Fortunately Gnome 3 still has fallback mode where it essentially emulates Gnome 2. Anytime I put a new user on Linux, I reach for Gnome. It ain't pretty but it is simple as hell and works.
Considering the fact that many programs defaulted to adding themselves to it, customizing it wasn't really an issue. You remove stuff from it the same way you remove anything else in Windows, right click > delete. You need to dig a little deeper for your objections to it.
I completely agree with you. I didn't mean to speak ill of Gnome's menu. When I first started using Linux full time in 2006, I did everything imaginable to make it work and act like Windows. As time wore on I found myself doing that less and less. Now, it is a veritable chore using Windows in the vm for the occasional foray into visual studio to maintain this certain crappy website that is done completely in asp.net. But don't get me started.
When's the last time you used Linux? When win2k was still current? The modern Linux desktop looks absolutely nothing like it. Unless you want it to, that is. Power of choice.
Thanks for the heads up but I got passed Start menu envy long ago and moved on to much more powerful ways to accomplish the same goals. I toyed around with gnomenu for a while which is 95 percent identical to whichever version of the windows start menu you want. I've used Avant Window Navigator, Cairo-Dock, Synapse, Kickoff, the Mint menu, and everything in between. Now I'm kind of digging the Unity launcher on the latest Ubuntu. I thought I was going to hate Unity but damned if they haven't come up with a few good ideas and one or two great ones.
The quick launch bar was introduced with Windows 95 via internet explorer 4 shell so people have been "pinning" launchers for a lot longer than Windows 7 has been around.
You can't. Because they didn't like the look of the big, floor-to-ceiling look of the old XP system, they shrunk it all down so that it only shows 5-6 items at a time and has a scrollbar.
In short, they made it harder to use and less functional than the XP Start Menu, and to everyone's amazement, people stopped using it, and then they claimed it was some sort of UX triumph.
This man speaks truth. The fact that this got passed Microsoft's UI designers is astounding.
It surprises me as one of the very few things I miss about Windows after moving to Linux was the Start menu. The Gnome main menu always seemed very sparse in comparison. What doesn't surprise me is that people used the XP menu more than on Vista or 7. Other than search and a few other minor things, the XP start menu is better. When I'm just sifting through it, I can find what I'm looking for much faster than the Vista click-a-thon.
How is that going to help them? To the consumer, windows phone isn't competing with "Linux", it's competing with Android and iOS and Blackberry. 99 out of 100 people have no idea that Android is Linux at the core or that iOS is BSD and wouldn't be able to tell you what difference it made if they did.
The reason the Motorola Atrix in your video is suffering lag is because of the Motoblur overlay. Motoblur is notorious for causing this issue. Vanilla android does not suffer from that issue as evidenced by the smoothness enjoyed by owners of the Nexus S which spec-wise is much less than the Atrix. The Vibrant in the video I posted above is perfectly liquid smooth because it is vanilla Android.
As for GUI acceleration, Gingerbread is much farther along in that respect and ICS will be better still. Again, I direct you to the video of the Samsung Vibrant above running Gingerbread with no lag or chop at all.
Honeycomb was a complete rush job and it shows. No argument there. Hopefully the upcoming Ice Cream Sandwich will solve Android tablet issues. However, vanilla Gingerbread like what is shown on both of the handsets in the videos I posted is blazing on iPhone 3GS era hardware. The Droid in the first second video has a much slower processor than the 3GS yet it isn't slow at all and the Vibrant in the first video with 1 GHz single core proc and 512 MB of RAM is completely lag free and is rendering web pages faster than any mobile device I have ever seen. The issue with Android is the crap that the OEM's plaster on it. The OS in and of itself is not at all slow.
I have a Motorola Droid and an HD7. Despite the age of the Droid, it launches apps faster than the Windows Phone. Furthermore, there are many small ways that the HD7 falls down that are just inexplicable. One is text reflow. When I zoom in on a web page, I expect the text to reflow so that I don't have to scroll side to side. This is a solved problem on iOS and Android since antiquity yet windows phone doesn't do it. Also, why can't I input a url into the browser in landscape mode? Why doesn't flash work? Why is the launcher stuck in portrait? Why can't I side-load apps on my own device without having to pay a fee? Why can't I tether? Why can't I hook my HD7 up to my computer without having to go through the Zune software? Why not just USB drive mode? Why does it take 3 times as long on it to load a web page vs my Droid? Why are third party apps so choppy (Engadget anyone?)? And on and on. This says it best.
I'm shooting entirely from the hip here but I'm guessing that if you allow logins via root, the crackers already have at least one half of your username/password combo whereas if you disable it, they have to guess them both.
