1 - Focus on *usability*. This means *simplicity* You don't have to drop skins/theme support, but get one looking *really* clean and sharp, and make that the default. If other people want to add more, fine, but get one default skin looking really clean and simple. For reference, the plastik theme for KDE is pretty darn close. This also means there shouldn't be a dozen icons on the taskbar - the default should be clock, wifi status (only if using wifi) and sound.
2 - You need really good UI building tools that are well documented and well supported. Stop cramming features into the desktop, get the basics rock solid and support the crap out of them on the builder.
3 - You should be able to make the desktop work just like Windows or MacOS - it's what people are familiar with. It doesn't matter how much better you think your desktop is. It might be lightyears easier to use than MacOS or Windows, but if it's too alien-feeling people won't want to switch to it.
Also, I'd say the chances are darn good for FBI to lie whenever something like this happens, just for the sake of looking good in the eyes of the general public and for painting anyone who disagrees in bad light.
I find it very difficult to believe that this, the most *transparent* administration in recent history, would allow such lies to be promulgated.
CDs. The one by our house has a good selection of the Rhino re-releases. Picked up a few old Elvis Costello records we didn't have or lost.
Seriously, that's the only thing I can find to buy when I get a Best Buy gift card. The only other thing I've bought there in the last ten years is my DSLR, as they were running a pretty good sale that included a nice camera bag and lens kit. I've never seen anything else there worth buying at the prices being offered.
The problem is that the surplus, having been collected, needs to go somewhere. You can't just stick it under a mattress - inflation would eat at its value, and it would also have a chilling effect on the economy. But you can't invest it, either, because that involves risk, and no one wants to be held accountable for a hundred million person's losses.
You absolutely could invest it. There are lots of *very* low risk, just-over-inflation investment instruments the government could take advantage of. Commercial paper, in particular, comes to mind. Municipal bonds are usually pretty stable, as well.
I think the underlying motivation of creating the surplus was just to create a back-door tax increase.
You assume we need one, big, monolithic "energy policy." As though a single entity could create an effective policy of that magnitude and complexity.
Madoff take over social security,
Well, it *is* a Ponzi scheme to begin with:
Where do social security surpluses go? To buy treasury bonds Who gets the money from the sale of treasury bonds? The federal government What does the federal government do with that money? Spend it When the social security administration cashes in those bonds, who has to pay them? The federal government Where is the federal government going to get the money to reimburse social security? Good question, any guesses?:)
The free market is perfect and always optimizes (someone's wallet).
The free market is not perfect, but if a good or service is poor allows for alternatives that might be better. When the government has a monopoly on something, there ARE no alternatives. You better hope it's run damn well, because with a bureaucracy that large, you aren't going to change it.
Look at their old ads - Full screen shot of an iPad. "Here's what you can do on an iPad." with a simple piano jingle behind it. Fade to Apple logo. The End. The right way to do an ad.
The wrong way includes that Motorola ad where the guy pilots a mech/spaceship with an Android tablet, the ad with the spinning razor death phones slicing through a city, and pretty much anything else involving jumping off buildings, talking to aliens, shooting lasers, robots or cyborgs.
Your average citizen cannot purchase an assault rifle. You can purchase a semi-automatic rifle that *looks* like an assault rifle. This is, basically, a hunting rifle with a different stock and a flash suppressor, neither of which increases it's lethality, but is sure does look scary.
The extra-large capacity magazines are garbage, and jam more often than not. The military doesn't use them.
It still takes us 3 months to knock out a simple bit of software, stuff still needs endless updates, problems haven't got any simpler to solve, nothing connects or works with other things properly without arguing with endless layers of configuration. Computing has become the activity, not the saviour of our time which is supposed to deliver us from mind numbing repetitiveness.
You clearly weren't alive in the 70's or 80's, when nothing talked to anything else and nothing was easy. It would be an amazing feat to get a database to import data from a spreadsheet on the same machine. CSV was the best you could hope for, and you'd loose all your metadata. And networking two different machines together? Good luck with that. Maybe with a serial cable and some Kermit scripts, you *might* get text files to transfer if you were lucky. Unless you had a few thousand dollars for a nice DECNet or Banyan system, of course. Want wireless data access? RTTY baby! A few suitcases full of equipment and batteries and you could open a Mainframe session at 50 baud.
Now, two people can be nearly anywhere in the world and send any type of data they want to each other instantaneously using devices that fit in their shirt pocket, for the price of a few bucks a day.
As Louis CK once said, everything is amazing and nobody is happy.
