Clang was superior to GCC in the majority of benchmarks, then I would support this decision. But that’s not the case, GCC is still leading in most benchmarks and can be an order of magnitude faster when the popular OpenMP library is used.[1] Sadly, BSD users are the losers here.
Agreed. All the important edits that I've made, were from a desktop where I could properly research and cite my changes. I could only see this being useful for minor edits and for people in poorer countries that only have smartphones. However, people that can only afford to get online with a smartphone, will probably have more urgent issues than editing Wikipedia. I've also seen quite a bit of vandalism from highschool addresses. Making it easier for bored teenagers in class to graffiti Wikipedia may not be the best idea.
While this post is a valuable addition to Drew's analysis, I feel it's not really a rebutal at all.
Yes, JavaScript is slow for the reasons Drew mentioned and yes, the DOM is a nightmare to optimize for responsive UIs. They're both right.
The key issue here is that these web technologies are being shoehorned into areas they were never designed for. From Document Object Model being used for Applications to the lightweight scripting language, JavaScript, being used for heavy weight programming of course the end result is going to be a poor mobile experience.
If W3C and WHATWG seriously want to compete with Android and iOS Apps, they should consider throwing out the DOM and CSS standards and starting over. JavaScript can be fixed, but DOM/CSS are so technically flawed to the core, the sooner they're depreciated, the sooner the web has a real chance as being a generic platform for applications.
This is one of major flaws behind these Web based Mobile OS’s, you think that after WebOS, beautiful as it was, Mozilla would have learned their lesson. Instead, they’re trying to drive underpowered hardware with a HTML/JS. All the web technologies are being shoehorned into areas they were never designed for. From DOM being used for Applications to the lightweight scripting language, JavaScript, being used for Apps, to a bloated HTML render as the platform's UI toolkit.
JavaScript is a nice little scripting language that’s got some nice functional programming features. When you need to need to write heavy applications that require performance, low memory usage, and multithreading, it’s the wrong choice.
I think BSD/Linux is a brilliant idea. I started off with SOLARIS and various flavors of BSD and have gradually moved over to GNU/Linux for hardware compatibility. Linux has finally reached BSDs rock solid stability, but I still miss the rc scripts, logical parameters, and well written man files of the BSD userland. Have you tried Starch Linux?
While these "successful takedowns" are great PR, the dirty secret is that by only taking down the C&C servers, the zomie machines just end up under different servers. MS has no issue applying updates without user permission to healthy PCs, so why not clean these infected ones? That would actually do some long term damage to these bot nets.
Except the user experience that makes Chrome so popular was never its look. It had always been its responsiveness. Instead of copying superficial things like version numbers and menu buttons, Mozilla should have never abandoned Electrolysis, the multiprocess overhaul to Firefox.
My company's president complains about the commute and company pays for Limo and chauffeur, so he can be more productive. Elon pays to get the highway fixed up with his own money. I need to get my resume polished up, so I can find a position at SpaceX or Tesla.
Apple are hypocritical thieves, nothing more, nothing less.
The real Hypocrisy is the government and legal system of China. As someone who's lived in China. they have ZERO respect for IP laws. Just downstairs from my apt I had a better selection of western and Chinese pirated DVDs than blockbuster, DVD's of Movies that are still playing in the Cinema. I'd often see the local cops come in to BUY DVDs. This is not some backwards city. This is Shanghai and Shenzhen I'm talking about.
They only reason this law is being enforced is that it's Apple and the government is trying to "send a message". Any Chinese owned store, especially with Communist connections, these violations would be ignored.
Say what you will about Ubuntu, of all the Linux distros, it has the most polished out of the box experience. In my career, I’ve probably installed close to a thousand Linux images and Ubuntu has consistently provided best hardware compatibly and least issues over the years. When Unity was started, the Gnome 2.x panel, was completely broken and useless in vertical mode, necessary for 720p netbooks and widescreen monitors. Gnome 3.x was looking to be the next KDE 4.0.
