That said, I would buy a x86-based Windows tablet for the ability to install Linux,
And you are absolutely not the market. We geeks are like the 0.01% of people who buy kit cars instead of regular cars. Nobody who isn't a total geek wants a Linux tablet - people don't buy tablets for the OS that runs them, but for the things they can do with them.
If the user and what he wants to do with your device isn't your #1 concern, you will utterly fail in the tablet market, because of the entrenched competition that does think that way. It works for MS in the desktop computer market, because there, they are the entrenched competition (and market leader). But you can't break into a market you don't own with the same business strategy that you use to defend your position in a market you do own.
How is the RT version any less of a tablet than an iPad?
How much do the marketing agencies pay for social media comment stuffing these days?
Talking about features in this discussion just proves the point. People don't buy features, they buy devices. If you don't understand that, you have a great career ahead of you in Microsoft, but nowhere else.;-)
Right there is the start of a uniquely American argument.
In a comment about the USSC that shouldn't be surprising. Still a funny reply, usually I'm the one reminding people on/. that a lot of readers are - like me - not USAians.:-)
We were talking about launching programs. I don't need pipes for that. I know what I can do in a shell, I do it all the time, every day. But I don't need a shell to launch a program, and Alfred is actually faster and has better completion than bash.
I launch most programs on my Mac via Alfred, by hitting ctrl+space and then typing the first few letters until Alfred has identified what I want. That's maybe 6 keys in total for most cases, and that's including the ctrl+space and the enter key to launch it. Or in other words: My application is already running long before anyone using a menu has found, much less launched it.
This has the potential to end Windows as the dominant gaming platform;
Two questions:
One, why do you think that? I don't see it as so obvious.
Two, is it really that much better? Valve is as much about locking you in and fucking you over as MS is. In the words of a comedian: "Are you trying to sell me shit in different flavours?"
Valve is infamous for its horrible customer support and its tendency to basically go *shrug* if you have an issue with Steam. If they extend that attitude to a living room appliance, this could reflect badly on Linux and kill any hopes of convincing the masses that it's a viable option.
Not only that, but there's also precedent that qualitative differences matter.
There are many cases where recording something is illegal even though my watching or listening it is perfectly legal, for example.
The officer following you around might be a similar case, and manual surveillance and database record keeping fall into entirely different legal categories.
They're still missing the point, so my bet is that it'll collect just as much dust as the old one.
What MS is selling is basically an ultrabook with a touchscreen, not a tablet. They're still not getting that a tablet is an entirely different device with different needs and usage cases.
MS has never been user-aware, always developer-focussed. I'm so happy it's finally biting them in the ass.
Of course a fingerprint sensor can be fooled. It doesn't take a video to prove that the sky is blue, you know?
What everyone misses is two important points. These are the days I'm glad I got out of the security industry because quite frankly, while lots of people are brilliant at the technology, most people are complete failures at the psychology of security.
First, a lot of people have no lock at all on their iPhones today. None. You can pick it up, slide to unlock and you're in. The fingerprint sensor will prevent the casual attacker, especially the one who doesn't want you noticing your phone is missing (people leave their phones on their tables when going to the bathroom, something that puzzles me but it happens).
Second, even an attacker dedicated and knowledgable enough to get your prints from somewhere and then build a fake finger will be slowed down enough to give you time for things like noticing your phone is missing, doing a remote wipe or changing your passwords.
Third, everyone is crying that fingerprints aren't good for "casual security" like your phone and should be reserved for serious stuff. You fools got that exactly backwards. Because fingerprints are so easily faked, never, ever use them for anything serious. But for your phone, it's perfect. It's easy to use, you can't forget it, and it's unique enough that you don't have to worry about everyone else also having 1-2-3-4 as their super-secret password.
Security is never about perfection, it is always about having the adequate security for your purpose and threat scenario. For 99% of people, having a fingerprint sensor is good enough and so easy to use that contrary to all the "good" security (that nobody enables), it will actually get used.
