Competitive advantage. Better to sell one phone that lasts forever, than no phone, because it failed to be seen as superior to a competing product. Besides phones are obsoleted every year or two anyway.
The Republicans were enticed into bed with a pretty little tea bagging wench... Time and again Obama and professional Republican politicians have started to work out the meaningful compromises that make a democracy work, only to have that dumbass wench throw a hissy fit...
So let me get this straight. Are you actually complaining that politicians are paying attention to their constituents? That's more than we're getting from the President and the "professional politicians" and the NSA and FISA spooks. Instead of listening they try to distract us with Syria, and even then they won't listen when we say "no" to war. Professionals like Feinstein and Boener want to justify and continue the spying and warmongering. The president and the professionals aren't making democracy work, they are subverting it in the same way an ass subverts its rider's will when it takes the bit in its teeth.
Tea partiers are voters. In 2010, more people (28%) agreed with and supported the tea party than opposed it (26%). The tea party is not the Republican party, the tea party is the man in the street, and the Republicans chose to listen to them. Good, I say, that's their job. The President and the democrats should listen too, instead of being narrowly focused on their own agenda, and deliberately fostering partisanship. Hey, here's a novel idea: what if politicians listened to EVERYONE instead of just their own little artificial fanclub? Oh wait, they're too professional to do anything other than take bribes.
What do you believe in? Do you believe in it enough to get off your butt and make your voice heard when your elected representatives ignore you and do the opposite? The tea party did, and they got noticed.
The Republicans need to toss the bimbo out. Let her make her own party.
Are you a Republican then? Because I think the Republicans alone get to decide what the Republicans stand for.
The current gnome and kde offerings are so awful I find myself preferring to use my Android phone, despite the tiny screen, awful keyboard, and limited functionality. It's just plain easier to use. And more intuitive. Or I use my win 7 laptop... but once IT switches that to Win 8 I'm going to be very very unhappy.
Still trying to find a Linux environment I like. I got by for some years on Fedora 10 and Windows XP, but those have pretty much reached the end of their life. The Mint stuff seems promising; but MATE and XFCE had some bugs, and lacked configurability. I think with maturity these may improve. It's sad when Windows is more configurable and less buggy than Linux. But right now it is true. I lost track of how many Linux distros I've installed in the last year.
I'm a professional Linux developer, not a hater, and I've been using it for 20 years. I can write code, but I don't want to have to. I don't want to have to be a beardy sysadmin just to get a system running and keep it up. I hacked it for years and you know what? I've decided I have better things to do with my sparse free time. I want something that just works, out of the box, without a silly learning curve, without having to use google as a user manual just to do basic stuff that takes one or two clicks on Windows. If I hack I want to do it for fun, not necessity.
Maybe because that would be illegal, and he would be engaging in exactly the sort of abuse he is warning about? And while it's true they'll find a dozen ways to send him to prison for life, there's no reason to hand them additional ammunition on a golden platter. It would suck to get pardoned for your whistleblowing, but still go to prison for computer hacking. And the hacking angle might detract from his credibility - if Anonymous can do that, how does it prove anything about the government?
Employer insists on using Windows 7 as a corporate standard, and all email and documents are in Office. And yes Excel is a killer app at work.
But at work I do all my development on Linux, and our products are Linux-based. Although our Linux build server and Git repos run on Windows.
So I really don't have much choice about using both.
At home, my wife insists on running Windows 8 for her Facebook and Excel. She hates it so I think I'm going to try to install Windows 7 on her UEFI machine, but she still prefers it to Linux. But I also run a couple of Linux machines, mainly for gaming and development. My kids love it, though really they flip back and forth between Linux and Windows... whatever does what they feel like at the moment.
For me? Windows covers my needs most of the time. Web browsing is more pleasant on Windows, it somehow feels tighter and more polished. I do a lot of hobby work in Excel and Word because, although they can be annoying and obtuse, they are rock solid and get the job done. Linux productivity apps are often sluggish, prone to crashes, lacking polish, and have weird user interface choices. For development, Windows sucks and I use Linux. Or cygwin if I absolutely must hack something together on Windows.
