First, there is a maximum of CO2 which earth can process, lets call that value X. Second, there are 7 billion people on earth. Logic and principals of the enlightenment allow us to conclude that every person has the same right and therefor the same share of that CO2. In recent years that value was calculated and the result was 1.5t CO2 per person. So if everyone gets a certificate over 1.5t CO2. The problem with that. Every Chinese is already at 2.5t, European are at 10t and the US with 19.78t CO2 per person. So after January the US citizens have to walk, as they are out of CO2 certificates. Logically that would not work. What will work is to divide the total man made CO2 production (Y) and divide it by the number of people. Then every person gets their certificates. Y will be definitely bigger than X. So we reduce Y over 20 years until it reaches X. And people and countries producing all the CO2 have to buy certificates, while others can sell their certificates. I know that was the initial idea behind those certificates. But somehow they failed. In Germany they failed because they where handed out for free to big polluters. So we have to have a change in certificate brokerage;-)
I do not know what this Red Scare is about. Must be something US specific. Nevertheless, we have scientific evidence that with a high probability we change the climate by adding more CO2 to the atmosphere. Weather is something completely different than climate. Even though weather phonemes are often mistaken as climate. While the climate change has an influence on the overall weather pattern, single weather patterns, regardless how strange they are, are not a good indicator for climate change.
Let me give you an example: Cooking tomato soup on a electric stove with settings from 0-6 when you turn on the heat to 4, bubbles appear at the soup's surface. They do this quite regular. However, looking at one bubble will not allow you to estimate the overall energy flow through your soup, but you could count bubbles and measure their volume. Now turn the stove to 6. The bubbles appear now more rapidly, they even might be bigger. You can count them too and measure their volume. If you collect enough data over a time period, you can estimate the increase in energy flow. At least you can say that the energy flow through your soup increased. And that is exactly what they do when they analyze historic weather data with climate models.
If this research is more accurate than previous studies then the climate change is progressing slower as expected. That is great news, as we wasted so much time. If the previous estimates are correct we are in big trouble. According to the new study we will be in big trouble a little later or if we act fast we still could make it and only face medium trouble.
I honestly do not understand why anti climate change honchos gloat over that news. It is like visiting the doctor and he tell you that his last diagnosis was a little too drastic and he has good news: You will not die next week, but in two weeks. So celebrate!
When you live in a town or smaller city the bus or tram comes by every 10 to 15 minutes (30 minutes at night). At junctions they are normally synchronized so you can switch vehicles in a matter of minutes (1 or 2 minutes). For a average traveling time of say 20 minutes, the potential to save time are 10%. And you have to move yourself a little which is good for you. For shorter distances you can use a bike or walk. Using a car for a 20 min ride is in most cities not very clever, as you cannot find a parking slot at the destination and have to search for one, which, even at optimal route, will introduce extra travel time and walk back time. Distances greater than 20 minutes reduce the effect of tram switching.
The bast way to save time would be to not go at all and do it by phone/Internet/whatever. And secondly, every advancement in travel speed and throughput has only increased the distances between home and workplace, they never resulted in the saving of time.
If you live in a bigger city the underground goes every 5 minutes (10 min at night) and buses and trams have similar schedules. So you are already faster using public transport today than using a car. So why optimize its speed again. It would be more wise to increase the capacity of public transport. When all people switch from cars to public transport the capacity in European cities have to be doubled. For an underground with a 5 min schedule that would mean either increase the capacity of one train or increase the schedule. As the train are already at full length in that special time zone where the go every 5 minutes, so they can try to use two floors, but that would imply to rebuild the infrastructure, which is not such a good idea. Another option is the increase in the schedule from 5 to 2.5 min. That is however, not possible with present control technology. Maybe we have to switch to automated trains, like they have in Paris or Nuremberg (Germany). this also gives additional space inside the train as no driver is required anymore.
With no cars on the road you can also use automated buses. And when you use them, you can switch to trams as trams are more energy efficient and you can remove the street cover where the tram goes which allows the rain to drain away instead of using up the sewer system. Makes a better climate in the city.
No he states: Renewable energy alone does not solve the problem. True. It is like, flower alone is not a cake. True, but without flower it will never become a cake (at least non I know).
The primary goal is sustainability. Part of that is re-newable energy.
It influences the system. However, the amount is small and the energy you extract from the wind is transfered as electric energy and then in the end converted to heat. Introducing the energy back into the system.
