Prove the deterrence exists, otherwise the equation is irrational: Based zero evidence, and on speculative bullshit instead.
Easy. Go join a denial of service with Anonymous right now. Having any second thoughts? I thought so.
Nope, I am not having second thoughts (assuming the DoS is one I'm entirely philosophically on board with, which admittedly is in the minority). That is because I---perhaps irrationally---refuse to allow fear to prevent me from doing things when I believe them to be the right thing to do. Otherwise, the only people able to affect the world will be those with conventional power. We need unconventional power to affect the world as non-wealthy, non-famous individuals, which means grouping up and generally is outlawed to some degree or another (as the quote I'm unsure is properly sourced to Emma Goldman goes, if voting has the power to change anything, it would be illegal). To choose not to do something that we consider the right course of action because we would be penalized for it is to abdicate what few avenues of power we have.
It's the one that's baked into the Nokia N9 (and sometimes I use the one baked into the N900). Hilariously, it's integrated into the OS at such a level that it acts like normal phone calls, and in that and other ways it's more seamless of an experience than on the platform Nokia now uses which Microsoft actually develops. Oh, the irony layered upon irony there . . .
We meet up every week at . . . hmm . . . wait, it's been months now since the last meeting . . . this might explain some of the overly silo'd development going on . . .
Are you sure "communication skills" means that you aren't socializing enough? Perhaps your emails are inadequate, you aren't keeping people informed, aren't discussing ideas with others or are not adequately explaining your ideas.
The fact that you only talk to people when you need some from them is a problem. What about brain storming? Design meetings? Code reviews?
Several times at my work, where I help with testing/QA (mostly I'm the IT guy, because apparently programmers suck at understanding and maintaining their computers and infrastructure---I guess they're more engineers than anything else, the "science" part of CompSci notwithstanding) I've had to pass on changes that one programmer is doing or projects they're working on to others who are overlapping or would benefit from some good ol' code reuse. There's really rather little communication between them outside of the bugtracker, and most of the time the cases they create for themselves are extremely terse, like
Title: Instance broken
Milestone: Next Possible
Comment: Will fix later.
So even in the one avenue of 'communication' that all of the programmers use, there's really nothing that anyone else can gleam (and you'd better believe they pay extremely little attention to cases not assigned to themselves). I've had multiple cases where programmers have "fixed" something they were annoyed with, and two of them talked about, but meanwhile a third was trying to fix a more legitimate bug and it was seriously aggravated by their fix. And then a tester noticed that "new" bug and it was created and assigned to a fourth programmer. Sigh.
Luckily my office is on the way to the break room, so it's easy for me to catch people and go "hey, are you working on that thing involving X? I hear Susan is working on Y which sounds to my lay ears like it might be related, maybe you two should compare notes." And honestly, sometimes I feel like that's the single most valuable job I do.
One of the nicest things about btrfs (or any copy-on-write filesystem, really) is the ease of snapshotting. Just add a step in your cron job where after the rsync is done, a snapshot is taken. Then if you never send corrupted data over rsync, great! You can just ignore those snapshots and it isn't any more hassle to manage. But if you do have issues, you can walk back through the snapshots and pull out uncorrupted data from before whatever wiped out your source did so.
You could adjust this for rotation, but rotation is for chumps who don't buy enough storage;) But no, more seriously, leveraging the filesystem itself for such versioning/rotation (the latter only if you really don't have the space) makes a lot more sense in this day and age.
Heh, that's actually a pretty good metaphor for it, "corporations terraforming or legal system", I like it. I mean, I hate that it's happening, but that's a great way of putting it.
Seems like some TCO talk is apropos here; the extra health issues with such fatty and generally low-quality foods as McDonalds may well offset the cost savings;)
More than likely the workers are all getting fatigued and small mistakes are starting.
It's well beyond time for the Japanese government to bring the Japanese military in to bring this under control. After that an international effort to assist Japan in any way required. Even considering the pride of the nation as a factor it's now becoming an international problem for any country that shares the pacific ocean.
This is well beyond TEPCO's ability and expertise, they are a utilities company. Furthermore it was their negligence through nonfeasance that got us into this mess in the first place. A criminal investigation should be conducted and the future of the company considered.
