No, they're actually moving onto the next holidays in the calendar and hoping to make a franchise of it with a year's worth of holidays. The first sequel will be Labor day, where the aliens will attack the beaches while WIll Smith is getting his last summer vacation in. The next will be Columbus day, where the alien space-sailors will contact us and sleep with our women and transfer an alien version of small pox and STDs that will threaten to wipe out up to 90% of the human population while the aliens are busy melting down our jewelry to ship back to the alien home world. Fortunately Will Smith and his laptop will be there to upload some anti-bodies into the alien bio-mainframe to stop the viruses.
That argument is silly.: you would have no objection to the food companies could put lead in their food as a sweetener or any other toxin that happened to enhance the taste because you view it as the person's responsibility to know what is in their food. You think I'm going to carry a wet chemical lab around with me to test food every time I'm hungry? The bottom line is that part of the reason why we have a government is to precisely to prevent people from passing poisonous or other misleading substances off as nutritious food. If you don't like it, move to some third world country where that sort of thing is acceptable.
But Bruce Byfield reports that 'De Icaza has not changed his opinions.' De Icaza calls the rumors 'a storm in a teacup.'
In other words, that check from MS finally cleared.:)
In actuality, I think that De Icaza actually believes in what he is doing and not a paid shill. However, I is still don't want anything to do with.NET on my computers.
You could see the same thing about the protestors that interrupted the torch carrying ceremonies prior to the Beijing olympics. Most chinese didn't view those as a criticism of the their government, but as an attach on chinese people. To say that Americans are used to people criticizing the U.S. government is an understatement, but this is not so in China. I'm tempted to chalk a lot of it up to the immersive indoctrination and political thought control that goes on in China, e.g. every Chinese college student has to take Mao Ze Dong thought, Deng Xiaoping thought, as well as military tactics and strategy. However, there's also a deep seated insecurity in the Chinese people -- for some reason they can easily interpret criticism of their government as a criticism of them. I can't tell if that itself is due to propaganda campaigns waged by the government or what though. Sometimes the U.S. government does this too, e.g. when G.W. Bush & Co painted anyone who criticized the attacks on Iraq as an unpatriotic traitor, including places like France, but also U.S. citizens.
Bullshit. The insurance companies spent about $10 million on ads trying to stop just the latest health care bill. Why? Because it killed their main way of maximizing profits: denial of coverage. We have seen nothing but fear mongering, lies and distortions from the conservatives through this whole process -- what is wrong with you people?
Because any voice contrary to what we already believe should be feared and silenced!
I agree completely, and I hope you will support my position that medical care is a work of the devil since it's god that made us sick, go intends for us to be sick. This makes health care imminently affordable, since we need no treatment because doing so would defy god's will. Furthermore, I'm sure you will agree with my ideas on the geocentric, flat, young earth theory.
/satire
The point of the above is that accepting contrary voices just because they're contrary doesn't put you in any better position to identify the truth than "fearing and silencing" contrary opinions. The fact is that Fox is not a useful resource, they're crowd baiting and playing on irrational fears to make a profit.
Simply stated, the bill cost a fortune, wasn't paid for, is complicated as hell, and doesn't do all that much--though it does include coverage for end-of life-counseling, or what Grassley now calls "pulling the plug on grandma." In their 2009 report to Congress, the Medicare trustees estimate the 10-year cost of [the republican medicare bill[ as high as $1.2 trillion. That figure--just for prescription-drug coverage that people over 65 still have to pay a lot of money for--dwarfs the $848 billion cost of the Senate bill.
This is typical of Republican governance, they bitch and moan all the time about fiscal responsibility, but they acted in the most inconceivably fiscally irresponsible way again and again during the decade or so they were in power. Now we the taxpayer and the democrats are at least attempting to clean up after the unmitigated spending spree that was the Bush Administration and Republican Congress (Iraq war, tax cuts for the wealthy, "free" prescriptions drugs) and are getting dinged for not being fiscally responsible? If this is a joke, it's not funny.
Now if we can just put an end to the asinine "war on drugs", we'll be in good shape. When the laws surrounding a substance are more harmful than the substance itself, there is a serious problem.
