But I really don't see the Unity disaster being fixed with the GNOME 3 debacle.
I tried Unity when it first got started in 10.10 and I hated it. It was buggy, it was unintuitive, on and on. Then I tried it again in 11.04 and while it was better it still pretty much sucked. On to 11.10 which while not being as good as Gnome 2, was usable. But now that I have been using it for a few months on 12.04, I love it. It's definitely a more productive environment for me than default Gnome 2 was especially with the integrated search. I prefer the approach to multiple monitors, the notification area is vastly improved and very uniform, the dock is solid and does exactly what it needs to do and even sports the per icon right click menu configurability. I'm a big fan of the HUD. Press the alt key and you can just start typing any functionality in your applications menus and the HUD will look until it finds a match. Makes Gimp very easy to use. About the only thing I don't like about Unity is the dash menu. It opens only after a noticable delay, does a very poor job of facilitating application discoverability and the icons are comically large. If it had some kind of list mode and a bit more functionality it might be better. But even that can be easily mitigated with the classic menu panel plugin or the cardapio launcher.
Basically, I thought I'd never like Unity but in 12.04 at least for me it seems solid and deserves a place at the table.
I had a Nokia 770 back in the day and I loved it. Carried it everywhere, wrote apps for it in Python, and used it as much as possible despite having one of the best Windows Mobile handsets at the time. Now I use a Galaxy Nexus and while it doesn't have the hardware keyboard (neither did the 770), I do have Ubuntu in a chroot, and a lot of the main cli tools like bash, vim, mc, etc. have native Android versions or can be easily compiled with the NDK so I'm not suffering too bad. I can't really think of anything I could do on the 770 that I can't do with the GNex but I do miss the old thing. Damn shame what happened to the company that made it.
Okay, seriously. This is getting a little over the top. Apple primarily makes smartphones, tablets, and laptops. If they fell off the face of the earth tomorrow people would just buy all that stuff from somebody else barely missing a beat. Yes, they are successful and yes, they make a lot of money. However, the level of philosophical importance that is being attached to the company is bordering on ridiculous. I'm not trying to be a hater but a ton of mindshare is devoted to this company completely out of proportion to their impact in the grand scheme of things. I get the amount of press that Microsoft gets as the computing world really does revolve around them but Apple? Really?
What's the difference between an Android tablet docked to mouse, keyboard and 1080p screen and a "bigger computer"?
The difference is people can pretend that this capability doesn't exist on Android and therefore "reality" maintains compatibility with their troll narrative.
Developing apps on a tablet is a parlour trick that doesn't really matter.
I've never developed an app on Android from start to finish on my tablet but it's a little more than a parlor trick. I keep a few of my lesser important projects in Dropbox and on more than a few occasions felt inspired and whipped out my Galaxy Nexus or Xoom and got to work. The ability to then compile and install right there on the device is awesome in that scenario. The only thing holding something like AIDE isn't as capable as a traditional IDE is it hasn't been around long enough for the developers to have had time to include, debug, and ship all the expected features. There is no fundamental reason that given enough time, AIDE or something like it couldn't be a first class development tool for Android.
So it's OK for you if your daughter can't call the police to come help her when she has an accident on the highway because 5 or 100 other users in the same cell are downloading porn right now? Wireless providers *have* to throttle to protect the voice network for public-safety purposes.
Don't voice calls get a much higher QoS priority than data already? That seems like the solution just like in someone's house that does a lot of downloading, just lower the priority of that traffic in the router and everything else should work just fine. If something needs first priority no matter what like VOIP then you just set it that way no "throttling" necessary.
nothing else is as credible a threat to MS on the mainstream desktop as Linux is.
Read it again. I bolded the relevant bits. OS X is a beast in the high-end niche of laptops over a thousand dollars but unless Apple decides to make an inexpensive entry-level general purpose computer, that's where it'll stay. The iPad is very successful but it isn't the "desktop". I've had lots of people come to me with computer problems that I'd have loved to turn on to OS X but they just can't spend the money and I'm not about to make them my Hackintosh guinea pig so it doesn't happen. Since Linux will run on the 300-600 dollar mainstream computers the majority of the market buys it is more of a threat to Windows than OS X is. For different reasons, both OS X and Linux maintaining their respective status quo is what will probably happen in the near term so it's academic anyway.
I'm a "real customer" of Google, e.g., I spend a lot of money for their services. Guess what. They have never offered to sell me their users' information. Pull the tinfoil a little tighter, man.
It's not really about laziness but about developer time = money. Java is faster to develop in than C and in the server environment it excels in, performance is really good. And Java Applets are a business staple that makes a lot of sense in a distributed corporate environment. There are also a ton of libraries for just about anything you're likely to ever want to do so why wouldn't you use it?