I used to prefer Linux generally. Now I prefer Windows 7, because the latest iterations of KDE and Gnome suck balls. Windows is lame and inefficient, but Linux desktops are far more so. KDE 3 was awesome. Gnome 2 was lame but usable. Now it seems there is nothing that works well. I tried XFCE but found things missing or hard to configure; I tried the various MATE/Cinnamon things, but they sometimes melded in Gnome 3 stupid-isms, or lacked configurability, and I never can keep track of which is which and it gets confusing. Unity is hideously ugly. There is just no consistency, nothing that feels familiar enough to be productive.
All I want is something that works and feels like Windows XP or Windows 7, and is at least as configurable as Windows. Why is that so hard? KDE 3 did it, and did it better than Windows... but now nobody is doing it.
When work forces me to Windows 8, I will probably prefer Linux again for desktop stuff. Frankly it's downright pathetic that Linux has now become my last choice, and it took Windows 8 to force me to use it.
Oddly these days I find myself using my Android phone more and more. Both Windows 8 and the latest Linux desktops have driven me away, and portability is very convenient. Learning Android development is on my to-do list. Phones and tablets just suck for a lot of stuff though, and I end up being forced back to the desktop by the extremely limited screen size and clunky touchscreen interaction. (It's not an Android thing; touchscreens are simply not good for productivity or precision work.)
Just wait till Google upgrades their van and offers X-ray Street View! The pr0n industry won't like it when you can just get a free live Google feed from your hot neighbors' house. Though sadly, none of my neighbors are hot.
No problem for the watchdogs. They'll figure out how to do this with cellular signals and keep and eye on the whole city. Though a cave might offer useful shielding... hmm...
Maybe if Microsoft had less money, they wouldn't spend it frivolously redesigning the Windows GUI every release.
MS: You are are always boasting about how innovative you are... so keep the teams doing the innovation, and slim down the GUI-redesign efforts. GUI redesign is not innovation, it is throwing money at a solved problem, hoping that the novelty value will boost sales. Clue-bat: tablets are WAY more novel than anything you're going to put in a Windows GUI. So you've already lost that. You've lost half the market, can you really afford to make every other release a throwaway experiment? You already have a GUI that is rock solid, functional, and has broad acceptance: Windows 7. So stop throwing money at novelty, make every release a home run. Windows' value is in business productivity, and in home productivity/gaming. Stick to what you already have that works, slim down the GUI design team, and focus your money and brainpower on being the best, most boring, most powerful productivity and gaming environment you can. Focus on quality instead of pixels. When I boot windows the last thing I want is a surprise.
Tablets cannot kill windows, but Microsoft can fumble the gun and shoot itself in the head. There is no way that tablets can replace desktop productivity, not for years to come. But competition could, instead of killing Microsoft, be one of the best things that ever happened to the company.. by forcing it to slim down, focus on its strengths, be leaner and stronger and healthier and more agile.
Agreed that is the biggest problem. Really the whole page-orientation is a problem. I want to be able to flow text continuously, at a readable font size, and have it adapt to my screen size.
File bloat is a problem too. PDF seems to encourage publishers to create 30MB graphical extravaganzas that are sluggish and hard to use. It's horrible for reference books too, since you can't export the text in anything resembling a usable format. Tables and paragraphs get deformatted and mangled.
HTML, with all its warts and limitations, would be far superior to PDF.
But... but... things don't kill people, people kill people!
People program these things right? And don't we already have rules about what and how and when people can kill other people? I don't see the need for more rules. Maybe robots are a good thing: the programming in a captured robot is evidence that someone is obeying or breaking the rules of murder.
