Honestly, I don't understand what all the complaining is about. It just seems like a lot of language snobbery to me.
As someone who works with PHP every working day: It's a language that wasn't designed, it was congealed. Its lack of design is very evident as soon as you start trying to build anything interesting with it. It was something that was created to solve a short-term problem for one guy, and more-or-less accidentally grew into what it is today. What structures it does have are poor attempts at imitating other languages.
Some examples of what went wrong:
- Arrays and hashes are the same data structure, for no readily apparent reason. Also, the simplest way of using that data structure is "array(a,b,c,...)", not "[a,b,c,...]" like everyone else.
- All variables start with $, in imitation of Perl, but don't use the @ or % prefixes the way Perl does, instead just pretending everything's a scalar even though it's not.
- For a long time, OOP was an afterthought.
- Unlike other scripting languages like Python, Ruby, and Perl, PHP can't figure out which files to include for you when you reference something outside of the current file. Instead, it offers a global facility called an "autoloader" that allows you to write your own code to tell it how to find it, which completely breaks when multiple libraries have competing autoloaders trying to pick up two different classes with the same name.
- Library functions display no consistency whatsoever. Some are camelCase, some are under_scored. Some search functions put the needle before the haystack, some the other way around.
- Some operators are funky: Values can be equal without being the same thing, for example.
- A significant number of errors, instead of generating exceptions that can be caught and handled, generate fatal errors, which crash your application no matter what. By comparison, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Java allow you to handle almost any error.
I could go on, but the point is there's real reasons for hating PHP.
You could go on forever. Every day that I work on PHP code, I discover another absuridity in this moronic language. Here is today's: take the php function intval, which is meant to parse a string and return an integer:
- if you pass it an object, it emits an E_NOTICE and returns 1
- if you pass it NULL, an array(), and perhaps other things, who knows, it returns 0
- if you pass it a garbage string that is not a number it returns 0
- if you pass it a number with garbage appended it returns the number (e.g., "123aaaa" returns 123)
- if you pass it an overly large number it returns MAXINT
Apparently it did not occur to the people designing this that using valid return values to indicate error conditions is not a good idea.
Add to this, the fact that to know what a PHP API function REALLY does, you often have to read the comments under the API documentation page so you can find out of all the weirdnesses and special cases that the documentation does not mention.
Aren't they also in a fight with Brazil over the top level domain ".amazon"? It would make sense that Brazil would want it and have a better claim to it than Amazon since they have the Amazon River and Amazon rainforest.
..I find that practically every single comment in this article applies to the PS3 as well.
Down to the bizarre warning that every game provides a custom icon for that means "saving, don't turn off". To add insult to injury, on the PS3 you have to click through a warning about the saving icon before starting every game, every single time.
I'm about as left as it gets, but I oppose the H1B status on the fact that it puts a large portion of workers at a major negotiation disadvantage. The problem isn't that there are foreigners taking these jobs, its that the foreigners are not able to negotiate on a level playing field, which drives down the wages for everyone.
That's the first intelligent thing I have read in this thread. The H1B program has two flaws: first, it is too expensive, slow, and restrictive for getting a Visa. At our startup, If we find someone really good we want to hire from europe (which is not so seldom, since we know a lot of people there) we have to wait for next year's quota, so (s)he can't get started until october next year. That can be over a year of waiting time! We're talking people we know, with a PhD and a strong track record.
Second, as the parent poster mentioned, it puts employees at a negotiation disadvantage because they cannot be unemployed while on the H1B. Also, if they are in the middle of a green card application and they change employers, they have to start from scratch. Solution would be to de-couple immigration H1B status and green card applications from employers. E.g., if an H1B holder could be unemployed for up to 12 months before he loses his visa, his negotiating position would be about as strong as a citizens', so he could ask for a fairer wage.
And before anyone starts the xenophobic rant that we should be hiring americans, nobody in the team that started this company was born in america. Now we are bringing money and jobs here. If the rules had been only a little bit more restrictive, this company likely wouldn't exist.