So I can understand Shuttleworth's desire for something like Unity, but what I disagree with is how he went about it. Instead of going off on his own with Unity and Mir forks, He should have worked with Gnome and Wayland to fix what was broken. See the Mint MATE project for how Ubuntu should have proceeded with Unity. All of these unnecessary forks just weaken and already stretched thin open source development efforts.
"Where I live helium is ridiculously expensive. So I went with the much cheaper alternative, hydrogen. It’s also more buoyant, about 8% more. Which means a higher burst altitude as you can use less gas."
Bonus points for using hydrogen instead of helium. Hydrogen is not dangerous if handled properly and helium is a scarce resource needed for many medical uses like MRIs.
Wow! Back in 1999 after I purchased my first cellphone, one of the first things I did was to investigate how to connect it to my laptop to give me a mobile modem. Sure enough there was serial cable I could buy for it.
I don't care how early Nokia was to enter the mobile phone market. There is no way they should be able to patent any part this process. I'd rather have no patents at all than grant a 20 year monopoly to some company for tacking "on a mobile device" to some obvious idea like tethering.
We need real patent reform like: * Eliminating Software patents * Fix the "obviousness test" and throw out all the existing ones that fail to meet this standard. * No patents granted to logical evolution of current technology like tethering * Grant a theoretical patent (i.e. where invention has not yet been realized) for no more than 7 years * Allow a patent extension/modification upon successful invention * Mechanical and physics-technology patents should last no more than 15 years
I worked in an office that did a trial to migrate from MS Office to OpenOffice. Every issue we had was either a missing feature like lack of the ability to resize images or a bug in the import/export filters. Of the 7 bug reports I filled out, all of the were cross platform and cross versions. The problem with OO is not related to difficulty in verifying bugs. If someone did fix some of the interoperability issues, it would go a long way to making OO more appealing to small businesses that want to use open source software.
I'm an IT pro, and I have flashed thousands of devices in my career. Hundreds of MB'a and countless HDs, cd-roms, RAID controllers, and amd network devices like WAPs. The only time I have bricked a device is when I lost power in the process. Even then, I was able to recover the device with some googling.
Maybe I've been lucky or maybe just buy H/W from good manufactures like Cisco, Dell, and HP.
As someone who suffered with a laggy HTML5 based WebOS Pre, then loved his silky smooth 3GS, but left the walled garden for a Galaxy S2, I am thrilled about this. My S2’s H/W by all accounts blows my old 3GS out of the water, yet I still find the experience more laggy than my 3 year old 3GS. I’m sure much of this is the Java VM holding Android back.
If there is a build for the S2, I will definitely flash it. The chance to have the open platform of Linux/Android with the native speed of IOS is worth at least trying out.
1. How do you judge 'making money on it'? Tax returns? What if you are a Not-For-Profit? What if your intellectual profit manifests as a not-yet-produced product the first year?
The current system gives copyright protection for the life of author plus 70 years. I would propose that after 10 or 15 years, you would have to file for extensions that would be treated like a property tax. And limit these extensions to another 10-15 years.
2. Why should my IP go to the state? JUST EXPIRE THE COPYRIGHT.
That's exactly what I meant. If you don't renew and pay taxes, it would go to the public domain.
Publishers and the recording industry want people to think of IP like real property. If that's the case, then if they want extensions in perpetuity to their IP, it should be taxed or it should enter the public domain.
Slashdot Mirror
The live REPL reminds me of Bret Victor, who used to work for apple.
http://worrydream.com/Apple/
I hope they take advantage of some of his ideas?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Thanks for the tips. I never considered using Xfwm with LXDE. I may give it a shot after experimenting with it myself first. In the past I've always found that the further I strayed from the main Ubuntu/RHEL distros, the quirkier and buggier the OS gets. The user was exited about trying Linux and I really wanted to give him a solid experience that rivaled XP. If Mint/Mate doesn't work, I'll give Xubuntu a shot.