We have so called renewable energy source, which is obviouly limited due to the fact that the sun output does not increase significantly (and that is good) and the earth is not getting warmer inside. And we have limited resources. So no we cannot replace every car with a lithium-battery powered electrical engine. A) we do not have enough copper and b) we do not have enough lithium.
So to switch to a sustainable way of life, we have to rethink transportation of electrity, goods, and humans. I personally find it very interesting that the average time used to get to ones job didn't change over the centuries. The faster we could go the longer the distances become. For a lot of office jobs, travel could be avoided or reduced, if people start working in offices closer to theri homes. If they are in a 20 minute walk or bicycle distance, you can skip the car. And you even could use busses or trams which can be implemented much more resource efficient than cars and even more personal cars.
In short: Sustainability requires renewable energy, but it also needs resource efficieny.
While the rest of the world accepts the fact of climate change. Including the government, car manufacturer, and the vast majority of the people. The US population stays on the other side. From an European view it is very interesting that some US politicians can state that climate change is a fraud and still be considered for being president. To us it is something out of the "the world is a disc"-type thing.
Honestly this was a good decision to ask slashdot about anything in education. Especially about a Ph.D. Beside that, if you are a real Ph.D. student you know that it does not matter what's written on your degree document, as long as you can show what you really did and if it matches your next position. In the industry this is even less important. More important are contacts in the right places. And a nice resumee.
Let say you want to have a wooden ruler. First, you get piece of wood in the desired length (or more) which is think and wide enough. Then you produce a mostly rectangular object which can be done without any measurements. Second, you make the surface smooth by rubbing a stone on the desired surface. Third, you get two sticks and a rope (or rope-like thing) knot each rope end to one of the sticks, and use some powder e.g., powdered char and dip the rope into it. Make sure the whole rope is full of char. Fourth, now hold the sticks in a way so that the rope is stretched and hold it above the surface of your wooden piece. You have to be very close to the surface. Now you have tow options: a) you use your third hand to pick or twitch the rope which gives you a straight line of char powder on the wood. b) you can lower the rope a little bit so it makes contact with the wood.
Preferably in construction work today, people you normally option one to do so. So it might be the best method.
With a straight line, on the wood, you can start to cut the wood accordingly and you get a ruler.
I work with both new shells and it did not reduce my productivity. So it can't be that bad. It is just some things are different now and you have to do work a little different. And yes the performance sucks. But instead of complaining. Try to find out what are the main causes of that. One is definitely Javascript in Gnome-Shell and one is the damn X11. And another one is the general memory wasting style of Linux applications. For example:
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
2643 ****** 20 0 1309m 211m 43m S 0 5.4 1:46.87 thunderbird-bin
2650 ****** 20 0 1050m 209m 40m S 4 5.3 7:13.57 firefox
2453 ****** 20 0 1026m 145m 49m S 1 3.7 2:15.61 gnome-shell
4134 ****** 20 0 593m 56m 17m S 0 1.4 0:04.45 evince
2607 ****** 20 0 369m 47m 11m S 0 1.2 0:10.20 ubuntuone-syncd
2579 ****** 20 0 456m 46m 13m S 0 1.2 0:09.72 gwibber-service
2736 ****** 20 0 693m 46m 27m S 2 1.2 3:59.32 plugin-containe
1407 ****** 20 0 159m 46m 16m S 2 1.2 2:51.15 Xorg
3464 ****** 20 0 779m 41m 20m S 0 1.1 0:07.32 nautilus
2616 ****** 20 0 421m 31m 1352 S 0 0.8 0:00.00 gwibber-service
Why are these memory figures that big? I know, the real use is smaller due to shared libraries and share memory etc. But still, this is too big.
I wouldn't categorize Unity and Gnome-Shell a step back. However, they have performance issues. Unity tried to address this with Unity 2D. And Gnome-Shell tries to address it with the mentioned change in its dependencies. Still this is not enough. but this is not only a Unity/Gnome-Shell thing. If you look at the memory footprint of present applications in Linux. It sucks. Some of these issues are related to X11 others are related to the way the widget-sets are implemented. We need a better separation of UI and application function. but these are general issues and we have to address them together.
In Ubuntu the default is Unity which is similar but not identical to Gnome-Shell. While Unity is faster, it has other short comings than Gnome-Shell. Personally I like the way Gnome-Shell arranges desktops (in a column) and the feature that it adds a new desktop when all are full. I dislike it that it closes a desktop when it is empty (or it thinks it is empty). This is annoying when you, for example, use Eclipse which performs a restart every now and then when you update something. Or when you develop a plugin etc.
