Not at all. Each of those guys was an arguably fine leader, until they went off.
Hitler pulled the Germans out of the depression returning Germany to a prosperous state, even bringing the world the Volkswagen. Then he went nuts and invaded most of Europe, and slaughtered millions of people because he didn't feel they fit his weird mold of what a person should be. It was (in part) this fear-mongering that brought out a hatred of the gypsies, gays, Jews, and frankly any non-Arian that he used to really ramp up his world domination efforts.
Stalin likewise brought the Soviet Union back to prosperity after the depression, after a few failed attempts, and even eventually did a great job of fighting off the back-stabbing, Hitler-led Nazis. He then used the fear of a US-led world domination threat to become the counterpart super-power, including the introduction of the Iron Curtain. Fair enough, the US was no less fear-mongering at the time, with its own Cold War issues. While the US had McCarthism, Stalin had the KGB. At least the way it's been portrayed outside the Iron Curtain, it's a pretty powerful fear-based motivator.
Bush (the younger), whatever you think of his policies, used the attacks on the 11th of September (in part) to build a ferver that has led to full-scale military action against a few questionable countries, rivaling a cost and scale of World War II, and that doesn't seem to be slowing down. All manner of fear and mongering continues out of this one, the least of which is a fear and misunderstanding of most things Islam, Arab, or, well, really anything "over there."
I, on the other hand, am not trying to scare anyone, or blame anything on "the other guy." I'm just pointing out a few guys that have done that; by far, not a comprehensive list, either.
Whether it did go to Texas first, last, or in the middle, it's possible to deny that as an actual end-point. It can be excused away by identifying the Texan who's compromised PC is relaying the worm's payload...
Fear-mongering is a tried-and-true motivator. Worked for Hitler. Worked for Stalin. Worked for Bush.
Too many leaders, world and smaller-group, who can't motivate and bring their people up through their own efforts try to defer their failures by bringing the other guys down.
Sadly, millions of people listen to their rantings, buy into their fear, and support their mongering.
Fair enough; you caught me skimming their page for quick facts; where they say "the 128/256-bit secured and encrypted SSL protocol" but, although I use the service, I didn't dig in enough to offer deep facts, and took that as an indication of the CR they generate. And I wasn't trying to suggest that even that would be easy to break, or that it isn't cutting-edge... Heck, a quick scan of some of the HTTPS sites I do visit all use 128-bit encryption. So maybe the use of "weak" in my statement was a little bit of a misnomer.
I agree with you, also, on the insecurity of the validation of the certificate requestor/hosts, but that's not unlike, as you say, many other cert providers require. At StartCom there's a small fee and a few easy hoops to validate you are who you say you are, but even if you jump through those hoops, your typical user isn't going to know the difference when they see the green bar (or whatever) in their browser showing that SSL is working on their session (if they do notice...).
I think, though, for addressing the concern of the OP, it's more about wrapping the credentials passed to a site than a trust relationship with the site. Having an account on a site presupposes some accepted level of trust (or foolishness), and wrapping that traffic is a separate concern. If you're giving your credentials to a seedy site, that's your business, but keeping those credentials (which are way too often the same as on other, less seedy sites, ala http://xkcd.com/792/) and other traffic out of the clear is probably still desirable.
The free certs from the likes of StartCom are relatively weak 128/256-bit encryption. That's a little weak if you're trying to secure any kind of serious credit card transaction, but just fine if you want to stop the average sniffer at your local coffee house from grabbing your blog password and seeing your self-hosted e-mail.
And annoying users can be avoided by updating the cert in the month before they expire (services like StartCom send reminders, gratis).
The virtual hosting is an issue, especially for a lot of self-servers. The free certs don't often offer much wild-carding or multiple domains. If you think about it, the certs that do cost tend to cost less than the bandwidth and electricity to the servers that are running those sites, and even inexpensive certs offer wildcards.
At the very least, you can still secure all of the sessions on the host with an SSL cert for the server, and annoy users with "cert seems to be for a different server" messages (who hasn't seen that for akamai-hosted sites?); in the end, most users will blow by that warning anyway, and the traffic will be encrypted.
Either they're quick with the invitations, or someone's quick with the phishing. I got an "invite" in the mail before I saw the notice on/. Free notebook...sigh.