For historical reasons, it is generally better to go with unstable rather than testing due to the way packages are merged. From the Debian FAQ:
3.1.5 Could you tell me whether to install testing or unstable?
This is a rather subjective issue. There is no perfect answer but only a "wise guess" could be made while deciding between unstable and testing. My personal order of preference is Stable, Unstable and Testing. The issue is like this:
Stable is rock solid. It does not break.
Testing breaks less often than Unstable. But when it breaks, it takes a long time for things to get rectified. Sometimes this could be days and it could be months at times.
Unstable changes a lot, and it can break at any point. However, fixes get rectified in many occasions in a couple of days and it always has the latest releases of software packaged for Debian.
But there are times when tracking testing would be beneficial as opposed to unstable. The author such situation due to the gcc transition from gcc3 to gcc4. He was trying to install the labplot package on a machine tracking unstable and it could not be installed in unstable as some of its dependencies have undergone gcc4 transition and some have not. But the package in testing was installable on a testing machine as the gcc4 transitioned packages had not "trickled down" to testing.
Nobody with even the slightest clue pretends that OSX or Linux are immune to Trojans and implying that this view is mainstream even amongst the most fervent fanboys is pure troll.
Nokia made a good decision after a series of really bad ones.
Nothing in your post supports this.
Windows allows them to retain revenue from services
Android would allow them to retain revenue from services
and also a level of differentiation that Android would not give them.
Tell that to Amazon and FusionGarage who both are releasing tablets based on Android that are nothing like traditional Android. It is patently absurd to pretend that Nokia will be able to do with closed Windows phone what they could have done with open source Android. MS won't allow them to change it too much as that would interfere with their relationships with other Windows phone OEM's like Samsung and HTC.
It's still quite possible that after a few months/years of bad sales with windows they go the Android route but then they would only be making money on the hardware and the margins are really thin there.
Samsung and HTC have made hundreds of millions with Android. How much has anybody made with windows phone?
Nokia wants a slice of the add and app/media sales revenue.
No, they wanted that billion dollars that MS handed them. There is no other way that they can realistically hope to make more money with wp than Android.
There are currently only Apple and Android who stands to profit massively from smartphones.
If by Android, you mean Samsung, HTC, Motorola, LG, Huawei and the slew of other vendors, then yes.
GP is right, Android is like cheap toilet paper. If you really care about saving money and trees then it's great, but for most of us the whole sandpaper effect just doesn't cut it.
Wow, are you so full of yourself that you think your opinion stands for "most of us"? How about letting other people actually think what they want to think for a change?
I have yet to meet anyone who doesn't read Slashdot that did regret getting an Android phone.
That sentence made no sense.
It seems like the stats bear that out.
The word Android appears nowhere in the article you sited and in no other way does the article support your claims. Please troll harder.
Well, I have an HD7 that a friend gave me and I have a few impressions I would like to add. First off, why doesn't text reflow when I zoom in on the browser? I can't read text that is.5 mm tall and if a website forces the text to stay wide, I have to pan the screen back and forth if I want to zoom in. That's just ridiculous and is a solved problem on iOS and Android since antiquity. Also, why can't I type in a url in landscape mode? I hate having to constantly switch orientation just to do this as one of the unfortunate side effects is sometimes websites get stuck in jumbo text mode where you can't zoom out at all. Also, why is the home screen stuck in portrait? My next question is why do apps take so long to start vs my Droid and my iPad? Another question might be, why are third party apps so choppy? Have you tried the Engadget app? It's practically a slide show at times. Another impression... my HD7 came with an extended battery. It barely lasts a day and a half of light use. Windows phone has a long way to go before it is even close to iOS or Android are in terms of overall utility and it shows in the fact that while Androids fly off the shelves, windows phones continue to collect dust.
Bullshit. That's a list of the nightly's for the Nexus S. Notice the dates. The last stable release was in May which was just 4 months ago. How often do you think they should be releasing? Every week? Get serious. People, not even modders, want to flash their phone that often. Every 4-6 months when a worthwhile number of upgrades get added to a ROM, release a stable update and keep the nightly's going for the truly insane. Anything else is ludicrous.
The Golden Age trilogy by John C. Wright is another very detailed exploration of the implications of this kind of technology taken to its logical conclusion. In that novel, everything you sense is augmented in one way or another. Real-life ads are blocked and made to appear like natural parts of the scenery. Your house can be any kind of dwelling you desire, the people around you can look like anything at all. AR has many interesting possibilities but I don't think it will truly be much more than novelty until it breaks out of the 4 inch screen and at the very least is overlayed on some glasses or possibly projected directly on the retina.