Whichever country can attract the best qualified people will have the strongest economy... this is what the US has excelled at so far. Now already the US doesn't allow people who study here and get degrees from top universities to transition to a job and eventually a green card. That is one of the dumbest economic policies currently in effect in this country.
Hatred has nothing to do with it and your misuse of the term is dishonest. It's actually called personal preference.
Fair enough. That was a response to the "lamest name ever" thread topic.
because honestly it is a better client than the desktop alternatives (thunderbird/evolution/kmail)
Honestly, gmain is a worse email client because it is polluted with a lot of advertising which significantly devalues the overall experience.
Keep forgetting about ads... ever heard of ad block pro?
Not to mention all the data mining they're not paying full value for.
That is a real and valid concern. But for everyone who has a gmail account, using the gmail web app or an imap client changes nothing in terms of privacy.
WebApps — treats online services as if they are desktop apps (Gmail, Twitter, Facebook)
Do. Not. Want.
Well maybe you don't. But millions of people use gmail, and some of them use ubungu. I know several people who have made the jump of forwarding all of their email accounts to gmail and using that exclusively as a mail client, because honestly it is a better client than the desktop alternatives (thunderbird/evolution/kmail). Making gmail a full-fledged citizen on ubuntu means it can behave just like a desktop app, with a gmail icon in the launcher, notifications arriving together with those from other applications in the system, etc. I for one am looking forward to this feature.
Dash Preview — right click any icon, get a detailed preview of what it is
Why? Should this not be the job of the file manager? Doesn't it already do this?
Well, maybe you're not searching through your file system. Maybe you search for an application to install, and can see a screenshot before clicking. Maybe you are searching for a song in your music collection, you get a preview of the album art, and a button to enqueue it or start playing it. And so on, with many third-party extensions likely to be coming. Is this useless eye-candy? maybe, but it is a lot more than the file previews in your file system browser, and I bet that after a bit of experimenting and tweaking some cool stuff will come out of this.
The US wasted millions of tons of grain making ethanol in a misguided attempt to not burn fossil fuel.
It's misguided because the farmland used to produce that grain could have produced food for human consumption, correct?
It's misguided because about 40% of the corn produced by the world's biggest corn producer, the USA, fills 10% of US car's gas tanks. Do the math. It just does not work. 40% of US corn production is enough to give a noticable upwards push to fuel prices worldwide, while the corresponding ethanol production is barely a blimp in the radar of world energy sources.
Much of the "green revolution" occurred because of extra energy input in the form of oil. Cheap oil allowed for the expansion of nitrogen fertilizer, pesticides and mechanical harvesting. While the last two don't use an enormous amount of oil, the first does. As fossil fuels become more expensive, so does nitrogen based fertilizer.
So there is likely a limit to the ability of said revolution to feed the planet. And I'm ignoring other potential limiters such as water, salinization of croplands and many others.
According to a recent report on "feeding the world" on the economist, thanks to cheap fertilizer the limiting factor to crop productivity is no longer nitrogen, as it was for most of human history, nor so much land, but mainly water.
Look at how many of the world's great rivers hardly reach the ocean anymore because they are used so intensively, worry about how river flow becomes more seasonal when there is less perennial snow, and worry about the potential for conflict between countries that are upriver and those dowriver ( as an example).
We shouldn't be arguing about mass starvation and malthusian catastrophes. Nor is that what TFA is predicting: you don't need to get nearly that far for a tightening of food supply to have dangerous consequences. I don't think anyone seriously contests that the spike in food prices was a big factor in the recent unrest in the arab world...
And in all this the US, the world's largest corn producer, is currently burning 40% of it's corn production by putting 10% etanol in gas. Stopping this senseless waste would be a concrete step to ease the upward pressure on food prices, and the unpredictable consequences it can bring.
..and you won't have to install linux, or fiddle with getting the built-in hardware to work.
With a learning curve like that, why would anyone want to run Windows?
Because most users don't install Windows themselves?
And here we have it: the simple answer.
The way to have more people using the Linux desktop is to HAVE IT PREINSTALLED by vendors, because most people are unwilling to install an OS themselves from scratch, no matter how incredible it is. Of course, this is much easier said than done, but I think that blaming GNOME/KDE/Unity for Linux's 1% market share is missing the point by a mile.