> Even the Japanese compacts of the late 80s/early 90s were quite spacious, more so than some early-2000s cars like certain model Corollas that were build for hobbits and the 1st-gen Focus where the floor area of the back sear was shorter than a human foot.
You mean, the imports were pretty spacious until the mid 90's, right when SUVs started becoming popular. Thank you for making my point for me.
Those aren't station wagons - station wagons have three rows of seats. The last real station wagon was the Buick Roadmaster. Everything since then are either 5-door, sport/compact wagons or crossovers.
People started buying SUVs en-masse when car companies, to keep up with CAFE standards, started downsizing their cars to the point that the average family couldn't fit in them anymore (2 adults + 2.5 kids) You used to be able to seat six comfortably in a large sedan. Such a vehicle doesn't exist anymore.
Trucks didn't count against CAFE, so that's what people could by if they didn't want to fold themselves into the artificially smaller cars.
The irony here is that the SUVs people were buying to replace their larger cars were less fuel efficient, so the whole point of CAFE was made moot.
The easy fix for all of this was simply to raise oil taxes, but the oil companies had better lobbyists than the car companies, so we end up with the ass-backwards CAFE standards.
What about the ads that now appear on site that are for things I have searched for? Wouldn't those ads be violating Apple's patent?
No, displaying ads is different from refining search results.
All these legal moves by Apple point to one thing. Apple is blocking other companies from bringing products to market that might be better their Apple's own products.
Dogpile just aggregates a bunch of search results.
Apple's patent is on refining results based on where the user is, the user's search history, etc...
For example, if you're in an airport and search for airplane, you are probably looking for information on airplanes, not Jefferson Airplane, or the movie Airplane, which is the first search result in Google.
This is amusing, because most of the Linux users I know are *constantly* upgrading to the latest version of everything. I'm still using Windows XP at work, though I have 7 at home, and my Mac (and most of my friend's) is/are still on 10.6. If it works, why upgrade?
In any case, why would you *bitterly* cling to Fedora 14? Does 15 have something you *absolutely* must have? Why did you upgrade to begin with?
And yet, here you are commenting on a Slashdot article, when you could be out building your own house and furniture, designing your own car and growing your own food. Weird - it's almost like you're letting other people do those things so you have more time to do things you like to do, like comment on Slashdot articles. What a crazy system, it's almost like it's *supposed* to work that way.
If you want something out of the ordinary you'll have to make it yourself or pay through the nose for someone else to.
Unless you don't value your time at all - doing it yourself is the same thing as paying through the nose. You can buy all the tools you need and take the time required to learn joinery and mill-work (not an easy thing to do.) At the end, you'll know how to make windows. A not completely un-useful skill, but unless you seriously want to build those kinds of things as a hobby or a profession, it's kind of a waste, isn't it?
Or, if you are still running Excel 2003, you just download the compatibility pack for Office 2007/2010, and you can open and save documents in those formats.
There are very specific rules regarding investing. If you are acting as an economic adviser to another entity, there is all sorts of legal language attached to that transaction that is supposed to insure that you are acting in the best interests of your client. It's similar to acting on behalf of someone else as their legal representative (in other words, lawyer)
If someone hires you as an adviser for their investments, and you tell them to invest in something that you know is dodgy, then you are in hot water. At the very least, there is the concept of due diligence, where you are supposed to do a through analysis of the investment before recommending it. It appears as though Goldman had done their due diligence before and decided against investing in L&H, which means they are in trouble if they then recommend someone else make a similar investment.
Here here. 5-year old Core 2 quad - all I really feel the need for is some more RAM as I'm doing more VMs these days, and a faster HD. Even my GTX260 plays new games fairly well.
Not if you are a company that, for some reason, relies on gadget functionality.
Another case in point: there is an obscure function in SQL server that lets you load in data from Excel quickly and easily. It's insanely useful when importing data in from some wierdo 3rd party applications that can't really export in another more useful format.
Thing is, Microsoft stopped shipping the standard Access/Excel ODBC drivers in 64-bit Windows 2003. This essentially made this function useless (you could still import CSV files, poorly - hooray) They didn't document this anywhere, and the examples still exist in the documentation for SQL 2005, even though it didn't work on the 64-bit version.
So enough people complained that they released 64-bit versions of the drivers a few years later. It's completely obscure functionality, but a ton of people used it.
Slashdot Mirror
1 - Focus on *usability*. This means *simplicity* You don't have to drop skins/theme support, but get one looking *really* clean and sharp, and make that the default. If other people want to add more, fine, but get one default skin looking really clean and simple. For reference, the plastik theme for KDE is pretty darn close. This also means there shouldn't be a dozen icons on the taskbar - the default should be clock, wifi status (only if using wifi) and sound.