Slashdot Mirror
Fortunately Gnome 3 still has fallback mode where it essentially emulates Gnome 2. Anytime I put a new user on Linux, I reach for Gnome. It ain't pretty but it is simple as hell and works.
Considering the fact that many programs defaulted to adding themselves to it, customizing it wasn't really an issue. You remove stuff from it the same way you remove anything else in Windows, right click > delete. You need to dig a little deeper for your objections to it.
For what it's worth to you, I've found that this solves my menu problems in the recent Ubuntu releases.
I completely agree with you. I didn't mean to speak ill of Gnome's menu. When I first started using Linux full time in 2006, I did everything imaginable to make it work and act like Windows. As time wore on I found myself doing that less and less. Now, it is a veritable chore using Windows in the vm for the occasional foray into visual studio to maintain this certain crappy website that is done completely in asp.net. But don't get me started.
When's the last time you used Linux? When win2k was still current? The modern Linux desktop looks absolutely nothing like it. Unless you want it to, that is. Power of choice.
Thanks for the heads up but I got passed Start menu envy long ago and moved on to much more powerful ways to accomplish the same goals. I toyed around with gnomenu for a while which is 95 percent identical to whichever version of the windows start menu you want. I've used Avant Window Navigator, Cairo-Dock, Synapse, Kickoff, the Mint menu, and everything in between. Now I'm kind of digging the Unity launcher on the latest Ubuntu. I thought I was going to hate Unity but damned if they haven't come up with a few good ideas and one or two great ones.
The quick launch bar was introduced with Windows 95 via internet explorer 4 shell so people have been "pinning" launchers for a lot longer than Windows 7 has been around.
You can't. Because they didn't like the look of the big, floor-to-ceiling look of the old XP system, they shrunk it all down so that it only shows 5-6 items at a time and has a scrollbar.
In short, they made it harder to use and less functional than the XP Start Menu, and to everyone's amazement, people stopped using it, and then they claimed it was some sort of UX triumph.
This man speaks truth. The fact that this got passed Microsoft's UI designers is astounding.
It surprises me as one of the very few things I miss about Windows after moving to Linux was the Start menu. The Gnome main menu always seemed very sparse in comparison. What doesn't surprise me is that people used the XP menu more than on Vista or 7. Other than search and a few other minor things, the XP start menu is better. When I'm just sifting through it, I can find what I'm looking for much faster than the Vista click-a-thon.
I learned something today. Thank you.
How is that going to help them? To the consumer, windows phone isn't competing with "Linux", it's competing with Android and iOS and Blackberry. 99 out of 100 people have no idea that Android is Linux at the core or that iOS is BSD and wouldn't be able to tell you what difference it made if they did.
According to wikipedia the median household income in Australia is 44,000 dollars It is 49,000 in the US. Where are you getting your numbers from?
As for GUI acceleration, Gingerbread is much farther along in that respect and ICS will be better still. Again, I direct you to the video of the Samsung Vibrant above running Gingerbread with no lag or chop at all.
Honeycomb was a complete rush job and it shows. No argument there. Hopefully the upcoming Ice Cream Sandwich will solve Android tablet issues. However, vanilla Gingerbread like what is shown on both of the handsets in the videos I posted is blazing on iPhone 3GS era hardware. The Droid in the first second video has a much slower processor than the 3GS yet it isn't slow at all and the Vibrant in the first video with 1 GHz single core proc and 512 MB of RAM is completely lag free and is rendering web pages faster than any mobile device I have ever seen. The issue with Android is the crap that the OEM's plaster on it. The OS in and of itself is not at all slow.
I have a Motorola Droid and an HD7. Despite the age of the Droid, it launches apps faster than the Windows Phone. Furthermore, there are many small ways that the HD7 falls down that are just inexplicable. One is text reflow. When I zoom in on a web page, I expect the text to reflow so that I don't have to scroll side to side. This is a solved problem on iOS and Android since antiquity yet windows phone doesn't do it. Also, why can't I input a url into the browser in landscape mode? Why doesn't flash work? Why is the launcher stuck in portrait? Why can't I side-load apps on my own device without having to pay a fee? Why can't I tether? Why can't I hook my HD7 up to my computer without having to go through the Zune software? Why not just USB drive mode? Why does it take 3 times as long on it to load a web page vs my Droid? Why are third party apps so choppy (Engadget anyone?)? And on and on. This says it best.
I have to agree that Android is very very slow.
And as an owner of several Android handsets, a Xoom, an iPad, and an HD7, I have to disagree. There is nothing inherently slow about Android.
I'm shooting entirely from the hip here but I'm guessing that if you allow logins via root, the crackers already have at least one half of your username/password combo whereas if you disable it, they have to guess them both.