Buying pre-installed linux is possible already, especially in the US. I just bought one of these: https://www.system76.com/laptops/model/lemu4. Everything pretty much just works, and they support future releases of ubuntu as well. Another old laptop I have is a dell inspiron 1501. It didn't come with linux pre-installed in the market I bought it in, but I knew the hardware was supported because the same model was sold with linux on it in some markets. A linux install is actually quite painless nowadays if all the hardware is supported. If you like an ultrabook you can try the Dell XPS 13: does not come with linux preinstalled yet, but they will in the future so everything should be well supported.
But who knows, maybe the next generation will require their leaders to have lived their entire lives squeaky clean.
i suspect that the existing ruling elite will learn to teach their kids how to avoid leaving "incriminating stuff" online, teach to avoid facebook etc. after all their kids will be brought up to know that they are likely to be the ruling elite and will understand the need.
Or, they will hire a professional "Face" to be the public face of their offspring, while protecting the real offspring with jamming devices against recording... said offspring will meanwhile indulge in building pyramids for their afterlife until the whole egypt fad fades off... at least according to Kelly Link http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/summer_2011/valley_of_the_girls_by_kelly_link
The WebApps can be platform-independent but something has to sit on linux to handle the api calls.
I understand that - my point is that you're tainting code that was platform-independent with code that only works on one platform.
That's a good point. The APIs are open and standard, so the hope is that different platforms can have their own native implementation.
THAT part (unless it is also written in something platform independent) must be platform-dependent.
Why does that part need to be written at all? Why does a WebApp need access to anything at the OS level? I'm not trying to be a Luddite, but I do not understand why you wouldn't write the entire program in a native language and provide better integration into the supported platform if you depend on such low-level access to the OS.(...)
You don't necessarily need so much low level access or very tight integration: you just want to be neatly integrated into the GUI, so that a user barely needs to know that this is a web app rather than a real application. Gmail, for instance, is probably already in many ways the best email client available, but to use it i would want notifications arriving in the notification indicator together with those from other programs, and I would like to be able to access its menus just like a real application with whatever functionality the os provides (global menu and HUD included, if you are in ubuntu). Google hangout will never fully replace skype until I can receive "calls" without having a browser tab open on google+, etc.
It's more about the fact that it tries to save screen space by moving and obscuring menus at the top of the screen, stripping down scrollbars until you're right on top of them, and just overall burying some things that used to be far easier to access.
But everyone is entitled to their own usage needs, I suppose.
The unity scroll bars were definitely too thin (and are apparently being changed for this version) but personally I had not even noticed it in the beginning because I use keyboard or mouse wheel or trackpad to scroll 95% of the time...
The global menu is good for maximised windows, less good for small windows far away from the top left. But global menu integration is what enables HUD to work without any special application support, so I think from 12.04 it will definitely be worth it. Navigating the application menus with a search-based keyboard interface is just awesome.
The only problem with this is you need a local client to still track your files, otherwise you can encrypt all your files and upload them, but if you have 5GB of files you will be using 5GB every single upload, which will kill your bandwidth. Typically these backup things to a compare, and would only upload the 2% of files you changed that month.
Anyway that is the biggest problem, is that when you encrypt your files, the storage device cannot scrutinize your files for changes (which is the whole point of encryption more less in the first place).
I'm sure there must be a technical way around this, but I think either way it would involve an amount of trust in the provider.
For total personal protection you can do it, it would just be expensive as it would be a bandwidth hog.
I use encfs as an encryption layer for the stuff I host on dropbox. Completely transparent to the user, and each file is encrypted separately so that updates are pushed separately. File names are encrypted as well. The only downside is that I can't use the dropbox web interface to download a file if I'm on someone else's PC, on my phone, etc. Likewise integrartion of google drive with all sorts of google services will likely not work in an encrypted form unless google themselves start to offer client-side encryption.
They don't sell your data to customers, that would be illegal..
