I'm all for extending the life of old machines. I know a lot of people are very happy with XP and don't need a new OS or computer, but there are times when it's just easier to move on and other times when it's better to stick with it.

Any competent admin would have started a migration to win7 a long time ago. Short of industrial use (e.g. a computer that controls machinery) there's little incentive to stick with xp. Patches to the OS are going to be of limited value for industrial applications anyway, as a competent setup would isolate the machines to a very secure private network (if any) and have multiple barriers of defense set up.

> So, boycotting works, you are saying?

It works by shutting people up. You're getting what you want by force, by suppressing the opposition and not overcoming it. The resentment will manifest itself in other forms and makes every victory you have tenuous. Voting is not mob rule it's majority rule, there are clear rules, everyone can get to the table and have a say. You're not letting Eich have his say.

> I like how only gays can support gay marriage.

yes, I'm sure OKCupid would have stood up for you even if the majority of their customers were against it. I'm sure Obama scolded Saudi Arabia during his recent visit in the same way his administration did with Russia. I'm sure neither of those entities are using the gay rights struggle as a pawns in their PR games. You are confusing souless corparations with people.

Metro should show some intelligence in how it open apps.

Ideally, if the user opens a metro app from the Desktop, it should be windowed. If it's opened from the Metro Screen it should be full screen.

Metro is a fine interface for touch devices. It looks good and works well. However it fails miserably when you're trying to use it in conjunction with the desktop. MS should go whole hog and create a Metro only tablet.

A lot of the blame for Win8 can be shouldered on Steven Sinofsky, who by all accounts thought himself as a cross between Steve Jobs and Napoleon. He was given free reign over Win8 due to his perceived success with MS Office (and the ribbon interface).

If you follow the MS news, you'll find constant suggestions that he treated the windows division as his fiefdom (and windows phone as a competitor, refusing even the most basic coordination) and that not only did he refuse to include a start menu in Win8 as a transitional step (up to that point, MS has usually offered a way to go back to the old behavior for at least one windows version) he intentionally introduced architectural changes to make it harder for MS to implement one in the future. You'll notice he was fired shortly after without much remorse by anyone.

The CEO of a company, and anyone in general, has a right to influence the society he lives in and how his government makes laws. He can do what he wishes with his money.

He should not be punished for taking part in the democratic process, he shouldn't be silenced, he should be outvoted. So, if you care enough, you need to become politically active. Boycotting things amounts to mob rule, it works the same way repression works.

The CEO of Mozilla doesn't own Mozilla, nor was he using it to influence his worldview. He's essentially an employee

OKCupid is leveraging it's own brand and Mozilla's to benefit itself and real losers are gays who let themselves be taken cynically taken advantage of.

Corporations don't have opinions, they only reflect those of it's customers. Where was the Rainbow Oreo in the 80's and 90's when gay rights was a divisive issue? Why didn't Oreo have an opinion then? These kinds of corporations only support the winning side of the culture wars. As we saw with Duck Dynasy and Cracker Barrel, if enough people complain, the company will unashamedly backflip. It's purely business, not ideological.

How would i do this with Debian Stable? The latest KDE (or near enough latest) isn't in backports and i can't find any repos (that don't constantly break or have missing dependencies) that have it.

I ended up moving towards Debian Testing (which is fine) but i'm interested in how you would do it.

oops, meant "Nepomuk & Akonadi"...so many strange names ;)

You're right about GNOME. Those guys won't be happy until they've reduced the Desktop to a single close button and a window.

I think you're being too harsh on KDE though. The usual KDE criticism is that they have too many advanced options. On my machine, KDE (and all it's related processes) are consuming about 90MB of RAM (even with some bling turned on), to compare Chromium is consuming about 400MB.

KDE4 has a unfair reputation for being wasteful. I think the stigma is mainly caused by Anakondi's initial one-time file indexing processes being heavy. People tend to switch to something else before it finishes and leave with bad impressions.

Ray-Ban sells $0.20 worth of molded plastic for $200.00. How much more expensive is this going to make things? Luxottica doesn't do small margins...

A side note, Ray-Ban owe their current existence to Tom Cruise and Top Gun (not to mention stupid people). They were super close to bankruptcy, then the film came out...

We're basing the idea that the multimeter was confiscated for being yellow from what was said in a sparkfun blog post. They have an incentive to down play the violation.

Indeed, If you look at the actual USPTO filing it is clearly stated that "Color is not claimed as a feature of the mark."

I've purchased some cheap multimeters that look a lot like flukes (The way the yellow cover is shaped, the font,spacing on the dial and the curves of the plastic).

Windows 7 is going to be less problematic transistion than a Debian based distro+KDE.

Xp to win7 is a lot more familiar that xp to KDE. If all she uses is a basic desktop, you can install a third party menu and the major difference with be a thicker taskbar. You can even set win7 to never combine taskbar apps and it'll be further like xp. With win7, other people can troubleshoot her problems.

Don't mix her with your ideological battles.

Only a year of two until Canonical shuts down then. They're not making any money, They're unlikely to make any money and generally people don't want an Ubuntu based anything.

Their server support business is lacklustre (Redhat, Novell, IBM and Oracle eat their lunch) and not enough to support a business.

It's hard to call Canonical a successful company - it's only still around because of its unique financial status.

The hardware Ubuntu phone OS needs is not low end. They might have had a chance with low-end phones, but the OS is too heavy and doesn't offer enough compelling reasons to use it. With so much abstraction, it's sure to be buggy as well.

Like Ubuntu TV, Edge, Unity and Mir this is going nowhere. Their hardware "partner" will load a few hundred phones with Ubuntu, they'll also sell Android Phones with the exact same hardware. It doesn't cost them anything, if they don't sell - the manufacturer will just reflash them.

>The colour scheme hurts my eyes - it's too shiny.

>The condensed comments are gone.

>So much waster space, the padding on everything is too big, margins are uselessly large. As the user scrolls down, the comment boxes get to ridiculously small proportions.

> There is no reply button. Are you trying to reduce discussion?

If you're trying to underemphasis the comments (the only worthwhile thing here) you're going to have to do better editorial work. Hacker News posts articles weeks before you do.

When teaching algebra, include a coding unit that shows the relationship between the two. This should cover the flow controls and functions. Teach first order logic as well. It will make sharpen their analytic skills and make them better citizens.

Who's going to teach it though? Over the years the teaching profession has been eroded to mediocrity, with low entry standards and BS union ideological wars

For the most part i spend my time in browser, terminal, pdf reader, word processor and occasionally a dedicated IDE.

All i really want in a UI is the ability to switch between these apps without having to mentally switch contexts. On a non-touch computer, a menu list of installed apps+taskbar with a stacking window manager is ideal.

Linux users are not the only ones who are rejecting the new UIs. Everyone hates how windows 8 works.

There is clearly a need for new UIs for touch based machines. The mistake is trying to create one UI that works for both worlds - this is the mistake Win8 and GNOME3 made.