Bingo. Realistically, if you're a company with less than a 100 employees (read: most companies), you're only going to have a handful of servers in house and they're each going to be dedicated to particular roles. You're not going to have 100 clustered fileservers - instead, you're going to have one or maybe two. You're not going to have a dozen e-mail servers - instead, you're going to have one or two. Consequently, the office admin's focus isn't going to be scalability; it just won't matter to the admin if they can script, say, creating a mailbox for 100 new users instead of just one. Instead, said office admin is going to be more focused on finding ways to do semi-unusual things (e.g. "create a VPN between this office and our new branch office", "promote this new server as a domain controller", "install SQL", etc.) that they might do, oh, once a year.
The trouble with Linux, and I'm speaking as someone who's used YaST in precisely this context, is that you have to make a choice - do you let the GUI manage it or do you CLI it? If you try to do both, there will be inconsistencies because the grammar of the config files is too ambiguous; consequently, the GUI config file parser will probably just overwrite whatever manual changes it thinks is "invalid", whether it really is or not. If you let the GUI manage it, you better hope the GUI has the flexibility necessary to meet your needs. If, for example, YaST doesn't understand named Apache virtual hosts, well, good luck figuring out where it's hiding all of the various config files that it was sensibly spreading out in multiple locations for you, and don't you dare use YaST to manage Apache again or it'll delete your Apache-legal but YaST-"invalid" directive.
The only solution I really see is for manual config file support with optional XML (or some other machine-friendly but still human-readable format) linkages. For example, if you want to hand-edit your resolv.conf, that's fine, but if the GUI is going to take over, it'll toss a directive on line 1 that says "#import resolv.conf.xml" and immediately overrides (but does not overwrite) everything following that. Then, if you still want to use the GUI but need to hand-edit something, you can edit the XML file using the appropriate syntax and know that your change will be reflected on the GUI.
That's my take. Your mileage, of course, may vary.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again - democracy simply doesn't work.
Now, over the years, a newsman learns a number of things that for one reason or another, he just cannot report. It doesn't seem to matter now, so...the following people are gay:
In the year 2001 I stopped working on physics, because I was tired of working on physics and working three jobs. (Engineer, Teacher, Physics Writer). When I stopped studying physics instead of resting, I started studying software and web site design.
A year later in the year 2002 I left Raytheon to work for the Disney Corporation as a software computer programmer in web site design; however, I got in on the tail end of the Dot Com “Bang”; and experienced the Dot Com “Bust.”
As another aside, what is it with crackpot "engineers"? Someone passed me a link to this guy back in the day - his "Foreclosure Solution Patent" is the stuff of legends.
Encryption won't solve the problem - they'll just torture the information they need out of those that have it. It's far better to just encapsulate the knowledge, make sure that nobody knows enough to bring down the entire organization, and hope for the best.
You're forgetting ability. There's a wide gulf between "there's something in the guts of the software interfering with our ability to 'get shit done'" and "I know where to find it and how to disable it".
However, that's not what the story is about. Instead, foreign police forces didn't need a "government backdoor" - instead, they'd use an investigation into a potential technical legal violation (think of how Al Capone was ultimately convicted of tax evasion and you'll get the idea), ask MS to provide enough info to ostensibly check for it ("Hey, we think this org is using pirated software."/"Okay, here's what you'll need to know to check for that."), then raid all of the computers in said org, hold them long enough to disrupt operations and grab everything off of them, then be done with it. Honestly, you don't need root/local admin access when you can carry the boxes out of the office by hand. Now, MS' official policy when foreign law enforcement calls is to simply say, "No, they're not pirates - we give free licenses to all non-profits" and force law enforcement to come up with some other arcane law (of which there are always plenty) to apply against the org of their choice.
It won't really affect anything, of course, but kudos to MS for not playing along.
Like most things, I think it would depend on the woman. I've met more than a few women that get extremely upset when they realize their man has a porn collection and the willingness to use it ("What, am I not good enough for you?!"). I've also met more than a few women that just write it off as "boys will be boys", and a subset of those that watch and enjoy the porn with the guys.