Your mileage may vary. It is certainly illegal in Europe, but it is very much legal in the US where privacy protection is not enshrined into law. Everyone sells your data to the highest bidder. Your credit card company, the departments stores you shop at, the websites you visit, etc...
To quote Archer Bunker: "Ah geez!" to all the people complaining a 12.04 search turns up book chapters 12 verse 4, or April 12, or whatever.;-)
All you gotta do is use quotes "OS X 10.6" or "Ubuntu 11.10" to qualify what you're looking for. Or wildcards "Ubuntu 11.* " Maybe searching is becoming a lost art? Unfortunately I can never remember the animals names for Mac or Linux; only the numbers.
Quoting is over-specific and will find way less content than say, ubuntu oneiric (without quotes). For instance on ubuntuforums most people will not bother to write "I am on ubuntu oneiric". They will write "I tested this on Oneiric" or "on kubuntu Oneiric". If we were using numbers, this would be hard to search for.
Wouldn't you also get specific advice if you just say 12.04?
Unless you got a page that was last modified on april 12th (that's how dates are written in some parts of the world) or on version 12.04 of some other software or that costs 12.04 dollars. Using distinctive words, that are not very commonly used in the internet at large is a MUCH better naming strategy for searchability.
Well, that's the thing. Unity is fantastic for netbooks, because that's what is was originally designed to accommodate. But anybody running a screen resolution higher than 1280x768 can feel somewhat hampered by it. As if the screen space is no longer being efficiently used.
Not this anybody. How is my screen space usage less efficient than say, gnome2? The launcher bar at the side uses probably comparable surface to the old gnome bar at the bottom (which was thinner but longer). But since this is a wide-format display (as are most PC screens on the market today) vertical space is more valuable than horizontal, so this is more efficient. I still have plenty of room for multiple side-by-side windows when I need them.
And when a window is full screen, it uses 100% of the vertical space because of global menu integration, which is great for broswers, IDEs, etc...
I've been using Unity on my netbook for a little more than a year now.
So how did you keep from mis-clicking when you'd reach for the back button in a maximized web browser and the auto-hidden launcher would pop up, especially after 11.10 which replaced touching the top left corner with touching anywhere on the left side at all?
Personally, I always disable auto-hide, since back in the days of windows 2000's disappearing taskbar. On Unity if I have a small screen I just make the launcher icons smaller. I want to be able to launch items with one click, and auto hiding of any sort makes that impossible, plus it makes things harder from a usability perspective (because the appear-disappear behavior can be confusing and is not easily discoverable if you are not aware of it, no matter how well is implemented). But many people I know like it, and enable it both on windows and unity. I guess they choose to pay a usability price for the extra screen surface for applications.
When I went backpacking around Europe 10 years ago, the cliche was that nearly every American backpacker had a copy of Let's Go. In some cities it was noticeable that hostels were far more likely to be fully booked if they appeared high in the list in Let's Go Europe.
It'd be interesting to see how this has changed for today's backpackers, among whom smartphones and netbooks seem ubiquitous, and where bookings are primarily web-driven.
Yeah, nothing would scream clueless american tourist quite like a let's go guide of Europe... Even the japanese tourists mostly have guidebooks of individual countries or regions of europe.
To a European, having a single guide book on the entirety of europe seems pretty absurd. And no, it is not the same as having a single guidebook of all of the USA, simply because of the practical differences between culturally and linguistically distinct countrires and the cultural variety and density of sights in countries that have a few millennia of history.
I never got the chance to skim the general parts of a let's go europe, but i'd be curious what they say about things like price ranges for services, opening hours, attitudes towards tourists, being able to pay by credit card, advice for women travelers or for traveling with children, law enforcement, food, nightlife, etc that are typically featured in a dedicated section of a good backpackers' guide but all vary widely from one country to another.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, I don't understand what all the complaining is about. It just seems like a lot of language snobbery to me.
As someone who works with PHP every working day: It's a language that wasn't designed, it was congealed. Its lack of design is very evident as soon as you start trying to build anything interesting with it. It was something that was created to solve a short-term problem for one guy, and more-or-less accidentally grew into what it is today. What structures it does have are poor attempts at imitating other languages.