Unity does not have that feature. It creates by default a 2x2 virtual desktop grid (just like this apple OS). However, Unity places the application menu in the top bar. This is cool and save space on the desktop. However, on small displays (where this space saving comes in real handy) applications with many menu options cannot show all their menu options. Even more, the menu disappears when the mouse is away from the menu (how the menu can be accessed on a touch interface, I don't know). This makes it hard to target the right menu option.
In general you have to change your basic way how to work with the UI. I use both (Gnome-Shell at work and Unity on my netbook) and it took some time to adjust to the new philosophy. After that transition it is ok to work with. Some things are better than with Gnome2 some things are worse (One really bad thing is the lack of options. I do like good default and I do not need that many options, but they went too far for my taste. Beside in Ghome-Shell, the default for switching of is "suspend" not "hiberante" (which would be at least a real off state) and not "power off". To get it you have to press ALT. This is hmm not very clever. Especially were a Ubuntu and I guess all other Linuxes boot in seconds.)
What both variants lack is a start application X on desktop/activity 1 and Y on desktop 2 etc. But that didn't work with Gnome2 or KDE.
What is most confusing is: The application menu is gone (actually it just moved). And the "Dock" has become more prominent.
Most annoying at the beginning is, that a click on the Dock starts the program. Another click does not start the program a second time or give you a second view of the same program. No it moves you to the previously opened view. You have to click with the middle mouse key to get the desired result. At least that was what I found most annoying after switching. After working with it for some month, the annoyance has gone. No I found other things that annoy me.:-D But hey, there is always potential for improvements.
I use Gnome-Shell on my office machine with a [Geforce 9500 GT] and it works fine. Beside some stupid design mistakes (which will most likely be addressed in future) it is nice to work with. However, the shell has two main problems. First when choosing the application menu under activities it takes seconds to appear. On a netbook (where I tried to use it as well) it took 15 seconds. As we all know that a system is considered unresponsive after 2 sec., this is definitely a no go. So performance of the application menu is one problem. There are also other performance problems all over the place, but this is the most prominent. The second, problem is the used language. While I can understand it, that they wanted to use a fast JavaScript engine as these perform so well in browsers, which have become application interface servers these days. The language itself sucks as it has too many options to do things and too many options to do them wrong (which makes it slow and buggy and hard to debug). So I wonder why they didn't define at least a DSL to abstract from the Javascript monster (As Gnome did with Vala for gobject).
We had a lot of dropouts too in Germany. Then they reformed the study system and made it a little bit easier and updated the curricula (which was definitely the right thing to do). In ancient times we had math together with the mathematicians, which resulted in 50% drop outs before the first 2 years, as so many students didn't get the math thing or CS theory done.
Nowadays, they drop out because of Java and or Scheme. However, we managed to teach them to give up after the first year if possible instead of trying to get it done for years and then fail. A lot of male students start CS for the wrong causes, and they learn now very quickly that they are not made for CS. this does not increase the output, but it reduces the frustration of the students. And obviously there is no way to increase the students fit for CS, as most people are not suited for that study. I doubt that you can improve that be changing high school curricula. BTW female students mostly do not drop out, because they really try to find out what CS is before they start it.
So the only thing we can do now: Tell them what CS is. So they can go and find another topic. For example: economics and engineering.
Yes it is different from the old oAW stuff. However, the Xpand language is now part of this new Xtend. You can use guillemont-expressions in text expression e.g., '''Some Text >''' which is a Xpand-Expression inside the '''...'''. However, all the foreach macros and templates form Xpand are gone, as there are similar constructs in Xtend.
Well the interesting thing is: I was talking about http://www.eclipse.org/Xtext/#xtend2 which looks for me by any definition exactly like http://www.eclipse.org/Xtext/xtend/ . However, xtend2 is different from xtend+xpand which were its predecessors [http://www.eclipse.org/modeling/m2t/?project=xpand]. So reading the news (again), I found out that the Eclipsians see the language in a quite different light as the modeling guys from itemis. But I am absolutely sure that this is the same language. Otherwise I would be wondering, why these two languages have the same syntax and are both based on xtext.