So for all I care, the real-world-stupid geniuses can continue theoretical discussions about theoretical security that nobody really uses, while the real-world normal people have just been given something that will jump their security level up from basically nothing to at least something. That's a massive improvement.
Why would anyone buy a locked-down box from a company that has the worst possible track record (the BBB gives them a straight F) when it comes to resolving issues with their customers? DRM is bad as it is, but combined with incompetent and slow customer support, it really is the nightmare we all have been talking about for a decade.
Or maybe there are a lot more closet masochists in our society than I ever thought.
The reason I'm not on Linkedin is that they're a sleazy business. I keep getting "invitations", many from people I don't know and who quite certainly don't know me. I keep getting them despite telling them several times that I don't want ANY mail from them EVER again.
They are, frankly, spammers.
And we all know that spammers are criminals and don't hesitate engaging in other criminal activities.
See, they are only thinking of you when they ask you for access to all your private data, because if they only knew you already have 7, they can stop trying to sell you more. It's for your benefit. Really...
Basically, if you want to train your superior, it takes diplomacy and a bit of cunning. When you leave the meeting with him having come up with a great idea, all of his own, that just happens to be the one you mentioned in passing at the beginning, you've mastered the art of boss-fu.:-)
Negative. MBAs are often the worst type of managers, because they know all the operational procedures, but they know very little about how to treat people as people, instead of resources. That said, there are always exceptions and some schools do in fact provide some excellent science-based education.
But if you think that MBAs in general know how to manage people, you've never been in the real world.
Unfortunately, management is a largely evidence-free space. Research on all your questions, and a thousand more, exists. 99% of managers don't seem to know anything about management nor people. Not in the way anyone else knows anything about their profession. That's largely because few people actually study management, most are something else by profession and were promoted to management positions, and if you're lucky they got two weeks of training.
Your case is typical. Managers don't know about how people work, so they try to manage them like any other resource. But, as the excellent little book "Peopleware" put it: "Adding manpower to a late project makes it later."
If you want to have a good job - leave. A company with that kind of management is unlikely to change.
If you can't or don't want to, buy your manager that book, or some other. Send it to his private address, anonymously. You don't want to embarass him. He most likely knows that he needs help, but he would never admit it.
There are very few novels that don't use some sort of alternate text (italics, bold, etc.), so that has to be noted in some way.
Much fewer than you think, that seems to be a curse of modern times. I could quote a friend of mine who works in the publishing industry and said something like "bold does not belong into a novel, EVER".
But yes, that and some titles and such are what a semantic markup language needs, and is why I said it needs some markers instead of saying plain text would do.
And, for that, HTML is a lot more tedious than a WYSIWYG word processor.
Frankly, 99% of the people using a word processor don't know how to use it. Everyone who submits a manuscript in Word format where he used individual formating instead of styles should be banned from writing anything again for five years (and life if he didn't spend that time learning how to use styles).
But it's not so much the fault of the authors as the tool. Those stupid crap WYSIWYG editors don't give you a visual indication of where your content is properly styled and where it's just crap you fixed with duct tape.
1. It is not a fact that human beings evolved from primordial goo. That would be an unsubstantiated assertion based on an extreme extrapolation of limited evidence of small-scale phenomena.
No, it isn't.
First, I agree that it isn't a fact, because we can only deduce it, not observe it directly. However, the other option is not, as you claim, that it's a crazy idea with little evidence.
Imagine, for a second, that gravity is not a fact. We do, however, have plenty of evidence that it exists and can deduce its existence from known facts in whatever depth and detail you require. So the alternative to "fact" is not "crazy idea", but the whole spectrum from "crazy idea" down to "almost fact, except for some semantic detail".
That mankind evolved the way the textbooks write is based on some of the most massive and tested evidence and theories in the field of science, partially because evolution has been attacked ever since Lamarck, Buffon, Darwin, etc. came up with the theory.
It is not fact, but contrary to what you write, it is the very best theory we have at this time, and not for lack of looking for other explanations.
HTML5 is great for text. Like, basically, any markup language. If you write a novel or something, you basically just need text with less than a dozen markers for where chapters start and such. Then you send it to your publisher and they'll do their part.