Some examples of what went wrong: - Arrays and hashes are the same data structure, for no readily apparent reason. Also, the simplest way of using that data structure is "array(a,b,c,...)", not "[a,b,c, ...]" like everyone else.
- All variables start with $, in imitation of Perl, but don't use the @ or % prefixes the way Perl does, instead just pretending everything's a scalar even though it's not.
- For a long time, OOP was an afterthought.
- Unlike other scripting languages like Python, Ruby, and Perl, PHP can't figure out which files to include for you when you reference something outside of the current file. Instead, it offers a global facility called an "autoloader" that allows you to write your own code to tell it how to find it, which completely breaks when multiple libraries have competing autoloaders trying to pick up two different classes with the same name.
- Library functions display no consistency whatsoever. Some are camelCase, some are under_scored. Some search functions put the needle before the haystack, some the other way around.
- Some operators are funky: Values can be equal without being the same thing, for example.
- A significant number of errors, instead of generating exceptions that can be caught and handled, generate fatal errors, which crash your application no matter what. By comparison, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Java allow you to handle almost any error.
I could go on, but the point is there's real reasons for hating PHP.
You could go on forever. Every day that I work on PHP code, I discover another absuridity in this moronic language. Here is today's: take the php function intval, which is meant to parse a string and return an integer:
- if you pass it an object, it emits an E_NOTICE and returns 1
- if you pass it NULL, an array(), and perhaps other things, who knows, it returns 0
- if you pass it a garbage string that is not a number it returns 0
- if you pass it a number with garbage appended it returns the number (e.g., "123aaaa" returns 123)
- if you pass it an overly large number it returns MAXINT
Apparently it did not occur to the people designing this that using valid return values to indicate error conditions is not a good idea.
Add to this, the fact that to know what a PHP API function REALLY does, you often have to read the comments under the API documentation page so you can find out of all the weirdnesses and special cases that the documentation does not mention.
Aren't they also in a fight with Brazil over the top level domain ".amazon"? It would make sense that Brazil would want it and have a better claim to it than Amazon since they have the Amazon River and Amazon rainforest.
https://xkcd.com/1165/
Advantage: Amazon.
Have you seen the proposed specs on the PS4 and next Xbox? They seem pretty powerful to just be targeting "soccer moms".
Have you seen a soccer mom?..
..I find that practically every single comment in this article applies to the PS3 as well.
Down to the bizarre warning that every game provides a custom icon for that means "saving, don't turn off". To add insult to injury, on the PS3 you have to click through a warning about the saving icon before starting every game, every single time.
http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=ubuntu+linux&word2=linux+mint
I'm about as left as it gets, but I oppose the H1B status on the fact that it puts a large portion of workers at a major negotiation disadvantage. The problem isn't that there are foreigners taking these jobs, its that the foreigners are not able to negotiate on a level playing field, which drives down the wages for everyone.
That's the first intelligent thing I have read in this thread. The H1B program has two flaws: first, it is too expensive, slow, and restrictive for getting a Visa. At our startup, If we find someone really good we want to hire from europe (which is not so seldom, since we know a lot of people there) we have to wait for next year's quota, so (s)he can't get started until october next year. That can be over a year of waiting time! We're talking people we know, with a PhD and a strong track record.
Second, as the parent poster mentioned, it puts employees at a negotiation disadvantage because they cannot be unemployed while on the H1B. Also, if they are in the middle of a green card application and they change employers, they have to start from scratch. Solution would be to de-couple immigration H1B status and green card applications from employers. E.g., if an H1B holder could be unemployed for up to 12 months before he loses his visa, his negotiating position would be about as strong as a citizens', so he could ask for a fairer wage.
And before anyone starts the xenophobic rant that we should be hiring americans, nobody in the team that started this company was born in america. Now we are bringing money and jobs here. If the rules had been only a little bit more restrictive, this company likely wouldn't exist.
Whichever country can attract the best qualified people will have the strongest economy... this is what the US has excelled at so far. Now already the US doesn't allow people who study here and get degrees from top universities to transition to a job and eventually a green card. That is one of the dumbest economic policies currently in effect in this country.