Me too. 1981 or 82, silver TRS-80 Color Computer, 16K extended. Couldn't afford software but I learned to type by entering listings from Rainbow and Hot CoCo. Upgraded to 64K memory and added composite video output myself, my first hardware hacks, so I could use a "real" monochrome monitor instead of a TV. Bought Leventhal's 6809 book and did a little machine language using DATA and POKE statements, but didn't get too far with that. Always wanted to get into OS9 and get a disk drive and stuff... or even better get one of the 68000-based machines... but it was just an expensive pipe dream.
After the CoCo I went to college, bought a PC clone and taught myself Turbo Pascal with only 256K and a 1.2MB floppy drive. I remember my first 20MB hard drive, I was so stoked, and it filled up so fast! I moved on to Turbo C++ and the rest is history. Learned to make GUIs and TSRs and text editors and stuff from do-it-yourself books.
My first real break was in 1989, helping my uncle computerize his business. I talked him into a 386 Dell PC with Unix System V, and tasked myself with writing accounting software for it. I managed to write a mailing list app for his customers with C, curses and db_FILE, but he wisely went with commercial accounting software. He loved Unix and remained a devotee for the rest of his life. If he was still alive he'd probably be a Linux geek now. And having tasted Unix for real, and having bought Tanenbaum's books, I desperately wanted to get my hands on MINIX so I could run it on my 286.
By 1993, having finally realized I wasn't up to the task of writing business software, I went back to college to get a proper education and a degree.
Kids already play in kitchens and garages and bathrooms filled with dangerous things. They have access to forks and wall outlets. They can eat poop in the backyard. They can go on the internet and get in all sorts of trouble. Then there is the whole world of neighborhoods, streets filled with cars, mischievous neighbor kids...
And as far as weapons? When I was a kid we made our own weapons: we sharpened sticks to make spears, hardened the tips in the fire, and then threw them at each other. We made bows and shot arrows at each other, and sometimes got hold of real bows and arrows. These can all be deadly or at least injurious, and they are incredibly easy to make.
Good parents deal with all these things and move on. When they are little you keep things out of reach. When they are old enough you educate them. Most of us survive to adulthood, and those that don't... its probably for a good reason. Some kids will drink poison. Some kids will steal your car keys and go joyriding. Some kids will slice their own wrists with kitchen knives. Danger is all around us, all the time, within easy reach to those sufficiently motivated toward self destruction, and/or stupid.
I guarantee you that if I have a 3d printer in the house, and I'm paying for the materials, and I control access to the internet, I'm damn well going to know who's using it and for what. It took 48 hours to "print" this thing! (Any parent that doesn't notice this or have some clue what their kids are up to has bigger problems than mere access to 3d printers.) And by the time they're old enough and clever enough to get around me, then they're basically adults and hopefully by then I've managed to get some sense into their heads.
me: Oh that's easy, I figure about two days of coding, plus a few days of testing. So a week if everything goes right, maybe two weeks if I run into a snag.
my manager: So, it'll really take four weeks, especially with meetings and interruptions. But since you also have X, Y, and Z to work on, let's call it 8 weeks. I'll add 3 weeks, that will give me negotiating room in the planning meeting. Tell you what, I'll call it 12 weeks, with a stretch goal of 10 weeks to hit the June release, otherwise it will go into the August release. If we go past June you'll be covering vacations for others anyway. But we better not miss the August release, that's a hard commit!
You might want to call the police and formally complain. They won't do anything, but it'll be on the record. If this guy is involved in criminal activity in the neighborhood, and there is an investigation, and you need to use the "I've been hacked" defense, there will be at least one piece of evidence in your favor.
FBI: criminal activity has been traced to your IP.
You: Its about time someone did something. I filed a complain six months ago about someone hacking my network...
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Competitive advantage. Better to sell one phone that lasts forever, than no phone, because it failed to be seen as superior to a competing product. Besides phones are obsoleted every year or two anyway.
I need a concave phone then, like a section of a sphere, since my jeans are tightly conformed to my ass-cheeks.
if they are "washboard" they are not flat.
The Republicans were enticed into bed with a pretty little tea bagging wench ... Time and again Obama and professional Republican politicians have started to work out the meaningful compromises that make a democracy work, only to have that dumbass wench throw a hissy fit...