That would be true, except the conservatives who were pushing this before the great satan became elected to the office of president needed a hopeless cause to distract their constituents from their problems, some of which were induced by the republican-led government (like a trillion dollar unnecessary war). The current distractions are all Obama, health care, and guns. Once the republicans get back into office, they'll go back to railing against immigrants, drugs and people who aren't like "good old-fashioned red blooded americans".
Heh, I'm sure somewhere you can find in one of Jesus' sermons something about tax cuts for the wealthy and how socialism is the work of the devil. Oh right, maybe not:
Jesus spoke remarkably often about wealth and poverty. To the poor he said, "Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God," (Luke's version). To the rich he said, "Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth," and "go, sell what you have, and give to the poor." When the rich turned away from him because they couldn't follow his command he observed, "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."
I'm sure what he really meant to say is that these things are okay as long as it's not the government who is doing these things, then it's a work of the devil.
What's ironic about your statement is that the "conservative stamp" these turkeys approved includes teaching the speeches of Jefferson Davis alongside those of Lincoln, who was a Democrat. It just goes to show you that LBJ didn't overestimate when he said "there goes the south for a decade" while passing JFK's civil rights bill. The realignment was so severe it now threatens to rewrite history, literally.
Take your knee-jerk libertarian craziness elsewhere you kook... I for one thank god that we have a government who views its job as to protect us the citizens from the people who would poison us to make a quick buck and I hope they do more to reign in corporate profits over public health. The bottom line is that private industry would happily poison us the public if they were allowed to. Why should the government dictate what can be served in food? Why not lead? It makes it taste sweeter and humans are programmed to enjoy sweet things. There'd be a slick marketing campaign and the food would look it was cooked with real sweeteners but advertise that all important fact that it had "no calories". While this might be considered an extreme, Just look at McDonald's who actually refer to their customers as users. Is it a coincidence that the same term is applied to drug addicts? No it isn't, McDonald's aim is to make a profit, not serve healthy food, who cares if the general populace is obese, diabetic and suffering from liver failure, they don't run the health care business.
Libertarians like you are competing with PETA for the grand prize in crazy.
I can guess that you, the mods and the parent are probably windows IT people, speaking as a unix/linux user -- neither you nor the parent have provided any evidence that this is actually true. Why should I believe you? What I see when I see a windows environment is an automatic processor penalty due to the need for anti-virus running all the time, an OS that is generally annoying and slow to use (this is my opinion, yours may differ), and the need to install additional software (cygwin) just to do what I need to get done, done.*** That and windows doesn't run a lot of the software I want, or has a high processor/memory overhead (hello superfetch!) just due to the OS.
*** For a living, I do calculations that generate data files routinely > 10 Gb and I need to do substantial post-processing on those data files. As far as I know, windows doesn't have the array of command line tools necessary to do what I need to. That is, I use the 30 years worth of unix tools like bash, grep, sort, sed, etc.
When I first read the title , I thought, well Windows and various other programs have *thought* they could read my mind since the 90s. Only problem is that they don't read my mind very well... In fact, if you were to bet against its guesses about what I want to do, you'd make more money that if you did. (Are you sure you want to quit? It looks like you're writing a letter... There are unused icons on your desktop! Dear Aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all. )
...Then I read the summary and I thought, oh that kind of mind reading.
...then I thought, well if predicting a user's behavior from mouse clicks and speech recognition works so badly, what makes them think that a computer will do any better at reading brainwaves? My guess is this will fail miserably.
Not to mention that there is a real chance this isn't being caused by floor-mats or sticky pedals at all and that it's the software that's causing this in the first place. My gut is to say that their patch is necessary for the same reason why the phone company uses a program whose job it is to go and find memory that is allocated but not being used and free that memory. It's because the system is so complicated that they don't know what's causing the problem and can't find the answer, so this patch acts as a stop-gap to at least cure the symptom if not the disease.
That message reads a lot like a troll to me. I've never heard of anyone crying because of an apple announcement ever and I've been buying macs since there really was an apple cult. It's true that Apple products made computers "fun" again during the 00s but nowadays, apple gears its products for the general populace, not their former core of users.
Likewise, I've never met a single coffee house owner who had such contempt for his or her customers. Most of the independent coffee houses I know are people who just really like running their own business and started out as patrons of coffee houses just as much as other customers. The corporate places tend to have more wage slaves who resent both their bosses and their customers the exact same way the AC does.