This was exactly my experience when "upgrading" an old 512 MB CoreDuo laptop to Linux. GNOME 2 was too heavy and LXDE was lacking features. My first try was with LXDE, but OpenBox does not give the option to move windows without drawing the contents(Bug 3342). As a result windows operations are painfully slow and this was a major downgrade from XP's user experience.
After trying both the nouveau and proprietary drivers, I ended up using the much heavier Mate (GNOME 2) based Mint. Mate has the option to disable window contents while dragging but with Mint, just a few Firefox tabs gets the HD thrashing, which is worse than it was doing with XP and much worse than LXDE was doing. If the user complains, I'll give XFCE a shot.
It is ridiculous to put a such a high resolution display on a tiny screen. I just recently upgraded from a 720 Nexus 4 to a 1080 Nexus 5. I have great vision and side-by-side, I can't tell the difference between the two screens for fine text or pictures. While this phone is a great value, the battery life is terrible and the games run no better than their predecessor. If I had a choice, I'd much rather have the N5 with my old N4's 720p screen.
it is decisively beaten by pretty much every graphics card over $100. You can't game at 1080p or use MadVR with maximum settings on Iris Pro.
To be competitive on the desktop, Intel needs something about as powerful as a Radeon HD 7850 or GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost. As of now they aren't even close.
I built my desktop with a 3.4GHz Core i5-3570K Ivy Bridge. Anyone telling you the HD Graphics 4000 is "good enough" for gaming is full of shit. Even my low rez 1200x1080 monitor, most games struggled to get 30 FPS at anything about the lowest detail level. When I got into Dota 2, that was the final straw. I caved in and bought a Radeon HD 7850 for $150. The difference is night and day. Integrated graphics are still garbage, worthless for anything beyond angry birds.
I dual boot to Linux and have a decent steam library. The only thing I'll give Intel, is that they do make decent open source drivers that perform nearly as well in Linux as Windows. The AMD open source drivers are terrible for gaming. They get 30-80% of the proprietary drivers FPS and have major issues with micro stuttering. And yes, I use the dev drivers from the edgy PPA along with all the tweaks like SB backend. They still suck.
Apple doesn't need to cheat because the last phone that was slower than its predecessor was the iPhone 4. Ever since then, every successor has had a faster gpu while rendering the same number pixels and therefore outperforms on the benchmarks and battery life. Above 300 PPI, you are just wasting battery life and hurting performance to display pixels the human eye can't even resolve. I wish more android manufactures had the guts to follow Apple's engineering wisdom here.
As a 12+ year Linux users, I have to give Shuttleworth some rope to hang or prove himself. For example, back in Gnome 2x-3x transition days, Gnome panel was broken for widescreen devices like LCD monitors and netbooks.[1] Unity turned out a bloated for my taste, but I fully understand his frustration with Gnome. In the end, for heavy weight desktops, I prefer Unity over Gnome 3.
PulseAudiois fine for playing music, but a real PITA for many hardcore gamers[2][3] including myself. I found latency was terrible with Wine + PA and later saw the developers had an issue with PA too.[4] After countless hours lost trying to debug some PA issues, I lost all respect for Poettering. The only worse sound server that I’ve encountered is AudioFlinger, and at least that has the excuse of being optimized for battery life over latency. So like Shuttleworth, I'm skeptical about any of Poettering's work.
Now to the meat of the debate, Mir. It's clear X11 is fundamentally broken for modern desktop/GPUs. [5] It needs to die and I don't care if it is replaced by Mir or Wayland. I have been hearing about Wayland for years now, and only after Mir was announced did I start to hear about it actually reaching a usable state. I wish they'd work together but maybe a little competition will help us all to finally rid Linux of X11.
[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86382
[2] http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/linux-and-open-source/pulse...