Absolutely easier when you're working on it than when you go back to clean it up. Since the project I'd mentioned had been developed with a strict eye on warnings, it was fairly easy to avoid writing (or at least committing) code with warnings. In the other project I'd mentioned, it took us a few weeks to clean up their wrongfully suppressed warnings and errors.
If you do it right, following the rules along the way, there's little clean-up to do when you're done introducing new code. Even in a hasty flurry of activity.
True that. Like I said, justifiable suppression in some cases. I guess if you can't work around or suppress the warning, you'd have to agree to allow it to remain. This seems to be one of those cases.
I know you're being factitious, but software compiled with "acceptable warnings" may also lead to runtime failures.
I once had a job writing C++ software where the lead made us write code with zero warnings, turning the compiler to the most strict. Justifiable suppression was allowed (for example, in cases of ambiguous type-casting from library headers). While I thought this was overkill, we were internally hired to help a group whose software was woefully unreliable; turns out they went the other way, turned off all compiler warnings and suppressed some "acceptable" errors. Correcting their errors and compromising on some of their warnings brought the quality of their software to at least a stable level.
There is a middle ground, but I've chosen to go with the zero-tolerance route on warnings; they're easy to get rid of, and encourage careful and thoughtful use (and even abuses).
A good rule of thumb is that if your IDE or compiler is complaining about it, you probably left yourself open for a failure.
Of course, not having any warnings doesn't prevent errors due to bad logic...that's a whole other ball of flame-bait.
You just made my original point: the UI is not the OS.
That said, I think we kind of agree, although from different angles. The user experience is one of Gnome or KDE or Windows or OSX (or Carbon or whatever you want to label theirs) or whatever. It isn't really the OS or its kernel or even the services or utilities that come with it.
For the most part, the hundreds of users I've had to interact with as I develop software pretty much boil down to the same needs on their system. There's a handful of applications they use to do their jobs (word processors, e-mail, web browser, graphics, and even proprietary stuff), and there's the mechanisms to launch them (hot-keys, shortcuts, menus) and manage them (layer and switch windows). When things go awry, they like to have a few other applications to aid in the overall management of their systems.
Most users are comfortable with what they were trained on, even if that training was by brute-force trial-and-error suffering through whatever came on their computers. Given the same application (Firefox, Word/OpenOffice, whatever), with roughly the same look (buttons, window frames, fonts, etc.), they don't care (after a bit) that they launched it from a "start" or "applications" menu, desktop shortcut, or slate filled with icons.
Further, in my generous experience, the desktop environment on Ubuntu is much more friendly and easy to work with than the CLI server-side. For desktop use, the package manager is adequate to find and install nearly every application needed to do desktop-based work. However, the myriad choices and obscure names and occasional fragmentation of features in the server software very frequently sends me back to building my own from source (ala Apache) or using the external tools (i.e., CPAN) instead of the repository.
Further, to curb unsafe computing practices by the kids (they just don't know or care enough to be careful), I replaced the Windows installations on their PCs with some Linux distro, and with the simple training of "this is where the apps get launched," both of my (then) teen-agers were able to successfully use their PCs without any loss of expected functionality ('though the boy-child did miss some of the Windows games).
Where I think non-Windows and non-Apple desktops suffer is not from "fragmentation" (or choice, as I called it before) of the desktop UI, but from the specific and particular applications. If you must have Microsoft Word (probably for some macros or particular formatting features) instead of just a WYSIWYG word-processor, then Linux is not for you. Likewise, GIMP is not going to replace Photoshop, and Blender isn't going to replace Autodesk or Maya.
The "probably" I stated was that the functionality was there, not that it "probably worked." Apologies if my use of commas broke the point. I wasn't (and still am not) thinking of a specific application, but more generally that when you use a similar (but different) application they may have different features or ways to get to them; a rich text editor may have different hot-keys or buttons to toggle bold text, for example--not that one works and the other doesn't.
That seems to have taken your discussion way off what I meant, and what I was commenting on in the first place.
Whatever your views on converging or diverging uses of computers in general or in society as a whole...it is my opinion that you gain, not lose, by having the UI be a component of the distribution, and that it be recognized as a separate component to the UI.
Speaking strictly to the OP discussion about the graphics layer and UI changing on Ubuntu, and then to my comment on whether or not that would be a different OS; start with you base installation of your favorite Ubuntu variant, and using your favorite package management tool, add the other desktop environments. Once done, you can change at login time your choice of desktop without changing the underlying OS.
