I need it to stop hanging for 10-20 seconds 2-3 minutes after I log into my workstation in the morning. For years I've put up with this.
I need to stop deleting lock files and parentlock files when it crashes. What year is this again?
I'd like it to run a little snappier.
I need it to understand the system "no proxy for" setting and actually use it properly.
When I lose features I use, it makes me mad. Gnome 3 has this problem.
It is hard to customize my colors the way I like.
My computer temperature no longer sits there on my title bar.
My CPU monitor is no longer there on my title bar.
Gnome keeps popping up title bars over my movie playing.
Sadly, Unity is even more frustrating and XFCE is still very rudimentary.
Agreed - my experience with nVidia drivers (the proprietary ones) has been pretty much flawless for over a decade now. This has been through both work and home systems - we're talking many many machines here.
ATI/AMD and Intel drivers... less so.
I don't have a problem with nVidia guarding a few of their secrets if the drivers work. And I go out of my way to buy nVidia graphics cards in everything I buy despite being a short drive from the ATI headquarters.
I have used Blackberry, and no, it doesn't even rate being called a smartphone. The constant operating system upgrades always messed up your settings. The little keyboard was poor and always inserted double characters. The bizarre network setup routed everything through RIM.
The Blackberry was a useful device that does one particular thing well at a particular point in history. But even a cheap Android phone is a better device. Time for RIM to go.
Spending $500 to $900 is more than enough for a item which is typically not going to last more than four years, no matter how well it was made. Even a cheap laptop is more than powerful enough to stream hi-def TV, do any office task you can imagine, surf the internet. Spending $1500 to $2000 is just throwing your money away on something that is going to break.
Sadly, manufacturers may change chipsets even on identical model numbers. The wifi card, for example, may be different on the same model. The graphics card used to be changed sometimes. Even the detailed model number is often meaningless.
We're assuming these are men. Let me just say that the women worth having like porn and video games just as much as guys. And the other kind aren't worth your time.
There are small research reactors all over the place. Your local university might have one. Lots of developing countries have them. They are generally conservatively designed so that overpower is physically impossible, using something like the doppler effect on reactivity to place an upper limit on power. Big deal.
I've heard good things about developing for iOS too. But developing for iOS requires me to invest cash in a development platform: a Mac portable or desktop. I've been told that dealing with the iOS App store is a pain if you are a corporate customer.
Really - Android was simple. Ubuntu + Eclipse is free. And you could buy a stack of books a foot high if you were having trouble. There really are few problems with device incompatibility - mostly developers don't know how to write for different screen sizes (a problem Apple doesn't have yet).
RIM seems to be trying harder now, but they needed to be trying harder 5 years ago. No company recovers from where they are (except Apple, and that was only because Microsoft helped them).
The Blackberry Ecosystem is such an enormous pain to develop for. Just trying to port over an existing Android app is one roadblock after another: the porting / re-signing tools were flaky. You had to use shitty MS Windows and follow weird badly written signing instructions. Developing natively is probably even worse - I hardly got anywhere with that. And this is all before you get to the market posting requirements.
In comparison, the Android development environment "just works". Toss Eclipse on Ubuntu, do a couple add-ins, and you are up and running in an hour or two. Very very low cost to develop an application. Clear instructions on what you need to do to get on the market. Amazon was pretty simple as well.
The banks and government business is the only thing keeping RIM afloat, and that can last a little while, but its a bad business model. RIM deserves to die.
Have that resume ready, RIM employees. You are going to need it soon.
I don't think it has necessarily anything to do with the Conservatives. It started long before. In my own area of the government (not federal), every question is regarded as a potential landmine. Managers are fundamentally taught - above all else - don't take risks and don't make mistakes. This attitude largely comes out of a tradition of unionism in the government ranks - either job protection for lower level workers or grievance avoidance for managers. As a result we manage our government on minutia - literally making headings over whether such-and-such consultant expensed a muffin. So when a potentially damaging question comes in formally, the first reaction is defensive.