3.1.5 Could you tell me whether to install testing or unstable?
This is a rather subjective issue. There is no perfect answer but only a "wise guess" could be made while deciding between unstable and testing. My personal order of preference is Stable, Unstable and Testing. The issue is like this:
Stable is rock solid. It does not break.
Testing breaks less often than Unstable. But when it breaks, it takes a long time for things to get rectified. Sometimes this could be days and it could be months at times.
Unstable changes a lot, and it can break at any point. However, fixes get rectified in many occasions in a couple of days and it always has the latest releases of software packaged for Debian.
But there are times when tracking testing would be beneficial as opposed to unstable. The author such situation due to the gcc transition from gcc3 to gcc4. He was trying to install the labplot package on a machine tracking unstable and it could not be installed in unstable as some of its dependencies have undergone gcc4 transition and some have not. But the package in testing was installable on a testing machine as the gcc4 transitioned packages had not "trickled down" to testing.
Nobody with even the slightest clue pretends that OSX or Linux are immune to Trojans and implying that this view is mainstream even amongst the most fervent fanboys is pure troll.
Absolutely. The title of the summary is "hides in pdfs" which is a big fat lie. Nice job, Slashdot.
Nokia made a good decision after a series of really bad ones.
Nothing in your post supports this.
Windows allows them to retain revenue from services
Android would allow them to retain revenue from services
and also a level of differentiation that Android would not give them.
Tell that to Amazon and FusionGarage who both are releasing tablets based on Android that are nothing like traditional Android. It is patently absurd to pretend that Nokia will be able to do with closed Windows phone what they could have done with open source Android. MS won't allow them to change it too much as that would interfere with their relationships with other Windows phone OEM's like Samsung and HTC.
It's still quite possible that after a few months/years of bad sales with windows they go the Android route but then they would only be making money on the hardware and the margins are really thin there.
Samsung and HTC have made hundreds of millions with Android. How much has anybody made with windows phone?
Nokia wants a slice of the add and app/media sales revenue.
No, they wanted that billion dollars that MS handed them. There is no other way that they can realistically hope to make more money with wp than Android.
There are currently only Apple and Android who stands to profit massively from smartphones.
If by Android, you mean Samsung, HTC, Motorola, LG, Huawei and the slew of other vendors, then yes.
GP is right, Android is like cheap toilet paper. If you really care about saving money and trees then it's great, but for most of us the whole sandpaper effect just doesn't cut it.
Wow, are you so full of yourself that you think your opinion stands for "most of us"? How about letting other people actually think what they want to think for a change?
I have yet to meet anyone who doesn't read Slashdot that did regret getting an Android phone.
That sentence made no sense.
It seems like the stats bear that out.
The word Android appears nowhere in the article you sited and in no other way does the article support your claims. Please troll harder.
Well, I have an HD7 that a friend gave me and I have a few impressions I would like to add. First off, why doesn't text reflow when I zoom in on the browser? I can't read text that is .5 mm tall and if a website forces the text to stay wide, I have to pan the screen back and forth if I want to zoom in. That's just ridiculous and is a solved problem on iOS and Android since antiquity. Also, why can't I type in a url in landscape mode? I hate having to constantly switch orientation just to do this as one of the unfortunate side effects is sometimes websites get stuck in jumbo text mode where you can't zoom out at all. Also, why is the home screen stuck in portrait? My next question is why do apps take so long to start vs my Droid and my iPad? Another question might be, why are third party apps so choppy? Have you tried the Engadget app? It's practically a slide show at times. Another impression... my HD7 came with an extended battery. It barely lasts a day and a half of light use. Windows phone has a long way to go before it is even close to iOS or Android are in terms of overall utility and it shows in the fact that while Androids fly off the shelves, windows phones continue to collect dust.
Unfortunately CyanogenMod is all but dead
Bullshit. That's a list of the nightly's for the Nexus S. Notice the dates. The last stable release was in May which was just 4 months ago. How often do you think they should be releasing? Every week? Get serious. People, not even modders, want to flash their phone that often. Every 4-6 months when a worthwhile number of upgrades get added to a ROM, release a stable update and keep the nightly's going for the truly insane. Anything else is ludicrous.
The Golden Age trilogy by John C. Wright is another very detailed exploration of the implications of this kind of technology taken to its logical conclusion. In that novel, everything you sense is augmented in one way or another. Real-life ads are blocked and made to appear like natural parts of the scenery. Your house can be any kind of dwelling you desire, the people around you can look like anything at all. AR has many interesting possibilities but I don't think it will truly be much more than novelty until it breaks out of the 4 inch screen and at the very least is overlayed on some glasses or possibly projected directly on the retina.