Replying to you because I accidentally moderated "Offtopic" instead of "Insightful", oops. Apropos of your comment, I'm really tired today and it's been a long day at work.
Well, with the exception of the big indoor mall water park, since the ultra-rich owners of the mall greased things to get the palm trees in without inspections . . . which meant that nobody checked for cockroaches. So the only cockroaches in all of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada are in the West Edmonton Mall waterpark.
Best part, by the time the owners finally admitted they needed to do something about them, it was too late, because you know what exterminators use to kill cockroaches? Yup, you guessed it, chlorine-based insecticides. So at this point after so many generations living around chlorinated water and then a few attempts at extermination these are basically unkillable cockroaches. With the exception that the winters here are cold enough that they've never gotten out of the mall.
In retrospect, thank god the LRT (ie. subway or "underground", basically, although it is mostly above ground) never ended up going to WEM.
To be fair, some of the behaviour that's been seen has been down to underlying bugs in the Xorg drivers that were never triggered under normal use but are hit by XMir. Others are down to implicit assumptions made in the drivers that XMir happens to violate. The problem is that there doesn't appear to have been enough room in the schedule to deal with these interactions, presumably because nobody accounted for the inevitable "This thing we thought would be easy turns out to be difficult" part of the project.
Unfortunately, I would have to say conclusively "no". We've already seen quite a few big names on our side tacitly admit that the NSA has pushed on them - Phil Zimmerman, PJ of Groklaw, even Linux Torvalds.
Leaving aside what I'll take as a typo of Linus as Linux, Linus has since stated it was a joke. PJ, meanwhile, was responding the climate of fear and the impossibility of anything being done online even having a hope of being truly private, so not any sort of deliberate pressure per se, just unable to live with How Things Are and choosing instead to retreat from them. I wish she hadn't, but that's her call.
I honestly don't even know who Phil Zimmerman is, so I'll just assume you're right on that one, although your track record isn't great;)
I think it's kindof balanced out. Sure, in theory someone could do more damage now, but in practice it takes a fair bit of know-how to do damage against anything that isn't extremely poorly set up (I'm looking at you, publicly-facing SQL servers). Meanwhile, back in the day a single guy with a box that could generate the right tones could potentially control all telephone routing for an entire coast.
Personal experience says Red Hat/CentOS and Fedora are the most widespread. I know a total of three Ubuntu users (one of which uses awesome instead of Unity), no Mint users, and a very large number of RH/FC users (through their workplace mostly). My friends (who do not share a work place with me) would report a similar statistic.
I have never met in person a Red Hat or Fedora user. Never. I have met a handful of Debian users, a single Gentoo user, and a ton of Ubuntu users (also a single Yellow Dog user years ago, but neither he nor it are around any longer as far as I know). I know several people who use Kubuntu . . . but that's entirely my own influence. If we went by my personal experience we'd conclude that Red Hat and Fedora users are nonexistent. Methinks neither of our personal samples are entirely indicative of worldwide usage . . .
I don't understand, how can it "confuse people"? If you know about it, then it's very easy to use. If you don't know about it, then either you'd never notice it OR you'd discover words appearing on middle-click and figure out what's going on pretty quickly. For the most part, Linux users are of above average tech savy and would likely understand without instruction. IF you were concerned about people getting confused then you could either: A. disable by default or B. bring up a "did you notice you just pasted some text?" info box the first time the user performs the action. This isn't hard. Why would the Gnome people think the correct solution is to remove the feature? Idiotic. I switched from KDE to Gnome when KDE 4 happened and then from Gnome to XFCE when Gnome 3 happened. I really hope XFCE stays sane or I'll be CLI only in ten years time.
I think it was around 4.4, if I remember, that KDE 4 finally seemed to be actually better than 3.5, and it's consistently gotten more stable as time has gone on. Hell, even the stuff that's been "removed" in KDE is just not in the default core now, for example Konqueror is still around. And the focus in KDE-land may be on having simple and understandable defaults, but almost never at the expense of features and configurability for the experienced or intelligent users; everything that vanished during the KDE 3.5 -> 4.x transition that I cared about has since been reimplemented, and hell, even the default launcher can be switched to the classic style if you want, and you can replace it with something else (I generally use Lancelot Launcher), or move it to the middle of your taskbar, or don't even have a taskbar, etc etc etc. While GNOME has been excising configuration and features, KDE has quietly become solid (again, around 4.4 or so) and absurdly malleable box of Lego pieces by which you can construct whatever desktop environment you really want.