If I had to hazard a guess, I'd assume that those that get upset about porn would get extremely upset about the robot sex slave, those that write porn off as "boys will be boys" might get a bit uncomfortable about the robot (there's a fine line between "porn's on the TV" and "my guy is with a robotic sex toy") but may or may not keep their discomfort to themselves, and those that watch and enjoy the porn will be arranging robotic threesomes, assuming they don't already have matching male sex robots to play with.
In Civ 2 (running on memory here), the "one true path" basically amounted to...
Get to philosophy before everyone else. Get free tech advance. Advance to Republic, switch government, then Democracy as fast as possible.. Switch government to Democracy once you get it (democracy was optimal about 98% of the time, unless you were in a war), build "Statue of Liberty" precisely to keep people from going to war with you. While all of this is going on, expand like crazy and set new cities to a Defending unit->Settler->Settler pattern, with the first settler being sent off on expansion duty and the second settler possibly being used for road and irrigation duty. Once Democracy is under way, get Factories as fast as possible, get industrialized, then steamroll the rest of the game into the ground.
If someone wishes to refine this a bit, feel free, but, yeah, there was definitely a "one true way". Once you figured it out, every game was just a variation of a theme.
It's not so much a matter of "gambling" as it is knowing that there's more than one way to win a game. In Civ II, for example, there was a fairly set formula that you could follow that would achieve victory far more often than not (basically, build lots of settlers and expand like crazy). There might be individual variations on that theme, but, for the most part, there was only one winning strategy ("one true path"), so, if you knew the way and everyone else around you knew the way, the only competition was in who had a better starting position to exercise this "one true path" and who could execute it more completely.
That gets repetitive. It also gives the feeling that the game has been "solved". Tic-tac-toe would be a good example of a "one true path" game - there's a known opener and a known counter to the opener, so, if both people know the opener and the counter, the game will always be a "cat's game".
With Civ 4, it was clear that they tried to come up with multiple paths of victory and each of them were similarly "optimal". If you weren't in a position to win with mass expansion, there were other ways you could still salvage the game and possibly achieve victory. That gives flexibility, but you have to know when to use which option, otherwise it can feel like "gambling with unknown odds". Granted, you won't have perfect knowledge, but that's part of the fun - how well do you understand your tactical and strategic situation given the information you do have? Is it enough for you to make a good decision?
The same way we talk about the Super Bo^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H... err... Big Game. Effectively immediately, you may refer to it as either The Agency or, if you have a particularly juvenile sense of humor, the Domestic Intelligence Collection Kelvinator. Kind of had to stretch on the "K", obviously, but I'll be danged if Kelvinator isn't a fantastically awesome brand name to incorporate into everything.
I don't know about you, but when I play MOO#, MOM or Civ#, the police stations and spy defenses don't start cannibalizing their own citizens if they have too much spare time on their hands.
OK, for some people, maybe it doesn't. But that doesn't mean that a nice organised file/folder structure shouldn't be maintained. If I'm looking for a photo of my house for example, I'm not going to know what date it was taken, I probably haven't tagged or named it at all. How is a search based system best for that? I just want to know where it is and use the file manager to have a bit of a look.
Easy - run a search on all images and look through their thumbnails. That's pretty much what you're doing when you're browsing through the filesystem manually anyway.
Problem is, OSs like windows 7 (maybe Vista? never used it) and OSX have these multiple "libraries" that don't seem to make any sense when you just use a file manager to look through them. Each user has one, and then there is a central one, and everything seems to be messily split up between them.
Last I checked, the "libraries" are just pre-canned and pre-indexed searches for certain items (music, pictures, etc.), of which the ones in their proper locations in the filesystem (i.e. pictures in "My Pictures", music in "My Music", and so on) are a subset of the ones you would find in this pre-canned search. Windows 7/Vista still defaults saved pictures to your "My Pictures" folder or something similar under your Users folder. Outside of that, the only major differences between post-XP Windows profiles and XP profiles is that "Documents and Settings" is now "Users" and all of the little sub-folders under "My Documents" (i.e. "My Pictures", "My Videos", etc.) are now at the root of the profile path. So, you can have your cake and eat it too if that's what you want. The important thing is that, thanks to those libraries, you don't have to have a neatly organized filesystem - you'll find your house picture no matter where you put it.