I work at university right now. We have a lot of projects together with software companies. I for myself are in a project were we design a language and tools to develop railway control centers based on programmable logic controllers (PLC) with Funkwerk-IT. That means our target languages are the IEC 61131-3 languages (e.g., FBD, ST). The general idea is, that you can model your railway control business logic in an appropriate language instead of coding it in FBD or ST. Part of the project was the design of a railway topology description language (and meta-model) which has been a valuable input to their own projects.
In another project about scientific workflows, a colleague of mine is writing an BPNM to BPEL converter in Xtend. And transformations for some scientific workflow notations (SWN). Here the big thing is that SWN are data flow oriented while BPNM and BPEL are control flow oriented.
A third project is about measuring software properties, based on their code and composition (architecture) and to monitor their run-time behavior. This effort is called MAMBA and will hopefully be presented at CSMR 2012.
Personally I used Xtend and Xpand a year ago to wrote an application based on JSF/Richfaces and all that stuff and I had to do a lot of similar things in the backing beans for my templates. So I wrote a small Xtext grammar and a generator in Xpand (utilizing also Xtend) to produce this similar code. It gave me quite a boost, as there was now less space for errors. The language itself is ugly and can be made better, but it took me a workday to build it including the generator.
The best thing about modeling, you can concentrate on the problem domain and forget about the implementation domain while formulating thing for the problem domain. Well, this is not new, XML and XSD went down the same path, however, the EMF tools are better integrated and they are closer to the data processing while XML is closer to data storage (conceptually).
I did not play with your tutorial. However, in most cases there is a file with a *.mwe2 extension (or similar). Right click on it and choose under Run as... the option run as MEW workflow.
Well. This would be possible. The predecessor of Xtend (2) was Xtend (1) and Xpand which are the sucessors of the openArchitectureWare transformations. And 3-5 year of Xtend or oAW experience is possible. Nevertheless, I am waiting for some dumb job offer writing just like the one you sketched;-)
To my knowledge gnome-shell is not a Canonical thing. And testing software in a production environment is my contribution to OSS. Also I am able through my experience to tell developers about problems.
Xtend is merely designed for model to model and model to text transformations. Yes you can also use it for other tasks. And yes Scala has some similar concepts.
Slashdot Mirror
First, there is a maximum of CO2 which earth can process, lets call that value X. Second, there are 7 billion people on earth. Logic and principals of the enlightenment allow us to conclude that every person has the same right and therefor the same share of that CO2. In recent years that value was calculated and the result was 1.5t CO2 per person. So if everyone gets a certificate over 1.5t CO2. The problem with that. Every Chinese is already at 2.5t, European are at 10t and the US with 19.78t CO2 per person. So after January the US citizens have to walk, as they are out of CO2 certificates. Logically that would not work. What will work is to divide the total man made CO2 production (Y) and divide it by the number of people. Then every person gets their certificates. Y will be definitely bigger than X. So we reduce Y over 20 years until it reaches X. And people and countries producing all the CO2 have to buy certificates, while others can sell their certificates. I know that was the initial idea behind those certificates. But somehow they failed. In Germany they failed because they where handed out for free to big polluters. So we have to have a change in certificate brokerage ;-)
I do not know what this Red Scare is about. Must be something US specific. Nevertheless, we have scientific evidence that with a high probability we change the climate by adding more CO2 to the atmosphere. Weather is something completely different than climate. Even though weather phonemes are often mistaken as climate. While the climate change has an influence on the overall weather pattern, single weather patterns, regardless how strange they are, are not a good indicator for climate change.
Let me give you an example: Cooking tomato soup on a electric stove with settings from 0-6 when you turn on the heat to 4, bubbles appear at the soup's surface. They do this quite regular. However, looking at one bubble will not allow you to estimate the overall energy flow through your soup, but you could count bubbles and measure their volume. Now turn the stove to 6. The bubbles appear now more rapidly, they even might be bigger. You can count them too and measure their volume. If you collect enough data over a time period, you can estimate the increase in energy flow. At least you can say that the energy flow through your soup increased. And that is exactly what they do when they analyze historic weather data with climate models.
We are just doomed a little later.
If this research is more accurate than previous studies then the climate change is progressing slower as expected. That is great news, as we wasted so much time. If the previous estimates are correct we are in big trouble. According to the new study we will be in big trouble a little later or if we act fast we still could make it and only face medium trouble.
I honestly do not understand why anti climate change honchos gloat over that news. It is like visiting the doctor and he tell you that his last diagnosis was a little too drastic and he has good news: You will not die next week, but in two weeks. So celebrate!