Sadly, we as Canadians have largely created out own bad government. Canadians deserve the mediocrity they have created.
A lot of artists under the Canadian system never see royalties - not that there is much from CBC play anyway. Middlemen tend to eat the royalties leaving artists with the crumbs. Nothing new - musicians have been screwed by business for decades, probably going on a century now.
I *love* the idea of CBC music - especially as lots of independent music is on there. Very few people under a certain age listen to the horrible big-media radio stations that are broadcast. And I love the idea that Canadian artists are featured - the quality of musicians in Canada is generally a lot higher than the U.S.
HOWEVER, the CBC Music site is an implementation mess. Sure they have a dedicated iPhone app, but iPhone is down in 3rd place popularity in Canada. Just try to use the thing on Android and watch your mobile device choke on the layers and layers of Flash badness. The site is horrible. But it should fail for the right reasons, not just because big media wants to kill it and force me to listen to Nickelback instead.
I have to agree. Having learned my craft during those early years, I recall the times well. Jack was hated by Commodore dealers, hated by users... and I don't doubt hated by his own employees. The way I see it, he basically sucked all the money he could out of a successful company and reinvested very little to keep the success rolling. They were never able to move past their 6502-based designs (the Amiga design was purchased).
You are partly correct. First, uranium was very cheap and the reactor designs well researched. That being done long ago in the 1950s and 60s, companies and governments had little incentive to do further research.
The boiling water reactor is a cheap design which is simple to build and maximizes profit. It has certain scary properties, such as radioactivity transport, enriched fuel, and a high negative void coefficient. This latter property may not be obvious, but a sudden increase feedwater cools the reactor, collapses steam voids, and can drive the reactor towards a prompt critical condition.
If we were concerned about safety, we'd all build something like a CANDU heavy water design, which costs more but has almost walk-away safety. As a friend commented "it is like a reactor designed by a paranoid person". By the way, this can burn thorium as well... research is being done by India. Sadly, this wouldn't help GE, Westinghouse or Areva's profits.
So, Japan built cheap unsafe plants and should have known better. Not feeling too sorry for them.
Have you ever been near a wind turbine? Obviously not. Try post something you know about next time.
Wind turbines are very large and quite loud. The tips of the blades are moving at a very high speed and make quite a bit of noise. I walk by one daily. You obviously don't.
The Ontario wind turbine FIT program was conceived as a combination manufacturing incentive and rural subsidy program. It failed on both counts... it seems that rural residents really don't want their pastoral farmland to be covered with ugly wind turbines or useless solar panels (which although they can move, typically aren't even pointing towards the sun).
Mostly, Ontario residents don't really like paying 4x to 8x the regular price of power while the province's base electrical system is allowed to languish as funds are diverted to the government's pet project.
This is Europe where countries like Germany are shutting down your carbon free nuclear and letting your less fluent neighbors burn coal on your behalf? Hypocrites.
And if we are giving economic stimulus through government incentives, we want to give the stimulus to OUR idiots, not them. Besides, making solar panels is tremendously polluting when done wrong. At least a US factory would have some sort of environmental standards.
GPS systems are a huge distraction. Do you really need a GPS for day-to-day driving? For most people, how often do you really drive somewhere you don't know? No more than a few times a year. And do you really need a GPS in a city you don't know? No. READ THE ROAD SIGNS! CHECK A MAP BEFORE YOU LEAVE! Folks that drive with GPS seem like some of the worst drivers on the road. Why? They are watching the screen and not the road signs. They are missing the obvious visual clues to where they are going.
GPS laws might not get much traction. Most places it's illegal to drive while on the cell phone but people still do it. Somehow, you put that iPhone in a dash mount and people somehow thing it is now a legal "hands free" device. People need some common sense.