But, you know, if XFCE goes crazy, don't fully resort to CLI right away. There's always Openbox! On the used iMac I have in my room which has a woefully underpowered . . . everything, I run Openbox as my default session, with tint2 as my taskbar, and KRunner bound to command+spacebar (the mac keyboard makes that feel a bit natural, but if you have a normal keyboard than the standard alt+f2 makes sense). Then add whatever file manager you like, and of course Yakuake, for all that nice drop-down terminal goodness, so you can ease your transition into curmudgeonly CLI-only user;) But no, joking aside, that's exactly my setup and it works pretty well for me (KDE apps in Openbox, launching things with either KRunner or Yakuake) and it's a nice blend of minimalism and GUI where each moving piece can be replaced with alternatives (the wallpaper setter is deprecated? time to install any of a dozen others and change a line or two in that script). So if even XFCE goes crazy and starts messing everything up, do consider a lightweight environment like Openbox.
...until Wayland comes around and breaks everything;)
(No, no, I'm sure X.org will still be an option for a long long time now, and either Openbox will be ported to work on Wayland or other alternatives will arise; the good thing about a minimalist environment is that you don't really need a giant organization behind it, a single dev or two can scratch their own itch et voila, we have a nice simple fallback plan.)
When I was first getting into Linux, I remembering thinking "hmmm, seems like there's two major desktop environments . . . well, I've liked KDE when I've tried it in Knoppix, I'll just go with that." Dodged. A. Fucking. Bullet. With a brief moment of doubt at the start of the KDE 4 transition (where I clung to KDE 3.5), it's just been a constant parade of pain on the GNOME side as feature after feature is removed because . . . reasons? At this point the ultra-minimalist Openbox config I tweaked long ago and log into sometimes (on the underpowered second-hand iMac I have in my bedroom it's the default) is more feature-packed than GNOME. I'm really glad I never grew attached or used to GNOME at any point.
You certainly would use streaming audio in that situation... And you might check your phone when getting out of the car and send a message of some kind. Now that message fails to send because you interrupt the connection mid way through. Or it just does something else unexpected. An uninterrupted internet connection is pretty much always better than an interrupted one.
But the thing is, since mobile devices have so long been in that situation of often dropping/switching connections, almost any decently written application or function already does that, and will silently retry or reconnect. Sure, this is a more elegant solution in theory, but we already have solutions in practice.
You seem to know alot about this device. Where did you get all this info?
I love the python phone/sms/gps libraries that I have in my N900/Maemo device. I don't suppose Sailfish still has that?
Not so sure that it does, but you can certainly try and find out by installing the Sailfish SDK and poking around in the virtual machine! Also related to the question of Python on Jolla/Sailfish, http://thpmaemo.blogspot.ca/2013/07/the-way-forward-with-python-on-qt-5.html (blog post by perhaps the most noteworthy Python-on-Nokia-Linux-devices programmer out there, Thomas Perl).
There was a brief period after Google bought DejaNews when you could request and have your Usenet posts deleted from their archive. Thank goodness. I was one of those loud ignorant linux fanboys back in circia 1996. Well before it was as uncool and derpy as today, but its good that I was able to erase the part of that I did under my real name.
The thing that always vaguely bothers me about that, though, is that if everyone can hide or delete their embarrassing activities, then that stuff remains embarrassing, instead of us as a culture growing up and accepting that past behaviours don't damn a person forever. If the majority of us have things we wouldn't want people to judge us on (which I think is a fairly reasonable hypothesis), and then we all knew those things, I'm pretty sure our culture would change to be less judgmental. It's the same principle behind people generally becoming less homophobic once they know that people they love and/or are friends with are gay; in times past, people could be extremely judgmental because it seemed like such an aberration, but once the (relative, compared to how it was once perceived) commonality of non-hetrosexuality is actually out in the open people's views soften.