Indeed it would never save.
When you live in a town or smaller city the bus or tram comes by every 10 to 15 minutes (30 minutes at night). At junctions they are normally synchronized so you can switch vehicles in a matter of minutes (1 or 2 minutes). For a average traveling time of say 20 minutes, the potential to save time are 10%. And you have to move yourself a little which is good for you. For shorter distances you can use a bike or walk. Using a car for a 20 min ride is in most cities not very clever, as you cannot find a parking slot at the destination and have to search for one, which, even at optimal route, will introduce extra travel time and walk back time. Distances greater than 20 minutes reduce the effect of tram switching.
The bast way to save time would be to not go at all and do it by phone/Internet/whatever. And secondly, every advancement in travel speed and throughput has only increased the distances between home and workplace, they never resulted in the saving of time.
If you live in a bigger city the underground goes every 5 minutes (10 min at night) and buses and trams have similar schedules. So you are already faster using public transport today than using a car. So why optimize its speed again. It would be more wise to increase the capacity of public transport. When all people switch from cars to public transport the capacity in European cities have to be doubled. For an underground with a 5 min schedule that would mean either increase the capacity of one train or increase the schedule. As the train are already at full length in that special time zone where the go every 5 minutes, so they can try to use two floors, but that would imply to rebuild the infrastructure, which is not such a good idea. Another option is the increase in the schedule from 5 to 2.5 min. That is however, not possible with present control technology. Maybe we have to switch to automated trains, like they have in Paris or Nuremberg (Germany). this also gives additional space inside the train as no driver is required anymore.
With no cars on the road you can also use automated buses. And when you use them, you can switch to trams as trams are more energy efficient and you can remove the street cover where the tram goes which allows the rain to drain away instead of using up the sewer system. Makes a better climate in the city.
No he states: Renewable energy alone does not solve the problem. True. It is like, flower alone is not a cake. True, but without flower it will never become a cake (at least non I know).
The primary goal is sustainability. Part of that is re-newable energy.
It influences the system. However, the amount is small and the energy you extract from the wind is transfered as electric energy and then in the end converted to heat. Introducing the energy back into the system.
We have so called renewable energy source, which is obviouly limited due to the fact that the sun output does not increase significantly (and that is good) and the earth is not getting warmer inside. And we have limited resources. So no we cannot replace every car with a lithium-battery powered electrical engine. A) we do not have enough copper and b) we do not have enough lithium.
So to switch to a sustainable way of life, we have to rethink transportation of electrity, goods, and humans. I personally find it very interesting that the average time used to get to ones job didn't change over the centuries. The faster we could go the longer the distances become. For a lot of office jobs, travel could be avoided or reduced, if people start working in offices closer to theri homes. If they are in a 20 minute walk or bicycle distance, you can skip the car. And you even could use busses or trams which can be implemented much more resource efficient than cars and even more personal cars.
In short: Sustainability requires renewable energy, but it also needs resource efficieny.
While the rest of the world accepts the fact of climate change. Including the government, car manufacturer, and the vast majority of the people. The US population stays on the other side. From an European view it is very interesting that some US politicians can state that climate change is a fraud and still be considered for being president. To us it is something out of the "the world is a disc"-type thing.
Honestly this was a good decision to ask slashdot about anything in education. Especially about a Ph.D. Beside that, if you are a real Ph.D. student you know that it does not matter what's written on your degree document, as long as you can show what you really did and if it matches your next position. In the industry this is even less important. More important are contacts in the right places. And a nice resumee.
Let say you want to have a wooden ruler. First, you get piece of wood in the desired length (or more) which is think and wide enough. Then you produce a mostly rectangular object which can be done without any measurements. Second, you make the surface smooth by rubbing a stone on the desired surface. Third, you get two sticks and a rope (or rope-like thing) knot each rope end to one of the sticks, and use some powder e.g., powdered char and dip the rope into it. Make sure the whole rope is full of char.
Fourth, now hold the sticks in a way so that the rope is stretched and hold it above the surface of your wooden piece. You have to be very close to the surface. Now you have tow options: a) you use your third hand to pick or twitch the rope which gives you a straight line of char powder on the wood. b) you can lower the rope a little bit so it makes contact with the wood.
Preferably in construction work today, people you normally option one to do so. So it might be the best method.
With a straight line, on the wood, you can start to cut the wood accordingly and you get a ruler.