Further, once the different UIs are installed, you can run their separate applications on each other's desktops (perhaps with some trade-offs for the different window parts).
Even more, you can actually run the different UIs simultaneously.
Yes, you caught me being a little hasty. And when you pull a sound-bite bit of text and edit it to your liking, you can even make a fella look more wrong.
At the end of the post you'll note I did more correctly state "GNU Linux," although I admit that should really be "GNU/Linux." Since we're talking about Ubuntu, which is based on Debian, which is a GNU/Linux distribution, I'll stand by my hasty typing.
Fair enough; the layers may be rather integrated. But I wasn't suggesting (quite) that you could take apart the UIs and piecemeal them together into some other option. There are dependencies that need to be respected, absolutely.
I think your example may be a bit more detailed than the typical user, or even just the Gnome vs KDE argument. Yes, when you switch from Gnome to KDE many of the applets, plug-ins, and supplementary do-dads go with. But the functionality, while perhaps different, is still probably there. You may have a different network manager, but you still have a way to manage your network adapters. Or audio, or screen-savers.
Additionally, for the most part the more full-featured frameworks, like QT, provide the APIs the UI may not (and that some may argue you should avoid anyway, to remain portable). The word processor/text editor that comes with the desktop environment may be drastically different, but OpenOffice still works on both, for example.
Perhaps it's rooted in a confusion in the use of "Operating System," or perhaps from your misunderstanding of what an OS is in general, or how the OS and UI interact. Surely, one can roll the UI into the "OS," but particularly in this case, the underlying mechanics aren't changing (there's still a GNU kernel in there), but the discussed changes are in layers between, which can be replaced if you don't like the changes.
The flexibility you chide is a strength not a weakness. When users are faced with Linux distros, they aren't experiencing the Linux OS, but the desktop interface atop the OS. When approaching a PC running Linux, they're faced often with Gnome or KDE or one of the others, probably tweaked with their distro's defaults or the previous user's preferences or tinkerings.
Further, except for us nuts-and-bolts users, few users even get into the UI they're presented with (beyond changing the background or adding widgets) after they've figured out how the launching mechanism works. Most of them are familiar and concerned with the applications they run (word processor, web browser, e-mail client). Those, for the most part, don't change when the underlying desktop changes (that is, switching from Gnome to KDE) any more than they do when applying different themes (colors, borders, fonts).
If you've ever written GUI software, you'd know that your fear-based misrepresentation (or perhaps another misunderstanding) of this is also unwarranted. Few people write application software directly to the UI (Gnome/KDE/etc), or even to the graphics layer beneath that (X/Wayland/whatever), but instead use an abstraction layer (QT, for example), for exactly the reason of removing the concern of which desktop UI it sits atop.
Underneath all of that, the OS, in this case GNU Linux, is the same.
Do it like they did in Red Planet; send some materials and robots to Mars first to build some initial shelters. Try to land or maneuver the materials to a safe part of the planet, perhaps in a workable crevice or crater. Try to build up some heat inside using solar. Plant some moss or other really cold-weather and low-water tolerant plants to build up a little oxygen. While that's going on, construct a sufficient ship that can also land in part or whole on the planet to add to this start-up terrarium for people. Drop some more supplies, get the robots to help, add on to the new human Habitrail, and then the people can hit the planet.
Assuming (and this is a big assumption) that enough refine-able materials are there, and that enough equipment and power can be brought with, Mars itself should be able to provide construction materials. I'm not sure how easily the dirt there can be made into metal, but there's probably a thickness where it'd provide the necessary protection and insulation against the atmosphere (and from those things that the atmosphere doesn't stop) so that Mars adobe-like structures could be built on the surface. Maybe it'd be a cast dome underneath feet-thick dirt, but it wouldn't take Star Trek tech to get it done.
When finally able, with equipment and infrastructure, drill into the hillsides, and live in tunnels like in Total Recall. Unlike Total Recall wishes, it'll be very unlikely that there's going to be an alien machine to turn the atmosphere. Nor will it be an astoundingly short time that the moss would do that, as in Red Planet. Earth humans on Mars will be in suits, buildings, and pressurized vehicles for longer than any of us will be alive.
I'm sure there'd be enough psychologically safe, capable and otherwise useful volunteers to get a colony started. Heck, I'll go!
After some amount of time, some of those may want to return, but probably as likely, some of those would want to get going to the next planet (Titan, anyone?).