What I'm saying, in part, is that if most people are able to purge the embarrassing moments from their history, then the few that aren't able will be judged and potentially punished unfairly. So the ironic part of it is, anonymity and/or the deletion of records helps perpetuate the need for that anonymity.
Full disclosure, though: I'm not posting under my real name, so it's not like I'm a fervent Real Name person. I do suspect that radical transparency might be better for humans in the long run, but I'm not going to claim it wouldn't be pretty painful along the way.
I really do think the KDE devs are going about it the right way, leveraging the Model-View paradigm to make it so most of the code can remain the same but the UI/UX can be changed for different circumstances. So if you do install on a tablet, you can have a full-screen launcher and nice finger-friendly icons and such, running what are underneath completely compatible programs. But if you run a desktop, you have the full and unfiltered desktop experience. You don't really have to sacrifice one for the other (well, the tablet side is taking a bit to entirely come together, but that's mostly hardware support, and if we're going to sacrifice either I'm sure we're all fine with our Android tablets or whatnot in the meantime, no need to muck up the desktop).
I'm typing this from a KDE install right now, loving Lancelot Launcher and Yakuake, and pitying my Windows-using colleagues when they don't have tabs, split-views or SFTP support in their file managers (and chuckling a bit about their Windows 8 angst). There were some scary and awkward times in the beginning of the KDE4 transition, but these days KDE is back to be stable and solid, and whatever layout and behaviour you want you can pretty much do it (the mere thought of which must drive the GNOME devs into panic attacks).
Not to be the KDE fanboy here, but Okular has been able to do that since . . . I dunno, whenever many years ago I first tried clicking on an EPUB.
At this point it almost seems like classic GNOME fans might be better off using KDE and themeing/fiddling with it to make it look and behave how they want. And KDE doesn't even make you write Javascript extentions to do any of that, it's all in the actual UI to customize it . . .
Bean-counters can easily compute whether someone has been physically present for N hours from clocking in. Figuring out whether someone has done their job adequately, however, is much harder, and they'd rather not work hard.
It's ironic, isn't it? People trying callously to get some measure of whether others below them in the food chain are working hard, but they aren't willing to work hard themselves to figure it out.
Slashdot Mirror
deterrence
Prove the deterrence exists, otherwise the equation is irrational: Based zero evidence, and on speculative bullshit instead.
Easy. Go join a denial of service with Anonymous right now. Having any second thoughts? I thought so.
Nope, I am not having second thoughts (assuming the DoS is one I'm entirely philosophically on board with, which admittedly is in the minority). That is because I---perhaps irrationally---refuse to allow fear to prevent me from doing things when I believe them to be the right thing to do. Otherwise, the only people able to affect the world will be those with conventional power. We need unconventional power to affect the world as non-wealthy, non-famous individuals, which means grouping up and generally is outlawed to some degree or another (as the quote I'm unsure is properly sourced to Emma Goldman goes, if voting has the power to change anything, it would be illegal). To choose not to do something that we consider the right course of action because we would be penalized for it is to abdicate what few avenues of power we have.
It's the one that's baked into the Nokia N9 (and sometimes I use the one baked into the N900). Hilariously, it's integrated into the OS at such a level that it acts like normal phone calls, and in that and other ways it's more seamless of an experience than on the platform Nokia now uses which Microsoft actually develops. Oh, the irony layered upon irony there . . .
What kind of radical, pointless, managerial bullshit is THAT?!?!?!??!!
We meet up every week at . . . hmm . . . wait, it's been months now since the last meeting . . . this might explain some of the overly silo'd development going on . . .
Are you sure "communication skills" means that you aren't socializing enough? Perhaps your emails are inadequate, you aren't keeping people informed, aren't discussing ideas with others or are not adequately explaining your ideas.
The fact that you only talk to people when you need some from them is a problem. What about brain storming? Design meetings? Code reviews?
Several times at my work, where I help with testing/QA (mostly I'm the IT guy, because apparently programmers suck at understanding and maintaining their computers and infrastructure---I guess they're more engineers than anything else, the "science" part of CompSci notwithstanding) I've had to pass on changes that one programmer is doing or projects they're working on to others who are overlapping or would benefit from some good ol' code reuse. There's really rather little communication between them outside of the bugtracker, and most of the time the cases they create for themselves are extremely terse, like
Title: Instance broken
Milestone: Next Possible
Comment: Will fix later.