Personally I like the Eclipse UI but blaming your dislike for it on Java seems a bit misplaced to me. IntelliJ and Netbeans are both written in Java and lots of people rave about them. As far as other popular applications written in Java there is Azureus, Oxygen XML, RSSOwl, Matlab, and plenty more. I'm sure you can nitpick them all but the same goes for applications written in any other language.
Yeah, I'm thinking it has a lot to do with your genetic predisposition. If you're wired to live a long time you probably will if you aren't you probably won't. You can cheat mother nature a little here and there with the diet and exercise but in the end she's the one holding all the cards. I'm hungry now.
It's pointless to try to swim against the tide and, yes, tablets are getting more and more locked down. There's still jailbreaking, rooting, and Nexus devices though. The really funny thing is that if I'm reading the tea leaves correctly the most open tablets will be the new Windows 8 stuff coming (not RT obviously). Crazy talk.
The full implications are worse than that. We are headed towards technological singularity. While I would like to believe this will usher in a new era of prosperity and achievement, consider the kind of sociopathic fevered egos who always wind up running things. Now imagine them even more "effective" (at doing what they have always done) than ever.
I'm a bit more optimistic than this but should the singularity occur you might as well not worry about the details of what comes after as by definition it's unpredictable. As far as companies DRMing artificial organs we probably have about as much to worry about that as we do all the other barn doors they've slammed shut after the horse got free. Certainly puts a new spin on rooting and jailbreaking!
Making owners of internet choke points responsible for censorship is a very effective proposition for a government that wants maximum effectiveness with minimum resource utilization. If someone used your computers to cause a problem, the government doesn't need to identify that person, all they need to do is come get you if your cafe allowed that on to the internet. That or you can preemptively filter, monitor and control content for the government on your own dime.
Provided it was legal, if I owned an internet cafe in Malaysia I'd just pay for access to an out of the country proxy service and point the router at it. Put Firefox on all of the computers with the "https anywhere" extension and put some kind of macro program on the computers that automatically rewrites any establishment identifying information like IP address, street address or whatever so hapless users don't accidentally give up their identity despite the encryption. I don't know how well tor works in Malaysia but that could be an option too.
I'm not saying my plan is fool-proof as it's just off the top of my head but I wouldn't take this law lying down if I didn't have to.
A free internet would be an impediment to your control of the population in that case, not an advantage.
Conceptually I unfortunately get that some people just want to dominate and oppress. But, and I may be thinking too highly of myself here, I'd like to believe that if I was the "supreme dictator" somewhere that my country would be awesome. As long as nobody was physically hurting anybody else or perpetrating some fraudulent scheme I'd just let them do whatever they want. "Soft" drugs? Legal. Prostitution? Legal. Want to talk shit about the government? Go ahead, I'll take it as constructive criticism. Anonymity would not only be legal, it would be encouraged. Hell, I'd use Bitcoin as the national currency if I could make it work. I just think my country would be great and I don't understand why none of the small-time dictators, not even once, have seen it my way.
What is the point of this kind of shit? Money? The richest countries in the world tend to be the freest. Power? Over what? You are the government, you already have a monopoly on legal force and coercion. The only thing this is going to do is get a lot of people sent to jail that didn't do shit. It makes no sense.
My problem with practically every software patent I've ever heard is they are patents on "ideas" not implementations. So when something like pinch-zoom is patented it doesn't have anything to do with how they actually achieved multi-touch but just the idea of spreading fingers apart to zoom the text. It's like patenting "going fast" and then hitting anybody going over 30 mph with a cease and desist. It's ludicrous.
"PC Makers"? Ha. They're middle men. Integetrators of other people's products. They "make" nothing. It was inevitable that they would get squeezed out until the last man that can survive on the smallest margin is left standing. All the ultrabooks and "surface"s in the world won't change the fact that Windows computers are a commodity and always will be until MS tells the OEMs to take a hike and put them all out of business.
pricing and a great execution on the flap-keyboard
I've typed on my netbook plenty of times which theoretically should have a better keyboard than the Surface flaps and I still hate it. So does practically everybody else I've ever heard discuss it. I just don't see how they think relying so much on the keyboard gimmick for their tablet is going to shift units. As for the price, yes, if Android tablet OEMs think they can keep pushing their 10 inch stuff for 499 then it could be a rout but I think Google is showing the way with the Nexus 7. Cut the features like rear cameras etc. that people don't necessarily need and drop the price = sales. It helps now that Jellybean is an actual contender.
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But I really don't see the Unity disaster being fixed with the GNOME 3 debacle.