I don't why I even respond because I'm sure to get a troll mod but I'd just like to point out that one of the major political parties solution to bad government is no government at all. This poorly functioning government is a direct result of the dual conservative mantras: 1) deregulation of markets is necessary for them to perform well and 2) less government is better. We saw how well #1 worked in the banking industry, this is more of the same. #2 results in chronically understaffed government agencies, or government agencies not able to do what they're supposed to do (e.g. the Republican senators holding up Obama's appointees right now).
My parents both worked for the FDA and if the NHTSA operates in any similar way to the FDA, it's a shadow of itself in the 1970s. For the FDA that means that there are less food inspectors and no surprise, there is a rise in food poisoning incidents. I wouldn't be surprised if NHTSA is also chronically understaffed. Additionally, even if individual government workers wanted to do their jobs, they are often prevented by doing so because that is not perceived as "business friendly". The political appointees who run the show are in the thrall of private industry, in fact, they are often people taken directly from private industry (e.g. big pharma lobbyists often run the FDA). This "government capture" is the fault of the democrats just as much as the republicans, e.g. Obama lied about hiring lobbyists in his campaign. Basically, we have a non-functioning government and one party's answer to this is the get rid of the thing all together. That is one solution but that wouldn't prevent things like this incident with Toyota.
I'm sure Toyota will do the right thing though, because that would be in its interests as a good corporate citizen. *snicker*
That was my gut reaction too but I learned something reading the wikipedia page on cochlear implants:
If a child is placed into a mainstream setting it makes it difficult for them because they feel like they do not fit in with their peers and cannot fully identify with the Deaf community. One interviewee in the Christiansen and Leigh study states "In high school it was the worst time for me with the cochlear implant because I was really trying to find my identity with the cochlear implant...I never accepted my deafness. And the cochlear implant in some ways showed me that no matter what, the moment I take it off I'm deaf. I'll never be hearing 24 hours." [37]
I'm not deaf but I think that there is enough a community for deaf people that they have a cultural identity of being deaf. By implanting children with the device, they are no longer in that culture, but neither are they a "normal" fully hearing person, even when they have the device plugged in. This may actually lead to a lower self-esteem for the child than if they were surrounded by people like them (i.e. deaf). But then again, teenagers or children who don't fit in or feel inadequate for any reason are as common as grass since schools and children tend to try and enforce sociological homogeneity, it doesn't matter if you wear thick glasses, are socially maladjusted, or have any other issue that makes you different from the "average" kid.
As for black people, I think the GP needs to learn a bit about skin tone discrimination amongst african americans and asians before he starts shooting off about skin lighteners and their evilness. Even americans of european descent do it, ever hear the term "redneck"? It immediately conjures a picture in one's mind of someone who is often poorly educated and poor financially and is often overweight.
Are you really trying to paint google, a company that did nearly $24 billion in revenue last year as the underdog getting smeared by the big, bad apple? Seriously, what you're implying to me that X multi-megacorp. is the underdog because Y multi-megacorp refused to let X go and displace Y's native app on Y's own device. In any case, why don't you have any sympathy for apple's programmers who are being displaced by google's programmers going around writing all these apps? Think of the number of salaries involved at apple that programmed that phone app.
As I recall, there were quite a few commenters here that thought Apple was being a schmuck for killing google's phone app even though google's app replaced apple's phone app instead of installing itself side-by-side. Here, you've got google killing their competitors that are trying to mooch off their mail service. Sounds like pretty similar behavior to me on both apple and google's part since they are trying to stamp out a competitor who is getting a "free lunch" off their products.
Yeah, it strikes me as funny and sad that a comment on this site, which is supposedly a tech site that focuses a lot on linux, are so clueless that they are modding comments that are based on information that are at least three years out of date as insightful. Here's an image showing the configuration dialog on e17 that clearly shows a "fonts" category, using the old antiquated bling theme no less. Here's the svn repo. that shows that the fonts configuration is at least 3 years old. That isn't even when the fonts dialog got put in there, it's only when they migrated to svn. I know, I used e17 for many, many years. The real truth is that e17 is the most customizable and flexible desktop manager that currently exists. You can not only customize different classes of fonts (e.g. dialog text vs. window titles, etc.), but you can define nearly everything from what happens when a mouse clicks on a window border vs. windows interior vs. desktop and just about everything else. The theming possibilities are likewise the most interesting I have ever seen for any window manager.