So even in the one avenue of 'communication' that all of the programmers use, there's really nothing that anyone else can gleam (and you'd better believe they pay extremely little attention to cases not assigned to themselves). I've had multiple cases where programmers have "fixed" something they were annoyed with, and two of them talked about, but meanwhile a third was trying to fix a more legitimate bug and it was seriously aggravated by their fix. And then a tester noticed that "new" bug and it was created and assigned to a fourth programmer. Sigh.
Luckily my office is on the way to the break room, so it's easy for me to catch people and go "hey, are you working on that thing involving X? I hear Susan is working on Y which sounds to my lay ears like it might be related, maybe you two should compare notes." And honestly, sometimes I feel like that's the single most valuable job I do.
One of the nicest things about btrfs (or any copy-on-write filesystem, really) is the ease of snapshotting. Just add a step in your cron job where after the rsync is done, a snapshot is taken. Then if you never send corrupted data over rsync, great! You can just ignore those snapshots and it isn't any more hassle to manage. But if you do have issues, you can walk back through the snapshots and pull out uncorrupted data from before whatever wiped out your source did so.
You could adjust this for rotation, but rotation is for chumps who don't buy enough storage ;) But no, more seriously, leveraging the filesystem itself for such versioning/rotation (the latter only if you really don't have the space) makes a lot more sense in this day and age.
Heh, that's actually a pretty good metaphor for it, "corporations terraforming or legal system", I like it. I mean, I hate that it's happening, but that's a great way of putting it.
Seems like some TCO talk is apropos here; the extra health issues with such fatty and generally low-quality foods as McDonalds may well offset the cost savings ;)
And that's probably exactly how they ended up with Percona.
More than likely the workers are all getting fatigued and small mistakes are starting.
It's well beyond time for the Japanese government to bring the Japanese military in to bring this under control. After that an international effort to assist Japan in any way required. Even considering the pride of the nation as a factor it's now becoming an international problem for any country that shares the pacific ocean.
This is well beyond TEPCO's ability and expertise, they are a utilities company. Furthermore it was their negligence through nonfeasance that got us into this mess in the first place. A criminal investigation should be conducted and the future of the company considered.
Replying to you because I accidentally moderated "Offtopic" instead of "Insightful", oops. Apropos of your comment, I'm really tired today and it's been a long day at work.
Well, with the exception of the big indoor mall water park, since the ultra-rich owners of the mall greased things to get the palm trees in without inspections . . . which meant that nobody checked for cockroaches. So the only cockroaches in all of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada are in the West Edmonton Mall waterpark.
Best part, by the time the owners finally admitted they needed to do something about them, it was too late, because you know what exterminators use to kill cockroaches? Yup, you guessed it, chlorine-based insecticides. So at this point after so many generations living around chlorinated water and then a few attempts at extermination these are basically unkillable cockroaches. With the exception that the winters here are cold enough that they've never gotten out of the mall.
In retrospect, thank god the LRT (ie. subway or "underground", basically, although it is mostly above ground) never ended up going to WEM.
Source: Matthew Garrett, The state of XMir
Leaving aside what I'll take as a typo of Linus as Linux, Linus has since stated it was a joke. PJ, meanwhile, was responding the climate of fear and the impossibility of anything being done online even having a hope of being truly private, so not any sort of deliberate pressure per se, just unable to live with How Things Are and choosing instead to retreat from them. I wish she hadn't, but that's her call.
I honestly don't even know who Phil Zimmerman is, so I'll just assume you're right on that one, although your track record isn't great ;)
I think it's kindof balanced out. Sure, in theory someone could do more damage now, but in practice it takes a fair bit of know-how to do damage against anything that isn't extremely poorly set up (I'm looking at you, publicly-facing SQL servers). Meanwhile, back in the day a single guy with a box that could generate the right tones could potentially control all telephone routing for an entire coast.