I tried Unity when it first got started in 10.10 and I hated it. It was buggy, it was unintuitive, on and on. Then I tried it again in 11.04 and while it was better it still pretty much sucked. On to 11.10 which while not being as good as Gnome 2, was usable. But now that I have been using it for a few months on 12.04, I love it. It's definitely a more productive environment for me than default Gnome 2 was especially with the integrated search. I prefer the approach to multiple monitors, the notification area is vastly improved and very uniform, the dock is solid and does exactly what it needs to do and even sports the per icon right click menu configurability. I'm a big fan of the HUD. Press the alt key and you can just start typing any functionality in your applications menus and the HUD will look until it finds a match. Makes Gimp very easy to use. About the only thing I don't like about Unity is the dash menu. It opens only after a noticable delay, does a very poor job of facilitating application discoverability and the icons are comically large. If it had some kind of list mode and a bit more functionality it might be better. But even that can be easily mitigated with the classic menu panel plugin or the cardapio launcher.
Basically, I thought I'd never like Unity but in 12.04 at least for me it seems solid and deserves a place at the table.
Spoken by someone who STILL has a Nokia N900
I had a Nokia 770 back in the day and I loved it. Carried it everywhere, wrote apps for it in Python, and used it as much as possible despite having one of the best Windows Mobile handsets at the time. Now I use a Galaxy Nexus and while it doesn't have the hardware keyboard (neither did the 770), I do have Ubuntu in a chroot, and a lot of the main cli tools like bash, vim, mc, etc. have native Android versions or can be easily compiled with the NDK so I'm not suffering too bad. I can't really think of anything I could do on the 770 that I can't do with the GNex but I do miss the old thing. Damn shame what happened to the company that made it.
Okay, seriously. This is getting a little over the top. Apple primarily makes smartphones, tablets, and laptops. If they fell off the face of the earth tomorrow people would just buy all that stuff from somebody else barely missing a beat. Yes, they are successful and yes, they make a lot of money. However, the level of philosophical importance that is being attached to the company is bordering on ridiculous. I'm not trying to be a hater but a ton of mindshare is devoted to this company completely out of proportion to their impact in the grand scheme of things. I get the amount of press that Microsoft gets as the computing world really does revolve around them but Apple? Really?
What's the difference between an Android tablet docked to mouse, keyboard and 1080p screen and a "bigger computer"?
The difference is people can pretend that this capability doesn't exist on Android and therefore "reality" maintains compatibility with their troll narrative.
Developing apps on a tablet is a parlour trick that doesn't really matter.
I've never developed an app on Android from start to finish on my tablet but it's a little more than a parlor trick. I keep a few of my lesser important projects in Dropbox and on more than a few occasions felt inspired and whipped out my Galaxy Nexus or Xoom and got to work. The ability to then compile and install right there on the device is awesome in that scenario. The only thing holding something like AIDE isn't as capable as a traditional IDE is it hasn't been around long enough for the developers to have had time to include, debug, and ship all the expected features. There is no fundamental reason that given enough time, AIDE or something like it couldn't be a first class development tool for Android.
So it's OK for you if your daughter can't call the police to come help her when she has an accident on the highway because 5 or 100 other users in the same cell are downloading porn right now? Wireless providers *have* to throttle to protect the voice network for public-safety purposes.
Don't voice calls get a much higher QoS priority than data already? That seems like the solution just like in someone's house that does a lot of downloading, just lower the priority of that traffic in the router and everything else should work just fine. If something needs first priority no matter what like VOIP then you just set it that way no "throttling" necessary.
nothing else is as credible a threat to MS on the mainstream desktop as Linux is.
Read it again. I bolded the relevant bits. OS X is a beast in the high-end niche of laptops over a thousand dollars but unless Apple decides to make an inexpensive entry-level general purpose computer, that's where it'll stay. The iPad is very successful but it isn't the "desktop". I've had lots of people come to me with computer problems that I'd have loved to turn on to OS X but they just can't spend the money and I'm not about to make them my Hackintosh guinea pig so it doesn't happen. Since Linux will run on the 300-600 dollar mainstream computers the majority of the market buys it is more of a threat to Windows than OS X is. For different reasons, both OS X and Linux maintaining their respective status quo is what will probably happen in the near term so it's academic anyway.
I'm a "real customer" of Google, e.g., I spend a lot of money for their services. Guess what. They have never offered to sell me their users' information. Pull the tinfoil a little tighter, man.
So if Google is all about openness, where is the source code for their search algorithm
Haha. When I see a statement like this, I know I'm being trolled. Good one.
It's not really about laziness but about developer time = money. Java is faster to develop in than C and in the server environment it excels in, performance is really good. And Java Applets are a business staple that makes a lot of sense in a distributed corporate environment. There are also a ton of libraries for just about anything you're likely to ever want to do so why wouldn't you use it?