I was being a little facetious, thanks for picking up on that, but the ribbon bar (of which I'm no fan) is a bit more than a change of a menu bar with changing icons. There are interactions that can be made right on the ribbon bar that make it a bit more than just a menu bar + tool bar.
Fundamentally, I agree that any tech savvy user will see it as just a re-worked menu and/or more useful tool bar, but it is a tremendous functional change in the way the programs operate beyond the main input window (e.g., the Word document). It's 80% eye-candy changes, 20% rearrangement, and 90% more annoying.
More to the point...it's what everyone (not just parents) notices is different in the newer versions of Office, since it's so present, and there's not an easy way to opt out of it.
Agreed. I remember as a kid wanting all kinds of stuff that I didn't get because my parents said "no." Sure, I could have gotten (at least some of) it anyway, but there would have been serious consequences for going behind their backs.
Owning and/or having mates that owned almost all of the consoles of the era, I was keenly aware of the romance novel approach to cover art. I longed for the day when graphics in the game would match or exceed the package (and sometimes still do). I used to get by, however, by falling back on the imagination built as a younger child playing with Legos or other similar representations of near-real life. The blocky representations of characters and objects were abstract due to technical limitations, but by applying imagination to fill in the gaps, the sprites and geometric shapes would flush out in my head to be what was needed to make the experience enjoyable.
I'll start using Go as soon as Google makes a browser-based development environment for it, ala Google Documents meets Bespin, and it makes something I can then deploy to servers other than the one running the development environment...
Read that as "non-3G" and "non-Android" (not an Android device without 3G...for that probably the only one really out there yet is the Archos 7 --not recommending, just saying that you can buy them--more expensive than you want, too).
For an easy-to-get non-Android platform, the PSP does Skype and WiFi pretty good, and you can spin some Ratchet and Clank between calls... in about your price range.
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Who is always the aggressor in the Middle East?
Uh, the sons of Adam?
Not at all. Each of those guys was an arguably fine leader, until they went off.
Hitler pulled the Germans out of the depression returning Germany to a prosperous state, even bringing the world the Volkswagen. Then he went nuts and invaded most of Europe, and slaughtered millions of people because he didn't feel they fit his weird mold of what a person should be. It was (in part) this fear-mongering that brought out a hatred of the gypsies, gays, Jews, and frankly any non-Arian that he used to really ramp up his world domination efforts.
Stalin likewise brought the Soviet Union back to prosperity after the depression, after a few failed attempts, and even eventually did a great job of fighting off the back-stabbing, Hitler-led Nazis. He then used the fear of a US-led world domination threat to become the counterpart super-power, including the introduction of the Iron Curtain. Fair enough, the US was no less fear-mongering at the time, with its own Cold War issues. While the US had McCarthism, Stalin had the KGB. At least the way it's been portrayed outside the Iron Curtain, it's a pretty powerful fear-based motivator.
Bush (the younger), whatever you think of his policies, used the attacks on the 11th of September (in part) to build a ferver that has led to full-scale military action against a few questionable countries, rivaling a cost and scale of World War II, and that doesn't seem to be slowing down. All manner of fear and mongering continues out of this one, the least of which is a fear and misunderstanding of most things Islam, Arab, or, well, really anything "over there."
I, on the other hand, am not trying to scare anyone, or blame anything on "the other guy." I'm just pointing out a few guys that have done that; by far, not a comprehensive list, either.
Plausible deniability.
Whether it did go to Texas first, last, or in the middle, it's possible to deny that as an actual end-point. It can be excused away by identifying the Texan who's compromised PC is relaying the worm's payload...
Fear-mongering is a tried-and-true motivator. Worked for Hitler. Worked for Stalin. Worked for Bush.
Too many leaders, world and smaller-group, who can't motivate and bring their people up through their own efforts try to defer their failures by bringing the other guys down.
Sadly, millions of people listen to their rantings, buy into their fear, and support their mongering.
Fair enough; you caught me skimming their page for quick facts; where they say "the 128/256-bit secured and encrypted SSL protocol" but, although I use the service, I didn't dig in enough to offer deep facts, and took that as an indication of the CR they generate. And I wasn't trying to suggest that even that would be easy to break, or that it isn't cutting-edge... Heck, a quick scan of some of the HTTPS sites I do visit all use 128-bit encryption. So maybe the use of "weak" in my statement was a little bit of a misnomer.