What's wrong with the structure linux OSs and windows XP used? It made logical sense, everything is in one place. A search engine will work no matter how things are stored anyway.
The structure isn't enforced strictly. Consequently, though you're encouraged to put pictures in "My Pictures" or something similar, you don't have to and there's nothing stopping you from exercising bad folder discipline and consequently losing your files. In the past, finding a misplaced file meant manually looking through every conceivable directory where you might have saved something and hoping you found it (blech!). Now, we've upgraded to file searches and indexes, which is an improvement. The future is increasing the range of attributes that you can attach to a file and utilizing those attributes in clever ways - not just "this is an image" and "this is a Word doc", but "this is an image that was created from a picture that was taken outside, which I can determine by the heavy use of light blue in the background and the ISO 100 exposure used by the camera, and I know the camera used ISO 100 exposure because it attached that information in this image's metadata". Instead of searching for a picture of your house by browsing through everything in %userprofile%, you can instead search for "pictures taken outside", the computer will figure it out for you based on a preexisting metadata query ("outside"="SELECT * FROM Filesystem WHERE filetype=image AND metadata="ISO 100" OR metadata="ISO 200" AND/OR..."), and you can then find your house from a much smaller yet more complete subset of pictures.
What you seem to be describing is a meta-data based filesystem. Believe me, I have NO issue with that. The filesystem itself I see as outdated. HOWEVER, that's not what Gnome will be acheiving with this. They're shaking up the desktop metaphor, and needlessly IMHO.
True, but a metadata-based filesystem isn't going to make much sense if it's presented in a file/folder context because it's not file/folder-dependent. GNOME Shell, at least from what I'm seeing (including your screenshot) is an attempt at presenting the data in a more metadata-"native" format. So, you have some default categories that make a bit of sense - presumably, you either want to start a program (Applications), go somewhere on your filesystem (Places - not a fan of this, actually, since we're trying to get away from precisely this sort of behavior, but I suppose you have to build a bridge somewhere), or go somewhere you've been recently (Recent Documents). I'm assuming the stuff on the left can be configured to show pretty much whatever you want, so you could presumably show something like "Music" or "Photos" or whatever instead of "Places". In order for these categories to be useful, they have to be big enough to show enough data to be worth parsing.
Now, should they be drawers that slide on hover instead of big, static blocks? Perhaps. Could they use other, more traditional UI elements to show the same information? Probably. I'll grant that execution isn't what it could be; then again, GNOME agrees with us on this which is why they're delaying the project into 2011. Of course, there was a fair amount of deviation between the various file/folder UIs in the '80s and early '90s while people sorted out what worked and what didn't, so I'm not particularly surprised that we're seeing some trial and error now that the underlying file organization scheme is radically changing. At least their naming convention is better than KDE's, though. I don't know about you, but when I think of a Dolphin, I think of a friendly grey cetacean, not a graphical file manager.
I actually kind of understand the need to rework the UI. The file/folder metaphor was a good starting point back when the contents of a computer system were simple enough where you could organize them by hand. Nowadays, it's pretty trivial to have enough documents, music, videos, photos, and so on lying around where the whole metaphor breaks down because there's just no way you can keep track of everything. Consequently, ditching the file/folder metaphor and instead pushing forward with a "what type of stuff do you want to work with?" approach would be rather beneficial, and is something that Windows and Mac have been slowly but incrementally pushing for quite a while.
Think about it this way - does it really matter where things go specifically, so long as you can get there easily? Do I really care that I can find and open a picture at ~/Documents/Pictures/2010/07/28 in seven double-clicks and nearly as many context changes, or do I care that I can go to "Pictures"->"Sort by date"->double-click on today's photo in four mouse-clicks and get a more holistic view of what's on my machine at a given moment? Do I care that I can find some music at ~/Documents/Music/Artist/Album/trackname.ogg, or would I rather just be able to "Play all songs in album Foo by artist Bar"?