Personal experience says Red Hat/CentOS and Fedora are the most widespread. I know a total of three Ubuntu users (one of which uses awesome instead of Unity), no Mint users, and a very large number of RH/FC users (through their workplace mostly). My friends (who do not share a work place with me) would report a similar statistic.
I have never met in person a Red Hat or Fedora user. Never. I have met a handful of Debian users, a single Gentoo user, and a ton of Ubuntu users (also a single Yellow Dog user years ago, but neither he nor it are around any longer as far as I know). I know several people who use Kubuntu . . . but that's entirely my own influence. If we went by my personal experience we'd conclude that Red Hat and Fedora users are nonexistent. Methinks neither of our personal samples are entirely indicative of worldwide usage . . .
I don't understand, how can it "confuse people"? If you know about it, then it's very easy to use. If you don't know about it, then either you'd never notice it OR you'd discover words appearing on middle-click and figure out what's going on pretty quickly. For the most part, Linux users are of above average tech savy and would likely understand without instruction. IF you were concerned about people getting confused then you could either: A. disable by default or B. bring up a "did you notice you just pasted some text?" info box the first time the user performs the action. This isn't hard. Why would the Gnome people think the correct solution is to remove the feature? Idiotic. I switched from KDE to Gnome when KDE 4 happened and then from Gnome to XFCE when Gnome 3 happened. I really hope XFCE stays sane or I'll be CLI only in ten years time.
I think it was around 4.4, if I remember, that KDE 4 finally seemed to be actually better than 3.5, and it's consistently gotten more stable as time has gone on. Hell, even the stuff that's been "removed" in KDE is just not in the default core now, for example Konqueror is still around. And the focus in KDE-land may be on having simple and understandable defaults, but almost never at the expense of features and configurability for the experienced or intelligent users; everything that vanished during the KDE 3.5 -> 4.x transition that I cared about has since been reimplemented, and hell, even the default launcher can be switched to the classic style if you want, and you can replace it with something else (I generally use Lancelot Launcher), or move it to the middle of your taskbar, or don't even have a taskbar, etc etc etc. While GNOME has been excising configuration and features, KDE has quietly become solid (again, around 4.4 or so) and absurdly malleable box of Lego pieces by which you can construct whatever desktop environment you really want.
But, you know, if XFCE goes crazy, don't fully resort to CLI right away. There's always Openbox! On the used iMac I have in my room which has a woefully underpowered . . . everything, I run Openbox as my default session, with tint2 as my taskbar, and KRunner bound to command+spacebar (the mac keyboard makes that feel a bit natural, but if you have a normal keyboard than the standard alt+f2 makes sense). Then add whatever file manager you like, and of course Yakuake, for all that nice drop-down terminal goodness, so you can ease your transition into curmudgeonly CLI-only user ;) But no, joking aside, that's exactly my setup and it works pretty well for me (KDE apps in Openbox, launching things with either KRunner or Yakuake) and it's a nice blend of minimalism and GUI where each moving piece can be replaced with alternatives (the wallpaper setter is deprecated? time to install any of a dozen others and change a line or two in that script). So if even XFCE goes crazy and starts messing everything up, do consider a lightweight environment like Openbox.
...until Wayland comes around and breaks everything ;)
(No, no, I'm sure X.org will still be an option for a long long time now, and either Openbox will be ported to work on Wayland or other alternatives will arise; the good thing about a minimalist environment is that you don't really need a giant organization behind it, a single dev or two can scratch their own itch et voila, we have a nice simple fallback plan.)
When I was first getting into Linux, I remembering thinking "hmmm, seems like there's two major desktop environments . . . well, I've liked KDE when I've tried it in Knoppix, I'll just go with that." Dodged. A. Fucking. Bullet. With a brief moment of doubt at the start of the KDE 4 transition (where I clung to KDE 3.5), it's just been a constant parade of pain on the GNOME side as feature after feature is removed because . . . reasons? At this point the ultra-minimalist Openbox config I tweaked long ago and log into sometimes (on the underpowered second-hand iMac I have in my bedroom it's the default) is more feature-packed than GNOME. I'm really glad I never grew attached or used to GNOME at any point.