I agree with you, also, on the insecurity of the validation of the certificate requestor/hosts, but that's not unlike, as you say, many other cert providers require. At StartCom there's a small fee and a few easy hoops to validate you are who you say you are, but even if you jump through those hoops, your typical user isn't going to know the difference when they see the green bar (or whatever) in their browser showing that SSL is working on their session (if they do notice...).
I think, though, for addressing the concern of the OP, it's more about wrapping the credentials passed to a site than a trust relationship with the site. Having an account on a site presupposes some accepted level of trust (or foolishness), and wrapping that traffic is a separate concern. If you're giving your credentials to a seedy site, that's your business, but keeping those credentials (which are way too often the same as on other, less seedy sites, ala http://xkcd.com/792/) and other traffic out of the clear is probably still desirable.
That's what I was gonna say!
The free certs from the likes of StartCom are relatively weak 128/256-bit encryption. That's a little weak if you're trying to secure any kind of serious credit card transaction, but just fine if you want to stop the average sniffer at your local coffee house from grabbing your blog password and seeing your self-hosted e-mail.
And annoying users can be avoided by updating the cert in the month before they expire (services like StartCom send reminders, gratis).
The virtual hosting is an issue, especially for a lot of self-servers. The free certs don't often offer much wild-carding or multiple domains. If you think about it, the certs that do cost tend to cost less than the bandwidth and electricity to the servers that are running those sites, and even inexpensive certs offer wildcards.
At the very least, you can still secure all of the sessions on the host with an SSL cert for the server, and annoy users with "cert seems to be for a different server" messages (who hasn't seen that for akamai-hosted sites?); in the end, most users will blow by that warning anyway, and the traffic will be encrypted.
Or more useful; he could rewrite PERL in that amount of time.
While I'm sure this happens a lot, he's not the kind of hacker I worry about.
Either they're quick with the invitations, or someone's quick with the phishing. I got an "invite" in the mail before I saw the notice on /. Free notebook...sigh.
Absolutely easier when you're working on it than when you go back to clean it up. Since the project I'd mentioned had been developed with a strict eye on warnings, it was fairly easy to avoid writing (or at least committing) code with warnings. In the other project I'd mentioned, it took us a few weeks to clean up their wrongfully suppressed warnings and errors.
If you do it right, following the rules along the way, there's little clean-up to do when you're done introducing new code. Even in a hasty flurry of activity.
True that. Like I said, justifiable suppression in some cases. I guess if you can't work around or suppress the warning, you'd have to agree to allow it to remain. This seems to be one of those cases.
I know you're being factitious, but software compiled with "acceptable warnings" may also lead to runtime failures.
I once had a job writing C++ software where the lead made us write code with zero warnings, turning the compiler to the most strict. Justifiable suppression was allowed (for example, in cases of ambiguous type-casting from library headers). While I thought this was overkill, we were internally hired to help a group whose software was woefully unreliable; turns out they went the other way, turned off all compiler warnings and suppressed some "acceptable" errors. Correcting their errors and compromising on some of their warnings brought the quality of their software to at least a stable level.
There is a middle ground, but I've chosen to go with the zero-tolerance route on warnings; they're easy to get rid of, and encourage careful and thoughtful use (and even abuses).
A good rule of thumb is that if your IDE or compiler is complaining about it, you probably left yourself open for a failure.
Of course, not having any warnings doesn't prevent errors due to bad logic...that's a whole other ball of flame-bait.
You just made my original point: the UI is not the OS.
That said, I think we kind of agree, although from different angles. The user experience is one of Gnome or KDE or Windows or OSX (or Carbon or whatever you want to label theirs) or whatever. It isn't really the OS or its kernel or even the services or utilities that come with it.
For the most part, the hundreds of users I've had to interact with as I develop software pretty much boil down to the same needs on their system. There's a handful of applications they use to do their jobs (word processors, e-mail, web browser, graphics, and even proprietary stuff), and there's the mechanisms to launch them (hot-keys, shortcuts, menus) and manage them (layer and switch windows). When things go awry, they like to have a few other applications to aid in the overall management of their systems.
Most users are comfortable with what they were trained on, even if that training was by brute-force trial-and-error suffering through whatever came on their computers. Given the same application (Firefox, Word/OpenOffice, whatever), with roughly the same look (buttons, window frames, fonts, etc.), they don't care (after a bit) that they launched it from a "start" or "applications" menu, desktop shortcut, or slate filled with icons.