The only reason I gave up e17 is that they decided to break parts of my theme for the login manager and I have just had enough of re-writing my theme every few months because they decided that they needed to do something differently. They're stuck in a point of perpetual alpha state software -- they have taken so long to release the software that they have to rewrite all the original code because it's old and out of date which means they can't release the software yet. It's not like it's getting more stable either because they *still* were breaking things nearly every other time I would update. A bigger issue however is the fact that I want compiz and I was having endless problems with vsync using the e17 compiz module which is a deal-breaker since I need to be able to watch movies on my PC and I want fancy effects.
For years, the proprietary NVIDIA drivers for linux have been using a feature called powermizer that changes the performance of the GPU based on what the PC needed. E.g., under normal conditions, the GPU is underclocked but when you run an openGL window or run a game, the GPU bumps up into full speed. In principal it sounds like a great idea, but it's been really annoying to wait around for what seemed like at least a year for NVIDIA to get it to run well enough with a composite manager like compiz. For a long time, things like highlighting text in firefox and then dragging it led to flickering of the screen, or the new kde has composite things built right in which didn't work well. During that period we had to do things like fool the GPU into running full tilt all the time because NVIDIA didn't give us an option to switch powermizer off until AFTER they fixed the problems with it.
One thing to point out is that there are now plenty of open source codes available for doing similar things as gaussian so it can be avoided now with relative ease. Two that come to mind are the the Department of Energy funded codes: nwchem for ab initio work and lammps for molecular dynamics. I use the NIH funded code vmd for visualization. The best part about those codes is that they're designed to be compiled using gcc and run on linux so you can get off the non-open source software train all together if you wish.
If a mechanized army does so well in the desert, why is the U.S. STILL fighting insurgents there or in Afghanistan? It's because for all the firepower an A10 has or an M1, they're pretty useless when you have to go house to house in order to find your enemy. Reread Dune again. Look at the tactics the fremen use. They're classic insurgency tactics, strike and fade, avoid a full blown line-in-the-sand type battle at all costs. Wear the enemy down slowly and sap their will to fight. The fremen also hid in the populace to make it more difficult to find them, the same as the U.S. faced or is facing in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam. They'd be labeled terrorists if they were fighting the U.S.
That's strange, my experience has been the opposite, but I don't use draw. I dominantly use calc and I think the 3.x versions are much more usable. A lot of that has to do with the fact that charts are now anti-aliased and you don't cringe after making one any more. The charting ability in general has been the one area of weakness for me as to why I needed Excel. With the 3.x versions, that reason is pretty much gone because they're much easier now and the axis labels and scales don't freak out as often.
Slashdot Mirror
No, they're actually moving onto the next holidays in the calendar and hoping to make a franchise of it with a year's worth of holidays. The first sequel will be Labor day, where the aliens will attack the beaches while WIll Smith is getting his last summer vacation in. The next will be Columbus day, where the alien space-sailors will contact us and sleep with our women and transfer an alien version of small pox and STDs that will threaten to wipe out up to 90% of the human population while the aliens are busy melting down our jewelry to ship back to the alien home world. Fortunately Will Smith and his laptop will be there to upload some anti-bodies into the alien bio-mainframe to stop the viruses.
That argument is silly.: you would have no objection to the food companies could put lead in their food as a sweetener or any other toxin that happened to enhance the taste because you view it as the person's responsibility to know what is in their food. You think I'm going to carry a wet chemical lab around with me to test food every time I'm hungry? The bottom line is that part of the reason why we have a government is to precisely to prevent people from passing poisonous or other misleading substances off as nutritious food. If you don't like it, move to some third world country where that sort of thing is acceptable.
In other words, that check from MS finally cleared. :)
.NET on my computers.