Ten years ago, applications might have mattered. However, OpenOffice (or whatever it is called today) is IMHO superior to Microsoft Office. Gimp and Inkscape are great drawing programs. Casual games tend to be cross-platform while hard-core games don't universally work on Windows anyway - this is what a game platform is for. The printer "just works" without any need for the user to fuss with drivers. The good tax programs are all web-based now. Sharepoint - seriously? - does anyone use that pile of crap? Most importantly, videos and music plays without a fuss. NFS networking actually works all the time, unlike tempermental CIFS. There are no virus worries. And Linux is so much simpler to use than Windows.
We have 5 computers in the house. My household was purged of Windows about 3 years ago and it was the best move I've made. Maintenance is low. No one is complaining, except the Windows users I know that want me to fix their computers.
Windows is still dominant because Microsoft uses its monopoly to force manufacturers to charge for it and preinstall it. End of story.
...screen resolution. There is virtually no difference coding between Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, or the (largely unavailable) Ice Cream Sandwich. The problem is it take a decent programmer to work around different screen resolutions and most studios really can't be bothered.
I have to take issue with the comment that 'you have to invest thousands in hardware' because that is just bullshit. Really you just need to buy a $150 low end Samsung phone and you should be able to do just fine. Your development suite is free and is natively supported on a free operating system (Ubuntu). Lets compare to Apple where the premium hardware will set you back thousands just to get started.
The studio probably did nothing to promote their products. I've certainly neither of their two titles. It really isn't obvious why they even need OpenGL for a 2D game so why are they moaning about changing texture shaders. And complaining about a 4GB download limit?
Seems like they never really made the effort. I am SO TIRED of Apple propaganda.
Sadly, I live in Canada and this entire discussion might as well be written in Swahili. I've heard there are things like legal online TV south of the border but not here. Admittedly we've gotten Netflix in the last year or so, but it is a stripped-down version. Best Buy doesn't care things like this here. Fortunately, unlike all these US-only services, The Pirate Bay doesn't care where you live.
Slashdot Mirror
The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Should win this contest by a mile.
I need it to stop hanging for 10-20 seconds 2-3 minutes after I log into my workstation in the morning. For years I've put up with this.
I need to stop deleting lock files and parentlock files when it crashes. What year is this again?
I'd like it to run a little snappier.
I need it to understand the system "no proxy for" setting and actually use it properly.
Sadly, Unity is even more frustrating and XFCE is still very rudimentary.
CAN I PLEASE HAVE KDE2 or GNOME2 back??
Markus Persson once again demonstrates why he's the coolest guy in the software industry.
Agreed - my experience with nVidia drivers (the proprietary ones) has been pretty much flawless for over a decade now. This has been through both work and home systems - we're talking many many machines here.
ATI/AMD and Intel drivers... less so.
I don't have a problem with nVidia guarding a few of their secrets if the drivers work. And I go out of my way to buy nVidia graphics cards in everything I buy despite being a short drive from the ATI headquarters.
I have used Blackberry, and no, it doesn't even rate being called a smartphone. The constant operating system upgrades always messed up your settings. The little keyboard was poor and always inserted double characters. The bizarre network setup routed everything through RIM.
The Blackberry was a useful device that does one particular thing well at a particular point in history. But even a cheap Android phone is a better device. Time for RIM to go.
Sadly, manufacturers may change chipsets even on identical model numbers. The wifi card, for example, may be different on the same model. The graphics card used to be changed sometimes. Even the detailed model number is often meaningless.
Lastly, don't buy Dell.
We're assuming these are men. Let me just say that the women worth having like porn and video games just as much as guys. And the other kind aren't worth your time.
There are small research reactors all over the place. Your local university might have one. Lots of developing countries have them. They are generally conservatively designed so that overpower is physically impossible, using something like the doppler effect on reactivity to place an upper limit on power. Big deal.
You might try posting articles from sources that aren't rabidly anti-nuclear.