2 - You need really good UI building tools that are well documented and well supported. Stop cramming features into the desktop, get the basics rock solid and support the crap out of them on the builder.
3 - You should be able to make the desktop work just like Windows or MacOS - it's what people are familiar with. It doesn't matter how much better you think your desktop is. It might be lightyears easier to use than MacOS or Windows, but if it's too alien-feeling people won't want to switch to it.
The purpose is to get you used to the idea, and to justify the TSA's existence.
But they have "Sources." And, as we all know, "Sources" are very reliable.
Also, I'd say the chances are darn good for FBI to lie whenever something like this happens, just for the sake of looking good in the eyes of the general public and for painting anyone who disagrees in bad light.
I find it very difficult to believe that this, the most *transparent* administration in recent history, would allow such lies to be promulgated.
No, but if you're claiming you hacked into an FBI laptop and stole data that the FBI claims doesn't exist, you'd better have *some* sort of proof.
Maybe a script kiddie hacked into an AT&T server and got the UDIDs, but claiming that they hacked into the FBI would make them sound cooler.
Probably not.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter
CDs. The one by our house has a good selection of the Rhino re-releases. Picked up a few old Elvis Costello records we didn't have or lost.
Seriously, that's the only thing I can find to buy when I get a Best Buy gift card. The only other thing I've bought there in the last ten years is my DSLR, as they were running a pretty good sale that included a nice camera bag and lens kit. I've never seen anything else there worth buying at the prices being offered.
When the majority of the U.N. really, really wants to solve a problem, the U.N. can manage to accomplish nothing.
The problem is that the surplus, having been collected, needs to go somewhere. You can't just stick it under a mattress - inflation would eat at its value, and it would also have a chilling effect on the economy. But you can't invest it, either, because that involves risk, and no one wants to be held accountable for a hundred million person's losses.
You absolutely could invest it. There are lots of *very* low risk, just-over-inflation investment instruments the government could take advantage of. Commercial paper, in particular, comes to mind. Municipal bonds are usually pretty stable, as well.
I think the underlying motivation of creating the surplus was just to create a back-door tax increase.
Enron take over energy policy,
You assume we need one, big, monolithic "energy policy." As though a single entity could create an effective policy of that magnitude and complexity.
Madoff take over social security,
Well, it *is* a Ponzi scheme to begin with:
Where do social security surpluses go? To buy treasury bonds :)
Who gets the money from the sale of treasury bonds? The federal government
What does the federal government do with that money? Spend it
When the social security administration cashes in those bonds, who has to pay them? The federal government
Where is the federal government going to get the money to reimburse social security? Good question, any guesses?
The free market is perfect and always optimizes (someone's wallet).
The free market is not perfect, but if a good or service is poor allows for alternatives that might be better. When the government has a monopoly on something, there ARE no alternatives. You better hope it's run damn well, because with a bureaucracy that large, you aren't going to change it.
Look at their old ads - Full screen shot of an iPad. "Here's what you can do on an iPad." with a simple piano jingle behind it. Fade to Apple logo. The End. The right way to do an ad.
The wrong way includes that Motorola ad where the guy pilots a mech/spaceship with an Android tablet, the ad with the spinning razor death phones slicing through a city, and pretty much anything else involving jumping off buildings, talking to aliens, shooting lasers, robots or cyborgs.
These latest ads veer into the latter category.
Your average citizen cannot purchase an assault rifle. You can purchase a semi-automatic rifle that *looks* like an assault rifle. This is, basically, a hunting rifle with a different stock and a flash suppressor, neither of which increases it's lethality, but is sure does look scary.
The extra-large capacity magazines are garbage, and jam more often than not. The military doesn't use them.
It still takes us 3 months to knock out a simple bit of software, stuff still needs endless updates, problems haven't got any simpler to solve, nothing connects or works with other things properly without arguing with endless layers of configuration. Computing has become the activity, not the saviour of our time which is supposed to deliver us from mind numbing repetitiveness.
You clearly weren't alive in the 70's or 80's, when nothing talked to anything else and nothing was easy. It would be an amazing feat to get a database to import data from a spreadsheet on the same machine. CSV was the best you could hope for, and you'd loose all your metadata. And networking two different machines together? Good luck with that. Maybe with a serial cable and some Kermit scripts, you *might* get text files to transfer if you were lucky. Unless you had a few thousand dollars for a nice DECNet or Banyan system, of course. Want wireless data access? RTTY baby! A few suitcases full of equipment and batteries and you could open a Mainframe session at 50 baud.