Having said all that, I do think that GNOME and KDE (okay, especially KDE) are jumping a bit ahead of the curve on this, which is fine by me. A lot of computer geeks are only starting to come around to the idea of a "semantic desktop" (oh, how I loathe that term...), or, if you prefer, a desktop that functions more like a local search engine than a filing cabinet, in no small part because the people "in the know" are calling it silly things like "semantic desktop", "NEPOMUK", and so on, then ranting about the power of tuples, metadata and RDF. You can just imagine how the rest of the world feels on the subject. I do think that, over time, this is the direction we're going to end up going, though. If you stop and think about it, it's a little strange that we interact with the Internet in one fashion (search for something->load it->bookmark it if I want to come back to it) and our computers in another fashion (traverse a pile of directories->find something?->load it->create a desktop shortcut if I want to come back to it, unless I overload my desktop with shortcuts, in which case I'll need a shortcut to the folder containing the shortcuts...). Since many people are spending more time on the Internet than on local content, doesn't it make sense to use the same mechanisms used on the Internet to find local content? Might as well, right?
What's a commercial? I'm a smug SWPL-style tech yuppie with no TV and both NoScript and AdBlock installed on my Mac, so I like to ask silly questions like this to prove my superiority over the unwashed masses.
Because OpenSUSE's KDE implementation tends to be less buggy and better integrated than most, it's frequently used as a reference distro for KDE reviews. Basically, if there's a KDE function that doesn't work on OpenSUSE, it's assumed that it doesn't work anywhere, which probably isn't too far from the truth.
Plus, YaST is a fairly intuitive and exhaustive system management console. It admittedly gets a little buggy when you start bumping into corner cases, but, if you're not into hand-coding your config files, it's vastly superior to dpkg-configure. Though I certainly don't begrudge anyone that's willing to wade their way through the command-line and their system's config files, it's nice to have some tools that help you go in the right direction when you need to do those one-off configuration jobs and don't require a fully functional LAMP installation (Webmin, phpMyAdmin, and so on).
Everyone needs to eat, but demand for any particular set of food products is generally not inelastic - there's no cartel keeping people from substituting butter for margarine.
Actually, there historically was such a cartel. When margarine first came out, it was illegal in many states in the US to sell yellow colored margarine because dairy lobbies felt that yellow margarine looked too much like butter. Consequently, if you wanted yellow margarine, you had to buy a yellow coloring pack and mix it in.
Most of those restrictions were phased out or ignored after World War 2.
Slashdot Mirror
Bingo. Realistically, if you're a company with less than a 100 employees (read: most companies), you're only going to have a handful of servers in house and they're each going to be dedicated to particular roles. You're not going to have 100 clustered fileservers - instead, you're going to have one or maybe two. You're not going to have a dozen e-mail servers - instead, you're going to have one or two. Consequently, the office admin's focus isn't going to be scalability; it just won't matter to the admin if they can script, say, creating a mailbox for 100 new users instead of just one. Instead, said office admin is going to be more focused on finding ways to do semi-unusual things (e.g. "create a VPN between this office and our new branch office", "promote this new server as a domain controller", "install SQL", etc.) that they might do, oh, once a year.
The trouble with Linux, and I'm speaking as someone who's used YaST in precisely this context, is that you have to make a choice - do you let the GUI manage it or do you CLI it? If you try to do both, there will be inconsistencies because the grammar of the config files is too ambiguous; consequently, the GUI config file parser will probably just overwrite whatever manual changes it thinks is "invalid", whether it really is or not. If you let the GUI manage it, you better hope the GUI has the flexibility necessary to meet your needs. If, for example, YaST doesn't understand named Apache virtual hosts, well, good luck figuring out where it's hiding all of the various config files that it was sensibly spreading out in multiple locations for you, and don't you dare use YaST to manage Apache again or it'll delete your Apache-legal but YaST-"invalid" directive.
The only solution I really see is for manual config file support with optional XML (or some other machine-friendly but still human-readable format) linkages. For example, if you want to hand-edit your resolv.conf, that's fine, but if the GUI is going to take over, it'll toss a directive on line 1 that says "#import resolv.conf.xml" and immediately overrides (but does not overwrite) everything following that. Then, if you still want to use the GUI but need to hand-edit something, you can edit the XML file using the appropriate syntax and know that your change will be reflected on the GUI.