Now if you write something more interesting, then HTML5 isn't the solution, mostly because there aren't any good editors and readers/browsers still don't guarantee you a good result. For stuff that requires DTP, you are better off with PDF today, and probably for a while.
And if you do your own typesetting, and/or if you want a professional look instead of the amateur crap that most word processing software (and most of the cheap DTP programs) generate, nothing beats LaTeX and nothing will in the forseable future.
Actually, thinking about that I need to rephrase:
Yes, HTML5 is great if you're an amateru posting a blog who doesn't care how your shit looks to the reader, because all of the 5 people reading your blog couldn't spot the difference anyway.
If you want to publish a book, if you care about writing and reading at all, if you don't want to contribute to the downfall of civilization, for fucks sake, think about typesetting.
[...] most people are really, really conservative at heart. Not in the political sense, necessarily. As a species, we hate change. Things that naturally change unsettle us. That's why for 99% of human history, things simply were. Fixed and eternal. You know, gods and their laws. Morality. Even today, just the idea that morals and ethics is something that changes and evolves is revolting. That fucking underage kids was perfectly fine in some ancient societies is not a topic for a polite dinner conversation, and the first instinct I bet almost everyone who just read that had was something along the lines of "what was wrong with them?".
It really is this simple: If the world is in continuous change, then the very idea of an unchanging, eternal god, good, truth, etc. is in doubt.
Slashdot Mirror
So what you are saying is that the ecosystem that you participate in and thus prop up sucks?
I understand you may or may not have a choice in the matter, but you know what they say about being a part of either the problem or the solution, yes?
Pads are heavily used by travelers for these services over a huge clunky laptop and are a must have for any expensive tablet.
Finally someone who understands why tablets are not notebooks with a touch screen.
That said, I would buy a x86-based Windows tablet for the ability to install Linux,
And you are absolutely not the market. We geeks are like the 0.01% of people who buy kit cars instead of regular cars. Nobody who isn't a total geek wants a Linux tablet - people don't buy tablets for the OS that runs them, but for the things they can do with them.
If the user and what he wants to do with your device isn't your #1 concern, you will utterly fail in the tablet market, because of the entrenched competition that does think that way. It works for MS in the desktop computer market, because there, they are the entrenched competition (and market leader). But you can't break into a market you don't own with the same business strategy that you use to defend your position in a market you do own.
How is the RT version any less of a tablet than an iPad?
How much do the marketing agencies pay for social media comment stuffing these days?
Talking about features in this discussion just proves the point. People don't buy features, they buy devices. If you don't understand that, you have a great career ahead of you in Microsoft, but nowhere else. ;-)
Right there is the start of a uniquely American argument.
In a comment about the USSC that shouldn't be surprising. Still a funny reply, usually I'm the one reminding people on /. that a lot of readers are - like me - not USAians. :-)
You've still given up
Says who?
We were talking about launching programs. I don't need pipes for that. I know what I can do in a shell, I do it all the time, every day. But I don't need a shell to launch a program, and Alfred is actually faster and has better completion than bash.
Funny or not, it actually is a superior way.
I launch most programs on my Mac via Alfred, by hitting ctrl+space and then typing the first few letters until Alfred has identified what I want. That's maybe 6 keys in total for most cases, and that's including the ctrl+space and the enter key to launch it. Or in other words: My application is already running long before anyone using a menu has found, much less launched it.
This has the potential to end Windows as the dominant gaming platform;
Two questions:
One, why do you think that? I don't see it as so obvious.
Two, is it really that much better? Valve is as much about locking you in and fucking you over as MS is. In the words of a comedian: "Are you trying to sell me shit in different flavours?"
It could also have the opposite effect.
Valve is infamous for its horrible customer support and its tendency to basically go *shrug* if you have an issue with Steam. If they extend that attitude to a living room appliance, this could reflect badly on Linux and kill any hopes of convincing the masses that it's a viable option.
Not only that, but there's also precedent that qualitative differences matter.
There are many cases where recording something is illegal even though my watching or listening it is perfectly legal, for example.