Hatred has nothing to do with it and your misuse of the term is dishonest. It's actually called personal preference.
Fair enough. That was a response to the "lamest name ever" thread topic.
because honestly it is a better client than the desktop alternatives (thunderbird/evolution/kmail)
Honestly, gmain is a worse email client because it is polluted with a lot of advertising which significantly devalues the overall experience.
Keep forgetting about ads... ever heard of ad block pro?
Not to mention all the data mining they're not paying full value for.
That is a real and valid concern. But for everyone who has a gmail account, using the gmail web app or an imap client changes nothing in terms of privacy.
WebApps — treats online services as if they are desktop apps (Gmail, Twitter, Facebook)
Do. Not. Want.
Well maybe you don't. But millions of people use gmail, and some of them use ubungu. I know several people who have made the jump of forwarding all of their email accounts to gmail and using that exclusively as a mail client, because honestly it is a better client than the desktop alternatives (thunderbird/evolution/kmail). Making gmail a full-fledged citizen on ubuntu means it can behave just like a desktop app, with a gmail icon in the launcher, notifications arriving together with those from other applications in the system, etc. I for one am looking forward to this feature.
Dash Preview — right click any icon, get a detailed preview of what it is
Why? Should this not be the job of the file manager? Doesn't it already do this?
Well, maybe you're not searching through your file system. Maybe you search for an application to install, and can see a screenshot before clicking. Maybe you are searching for a song in your music collection, you get a preview of the album art, and a button to enqueue it or start playing it. And so on, with many third-party extensions likely to be coming. Is this useless eye-candy? maybe, but it is a lot more than the file previews in your file system browser, and I bet that after a bit of experimenting and tweaking some cool stuff will come out of this.
Dumb genius isn't an oxymoron, it's just a genius who's unable to speak. Moron genius - that's an oxymoron.
It appears you have out-pedenticed me...
The scripts are irrelevant if not ran on the real environment,
Well, that's an oxymoron
It does not mean what you think it means.
Cold fire is an oxymoron, or dry water, or dumb genius. An oxymoron is an inherently contradictory combination of terms.
I should've saw that one coming.
I studied international economics at George Washington, and have a law degree.
Didn't see that one coming...
It's misguided because the farmland used to produce that grain could have produced food for human consumption, correct?
It's misguided because about 40% of the corn produced by the world's biggest corn producer, the USA, fills 10% of US car's gas tanks. Do the math. It just does not work. 40% of US corn production is enough to give a noticable upwards push to fuel prices worldwide, while the corresponding ethanol production is barely a blimp in the radar of world energy sources.
Much of the "green revolution" occurred because of extra energy input in the form of oil. Cheap oil allowed for the expansion of nitrogen fertilizer, pesticides and mechanical harvesting. While the last two don't use an enormous amount of oil, the first does. As fossil fuels become more expensive, so does nitrogen based fertilizer.
So there is likely a limit to the ability of said revolution to feed the planet. And I'm ignoring other potential limiters such as water, salinization of croplands and many others.
According to a recent report on "feeding the world" on the economist, thanks to cheap fertilizer the limiting factor to crop productivity is no longer nitrogen, as it was for most of human history, nor so much land, but mainly water.
Look at how many of the world's great rivers hardly reach the ocean anymore because they are used so intensively, worry about how river flow becomes more seasonal when there is less perennial snow, and worry about the potential for conflict between countries that are upriver and those dowriver ( as an example).
We shouldn't be arguing about mass starvation and malthusian catastrophes. Nor is that what TFA is predicting: you don't need to get nearly that far for a tightening of food supply to have dangerous consequences. I don't think anyone seriously contests that the spike in food prices was a big factor in the recent unrest in the arab world...
And in all this the US, the world's largest corn producer, is currently burning 40% of it's corn production by putting 10% etanol in gas. Stopping this senseless waste would be a concrete step to ease the upward pressure on food prices, and the unpredictable consequences it can bring.
With a learning curve like that, why would anyone want to run Windows?