That's my take. Your mileage, of course, may vary.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again - democracy simply doesn't work.
Now, over the years, a newsman learns a number of things that for one reason or another, he just cannot report. It doesn't seem to matter now, so...the following people are gay:
Ahem. Rootkit. It's not called that because Windows got 'em first.
Heck, there are even tools that deal with *NIX rootkits and the like. Several of them, in fact.
Y'know, they don't call them "rootkits" because they originally came out on Windows...
No... no, that wasn't it at all.
Also, can I buy you a vowel? You look like someone that could use one.
What in the name of all that is good and holy was that?!
As another aside, what is it with crackpot "engineers"? Someone passed me a link to this guy back in the day - his "Foreclosure Solution Patent" is the stuff of legends.
Obligatory XKCD link.
Encryption won't solve the problem - they'll just torture the information they need out of those that have it. It's far better to just encapsulate the knowledge, make sure that nobody knows enough to bring down the entire organization, and hope for the best.
You're forgetting ability. There's a wide gulf between "there's something in the guts of the software interfering with our ability to 'get shit done'" and "I know where to find it and how to disable it".
However, that's not what the story is about. Instead, foreign police forces didn't need a "government backdoor" - instead, they'd use an investigation into a potential technical legal violation (think of how Al Capone was ultimately convicted of tax evasion and you'll get the idea), ask MS to provide enough info to ostensibly check for it ("Hey, we think this org is using pirated software."/"Okay, here's what you'll need to know to check for that."), then raid all of the computers in said org, hold them long enough to disrupt operations and grab everything off of them, then be done with it. Honestly, you don't need root/local admin access when you can carry the boxes out of the office by hand. Now, MS' official policy when foreign law enforcement calls is to simply say, "No, they're not pirates - we give free licenses to all non-profits" and force law enforcement to come up with some other arcane law (of which there are always plenty) to apply against the org of their choice.
It won't really affect anything, of course, but kudos to MS for not playing along.
You fool - you never trust the SATA bus! You never know what's listening in!
Do you like fish sticks?
Like most things, I think it would depend on the woman. I've met more than a few women that get extremely upset when they realize their man has a porn collection and the willingness to use it ("What, am I not good enough for you?!"). I've also met more than a few women that just write it off as "boys will be boys", and a subset of those that watch and enjoy the porn with the guys.
If I had to hazard a guess, I'd assume that those that get upset about porn would get extremely upset about the robot sex slave, those that write porn off as "boys will be boys" might get a bit uncomfortable about the robot (there's a fine line between "porn's on the TV" and "my guy is with a robotic sex toy") but may or may not keep their discomfort to themselves, and those that watch and enjoy the porn will be arranging robotic threesomes, assuming they don't already have matching male sex robots to play with.
In Civ 2 (running on memory here), the "one true path" basically amounted to...
Get to philosophy before everyone else. Get free tech advance. Advance to Republic, switch government, then Democracy as fast as possible.. Switch government to Democracy once you get it (democracy was optimal about 98% of the time, unless you were in a war), build "Statue of Liberty" precisely to keep people from going to war with you. While all of this is going on, expand like crazy and set new cities to a Defending unit->Settler->Settler pattern, with the first settler being sent off on expansion duty and the second settler possibly being used for road and irrigation duty. Once Democracy is under way, get Factories as fast as possible, get industrialized, then steamroll the rest of the game into the ground.
If someone wishes to refine this a bit, feel free, but, yeah, there was definitely a "one true way". Once you figured it out, every game was just a variation of a theme.
It's not so much a matter of "gambling" as it is knowing that there's more than one way to win a game. In Civ II, for example, there was a fairly set formula that you could follow that would achieve victory far more often than not (basically, build lots of settlers and expand like crazy). There might be individual variations on that theme, but, for the most part, there was only one winning strategy ("one true path"), so, if you knew the way and everyone else around you knew the way, the only competition was in who had a better starting position to exercise this "one true path" and who could execute it more completely.