Personally I like the Eclipse UI but blaming your dislike for it on Java seems a bit misplaced to me. IntelliJ and Netbeans are both written in Java and lots of people rave about them. As far as other popular applications written in Java there is Azureus, Oxygen XML, RSSOwl, Matlab, and plenty more. I'm sure you can nitpick them all but the same goes for applications written in any other language.
Um, could you forward me those slides?
Yeah, I'm thinking it has a lot to do with your genetic predisposition. If you're wired to live a long time you probably will if you aren't you probably won't. You can cheat mother nature a little here and there with the diet and exercise but in the end she's the one holding all the cards. I'm hungry now.
It's pointless to try to swim against the tide and, yes, tablets are getting more and more locked down. There's still jailbreaking, rooting, and Nexus devices though. The really funny thing is that if I'm reading the tea leaves correctly the most open tablets will be the new Windows 8 stuff coming (not RT obviously). Crazy talk.
Why support a competitor when they have their own in-house "Redneck Electronic Sellers" Warehouse Deals?
Yeah, a good old fashioned denial of service would be a bitch!
The full implications are worse than that. We are headed towards technological singularity. While I would like to believe this will usher in a new era of prosperity and achievement, consider the kind of sociopathic fevered egos who always wind up running things. Now imagine them even more "effective" (at doing what they have always done) than ever.
I'm a bit more optimistic than this but should the singularity occur you might as well not worry about the details of what comes after as by definition it's unpredictable. As far as companies DRMing artificial organs we probably have about as much to worry about that as we do all the other barn doors they've slammed shut after the horse got free. Certainly puts a new spin on rooting and jailbreaking!
..maybe I'm totally off base and out of line here,
You are neither. The guy is full of shit.
Or a sharp rise in the number of tor and Freenet users in that part of the world.
Making owners of internet choke points responsible for censorship is a very effective proposition for a government that wants maximum effectiveness with minimum resource utilization. If someone used your computers to cause a problem, the government doesn't need to identify that person, all they need to do is come get you if your cafe allowed that on to the internet. That or you can preemptively filter, monitor and control content for the government on your own dime.
Provided it was legal, if I owned an internet cafe in Malaysia I'd just pay for access to an out of the country proxy service and point the router at it. Put Firefox on all of the computers with the "https anywhere" extension and put some kind of macro program on the computers that automatically rewrites any establishment identifying information like IP address, street address or whatever so hapless users don't accidentally give up their identity despite the encryption. I don't know how well tor works in Malaysia but that could be an option too.
I'm not saying my plan is fool-proof as it's just off the top of my head but I wouldn't take this law lying down if I didn't have to.
A free internet would be an impediment to your control of the population in that case, not an advantage.
Conceptually I unfortunately get that some people just want to dominate and oppress. But, and I may be thinking too highly of myself here, I'd like to believe that if I was the "supreme dictator" somewhere that my country would be awesome. As long as nobody was physically hurting anybody else or perpetrating some fraudulent scheme I'd just let them do whatever they want. "Soft" drugs? Legal. Prostitution? Legal. Want to talk shit about the government? Go ahead, I'll take it as constructive criticism. Anonymity would not only be legal, it would be encouraged. Hell, I'd use Bitcoin as the national currency if I could make it work. I just think my country would be great and I don't understand why none of the small-time dictators, not even once, have seen it my way.
What is the point of this kind of shit? Money? The richest countries in the world tend to be the freest. Power? Over what? You are the government, you already have a monopoly on legal force and coercion. The only thing this is going to do is get a lot of people sent to jail that didn't do shit. It makes no sense.
My problem with practically every software patent I've ever heard is they are patents on "ideas" not implementations. So when something like pinch-zoom is patented it doesn't have anything to do with how they actually achieved multi-touch but just the idea of spreading fingers apart to zoom the text. It's like patenting "going fast" and then hitting anybody going over 30 mph with a cease and desist. It's ludicrous.
"PC Makers"? Ha. They're middle men. Integetrators of other people's products. They "make" nothing. It was inevitable that they would get squeezed out until the last man that can survive on the smallest margin is left standing. All the ultrabooks and "surface"s in the world won't change the fact that Windows computers are a commodity and always will be until MS tells the OEMs to take a hike and put them all out of business.
pricing and a great execution on the flap-keyboard
I've typed on my netbook plenty of times which theoretically should have a better keyboard than the Surface flaps and I still hate it. So does practically everybody else I've ever heard discuss it. I just don't see how they think relying so much on the keyboard gimmick for their tablet is going to shift units. As for the price, yes, if Android tablet OEMs think they can keep pushing their 10 inch stuff for 499 then it could be a rout but I think Google is showing the way with the Nexus 7. Cut the features like rear cameras etc. that people don't necessarily need and drop the price = sales. It helps now that Jellybean is an actual contender.