So let me get this straight. Are you actually complaining that politicians are paying attention to their constituents? That's more than we're getting from the President and the "professional politicians" and the NSA and FISA spooks. Instead of listening they try to distract us with Syria, and even then they won't listen when we say "no" to war. Professionals like Feinstein and Boener want to justify and continue the spying and warmongering. The president and the professionals aren't making democracy work, they are subverting it in the same way an ass subverts its rider's will when it takes the bit in its teeth.
Tea partiers are voters. In 2010, more people (28%) agreed with and supported the tea party than opposed it (26%). The tea party is not the Republican party, the tea party is the man in the street, and the Republicans chose to listen to them. Good, I say, that's their job. The President and the democrats should listen too, instead of being narrowly focused on their own agenda, and deliberately fostering partisanship. Hey, here's a novel idea: what if politicians listened to EVERYONE instead of just their own little artificial fanclub? Oh wait, they're too professional to do anything other than take bribes.
What do you believe in? Do you believe in it enough to get off your butt and make your voice heard when your elected representatives ignore you and do the opposite? The tea party did, and they got noticed.
The Republicans need to toss the bimbo out. Let her make her own party.
Are you a Republican then? Because I think the Republicans alone get to decide what the Republicans stand for.
It's as if they are saying that climate change (if true) would be a bad thing...
How long before your car spies on you and auto-reports traffic violations to the local authority?
I see, so I's are female and E's are male.
The current gnome and kde offerings are so awful I find myself preferring to use my Android phone, despite the tiny screen, awful keyboard, and limited functionality. It's just plain easier to use. And more intuitive. Or I use my win 7 laptop... but once IT switches that to Win 8 I'm going to be very very unhappy.
Still trying to find a Linux environment I like. I got by for some years on Fedora 10 and Windows XP, but those have pretty much reached the end of their life. The Mint stuff seems promising; but MATE and XFCE had some bugs, and lacked configurability. I think with maturity these may improve. It's sad when Windows is more configurable and less buggy than Linux. But right now it is true. I lost track of how many Linux distros I've installed in the last year.
I'm a professional Linux developer, not a hater, and I've been using it for 20 years. I can write code, but I don't want to have to. I don't want to have to be a beardy sysadmin just to get a system running and keep it up. I hacked it for years and you know what? I've decided I have better things to do with my sparse free time. I want something that just works, out of the box, without a silly learning curve, without having to use google as a user manual just to do basic stuff that takes one or two clicks on Windows. If I hack I want to do it for fun, not necessity.
Maybe because that would be illegal, and he would be engaging in exactly the sort of abuse he is warning about? And while it's true they'll find a dozen ways to send him to prison for life, there's no reason to hand them additional ammunition on a golden platter. It would suck to get pardoned for your whistleblowing, but still go to prison for computer hacking. And the hacking angle might detract from his credibility - if Anonymous can do that, how does it prove anything about the government?
Employer insists on using Windows 7 as a corporate standard, and all email and documents are in Office. And yes Excel is a killer app at work. But at work I do all my development on Linux, and our products are Linux-based. Although our Linux build server and Git repos run on Windows. So I really don't have much choice about using both.
At home, my wife insists on running Windows 8 for her Facebook and Excel. She hates it so I think I'm going to try to install Windows 7 on her UEFI machine, but she still prefers it to Linux. But I also run a couple of Linux machines, mainly for gaming and development. My kids love it, though really they flip back and forth between Linux and Windows... whatever does what they feel like at the moment.
For me? Windows covers my needs most of the time. Web browsing is more pleasant on Windows, it somehow feels tighter and more polished. I do a lot of hobby work in Excel and Word because, although they can be annoying and obtuse, they are rock solid and get the job done. Linux productivity apps are often sluggish, prone to crashes, lacking polish, and have weird user interface choices. For development, Windows sucks and I use Linux. Or cygwin if I absolutely must hack something together on Windows.