That gets repetitive. It also gives the feeling that the game has been "solved". Tic-tac-toe would be a good example of a "one true path" game - there's a known opener and a known counter to the opener, so, if both people know the opener and the counter, the game will always be a "cat's game".
With Civ 4, it was clear that they tried to come up with multiple paths of victory and each of them were similarly "optimal". If you weren't in a position to win with mass expansion, there were other ways you could still salvage the game and possibly achieve victory. That gives flexibility, but you have to know when to use which option, otherwise it can feel like "gambling with unknown odds". Granted, you won't have perfect knowledge, but that's part of the fun - how well do you understand your tactical and strategic situation given the information you do have? Is it enough for you to make a good decision?
The same way we talk about the Super Bo^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H... err... Big Game. Effectively immediately, you may refer to it as either The Agency or, if you have a particularly juvenile sense of humor, the Domestic Intelligence Collection Kelvinator. Kind of had to stretch on the "K", obviously, but I'll be danged if Kelvinator isn't a fantastically awesome brand name to incorporate into everything.
I don't know about you, but when I play MOO#, MOM or Civ#, the police stations and spy defenses don't start cannibalizing their own citizens if they have too much spare time on their hands.
Easy - run a search on all images and look through their thumbnails. That's pretty much what you're doing when you're browsing through the filesystem manually anyway.
Last I checked, the "libraries" are just pre-canned and pre-indexed searches for certain items (music, pictures, etc.), of which the ones in their proper locations in the filesystem (i.e. pictures in "My Pictures", music in "My Music", and so on) are a subset of the ones you would find in this pre-canned search. Windows 7/Vista still defaults saved pictures to your "My Pictures" folder or something similar under your Users folder. Outside of that, the only major differences between post-XP Windows profiles and XP profiles is that "Documents and Settings" is now "Users" and all of the little sub-folders under "My Documents" (i.e. "My Pictures", "My Videos", etc.) are now at the root of the profile path. So, you can have your cake and eat it too if that's what you want. The important thing is that, thanks to those libraries, you don't have to have a neatly organized filesystem - you'll find your house picture no matter where you put it.
The structure isn't enforced strictly. Consequently, though you're encouraged to put pictures in "My Pictures" or something similar, you don't have to and there's nothing stopping you from exercising bad folder discipline and consequently losing your files. In the past, finding a misplaced file meant manually looking through every conceivable directory where you might have saved something and hoping you found it (blech!). Now, we've upgraded to file searches and indexes, which is an improvement. The future is increasing the range of attributes that you can attach to a file and utilizing those attributes in clever ways - not just "this is an image" and "this is a Word doc", but "this is an image that was created from a picture that was taken outside, which I can determine by the heavy use of light blue in the background and the ISO 100 exposure used by the camera, and I know the camera used ISO 100 exposure because it attached that information in this image's metadata". Instead of searching for a picture of your house by browsing through everything in %userprofile%, you can instead search for "pictures taken outside", the computer will figure it out for you based on a preexisting metadata query ("outside"="SELECT * FROM Filesystem WHERE filetype=image AND metadata="ISO 100" OR metadata="ISO 200" AND/OR..."), and you can then find your house from a much smaller yet more complete subset of pictures.
True, but a metadata-based filesystem isn't going to make much sense if it's presented in a file/folder context because it's not file/folder-dependent. GNOME Shell, at least from what I'm seeing (including your screenshot) is an attempt at presenting the data in a more metadata-"native" format. So, you have some default categories that make a bit of sense - presumably, you either want to start a program (Applications), go somewhere on your filesystem (Places - not a fan of this, actually, since we're trying to get away from precisely this sort of behavior, but I suppose you have to build a bridge somewhere), or go somewhere you've been recently (Recent Documents). I'm assuming the stuff on the left can be configured to show pretty much whatever you want, so you could presumably show something like "Music" or "Photos" or whatever instead of "Places". In order for these categories to be useful, they have to be big enough to show enough data to be worth parsing.