[3] http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=960195
[4] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEyODM
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44
I'm deeply disappointed that this issue was decided over philosophical instead of technical merits. If Clang was superior to GCC in the majority of benchmarks, then I would support this decision. But that’s not the case, GCC is still leading in most benchmarks and can be an order of magnitude faster when the popular OpenMP library is used.[1] Sadly, BSD users are the losers here.
[1] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=llvm_33svn_competes&num=5
Agreed. All the important edits that I've made, were from a desktop where I could properly research and cite my changes. I could only see this being useful for minor edits and for people in poorer countries that only have smartphones. However, people that can only afford to get online with a smartphone, will probably have more urgent issues than editing Wikipedia. I've also seen quite a bit of vandalism from highschool addresses. Making it easier for bored teenagers in class to graffiti Wikipedia may not be the best idea.
I always thought Alastair Reynolds' "Revelation Space" would make a great series of movies. Lets see how the Hollywood "Ender's Game" turns out.
While this post is a valuable addition to Drew's analysis, I feel it's not really a rebutal at all.
Yes, JavaScript is slow for the reasons Drew mentioned and yes, the DOM is a nightmare to optimize for responsive UIs. They're both right.
The key issue here is that these web technologies are being shoehorned into areas they were never designed for. From Document Object Model being used for Applications to the lightweight scripting language, JavaScript, being used for heavy weight programming of course the end result is going to be a poor mobile experience.
If W3C and WHATWG seriously want to compete with Android and iOS Apps, they should consider throwing out the DOM and CSS standards and starting over. JavaScript can be fixed, but DOM/CSS are so technically flawed to the core, the sooner they're depreciated, the sooner the web has a real chance as being a generic platform for applications.
This is one of major flaws behind these Web based Mobile OS’s, you think that after WebOS, beautiful as it was, Mozilla would have learned their lesson. Instead, they’re trying to drive underpowered hardware with a HTML/JS. All the web technologies are being shoehorned into areas they were never designed for. From DOM being used for Applications to the lightweight scripting language, JavaScript, being used for Apps, to a bloated HTML render as the platform's UI toolkit.
JavaScript is a nice little scripting language that’s got some nice functional programming features. When you need to need to write heavy applications that require performance, low memory usage, and multithreading, it’s the wrong choice.
I think BSD/Linux is a brilliant idea. I started off with SOLARIS and various flavors of BSD and have gradually moved over to GNU/Linux for hardware compatibility. Linux has finally reached BSDs rock solid stability, but I still miss the rc scripts, logical parameters, and well written man files of the BSD userland. Have you tried Starch Linux?
And, maybe if you had either
A) RTFA or
B) watched http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44&autoplay=1
You could have added something Intelligent to this conversation.
While these "successful takedowns" are great PR, the dirty secret is that by only taking down the C&C servers, the zomie machines just end up under different servers. MS has no issue applying updates without user permission to healthy PCs, so why not clean these infected ones? That would actually do some long term damage to these bot nets.
Except the user experience that makes Chrome so popular was never its look. It had always been its responsiveness. Instead of copying superficial things like version numbers and menu buttons, Mozilla should have never abandoned Electrolysis, the multiprocess overhaul to Firefox.
My company's president complains about the commute and company pays for Limo and chauffeur, so he can be more productive. Elon pays to get the highway fixed up with his own money. I need to get my resume polished up, so I can find a position at SpaceX or Tesla.
Apple are hypocritical thieves, nothing more, nothing less.
The real Hypocrisy is the government and legal system of China. As someone who's lived in China. they have ZERO respect for IP laws. Just downstairs from my apt I had a better selection of western and Chinese pirated DVDs than blockbuster, DVD's of Movies that are still playing in the Cinema. I'd often see the local cops come in to BUY DVDs. This is not some backwards city. This is Shanghai and Shenzhen I'm talking about.
They only reason this law is being enforced is that it's Apple and the government is trying to "send a message". Any Chinese owned store, especially with Communist connections, these violations would be ignored.