I've heard good things about developing for iOS too. But developing for iOS requires me to invest cash in a development platform: a Mac portable or desktop. I've been told that dealing with the iOS App store is a pain if you are a corporate customer. Really - Android was simple. Ubuntu + Eclipse is free. And you could buy a stack of books a foot high if you were having trouble. There really are few problems with device incompatibility - mostly developers don't know how to write for different screen sizes (a problem Apple doesn't have yet). RIM seems to be trying harder now, but they needed to be trying harder 5 years ago. No company recovers from where they are (except Apple, and that was only because Microsoft helped them).
The Blackberry Ecosystem is such an enormous pain to develop for. Just trying to port over an existing Android app is one roadblock after another: the porting / re-signing tools were flaky. You had to use shitty MS Windows and follow weird badly written signing instructions. Developing natively is probably even worse - I hardly got anywhere with that. And this is all before you get to the market posting requirements.
In comparison, the Android development environment "just works". Toss Eclipse on Ubuntu, do a couple add-ins, and you are up and running in an hour or two. Very very low cost to develop an application. Clear instructions on what you need to do to get on the market. Amazon was pretty simple as well.
The banks and government business is the only thing keeping RIM afloat, and that can last a little while, but its a bad business model. RIM deserves to die.
Have that resume ready, RIM employees. You are going to need it soon.
I don't think it has necessarily anything to do with the Conservatives. It started long before. In my own area of the government (not federal), every question is regarded as a potential landmine. Managers are fundamentally taught - above all else - don't take risks and don't make mistakes. This attitude largely comes out of a tradition of unionism in the government ranks - either job protection for lower level workers or grievance avoidance for managers. As a result we manage our government on minutia - literally making headings over whether such-and-such consultant expensed a muffin. So when a potentially damaging question comes in formally, the first reaction is defensive.
Sadly, we as Canadians have largely created out own bad government. Canadians deserve the mediocrity they have created.
A lot of artists under the Canadian system never see royalties - not that there is much from CBC play anyway. Middlemen tend to eat the royalties leaving artists with the crumbs. Nothing new - musicians have been screwed by business for decades, probably going on a century now.
I *love* the idea of CBC music - especially as lots of independent music is on there. Very few people under a certain age listen to the horrible big-media radio stations that are broadcast. And I love the idea that Canadian artists are featured - the quality of musicians in Canada is generally a lot higher than the U.S.
HOWEVER, the CBC Music site is an implementation mess. Sure they have a dedicated iPhone app, but iPhone is down in 3rd place popularity in Canada. Just try to use the thing on Android and watch your mobile device choke on the layers and layers of Flash badness. The site is horrible. But it should fail for the right reasons, not just because big media wants to kill it and force me to listen to Nickelback instead.
I have to agree. Having learned my craft during those early years, I recall the times well. Jack was hated by Commodore dealers, hated by users... and I don't doubt hated by his own employees. The way I see it, he basically sucked all the money he could out of a successful company and reinvested very little to keep the success rolling. They were never able to move past their 6502-based designs (the Amiga design was purchased).
I have to recommend this is an outstanding read: http://www.amazon.com/On-Edge-Spectacular-Rise-Commodore/dp/0973864907
You are partly correct. First, uranium was very cheap and the reactor designs well researched. That being done long ago in the 1950s and 60s, companies and governments had little incentive to do further research.
The boiling water reactor is a cheap design which is simple to build and maximizes profit. It has certain scary properties, such as radioactivity transport, enriched fuel, and a high negative void coefficient. This latter property may not be obvious, but a sudden increase feedwater cools the reactor, collapses steam voids, and can drive the reactor towards a prompt critical condition.
If we were concerned about safety, we'd all build something like a CANDU heavy water design, which costs more but has almost walk-away safety. As a friend commented "it is like a reactor designed by a paranoid person". By the way, this can burn thorium as well... research is being done by India. Sadly, this wouldn't help GE, Westinghouse or Areva's profits.