I used to prefer Linux generally. Now I prefer Windows 7, because the latest iterations of KDE and Gnome suck balls. Windows is lame and inefficient, but Linux desktops are far more so. KDE 3 was awesome. Gnome 2 was lame but usable. Now it seems there is nothing that works well. I tried XFCE but found things missing or hard to configure; I tried the various MATE/Cinnamon things, but they sometimes melded in Gnome 3 stupid-isms, or lacked configurability, and I never can keep track of which is which and it gets confusing. Unity is hideously ugly. There is just no consistency, nothing that feels familiar enough to be productive.
All I want is something that works and feels like Windows XP or Windows 7, and is at least as configurable as Windows. Why is that so hard? KDE 3 did it, and did it better than Windows... but now nobody is doing it.
When work forces me to Windows 8, I will probably prefer Linux again for desktop stuff. Frankly it's downright pathetic that Linux has now become my last choice, and it took Windows 8 to force me to use it.
Oddly these days I find myself using my Android phone more and more. Both Windows 8 and the latest Linux desktops have driven me away, and portability is very convenient. Learning Android development is on my to-do list. Phones and tablets just suck for a lot of stuff though, and I end up being forced back to the desktop by the extremely limited screen size and clunky touchscreen interaction. (It's not an Android thing; touchscreens are simply not good for productivity or precision work.)
Just wait till Google upgrades their van and offers X-ray Street View! The pr0n industry won't like it when you can just get a free live Google feed from your hot neighbors' house. Though sadly, none of my neighbors are hot.
No problem for the watchdogs. They'll figure out how to do this with cellular signals and keep and eye on the whole city. Though a cave might offer useful shielding... hmm...
Maybe if Microsoft had less money, they wouldn't spend it frivolously redesigning the Windows GUI every release.
MS: You are are always boasting about how innovative you are... so keep the teams doing the innovation, and slim down the GUI-redesign efforts. GUI redesign is not innovation, it is throwing money at a solved problem, hoping that the novelty value will boost sales. Clue-bat: tablets are WAY more novel than anything you're going to put in a Windows GUI. So you've already lost that. You've lost half the market, can you really afford to make every other release a throwaway experiment? You already have a GUI that is rock solid, functional, and has broad acceptance: Windows 7. So stop throwing money at novelty, make every release a home run. Windows' value is in business productivity, and in home productivity/gaming. Stick to what you already have that works, slim down the GUI design team, and focus your money and brainpower on being the best, most boring, most powerful productivity and gaming environment you can. Focus on quality instead of pixels. When I boot windows the last thing I want is a surprise.
Tablets cannot kill windows, but Microsoft can fumble the gun and shoot itself in the head. There is no way that tablets can replace desktop productivity, not for years to come. But competition could, instead of killing Microsoft, be one of the best things that ever happened to the company.. by forcing it to slim down, focus on its strengths, be leaner and stronger and healthier and more agile.
Agreed that is the biggest problem. Really the whole page-orientation is a problem. I want to be able to flow text continuously, at a readable font size, and have it adapt to my screen size.
File bloat is a problem too. PDF seems to encourage publishers to create 30MB graphical extravaganzas that are sluggish and hard to use. It's horrible for reference books too, since you can't export the text in anything resembling a usable format. Tables and paragraphs get deformatted and mangled.
HTML, with all its warts and limitations, would be far superior to PDF.
What an awful format for ebooks.
But... but... things don't kill people, people kill people!
People program these things right? And don't we already have rules about what and how and when people can kill other people? I don't see the need for more rules. Maybe robots are a good thing: the programming in a captured robot is evidence that someone is obeying or breaking the rules of murder.
Me too. 1981 or 82, silver TRS-80 Color Computer, 16K extended. Couldn't afford software but I learned to type by entering listings from Rainbow and Hot CoCo. Upgraded to 64K memory and added composite video output myself, my first hardware hacks, so I could use a "real" monochrome monitor instead of a TV. Bought Leventhal's 6809 book and did a little machine language using DATA and POKE statements, but didn't get too far with that. Always wanted to get into OS9 and get a disk drive and stuff... or even better get one of the 68000-based machines... but it was just an expensive pipe dream.