Because most users don't install Windows themselves?
And here we have it: the simple answer.
The way to have more people using the Linux desktop is to HAVE IT PREINSTALLED by vendors, because most people are unwilling to install an OS themselves from scratch, no matter how incredible it is. Of course, this is much easier said than done, but I think that blaming GNOME/KDE/Unity for Linux's 1% market share is missing the point by a mile.
Buying pre-installed linux is possible already, especially in the US. I just bought one of these: https://www.system76.com/laptops/model/lemu4. Everything pretty much just works, and they support future releases of ubuntu as well. Another old laptop I have is a dell inspiron 1501. It didn't come with linux pre-installed in the market I bought it in, but I knew the hardware was supported because the same model was sold with linux on it in some markets. A linux install is actually quite painless nowadays if all the hardware is supported. If you like an ultrabook you can try the Dell XPS 13: does not come with linux preinstalled yet, but they will in the future so everything should be well supported.
But who knows, maybe the next generation will require their leaders to have lived their entire lives squeaky clean.
i suspect that the existing ruling elite will learn to teach their kids how to avoid leaving "incriminating stuff" online, teach to avoid facebook etc. after all their kids will be brought up to know that they are likely to be the ruling elite and will understand the need.
Or, they will hire a professional "Face" to be the public face of their offspring, while protecting the real offspring with jamming devices against recording... said offspring will meanwhile indulge in building pyramids for their afterlife until the whole egypt fad fades off... at least according to Kelly Link http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/summer_2011/valley_of_the_girls_by_kelly_link
I understand that - my point is that you're tainting code that was platform-independent with code that only works on one platform.
That's a good point. The APIs are open and standard, so the hope is that different platforms can have their own native implementation.
THAT part (unless it is also written in something platform independent) must be platform-dependent.
Why does that part need to be written at all? Why does a WebApp need access to anything at the OS level? I'm not trying to be a Luddite, but I do not understand why you wouldn't write the entire program in a native language and provide better integration into the supported platform if you depend on such low-level access to the OS.(...)
You don't necessarily need so much low level access or very tight integration: you just want to be neatly integrated into the GUI, so that a user barely needs to know that this is a web app rather than a real application. Gmail, for instance, is probably already in many ways the best email client available, but to use it i would want notifications arriving in the notification indicator together with those from other programs, and I would like to be able to access its menus just like a real application with whatever functionality the os provides (global menu and HUD included, if you are in ubuntu). Google hangout will never fully replace skype until I can receive "calls" without having a browser tab open on google+, etc.
It's more about the fact that it tries to save screen space by moving and obscuring menus at the top of the screen, stripping down scrollbars until you're right on top of them, and just overall burying some things that used to be far easier to access.
But everyone is entitled to their own usage needs, I suppose.
The unity scroll bars were definitely too thin (and are apparently being changed for this version) but personally I had not even noticed it in the beginning because I use keyboard or mouse wheel or trackpad to scroll 95% of the time...
The global menu is good for maximised windows, less good for small windows far away from the top left. But global menu integration is what enables HUD to work without any special application support, so I think from 12.04 it will definitely be worth it. Navigating the application menus with a search-based keyboard interface is just awesome.
The only problem with this is you need a local client to still track your files, otherwise you can encrypt all your files and upload them, but if you have 5GB of files you will be using 5GB every single upload, which will kill your bandwidth. Typically these backup things to a compare, and would only upload the 2% of files you changed that month.
Anyway that is the biggest problem, is that when you encrypt your files, the storage device cannot scrutinize your files for changes (which is the whole point of encryption more less in the first place).
I'm sure there must be a technical way around this, but I think either way it would involve an amount of trust in the provider.
For total personal protection you can do it, it would just be expensive as it would be a bandwidth hog.
I use encfs as an encryption layer for the stuff I host on dropbox. Completely transparent to the user, and each file is encrypted separately so that updates are pushed separately. File names are encrypted as well. The only downside is that I can't use the dropbox web interface to download a file if I'm on someone else's PC, on my phone, etc. Likewise integrartion of google drive with all sorts of google services will likely not work in an encrypted form unless google themselves start to offer client-side encryption.