In actuality, I think that De Icaza actually believes in what he is doing and not a paid shill. However, I is still don't want anything to do with
You could see the same thing about the protestors that interrupted the torch carrying ceremonies prior to the Beijing olympics. Most chinese didn't view those as a criticism of the their government, but as an attach on chinese people. To say that Americans are used to people criticizing the U.S. government is an understatement, but this is not so in China. I'm tempted to chalk a lot of it up to the immersive indoctrination and political thought control that goes on in China, e.g. every Chinese college student has to take Mao Ze Dong thought, Deng Xiaoping thought, as well as military tactics and strategy. However, there's also a deep seated insecurity in the Chinese people -- for some reason they can easily interpret criticism of their government as a criticism of them. I can't tell if that itself is due to propaganda campaigns waged by the government or what though. Sometimes the U.S. government does this too, e.g. when G.W. Bush & Co painted anyone who criticized the attacks on Iraq as an unpatriotic traitor, including places like France, but also U.S. citizens.
Bullshit. The insurance companies spent about $10 million on ads trying to stop just the latest health care bill. Why? Because it killed their main way of maximizing profits: denial of coverage. We have seen nothing but fear mongering, lies and distortions from the conservatives through this whole process -- what is wrong with you people?
I agree completely, and I hope you will support my position that medical care is a work of the devil since it's god that made us sick, go intends for us to be sick. This makes health care imminently affordable, since we need no treatment because doing so would defy god's will. Furthermore, I'm sure you will agree with my ideas on the geocentric, flat, young earth theory.
/satire
The point of the above is that accepting contrary voices just because they're contrary doesn't put you in any better position to identify the truth than "fearing and silencing" contrary opinions. The fact is that Fox is not a useful resource, they're crowd baiting and playing on irrational fears to make a profit.
You mean the one that will cost about a trillion dollars that isn't paid for:
This is typical of Republican governance, they bitch and moan all the time about fiscal responsibility, but they acted in the most inconceivably fiscally irresponsible way again and again during the decade or so they were in power. Now we the taxpayer and the democrats are at least attempting to clean up after the unmitigated spending spree that was the Bush Administration and Republican Congress (Iraq war, tax cuts for the wealthy, "free" prescriptions drugs) and are getting dinged for not being fiscally responsible? If this is a joke, it's not funny.
That would be true, except the conservatives who were pushing this before the great satan became elected to the office of president needed a hopeless cause to distract their constituents from their problems, some of which were induced by the republican-led government (like a trillion dollar unnecessary war). The current distractions are all Obama, health care, and guns. Once the republicans get back into office, they'll go back to railing against immigrants, drugs and people who aren't like "good old-fashioned red blooded americans".
Double nope. What kind of advice was it? It was security advice. Security modifies advice, that means it's being used as an adjective, not a noun.
I'm sure what he really meant to say is that these things are okay as long as it's not the government who is doing these things, then it's a work of the devil.
What's ironic about your statement is that the "conservative stamp" these turkeys approved includes teaching the speeches of Jefferson Davis alongside those of Lincoln, who was a Democrat. It just goes to show you that LBJ didn't overestimate when he said "there goes the south for a decade" while passing JFK's civil rights bill. The realignment was so severe it now threatens to rewrite history, literally.
Take your knee-jerk libertarian craziness elsewhere you kook... I for one thank god that we have a government who views its job as to protect us the citizens from the people who would poison us to make a quick buck and I hope they do more to reign in corporate profits over public health. The bottom line is that private industry would happily poison us the public if they were allowed to. Why should the government dictate what can be served in food? Why not lead? It makes it taste sweeter and humans are programmed to enjoy sweet things. There'd be a slick marketing campaign and the food would look it was cooked with real sweeteners but advertise that all important fact that it had "no calories". While this might be considered an extreme, Just look at McDonald's who actually refer to their customers as users. Is it a coincidence that the same term is applied to drug addicts? No it isn't, McDonald's aim is to make a profit, not serve healthy food, who cares if the general populace is obese, diabetic and suffering from liver failure, they don't run the health care business.
Libertarians like you are competing with PETA for the grand prize in crazy.
I can guess that you, the mods and the parent are probably windows IT people, speaking as a unix/linux user -- neither you nor the parent have provided any evidence that this is actually true. Why should I believe you? What I see when I see a windows environment is an automatic processor penalty due to the need for anti-virus running all the time, an OS that is generally annoying and slow to use (this is my opinion, yours may differ), and the need to install additional software (cygwin) just to do what I need to get done, done.*** That and windows doesn't run a lot of the software I want, or has a high processor/memory overhead (hello superfetch!) just due to the OS.