Further, in my generous experience, the desktop environment on Ubuntu is much more friendly and easy to work with than the CLI server-side. For desktop use, the package manager is adequate to find and install nearly every application needed to do desktop-based work. However, the myriad choices and obscure names and occasional fragmentation of features in the server software very frequently sends me back to building my own from source (ala Apache) or using the external tools (i.e., CPAN) instead of the repository.
Further, to curb unsafe computing practices by the kids (they just don't know or care enough to be careful), I replaced the Windows installations on their PCs with some Linux distro, and with the simple training of "this is where the apps get launched," both of my (then) teen-agers were able to successfully use their PCs without any loss of expected functionality ('though the boy-child did miss some of the Windows games).
Where I think non-Windows and non-Apple desktops suffer is not from "fragmentation" (or choice, as I called it before) of the desktop UI, but from the specific and particular applications. If you must have Microsoft Word (probably for some macros or particular formatting features) instead of just a WYSIWYG word-processor, then Linux is not for you. Likewise, GIMP is not going to replace Photoshop, and Blender isn't going to replace Autodesk or Maya.
The "probably" I stated was that the functionality was there, not that it "probably worked." Apologies if my use of commas broke the point. I wasn't (and still am not) thinking of a specific application, but more generally that when you use a similar (but different) application they may have different features or ways to get to them; a rich text editor may have different hot-keys or buttons to toggle bold text, for example--not that one works and the other doesn't.
That seems to have taken your discussion way off what I meant, and what I was commenting on in the first place.
Whatever your views on converging or diverging uses of computers in general or in society as a whole...it is my opinion that you gain, not lose, by having the UI be a component of the distribution, and that it be recognized as a separate component to the UI.
Speaking strictly to the OP discussion about the graphics layer and UI changing on Ubuntu, and then to my comment on whether or not that would be a different OS; start with you base installation of your favorite Ubuntu variant, and using your favorite package management tool, add the other desktop environments. Once done, you can change at login time your choice of desktop without changing the underlying OS.
Further, once the different UIs are installed, you can run their separate applications on each other's desktops (perhaps with some trade-offs for the different window parts).
Even more, you can actually run the different UIs simultaneously.
The OS is under the UI. The UI is not the OS.
Yes, you caught me being a little hasty. And when you pull a sound-bite bit of text and edit it to your liking, you can even make a fella look more wrong.
At the end of the post you'll note I did more correctly state "GNU Linux," although I admit that should really be "GNU/Linux." Since we're talking about Ubuntu, which is based on Debian, which is a GNU/Linux distribution, I'll stand by my hasty typing.
Far more passionate people than me have debated this to ends I would never have bothered. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU/Linux_naming_controversy
Fair enough; the layers may be rather integrated. But I wasn't suggesting (quite) that you could take apart the UIs and piecemeal them together into some other option. There are dependencies that need to be respected, absolutely.
I think your example may be a bit more detailed than the typical user, or even just the Gnome vs KDE argument. Yes, when you switch from Gnome to KDE many of the applets, plug-ins, and supplementary do-dads go with. But the functionality, while perhaps different, is still probably there. You may have a different network manager, but you still have a way to manage your network adapters. Or audio, or screen-savers.
Additionally, for the most part the more full-featured frameworks, like QT, provide the APIs the UI may not (and that some may argue you should avoid anyway, to remain portable). The word processor/text editor that comes with the desktop environment may be drastically different, but OpenOffice still works on both, for example.
That's an interesting opinion.
Perhaps it's rooted in a confusion in the use of "Operating System," or perhaps from your misunderstanding of what an OS is in general, or how the OS and UI interact. Surely, one can roll the UI into the "OS," but particularly in this case, the underlying mechanics aren't changing (there's still a GNU kernel in there), but the discussed changes are in layers between, which can be replaced if you don't like the changes.
The flexibility you chide is a strength not a weakness. When users are faced with Linux distros, they aren't experiencing the Linux OS, but the desktop interface atop the OS. When approaching a PC running Linux, they're faced often with Gnome or KDE or one of the others, probably tweaked with their distro's defaults or the previous user's preferences or tinkerings.
Further, except for us nuts-and-bolts users, few users even get into the UI they're presented with (beyond changing the background or adding widgets) after they've figured out how the launching mechanism works. Most of them are familiar and concerned with the applications they run (word processor, web browser, e-mail client). Those, for the most part, don't change when the underlying desktop changes (that is, switching from Gnome to KDE) any more than they do when applying different themes (colors, borders, fonts).