The officer following you around might be a similar case, and manual surveillance and database record keeping fall into entirely different legal categories.
They're still missing the point, so my bet is that it'll collect just as much dust as the old one.
What MS is selling is basically an ultrabook with a touchscreen, not a tablet. They're still not getting that a tablet is an entirely different device with different needs and usage cases.
MS has never been user-aware, always developer-focussed. I'm so happy it's finally biting them in the ass.
Not a counterexample.
If you add expertise to a project that didn't have any that far, you're probably going to help it. But knowledge and manpower aren't the same things.
Of course a fingerprint sensor can be fooled. It doesn't take a video to prove that the sky is blue, you know?
What everyone misses is two important points. These are the days I'm glad I got out of the security industry because quite frankly, while lots of people are brilliant at the technology, most people are complete failures at the psychology of security.
First, a lot of people have no lock at all on their iPhones today. None. You can pick it up, slide to unlock and you're in. The fingerprint sensor will prevent the casual attacker, especially the one who doesn't want you noticing your phone is missing (people leave their phones on their tables when going to the bathroom, something that puzzles me but it happens).
Second, even an attacker dedicated and knowledgable enough to get your prints from somewhere and then build a fake finger will be slowed down enough to give you time for things like noticing your phone is missing, doing a remote wipe or changing your passwords.
Third, everyone is crying that fingerprints aren't good for "casual security" like your phone and should be reserved for serious stuff. You fools got that exactly backwards. Because fingerprints are so easily faked, never, ever use them for anything serious. But for your phone, it's perfect. It's easy to use, you can't forget it, and it's unique enough that you don't have to worry about everyone else also having 1-2-3-4 as their super-secret password.
Security is never about perfection, it is always about having the adequate security for your purpose and threat scenario. For 99% of people, having a fingerprint sensor is good enough and so easy to use that contrary to all the "good" security (that nobody enables), it will actually get used.
So for all I care, the real-world-stupid geniuses can continue theoretical discussions about theoretical security that nobody really uses, while the real-world normal people have just been given something that will jump their security level up from basically nothing to at least something. That's a massive improvement.
Why would anyone buy a locked-down box from a company that has the worst possible track record (the BBB gives them a straight F) when it comes to resolving issues with their customers? DRM is bad as it is, but combined with incompetent and slow customer support, it really is the nightmare we all have been talking about for a decade.
Or maybe there are a lot more closet masochists in our society than I ever thought.
The reason I'm not on Linkedin is that they're a sleazy business. I keep getting "invitations", many from people I don't know and who quite certainly don't know me. I keep getting them despite telling them several times that I don't want ANY mail from them EVER again.
They are, frankly, spammers.
And we all know that spammers are criminals and don't hesitate engaging in other criminal activities.
See, they are only thinking of you when they ask you for access to all your private data, because if they only knew you already have 7, they can stop trying to sell you more. It's for your benefit. Really...
Always, always follow the money.
Googles main business is selling ads. So who will profit from this?
Or that.
Basically, if you want to train your superior, it takes diplomacy and a bit of cunning. When you leave the meeting with him having come up with a great idea, all of his own, that just happens to be the one you mentioned in passing at the beginning, you've mastered the art of boss-fu. :-)
Negative. MBAs are often the worst type of managers, because they know all the operational procedures, but they know very little about how to treat people as people, instead of resources. That said, there are always exceptions and some schools do in fact provide some excellent science-based education.
But if you think that MBAs in general know how to manage people, you've never been in the real world.
You're right. I think they're quoting him. I read both of them, but Peopleware is easier to read and remember.
Unfortunately, management is a largely evidence-free space. Research on all your questions, and a thousand more, exists. 99% of managers don't seem to know anything about management nor people. Not in the way anyone else knows anything about their profession. That's largely because few people actually study management, most are something else by profession and were promoted to management positions, and if you're lucky they got two weeks of training.
Your case is typical. Managers don't know about how people work, so they try to manage them like any other resource. But, as the excellent little book "Peopleware" put it: "Adding manpower to a late project makes it later."