*** For a living, I do calculations that generate data files routinely > 10 Gb and I need to do substantial post-processing on those data files. As far as I know, windows doesn't have the array of command line tools necessary to do what I need to. That is, I use the 30 years worth of unix tools like bash, grep, sort, sed, etc.
When I first read the title , I thought, well Windows and various other programs have *thought* they could read my mind since the 90s. Only problem is that they don't read my mind very well... In fact, if you were to bet against its guesses about what I want to do, you'd make more money that if you did. (Are you sure you want to quit? It looks like you're writing a letter... There are unused icons on your desktop! Dear Aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all. )
...Then I read the summary and I thought, oh that kind of mind reading.
...then I thought, well if predicting a user's behavior from mouse clicks and speech recognition works so badly, what makes them think that a computer will do any better at reading brainwaves? My guess is this will fail miserably.
Not to mention that there is a real chance this isn't being caused by floor-mats or sticky pedals at all and that it's the software that's causing this in the first place. My gut is to say that their patch is necessary for the same reason why the phone company uses a program whose job it is to go and find memory that is allocated but not being used and free that memory. It's because the system is so complicated that they don't know what's causing the problem and can't find the answer, so this patch acts as a stop-gap to at least cure the symptom if not the disease.
I think you'd have to be nuts not to install it.
That message reads a lot like a troll to me. I've never heard of anyone crying because of an apple announcement ever and I've been buying macs since there really was an apple cult. It's true that Apple products made computers "fun" again during the 00s but nowadays, apple gears its products for the general populace, not their former core of users.
Likewise, I've never met a single coffee house owner who had such contempt for his or her customers. Most of the independent coffee houses I know are people who just really like running their own business and started out as patrons of coffee houses just as much as other customers. The corporate places tend to have more wage slaves who resent both their bosses and their customers the exact same way the AC does.
I don't why I even respond because I'm sure to get a troll mod but I'd just like to point out that one of the major political parties solution to bad government is no government at all. This poorly functioning government is a direct result of the dual conservative mantras: 1) deregulation of markets is necessary for them to perform well and 2) less government is better. We saw how well #1 worked in the banking industry, this is more of the same. #2 results in chronically understaffed government agencies, or government agencies not able to do what they're supposed to do (e.g. the Republican senators holding up Obama's appointees right now).
My parents both worked for the FDA and if the NHTSA operates in any similar way to the FDA, it's a shadow of itself in the 1970s. For the FDA that means that there are less food inspectors and no surprise, there is a rise in food poisoning incidents. I wouldn't be surprised if NHTSA is also chronically understaffed. Additionally, even if individual government workers wanted to do their jobs, they are often prevented by doing so because that is not perceived as "business friendly". The political appointees who run the show are in the thrall of private industry, in fact, they are often people taken directly from private industry (e.g. big pharma lobbyists often run the FDA). This "government capture" is the fault of the democrats just as much as the republicans, e.g. Obama lied about hiring lobbyists in his campaign. Basically, we have a non-functioning government and one party's answer to this is the get rid of the thing all together. That is one solution but that wouldn't prevent things like this incident with Toyota.
I'm sure Toyota will do the right thing though, because that would be in its interests as a good corporate citizen. *snicker*
I'm not deaf but I think that there is enough a community for deaf people that they have a cultural identity of being deaf. By implanting children with the device, they are no longer in that culture, but neither are they a "normal" fully hearing person, even when they have the device plugged in. This may actually lead to a lower self-esteem for the child than if they were surrounded by people like them (i.e. deaf). But then again, teenagers or children who don't fit in or feel inadequate for any reason are as common as grass since schools and children tend to try and enforce sociological homogeneity, it doesn't matter if you wear thick glasses, are socially maladjusted, or have any other issue that makes you different from the "average" kid.
As for black people, I think the GP needs to learn a bit about skin tone discrimination amongst african americans and asians before he starts shooting off about skin lighteners and their evilness. Even americans of european descent do it, ever hear the term "redneck"? It immediately conjures a picture in one's mind of someone who is often poorly educated and poor financially and is often overweight.