If you've ever written GUI software, you'd know that your fear-based misrepresentation (or perhaps another misunderstanding) of this is also unwarranted. Few people write application software directly to the UI (Gnome/KDE/etc), or even to the graphics layer beneath that (X/Wayland/whatever), but instead use an abstraction layer (QT, for example), for exactly the reason of removing the concern of which desktop UI it sits atop.
Underneath all of that, the OS, in this case GNU Linux, is the same.
The desktop sits atop the OS. It's not a different OS, but a different GUI.
Unlike Windows or Mac, you can actually have several different GUIs installed, and even switch between them at will.
Heh. At first I read that as "Swedish Court Order _Detination_ of Wikileaks Founder..."
Totally different meaning, that one.
Do it like they did in Red Planet; send some materials and robots to Mars first to build some initial shelters. Try to land or maneuver the materials to a safe part of the planet, perhaps in a workable crevice or crater. Try to build up some heat inside using solar. Plant some moss or other really cold-weather and low-water tolerant plants to build up a little oxygen. While that's going on, construct a sufficient ship that can also land in part or whole on the planet to add to this start-up terrarium for people. Drop some more supplies, get the robots to help, add on to the new human Habitrail, and then the people can hit the planet.
Assuming (and this is a big assumption) that enough refine-able materials are there, and that enough equipment and power can be brought with, Mars itself should be able to provide construction materials. I'm not sure how easily the dirt there can be made into metal, but there's probably a thickness where it'd provide the necessary protection and insulation against the atmosphere (and from those things that the atmosphere doesn't stop) so that Mars adobe-like structures could be built on the surface. Maybe it'd be a cast dome underneath feet-thick dirt, but it wouldn't take Star Trek tech to get it done.
When finally able, with equipment and infrastructure, drill into the hillsides, and live in tunnels like in Total Recall. Unlike Total Recall wishes, it'll be very unlikely that there's going to be an alien machine to turn the atmosphere. Nor will it be an astoundingly short time that the moss would do that, as in Red Planet. Earth humans on Mars will be in suits, buildings, and pressurized vehicles for longer than any of us will be alive.
I'm sure there'd be enough psychologically safe, capable and otherwise useful volunteers to get a colony started. Heck, I'll go!
After some amount of time, some of those may want to return, but probably as likely, some of those would want to get going to the next planet (Titan, anyone?).
I was being a little facetious, thanks for picking up on that, but the ribbon bar (of which I'm no fan) is a bit more than a change of a menu bar with changing icons. There are interactions that can be made right on the ribbon bar that make it a bit more than just a menu bar + tool bar.
Fundamentally, I agree that any tech savvy user will see it as just a re-worked menu and/or more useful tool bar, but it is a tremendous functional change in the way the programs operate beyond the main input window (e.g., the Word document). It's 80% eye-candy changes, 20% rearrangement, and 90% more annoying.
More to the point...it's what everyone (not just parents) notices is different in the newer versions of Office, since it's so present, and there's not an easy way to opt out of it.
A stupid ribbon bar.
Agreed. I remember as a kid wanting all kinds of stuff that I didn't get because my parents said "no." Sure, I could have gotten (at least some of) it anyway, but there would have been serious consequences for going behind their backs.
Owning and/or having mates that owned almost all of the consoles of the era, I was keenly aware of the romance novel approach to cover art. I longed for the day when graphics in the game would match or exceed the package (and sometimes still do). I used to get by, however, by falling back on the imagination built as a younger child playing with Legos or other similar representations of near-real life. The blocky representations of characters and objects were abstract due to technical limitations, but by applying imagination to fill in the gaps, the sprites and geometric shapes would flush out in my head to be what was needed to make the experience enjoyable.
No LSD required.
I'll start using Go as soon as Google makes a browser-based development environment for it, ala Google Documents meets Bespin, and it makes something I can then deploy to servers other than the one running the development environment...
Read that as "non-3G" and "non-Android" (not an Android device without 3G...for that probably the only one really out there yet is the Archos 7 --not recommending, just saying that you can buy them--more expensive than you want, too).
For an easy-to-get non-Android platform, the PSP does Skype and WiFi pretty good, and you can spin some Ratchet and Clank between calls... in about your price range.