You certainly would use streaming audio in that situation... And you might check your phone when getting out of the car and send a message of some kind. Now that message fails to send because you interrupt the connection mid way through. Or it just does something else unexpected. An uninterrupted internet connection is pretty much always better than an interrupted one.
But the thing is, since mobile devices have so long been in that situation of often dropping/switching connections, almost any decently written application or function already does that, and will silently retry or reconnect. Sure, this is a more elegant solution in theory, but we already have solutions in practice.
You seem to know alot about this device. Where did you get all this info? I love the python phone/sms/gps libraries that I have in my N900/Maemo device. I don't suppose Sailfish still has that?
Not so sure that it does, but you can certainly try and find out by installing the Sailfish SDK and poking around in the virtual machine! Also related to the question of Python on Jolla/Sailfish, http://thpmaemo.blogspot.ca/2013/07/the-way-forward-with-python-on-qt-5.html (blog post by perhaps the most noteworthy Python-on-Nokia-Linux-devices programmer out there, Thomas Perl).
There was a brief period after Google bought DejaNews when you could request and have your Usenet posts deleted from their archive. Thank goodness. I was one of those loud ignorant linux fanboys back in circia 1996. Well before it was as uncool and derpy as today, but its good that I was able to erase the part of that I did under my real name.
The thing that always vaguely bothers me about that, though, is that if everyone can hide or delete their embarrassing activities, then that stuff remains embarrassing, instead of us as a culture growing up and accepting that past behaviours don't damn a person forever. If the majority of us have things we wouldn't want people to judge us on (which I think is a fairly reasonable hypothesis), and then we all knew those things, I'm pretty sure our culture would change to be less judgmental. It's the same principle behind people generally becoming less homophobic once they know that people they love and/or are friends with are gay; in times past, people could be extremely judgmental because it seemed like such an aberration, but once the (relative, compared to how it was once perceived) commonality of non-hetrosexuality is actually out in the open people's views soften.
What I'm saying, in part, is that if most people are able to purge the embarrassing moments from their history, then the few that aren't able will be judged and potentially punished unfairly. So the ironic part of it is, anonymity and/or the deletion of records helps perpetuate the need for that anonymity.
Full disclosure, though: I'm not posting under my real name, so it's not like I'm a fervent Real Name person. I do suspect that radical transparency might be better for humans in the long run, but I'm not going to claim it wouldn't be pretty painful along the way.
I really do think the KDE devs are going about it the right way, leveraging the Model-View paradigm to make it so most of the code can remain the same but the UI/UX can be changed for different circumstances. So if you do install on a tablet, you can have a full-screen launcher and nice finger-friendly icons and such, running what are underneath completely compatible programs. But if you run a desktop, you have the full and unfiltered desktop experience. You don't really have to sacrifice one for the other (well, the tablet side is taking a bit to entirely come together, but that's mostly hardware support, and if we're going to sacrifice either I'm sure we're all fine with our Android tablets or whatnot in the meantime, no need to muck up the desktop).
I'm typing this from a KDE install right now, loving Lancelot Launcher and Yakuake, and pitying my Windows-using colleagues when they don't have tabs, split-views or SFTP support in their file managers (and chuckling a bit about their Windows 8 angst). There were some scary and awkward times in the beginning of the KDE4 transition, but these days KDE is back to be stable and solid, and whatever layout and behaviour you want you can pretty much do it (the mere thought of which must drive the GNOME devs into panic attacks).
Not to be the KDE fanboy here, but Okular has been able to do that since . . . I dunno, whenever many years ago I first tried clicking on an EPUB.
At this point it almost seems like classic GNOME fans might be better off using KDE and themeing/fiddling with it to make it look and behave how they want. And KDE doesn't even make you write Javascript extentions to do any of that, it's all in the actual UI to customize it . . .
Bean-counters can easily compute whether someone has been physically present for N hours from clocking in. Figuring out whether someone has done their job adequately, however, is much harder, and they'd rather not work hard.
It's ironic, isn't it? People trying callously to get some measure of whether others below them in the food chain are working hard, but they aren't willing to work hard themselves to figure it out.
Naw, they just all got private iPads (albeit invariably on the taxpayer dime).
Well, it was the Board's goal of getting a sweet cashout by setting the company up to be purchased by Microsoft.