So, Japan built cheap unsafe plants and should have known better. Not feeling too sorry for them.
Have you ever been near a wind turbine? Obviously not. Try post something you know about next time.
Wind turbines are very large and quite loud. The tips of the blades are moving at a very high speed and make quite a bit of noise. I walk by one daily. You obviously don't.
The Ontario wind turbine FIT program was conceived as a combination manufacturing incentive and rural subsidy program. It failed on both counts... it seems that rural residents really don't want their pastoral farmland to be covered with ugly wind turbines or useless solar panels (which although they can move, typically aren't even pointing towards the sun).
Mostly, Ontario residents don't really like paying 4x to 8x the regular price of power while the province's base electrical system is allowed to languish as funds are diverted to the government's pet project.
This is Europe where countries like Germany are shutting down your carbon free nuclear and letting your less fluent neighbors burn coal on your behalf? Hypocrites.
Its a pretty cool app, too bad wind is a stupid way to make electricity.
And if we are giving economic stimulus through government incentives, we want to give the stimulus to OUR idiots, not them. Besides, making solar panels is tremendously polluting when done wrong. At least a US factory would have some sort of environmental standards.
GPS systems are a huge distraction. Do you really need a GPS for day-to-day driving? For most people, how often do you really drive somewhere you don't know? No more than a few times a year. And do you really need a GPS in a city you don't know? No. READ THE ROAD SIGNS! CHECK A MAP BEFORE YOU LEAVE! Folks that drive with GPS seem like some of the worst drivers on the road. Why? They are watching the screen and not the road signs. They are missing the obvious visual clues to where they are going.
GPS laws might not get much traction. Most places it's illegal to drive while on the cell phone but people still do it. Somehow, you put that iPhone in a dash mount and people somehow thing it is now a legal "hands free" device. People need some common sense.
Ten years ago, applications might have mattered. However, OpenOffice (or whatever it is called today) is IMHO superior to Microsoft Office. Gimp and Inkscape are great drawing programs. Casual games tend to be cross-platform while hard-core games don't universally work on Windows anyway - this is what a game platform is for. The printer "just works" without any need for the user to fuss with drivers. The good tax programs are all web-based now. Sharepoint - seriously? - does anyone use that pile of crap? Most importantly, videos and music plays without a fuss. NFS networking actually works all the time, unlike tempermental CIFS. There are no virus worries. And Linux is so much simpler to use than Windows.
We have 5 computers in the house. My household was purged of Windows about 3 years ago and it was the best move I've made. Maintenance is low. No one is complaining, except the Windows users I know that want me to fix their computers.
Windows is still dominant because Microsoft uses its monopoly to force manufacturers to charge for it and preinstall it. End of story.
...screen resolution. There is virtually no difference coding between Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, or the (largely unavailable) Ice Cream Sandwich. The problem is it take a decent programmer to work around different screen resolutions and most studios really can't be bothered.
I have to take issue with the comment that 'you have to invest thousands in hardware' because that is just bullshit. Really you just need to buy a $150 low end Samsung phone and you should be able to do just fine. Your development suite is free and is natively supported on a free operating system (Ubuntu). Lets compare to Apple where the premium hardware will set you back thousands just to get started.
The studio probably did nothing to promote their products. I've certainly neither of their two titles. It really isn't obvious why they even need OpenGL for a 2D game so why are they moaning about changing texture shaders. And complaining about a 4GB download limit?
Seems like they never really made the effort. I am SO TIRED of Apple propaganda.
It is about QUALITY not QUANTITY. Myspace is for advertising. Facebook is for idiots.
Sadly, I live in Canada and this entire discussion might as well be written in Swahili. I've heard there are things like legal online TV south of the border but not here. Admittedly we've gotten Netflix in the last year or so, but it is a stripped-down version. Best Buy doesn't care things like this here. Fortunately, unlike all these US-only services, The Pirate Bay doesn't care where you live.