Say what you will about Ubuntu, of all the Linux distros, it has the most polished out of the box experience. In my career, I’ve probably installed close to a thousand Linux images and Ubuntu has consistently provided best hardware compatibly and least issues over the years. When Unity was started, the Gnome 2.x panel, was completely broken and useless in vertical mode, necessary for 720p netbooks and widescreen monitors. Gnome 3.x was looking to be the next KDE 4.0.
So I can understand Shuttleworth's desire for something like Unity, but what I disagree with is how he went about it. Instead of going off on his own with Unity and Mir forks, He should have worked with Gnome and Wayland to fix what was broken. See the Mint MATE project for how Ubuntu should have proceeded with Unity. All of these unnecessary forks just weaken and already stretched thin open source development efforts.
"Where I live helium is ridiculously expensive. So I went with the much cheaper alternative, hydrogen. It’s also more buoyant, about 8% more. Which means a higher burst altitude as you can use less gas."
Bonus points for using hydrogen instead of helium. Hydrogen is not dangerous if handled properly and helium is a scarce resource needed for many medical uses like MRIs.
Wow! Back in 1999 after I purchased my first cellphone, one of the first things I did was to investigate how to connect it to my laptop to give me a mobile modem. Sure enough there was serial cable I could buy for it.
I don't care how early Nokia was to enter the mobile phone market. There is no way they should be able to patent any part this process. I'd rather have no patents at all than grant a 20 year monopoly to some company for tacking "on a mobile device" to some obvious idea like tethering.
We need real patent reform like:
* Eliminating Software patents
* Fix the "obviousness test" and throw out all the existing ones that fail to meet this standard.
* No patents granted to logical evolution of current technology like tethering
* Grant a theoretical patent (i.e. where invention has not yet been realized) for no more than 7 years
* Allow a patent extension/modification upon successful invention
* Mechanical and physics-technology patents should last no more than 15 years
I worked in an office that did a trial to migrate from MS Office to OpenOffice. Every issue we had was either a missing feature like lack of the ability to resize images or a bug in the import/export filters. Of the 7 bug reports I filled out, all of the were cross platform and cross versions. The problem with OO is not related to difficulty in verifying bugs. If someone did fix some of the interoperability issues, it would go a long way to making OO more appealing to small businesses that want to use open source software.
I'm an IT pro, and I have flashed thousands of devices in my career. Hundreds of MB'a and countless HDs, cd-roms, RAID controllers, and amd network devices like WAPs. The only time I have bricked a device is when I lost power in the process. Even then, I was able to recover the device with some googling.
Maybe I've been lucky or maybe just buy H/W from good manufactures like Cisco, Dell, and HP.
As someone who suffered with a laggy HTML5 based WebOS Pre, then loved his silky smooth 3GS, but left the walled garden for a Galaxy S2, I am thrilled about this. My S2’s H/W by all accounts blows my old 3GS out of the water, yet I still find the experience more laggy than my 3 year old 3GS. I’m sure much of this is the Java VM holding Android back.
Also, I really like the idea of a gesture based UI. So far the reviewers have loved the Blackberry gesture based UI.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/02/review-blackberry-10-is-better-much-better-late-than-never/
If there is a build for the S2, I will definitely flash it. The chance to have the open platform of Linux/Android with the native speed of IOS is worth at least trying out.
1. How do you judge 'making money on it'? Tax returns? What if you are a Not-For-Profit? What if your intellectual profit manifests as a not-yet-produced product the first year?
The current system gives copyright protection for the life of author plus 70 years. I would propose that after 10 or 15 years, you would have to file for extensions that would be treated like a property tax. And limit these extensions to another 10-15 years.
2. Why should my IP go to the state? JUST EXPIRE THE COPYRIGHT.
That's exactly what I meant. If you don't renew and pay taxes, it would go to the public domain.
Publishers and the recording industry want people to think of IP like real property. If that's the case, then if they want extensions in perpetuity to their IP, it should be taxed or it should enter the public domain.