I work with both new shells and it did not reduce my productivity. So it can't be that bad. It is just some things are different now and you have to do work a little different. And yes the performance sucks. But instead of complaining. Try to find out what are the main causes of that. One is definitely Javascript in Gnome-Shell and one is the damn X11. And another one is the general memory wasting style of Linux applications. For example:
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
2643 ****** 20 0 1309m 211m 43m S 0 5.4 1:46.87 thunderbird-bin
2650 ****** 20 0 1050m 209m 40m S 4 5.3 7:13.57 firefox
2453 ****** 20 0 1026m 145m 49m S 1 3.7 2:15.61 gnome-shell
4134 ****** 20 0 593m 56m 17m S 0 1.4 0:04.45 evince
2607 ****** 20 0 369m 47m 11m S 0 1.2 0:10.20 ubuntuone-syncd
2579 ****** 20 0 456m 46m 13m S 0 1.2 0:09.72 gwibber-service
2736 ****** 20 0 693m 46m 27m S 2 1.2 3:59.32 plugin-containe
1407 ****** 20 0 159m 46m 16m S 2 1.2 2:51.15 Xorg
3464 ****** 20 0 779m 41m 20m S 0 1.1 0:07.32 nautilus
2616 ****** 20 0 421m 31m 1352 S 0 0.8 0:00.00 gwibber-service
Why are these memory figures that big? I know, the real use is smaller due to shared libraries and share memory etc. But still, this is too big.
I wouldn't categorize Unity and Gnome-Shell a step back. However, they have performance issues. Unity tried to address this with Unity 2D. And Gnome-Shell tries to address it with the mentioned change in its dependencies. Still this is not enough. but this is not only a Unity/Gnome-Shell thing. If you look at the memory footprint of present applications in Linux. It sucks. Some of these issues are related to X11 others are related to the way the widget-sets are implemented. We need a better separation of UI and application function. but these are general issues and we have to address them together.
In Ubuntu the default is Unity which is similar but not identical to Gnome-Shell. While Unity is faster, it has other short comings than Gnome-Shell. Personally I like the way Gnome-Shell arranges desktops (in a column) and the feature that it adds a new desktop when all are full. I dislike it that it closes a desktop when it is empty (or it thinks it is empty). This is annoying when you, for example, use Eclipse which performs a restart every now and then when you update something. Or when you develop a plugin etc.
Unity does not have that feature. It creates by default a 2x2 virtual desktop grid (just like this apple OS). However, Unity places the application menu in the top bar. This is cool and save space on the desktop. However, on small displays (where this space saving comes in real handy) applications with many menu options cannot show all their menu options. Even more, the menu disappears when the mouse is away from the menu (how the menu can be accessed on a touch interface, I don't know). This makes it hard to target the right menu option.
In general you have to change your basic way how to work with the UI. I use both (Gnome-Shell at work and Unity on my netbook) and it took some time to adjust to the new philosophy. After that transition it is ok to work with. Some things are better than with Gnome2 some things are worse (One really bad thing is the lack of options. I do like good default and I do not need that many options, but they went too far for my taste. Beside in Ghome-Shell, the default for switching of is "suspend" not "hiberante" (which would be at least a real off state) and not "power off". To get it you have to press ALT. This is hmm not very clever. Especially were a Ubuntu and I guess all other Linuxes boot in seconds.)
What both variants lack is a start application X on desktop/activity 1 and Y on desktop 2 etc. But that didn't work with Gnome2 or KDE.
What is most confusing is: The application menu is gone (actually it just moved). And the "Dock" has become more prominent.
Most annoying at the beginning is, that a click on the Dock starts the program. Another click does not start the program a second time or give you a second view of the same program. No it moves you to the previously opened view. You have to click with the middle mouse key to get the desired result. At least that was what I found most annoying after switching. After working with it for some month, the annoyance has gone. No I found other things that annoy me. :-D But hey, there is always potential for improvements.
I use Gnome-Shell on my office machine with a [Geforce 9500 GT] and it works fine. Beside some stupid design mistakes (which will most likely be addressed in future) it is nice to work with. However, the shell has two main problems. First when choosing the application menu under activities it takes seconds to appear. On a netbook (where I tried to use it as well) it took 15 seconds. As we all know that a system is considered unresponsive after 2 sec., this is definitely a no go. So performance of the application menu is one problem. There are also other performance problems all over the place, but this is the most prominent.