After the CoCo I went to college, bought a PC clone and taught myself Turbo Pascal with only 256K and a 1.2MB floppy drive. I remember my first 20MB hard drive, I was so stoked, and it filled up so fast! I moved on to Turbo C++ and the rest is history. Learned to make GUIs and TSRs and text editors and stuff from do-it-yourself books.
My first real break was in 1989, helping my uncle computerize his business. I talked him into a 386 Dell PC with Unix System V, and tasked myself with writing accounting software for it. I managed to write a mailing list app for his customers with C, curses and db_FILE, but he wisely went with commercial accounting software. He loved Unix and remained a devotee for the rest of his life. If he was still alive he'd probably be a Linux geek now. And having tasted Unix for real, and having bought Tanenbaum's books, I desperately wanted to get my hands on MINIX so I could run it on my 286.
By 1993, having finally realized I wasn't up to the task of writing business software, I went back to college to get a proper education and a degree.
Kids already play in kitchens and garages and bathrooms filled with dangerous things. They have access to forks and wall outlets. They can eat poop in the backyard. They can go on the internet and get in all sorts of trouble. Then there is the whole world of neighborhoods, streets filled with cars, mischievous neighbor kids...
And as far as weapons? When I was a kid we made our own weapons: we sharpened sticks to make spears, hardened the tips in the fire, and then threw them at each other. We made bows and shot arrows at each other, and sometimes got hold of real bows and arrows. These can all be deadly or at least injurious, and they are incredibly easy to make.
Good parents deal with all these things and move on. When they are little you keep things out of reach. When they are old enough you educate them. Most of us survive to adulthood, and those that don't... its probably for a good reason. Some kids will drink poison. Some kids will steal your car keys and go joyriding. Some kids will slice their own wrists with kitchen knives. Danger is all around us, all the time, within easy reach to those sufficiently motivated toward self destruction, and/or stupid.
I guarantee you that if I have a 3d printer in the house, and I'm paying for the materials, and I control access to the internet, I'm damn well going to know who's using it and for what. It took 48 hours to "print" this thing! (Any parent that doesn't notice this or have some clue what their kids are up to has bigger problems than mere access to 3d printers.) And by the time they're old enough and clever enough to get around me, then they're basically adults and hopefully by then I've managed to get some sense into their heads.
Besides the kids still need to obtain bullets..
me: Oh that's easy, I figure about two days of coding, plus a few days of testing. So a week if everything goes right, maybe two weeks if I run into a snag.
my manager: So, it'll really take four weeks, especially with meetings and interruptions. But since you also have X, Y, and Z to work on, let's call it 8 weeks. I'll add 3 weeks, that will give me negotiating room in the planning meeting. Tell you what, I'll call it 12 weeks, with a stretch goal of 10 weeks to hit the June release, otherwise it will go into the August release. If we go past June you'll be covering vacations for others anyway. But we better not miss the August release, that's a hard commit!
me: Sure I can commit to that.
Wait, you released a Digital Novel about my Wang?
No, its not a digital novel. Its a novel about joining rank digits to your wang.
Yes, and Apple, you should stop fighting with Motorola/Google, just because they are making a great product that is just like yours.
Oh, that's just great. Now I'll have to manually set the credentials to admin / 1234, like God intended them to be.
Take an arbitrary list, and output a sorted liste with no duplicate entries
In that case, sh wins this readability pissing contest:
cat list | sort | uniq
fail
You might want to call the police and formally complain. They won't do anything, but it'll be on the record. If this guy is involved in criminal activity in the neighborhood, and there is an investigation, and you need to use the "I've been hacked" defense, there will be at least one piece of evidence in your favor.
FBI: criminal activity has been traced to your IP.
You: Its about time someone did something. I filed a complain six months ago about someone hacking my network...