They don't sell your data to customers, that would be illegal..
Your mileage may vary. It is certainly illegal in Europe, but it is very much legal in the US where privacy protection is not enshrined into law. Everyone sells your data to the highest bidder. Your credit card company, the departments stores you shop at, the websites you visit, etc...
Wow thanks! You just saved me so much time with your summary. You've been modded funny, but I think it should be informative instead. ;)
If you want to save time, you're missing the point of slashdot.
To quote Archer Bunker: "Ah geez!" to all the people complaining a 12.04 search turns up book chapters 12 verse 4, or April 12, or whatever. ;-)
All you gotta do is use quotes "OS X 10.6" or "Ubuntu 11.10" to qualify what you're looking for. Or wildcards "Ubuntu 11.* " Maybe searching is becoming a lost art? Unfortunately I can never remember the animals names for Mac or Linux; only the numbers.
Quoting is over-specific and will find way less content than say, ubuntu oneiric (without quotes). For instance on ubuntuforums most people will not bother to write "I am on ubuntu oneiric". They will write "I tested this on Oneiric" or "on kubuntu Oneiric". If we were using numbers, this would be hard to search for.
Wouldn't you also get specific advice if you just say 12.04?
Unless you got a page that was last modified on april 12th (that's how dates are written in some parts of the world) or on version 12.04 of some other software or that costs 12.04 dollars. Using distinctive words, that are not very commonly used in the internet at large is a MUCH better naming strategy for searchability.
Well, that's the thing. Unity is fantastic for netbooks, because that's what is was originally designed to accommodate. But anybody running a screen resolution higher than 1280x768 can feel somewhat hampered by it. As if the screen space is no longer being efficiently used.
Not this anybody. How is my screen space usage less efficient than say, gnome2? The launcher bar at the side uses probably comparable surface to the old gnome bar at the bottom (which was thinner but longer). But since this is a wide-format display (as are most PC screens on the market today) vertical space is more valuable than horizontal, so this is more efficient. I still have plenty of room for multiple side-by-side windows when I need them.
And when a window is full screen, it uses 100% of the vertical space because of global menu integration, which is great for broswers, IDEs, etc...
I've been using Unity on my netbook for a little more than a year now.
So how did you keep from mis-clicking when you'd reach for the back button in a maximized web browser and the auto-hidden launcher would pop up, especially after 11.10 which replaced touching the top left corner with touching anywhere on the left side at all?
Personally, I always disable auto-hide, since back in the days of windows 2000's disappearing taskbar. On Unity if I have a small screen I just make the launcher icons smaller. I want to be able to launch items with one click, and auto hiding of any sort makes that impossible, plus it makes things harder from a usability perspective (because the appear-disappear behavior can be confusing and is not easily discoverable if you are not aware of it, no matter how well is implemented). But many people I know like it, and enable it both on windows and unity. I guess they choose to pay a usability price for the extra screen surface for applications.
When I went backpacking around Europe 10 years ago, the cliche was that nearly every American backpacker had a copy of Let's Go. In some cities it was noticeable that hostels were far more likely to be fully booked if they appeared high in the list in Let's Go Europe. It'd be interesting to see how this has changed for today's backpackers, among whom smartphones and netbooks seem ubiquitous, and where bookings are primarily web-driven.
Yeah, nothing would scream clueless american tourist quite like a let's go guide of Europe... Even the japanese tourists mostly have guidebooks of individual countries or regions of europe.
To a European, having a single guide book on the entirety of europe seems pretty absurd. And no, it is not the same as having a single guidebook of all of the USA, simply because of the practical differences between culturally and linguistically distinct countrires and the cultural variety and density of sights in countries that have a few millennia of history.
I never got the chance to skim the general parts of a let's go europe, but i'd be curious what they say about things like price ranges for services, opening hours, attitudes towards tourists, being able to pay by credit card, advice for women travelers or for traveling with children, law enforcement, food, nightlife, etc that are typically featured in a dedicated section of a good backpackers' guide but all vary widely from one country to another.