Now, should they be drawers that slide on hover instead of big, static blocks? Perhaps. Could they use other, more traditional UI elements to show the same information? Probably. I'll grant that execution isn't what it could be; then again, GNOME agrees with us on this which is why they're delaying the project into 2011. Of course, there was a fair amount of deviation between the various file/folder UIs in the '80s and early '90s while people sorted out what worked and what didn't, so I'm not particularly surprised that we're seeing some trial and error now that the underlying file organization scheme is radically changing. At least their naming convention is better than KDE's, though. I don't know about you, but when I think of a Dolphin, I think of a friendly grey cetacean, not a graphical file manager.
I actually kind of understand the need to rework the UI. The file/folder metaphor was a good starting point back when the contents of a computer system were simple enough where you could organize them by hand. Nowadays, it's pretty trivial to have enough documents, music, videos, photos, and so on lying around where the whole metaphor breaks down because there's just no way you can keep track of everything. Consequently, ditching the file/folder metaphor and instead pushing forward with a "what type of stuff do you want to work with?" approach would be rather beneficial, and is something that Windows and Mac have been slowly but incrementally pushing for quite a while.
Think about it this way - does it really matter where things go specifically, so long as you can get there easily? Do I really care that I can find and open a picture at ~/Documents/Pictures/2010/07/28 in seven double-clicks and nearly as many context changes, or do I care that I can go to "Pictures"->"Sort by date"->double-click on today's photo in four mouse-clicks and get a more holistic view of what's on my machine at a given moment? Do I care that I can find some music at ~/Documents/Music/Artist/Album/trackname.ogg, or would I rather just be able to "Play all songs in album Foo by artist Bar"?
Having said all that, I do think that GNOME and KDE (okay, especially KDE) are jumping a bit ahead of the curve on this, which is fine by me. A lot of computer geeks are only starting to come around to the idea of a "semantic desktop" (oh, how I loathe that term...), or, if you prefer, a desktop that functions more like a local search engine than a filing cabinet, in no small part because the people "in the know" are calling it silly things like "semantic desktop", "NEPOMUK", and so on, then ranting about the power of tuples, metadata and RDF. You can just imagine how the rest of the world feels on the subject. I do think that, over time, this is the direction we're going to end up going, though. If you stop and think about it, it's a little strange that we interact with the Internet in one fashion (search for something->load it->bookmark it if I want to come back to it) and our computers in another fashion (traverse a pile of directories->find something?->load it->create a desktop shortcut if I want to come back to it, unless I overload my desktop with shortcuts, in which case I'll need a shortcut to the folder containing the shortcuts...). Since many people are spending more time on the Internet than on local content, doesn't it make sense to use the same mechanisms used on the Internet to find local content? Might as well, right?
What's a commercial? I'm a smug SWPL-style tech yuppie with no TV and both NoScript and AdBlock installed on my Mac, so I like to ask silly questions like this to prove my superiority over the unwashed masses.
Yep - big, big fan of ncurses YaST.
Because OpenSUSE's KDE implementation tends to be less buggy and better integrated than most, it's frequently used as a reference distro for KDE reviews. Basically, if there's a KDE function that doesn't work on OpenSUSE, it's assumed that it doesn't work anywhere, which probably isn't too far from the truth.
Plus, YaST is a fairly intuitive and exhaustive system management console. It admittedly gets a little buggy when you start bumping into corner cases, but, if you're not into hand-coding your config files, it's vastly superior to dpkg-configure. Though I certainly don't begrudge anyone that's willing to wade their way through the command-line and their system's config files, it's nice to have some tools that help you go in the right direction when you need to do those one-off configuration jobs and don't require a fully functional LAMP installation (Webmin, phpMyAdmin, and so on).
Everyone needs to eat, but demand for any particular set of food products is generally not inelastic - there's no cartel keeping people from substituting butter for margarine.
Actually, there historically was such a cartel. When margarine first came out, it was illegal in many states in the US to sell yellow colored margarine because dairy lobbies felt that yellow margarine looked too much like butter. Consequently, if you wanted yellow margarine, you had to buy a yellow coloring pack and mix it in.
Most of those restrictions were phased out or ignored after World War 2.
I'm betting it's the Fark "this" meme, only "that". If this is the case, then it's a statement of agreement with the parent.
Mods might be handing out "Insightful" mods for the karma boost. "Funny" is just a score with no long-term meaning.