If you want to have a good job - leave. A company with that kind of management is unlikely to change.
If you can't or don't want to, buy your manager that book, or some other. Send it to his private address, anonymously. You don't want to embarass him. He most likely knows that he needs help, but he would never admit it.
There are very few novels that don't use some sort of alternate text (italics, bold, etc.), so that has to be noted in some way.
Much fewer than you think, that seems to be a curse of modern times. I could quote a friend of mine who works in the publishing industry and said something like "bold does not belong into a novel, EVER".
But yes, that and some titles and such are what a semantic markup language needs, and is why I said it needs some markers instead of saying plain text would do.
And, for that, HTML is a lot more tedious than a WYSIWYG word processor.
Frankly, 99% of the people using a word processor don't know how to use it. Everyone who submits a manuscript in Word format where he used individual formating instead of styles should be banned from writing anything again for five years (and life if he didn't spend that time learning how to use styles).
But it's not so much the fault of the authors as the tool. Those stupid crap WYSIWYG editors don't give you a visual indication of where your content is properly styled and where it's just crap you fixed with duct tape.
1. It is not a fact that human beings evolved from primordial goo. That would be an unsubstantiated assertion based on an extreme extrapolation of limited evidence of small-scale phenomena.
No, it isn't.
First, I agree that it isn't a fact, because we can only deduce it, not observe it directly. However, the other option is not, as you claim, that it's a crazy idea with little evidence.
Imagine, for a second, that gravity is not a fact. We do, however, have plenty of evidence that it exists and can deduce its existence from known facts in whatever depth and detail you require. So the alternative to "fact" is not "crazy idea", but the whole spectrum from "crazy idea" down to "almost fact, except for some semantic detail".
That mankind evolved the way the textbooks write is based on some of the most massive and tested evidence and theories in the field of science, partially because evolution has been attacked ever since Lamarck, Buffon, Darwin, etc. came up with the theory.
It is not fact, but contrary to what you write, it is the very best theory we have at this time, and not for lack of looking for other explanations.
HTML5 is great for text. Like, basically, any markup language. If you write a novel or something, you basically just need text with less than a dozen markers for where chapters start and such. Then you send it to your publisher and they'll do their part.
Now if you write something more interesting, then HTML5 isn't the solution, mostly because there aren't any good editors and readers/browsers still don't guarantee you a good result. For stuff that requires DTP, you are better off with PDF today, and probably for a while.
And if you do your own typesetting, and/or if you want a professional look instead of the amateur crap that most word processing software (and most of the cheap DTP programs) generate, nothing beats LaTeX and nothing will in the forseable future.
Actually, thinking about that I need to rephrase:
Yes, HTML5 is great if you're an amateru posting a blog who doesn't care how your shit looks to the reader, because all of the 5 people reading your blog couldn't spot the difference anyway.
If you want to publish a book, if you care about writing and reading at all, if you don't want to contribute to the downfall of civilization, for fucks sake, think about typesetting.
Here's a few starters:
http://www.thebookdesigner.com/2010/01/the-trouble-with-word-processors/
http://oestrem.com/thingstwice/2007/05/latex-vs-word-vs-writer/
http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/110133/visual-comparison-between-latex-and-word-output-hyphenation-typesetting-ligat
Now if only there were a WYSIWYG LaTeX editor for OS X that's as easy to use as Pages - I'd be using it all day.
The answer is simple: Fear of change.
As I posted a few days ago:
[...] most people are really, really conservative at heart. Not in the political sense, necessarily. As a species, we hate change. Things that naturally change unsettle us. That's why for 99% of human history, things simply were. Fixed and eternal. You know, gods and their laws. Morality. Even today, just the idea that morals and ethics is something that changes and evolves is revolting. That fucking underage kids was perfectly fine in some ancient societies is not a topic for a polite dinner conversation, and the first instinct I bet almost everyone who just read that had was something along the lines of "what was wrong with them?".
It really is this simple: If the world is in continuous change, then the very idea of an unchanging, eternal god, good, truth, etc. is in doubt.