The second, problem is the used language. While I can understand it, that they wanted to use a fast JavaScript engine as these perform so well in browsers, which have become application interface servers these days. The language itself sucks as it has too many options to do things and too many options to do them wrong (which makes it slow and buggy and hard to debug). So I wonder why they didn't define at least a DSL to abstract from the Javascript monster (As Gnome did with Vala for gobject).
We had a lot of dropouts too in Germany. Then they reformed the study system and made it a little bit easier and updated the curricula (which was definitely the right thing to do). In ancient times we had math together with the mathematicians, which resulted in 50% drop outs before the first 2 years, as so many students didn't get the math thing or CS theory done.
Nowadays, they drop out because of Java and or Scheme. However, we managed to teach them to give up after the first year if possible instead of trying to get it done for years and then fail. A lot of male students start CS for the wrong causes, and they learn now very quickly that they are not made for CS. this does not increase the output, but it reduces the frustration of the students. And obviously there is no way to increase the students fit for CS, as most people are not suited for that study. I doubt that you can improve that be changing high school curricula. BTW female students mostly do not drop out, because they really try to find out what CS is before they start it.
So the only thing we can do now: Tell them what CS is. So they can go and find another topic. For example: economics and engineering.
Yes it is different from the old oAW stuff. However, the Xpand language is now part of this new Xtend. You can use guillemont-expressions in text expression e.g., '''Some Text >''' which is a Xpand-Expression inside the '''...'''. However, all the foreach macros and templates form Xpand are gone, as there are similar constructs in Xtend.
Well the interesting thing is: I was talking about http://www.eclipse.org/Xtext/#xtend2 which looks for me by any definition exactly like http://www.eclipse.org/Xtext/xtend/ . However, xtend2 is different from xtend+xpand which were its predecessors [http://www.eclipse.org/modeling/m2t/?project=xpand]. So reading the news (again), I found out that the Eclipsians see the language in a quite different light as the modeling guys from itemis. But I am absolutely sure that this is the same language. Otherwise I would be wondering, why these two languages have the same syntax and are both based on xtext.
I work at university right now. We have a lot of projects together with software companies. I for myself are in a project were we design a language and tools to develop railway control centers based on programmable logic controllers (PLC) with Funkwerk-IT. That means our target languages are the IEC 61131-3 languages (e.g., FBD, ST). The general idea is, that you can model your railway control business logic in an appropriate language instead of coding it in FBD or ST. Part of the project was the design of a railway topology description language (and meta-model) which has been a valuable input to their own projects.
In another project about scientific workflows, a colleague of mine is writing an BPNM to BPEL converter in Xtend. And transformations for some scientific workflow notations (SWN). Here the big thing is that SWN are data flow oriented while BPNM and BPEL are control flow oriented.
A third project is about measuring software properties, based on their code and composition (architecture) and to monitor their run-time behavior. This effort is called MAMBA and will hopefully be presented at CSMR 2012.
Personally I used Xtend and Xpand a year ago to wrote an application based on JSF/Richfaces and all that stuff and I had to do a lot of similar things in the backing beans for my templates. So I wrote a small Xtext grammar and a generator in Xpand (utilizing also Xtend) to produce this similar code. It gave me quite a boost, as there was now less space for errors. The language itself is ugly and can be made better, but it took me a workday to build it including the generator.
The best thing about modeling, you can concentrate on the problem domain and forget about the implementation domain while formulating thing for the problem domain. Well, this is not new, XML and XSD went down the same path, however, the EMF tools are better integrated and they are closer to the data processing while XML is closer to data storage (conceptually).
I did not play with your tutorial. However, in most cases there is a file with a *.mwe2 extension (or similar). Right click on it and choose under Run as ... the option run as MEW workflow.
nope. Xtend compiles to Java, which is compiled to JVM byte code.
It is so cool it will be at least 2 inches in length and diameter.
Well. This would be possible. The predecessor of Xtend (2) was Xtend (1) and Xpand which are the sucessors of the openArchitectureWare transformations. And 3-5 year of Xtend or oAW experience is possible. Nevertheless, I am waiting for some dumb job offer writing just like the one you sketched ;-)
To my knowledge gnome-shell is not a Canonical thing. And testing software in a production environment is my contribution to OSS. Also I am able through my experience to tell developers about problems.
Xtend is merely designed for model to model and model to text transformations. Yes you can also use it for other tasks. And yes Scala has some similar concepts.