Now, two people can be nearly anywhere in the world and send any type of data they want to each other instantaneously using devices that fit in their shirt pocket, for the price of a few bucks a day.
As Louis CK once said, everything is amazing and nobody is happy.
> Even the Japanese compacts of the late 80s/early 90s were quite spacious, more so than some early-2000s cars like certain model Corollas that were build for hobbits and the 1st-gen Focus where the floor area of the back sear was shorter than a human foot.
You mean, the imports were pretty spacious until the mid 90's, right when SUVs started becoming popular. Thank you for making my point for me.
Those aren't station wagons - station wagons have three rows of seats. The last real station wagon was the Buick Roadmaster. Everything since then are either 5-door, sport/compact wagons or crossovers.
People started buying SUVs en-masse when car companies, to keep up with CAFE standards, started downsizing their cars to the point that the average family couldn't fit in them anymore (2 adults + 2.5 kids) You used to be able to seat six comfortably in a large sedan. Such a vehicle doesn't exist anymore.
Trucks didn't count against CAFE, so that's what people could by if they didn't want to fold themselves into the artificially smaller cars.
The irony here is that the SUVs people were buying to replace their larger cars were less fuel efficient, so the whole point of CAFE was made moot.
The easy fix for all of this was simply to raise oil taxes, but the oil companies had better lobbyists than the car companies, so we end up with the ass-backwards CAFE standards.
What about the ads that now appear on site that are for things I have searched for? Wouldn't those ads be violating Apple's patent?
No, displaying ads is different from refining search results.
All these legal moves by Apple point to one thing. Apple is blocking other companies from bringing products to market that might be better their Apple's own products.
There's a reason they're known as "Samesung"
Dogpile just aggregates a bunch of search results.
Apple's patent is on refining results based on where the user is, the user's search history, etc...
For example, if you're in an airport and search for airplane, you are probably looking for information on airplanes, not Jefferson Airplane, or the movie Airplane, which is the first search result in Google.
This is amusing, because most of the Linux users I know are *constantly* upgrading to the latest version of everything. I'm still using Windows XP at work, though I have 7 at home, and my Mac (and most of my friend's) is/are still on 10.6. If it works, why upgrade?
In any case, why would you *bitterly* cling to Fedora 14? Does 15 have something you *absolutely* must have? Why did you upgrade to begin with?
And yet, here you are commenting on a Slashdot article, when you could be out building your own house and furniture, designing your own car and growing your own food. Weird - it's almost like you're letting other people do those things so you have more time to do things you like to do, like comment on Slashdot articles. What a crazy system, it's almost like it's *supposed* to work that way.
If you want something out of the ordinary you'll have to make it yourself or pay through the nose for someone else to.
Unless you don't value your time at all - doing it yourself is the same thing as paying through the nose. You can buy all the tools you need and take the time required to learn joinery and mill-work (not an easy thing to do.) At the end, you'll know how to make windows. A not completely un-useful skill, but unless you seriously want to build those kinds of things as a hobby or a profession, it's kind of a waste, isn't it?
Or, if you are still running Excel 2003, you just download the compatibility pack for Office 2007/2010, and you can open and save documents in those formats.
There are very specific rules regarding investing. If you are acting as an economic adviser to another entity, there is all sorts of legal language attached to that transaction that is supposed to insure that you are acting in the best interests of your client. It's similar to acting on behalf of someone else as their legal representative (in other words, lawyer)
If someone hires you as an adviser for their investments, and you tell them to invest in something that you know is dodgy, then you are in hot water. At the very least, there is the concept of due diligence, where you are supposed to do a through analysis of the investment before recommending it. It appears as though Goldman had done their due diligence before and decided against investing in L&H, which means they are in trouble if they then recommend someone else make a similar investment.
Here here. 5-year old Core 2 quad - all I really feel the need for is some more RAM as I'm doing more VMs these days, and a faster HD. Even my GTX260 plays new games fairly well.
Not if you are a company that, for some reason, relies on gadget functionality.
Another case in point: there is an obscure function in SQL server that lets you load in data from Excel quickly and easily. It's insanely useful when importing data in from some wierdo 3rd party applications that can't really export in another more useful format.
Thing is, Microsoft stopped shipping the standard Access/Excel ODBC drivers in 64-bit Windows 2003. This essentially made this function useless (you could still import CSV files, poorly - hooray) They didn't document this anywhere, and the examples still exist in the documentation for SQL 2005, even though it didn't work on the 64-bit version.
So enough people complained that they released 64-bit versions of the drivers a few years later. It's completely obscure functionality, but a ton of people used it.