Are you really trying to paint google, a company that did nearly $24 billion in revenue last year as the underdog getting smeared by the big, bad apple? Seriously, what you're implying to me that X multi-megacorp. is the underdog because Y multi-megacorp refused to let X go and displace Y's native app on Y's own device. In any case, why don't you have any sympathy for apple's programmers who are being displaced by google's programmers going around writing all these apps? Think of the number of salaries involved at apple that programmed that phone app.
As I recall, there were quite a few commenters here that thought Apple was being a schmuck for killing google's phone app even though google's app replaced apple's phone app instead of installing itself side-by-side. Here, you've got google killing their competitors that are trying to mooch off their mail service. Sounds like pretty similar behavior to me on both apple and google's part since they are trying to stamp out a competitor who is getting a "free lunch" off their products.
Yeah, it strikes me as funny and sad that a comment on this site, which is supposedly a tech site that focuses a lot on linux, are so clueless that they are modding comments that are based on information that are at least three years out of date as insightful. Here's an image showing the configuration dialog on e17 that clearly shows a "fonts" category, using the old antiquated bling theme no less. Here's the svn repo. that shows that the fonts configuration is at least 3 years old. That isn't even when the fonts dialog got put in there, it's only when they migrated to svn. I know, I used e17 for many, many years. The real truth is that e17 is the most customizable and flexible desktop manager that currently exists. You can not only customize different classes of fonts (e.g. dialog text vs. window titles, etc.), but you can define nearly everything from what happens when a mouse clicks on a window border vs. windows interior vs. desktop and just about everything else. The theming possibilities are likewise the most interesting I have ever seen for any window manager.
The only reason I gave up e17 is that they decided to break parts of my theme for the login manager and I have just had enough of re-writing my theme every few months because they decided that they needed to do something differently. They're stuck in a point of perpetual alpha state software -- they have taken so long to release the software that they have to rewrite all the original code because it's old and out of date which means they can't release the software yet. It's not like it's getting more stable either because they *still* were breaking things nearly every other time I would update. A bigger issue however is the fact that I want compiz and I was having endless problems with vsync using the e17 compiz module which is a deal-breaker since I need to be able to watch movies on my PC and I want fancy effects.
For years, the proprietary NVIDIA drivers for linux have been using a feature called powermizer that changes the performance of the GPU based on what the PC needed. E.g., under normal conditions, the GPU is underclocked but when you run an openGL window or run a game, the GPU bumps up into full speed. In principal it sounds like a great idea, but it's been really annoying to wait around for what seemed like at least a year for NVIDIA to get it to run well enough with a composite manager like compiz. For a long time, things like highlighting text in firefox and then dragging it led to flickering of the screen, or the new kde has composite things built right in which didn't work well. During that period we had to do things like fool the GPU into running full tilt all the time because NVIDIA didn't give us an option to switch powermizer off until AFTER they fixed the problems with it.
One thing to point out is that there are now plenty of open source codes available for doing similar things as gaussian so it can be avoided now with relative ease. Two that come to mind are the the Department of Energy funded codes: nwchem for ab initio work and lammps for molecular dynamics. I use the NIH funded code vmd for visualization. The best part about those codes is that they're designed to be compiled using gcc and run on linux so you can get off the non-open source software train all together if you wish.
If a mechanized army does so well in the desert, why is the U.S. STILL fighting insurgents there or in Afghanistan? It's because for all the firepower an A10 has or an M1, they're pretty useless when you have to go house to house in order to find your enemy. Reread Dune again. Look at the tactics the fremen use. They're classic insurgency tactics, strike and fade, avoid a full blown line-in-the-sand type battle at all costs. Wear the enemy down slowly and sap their will to fight. The fremen also hid in the populace to make it more difficult to find them, the same as the U.S. faced or is facing in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam. They'd be labeled terrorists if they were fighting the U.S.
That's strange, my experience has been the opposite, but I don't use draw. I dominantly use calc and I think the 3.x versions are much more usable. A lot of that has to do with the fact that charts are now anti-aliased and you don't cringe after making one any more. The charting ability in general has been the one area of weakness for me as to why I needed Excel. With the 3.x versions, that reason is pretty much gone because they're much easier now and the axis labels and scales don't freak out as often.