Nature of the job for me - Network Admin/Engineering, so all day, every day at work, then it's also my source of video and entertainment at home since I don't watch TV. Would MUCH rather swap the work time with kayaking though (nature provides a MUCH better show than any computer screen).
Exactly - it is an interface aimed at the casual user, not an officer worker, administrator or power user who needs to be able to manage a multitude of programs at once.
I could understand that sort of decision if the majority of their users were tablet/phone based, but they're not - they're PC users.
I'm not surprised that a lot of folks are still on XP - at my university (where I work as a NOC network admin), the majority of the Windows machines are still XP. XP is simply what was put on older machines, and then a few years back with everyone hating Vista, new machines that had it were back-rev'd to XP Pro. Newer machines are mostly coming with Windows 7 Pro, however, a considerably number of people are installing alternate OSs on them alongside or to replace Windows 7. So far, exposure to Windows 8 has been 100% negative (the only time I ever recall seeing staff completely of the same opinion), so I don't see it ever catching on at all.
So yes... come April 2014, like or not, XP will be dead, and businesses will have to get off of it. They just don't necessarily have to stick with Windows for whatever they install instead.
I have an MP3/media player for music, a GPS for navigation and computers at home for contacts. I personally loath text messaging - a horrible form of communication due to the character limits and people's horrific bastardization of proper grammar to skirt said character limit. I do agree that the ability to make a call while out is a handy thing, but my issue has been that I cannot simply get a cell phone which is JUST a phone. I don't want to pay $40 a month for something I'll use once or twice (if that) in a year to make a call, and last I looked (about a year ago) I couldn't find a company in Canada that offered a super-basic phone for a pay-as-you-go price that has no expiration time.
For me, they're just not a useful device. A super-basic cell phone that is only a phone would be useful if the cost was fair, but I have no use for a smart phone.
I just found that KDE is very clunky and bloated. I was a KDE fan quite a while ago, running the original 1.0 version when it came out on FreeBSD. It just got too big and too bloated. Today there are just so many other shells that are either lighter on resources, easier to use or both.
When I tell people I don't have a cell, they so often say "OMG... you're a tech guy - how can you live without a Cell phone!?"
I often reply "How can you live -with- one?"
There is a certain wonderful charm to being unavailable to the world. Technology is great and all, and definitely everything my career is built around, but knowing when to unplug and walk away for a while is good too.
We have similar - a residence network and the main campus network. On the main campus network we have a bit more control in that we are not acting as an ISP that provides completely unrestricted access. We do not allow much P2P, and are quick to lock a host that abuses bandwidth. I would estimate the bandwidth requirements for the main network sit around 60M per student. The only reason it is that much is because of the recent spike in the use of educational video streaming by the professors, which is more of a misuse issue (IE, professors should pre-download the video they want people to see and show it on a single display unit rather than telling people to go look at it on-line all at once).
It is inevitable though that the bandwidth-per-student counters will continue to increase, even though the majority of that usage is likely non-academic (as is the case now).
Speaking as a Network admin at a major university, the amount of bandwidth-per-user really depends on the levels of control the school is allowed (or willing) to apply to the user's Network usage.
For example, in our residences, students are told they have unfiltered access to the Internet, as in, they are allowed to use any software they wish. The only stated restrictions are overall bandwidth related on a per-day basis. Behind the scenes, a we use packet shaping hardware to limit the total amount of per-user bandwidth usable for such things as P2P or VoIP (to prevent super-nodes) but otherwise leave it alone. In this model, 100Mbps per 1000 students is inadequate, but only just barely. We currently have it at approximately 120Mbps per 1000 students.
Under tighter control circumstances, where P2P is disabled and/or other controls, caps, and so on are enacted, you can likely get away with less bandwidth. Other networks we distribute have such tighter controls, and allow us to dial the number down further to around 70Mbps per 1000 students (without any web censorship).
Agreed - outsourcing is NEVER a good idea. Every single business I've ever seen that did it always came to regret it in the end.
I do believe in a decade or so we'll be able to look up the word "Retarded" in the dictionary and see "Harper" listed as one of the synonyms.
This isn't the first time he and his government have done such a thing - last year it was the new crime bill, which awards more jail time for pot growers/dealers (a harmless drug, at that) than to a paedophile or rapist. Seriously:
Oh... and despite tossing out more and longer prison sentences, he's also shutting down prisons. Logic is not one of his strong points.
Unity's come a long way since it's rather embarrassing first appearance, and that's a good thing Ubuntu. While I'm sure arguments over whether it's good or bad will rage on for years, the one truth about it is that it is an Application-Centric shell. AC shells are becoming the norm in the OS front, as seen by Unity, iOS, Andriod and the up-and-coming Windows 8 Metro. From a usability standpoint, they make perfect sense - they're very, very easy to use for someone who knows little to nothing about computers.
Therein is the problem for the power-user. Power users (Network admins, coders, computer enthusiasts/expects, etc.) tend to do a lot of things at once, and an AC shell is terrible for trying to actually do serious work with a computer. Power-users tend to migrate toward Task-Centric shells where active software is displayed on a task bar of some sort with applications contained in their own windows. Again, this makes sense given the type of user.
What does not make sense is Ubuntu's lack of flexibility in regards to the shell. While it caters nicely to the novice user, a power-user has little choice unless he/she wants to go to the trouble of installing an alternate shell that is more Task-Centric in nature.
I personally switched from Ubuntu to Mint back in 2009, at the time largely because Mint was a much more polished distribution. Now, Mint offers the extra perk of a shell that gives the user a choice as to how Application or Task Centric they want their environment to be. Their extensions to Gnome 3 initially allowed this with the Mint 12 release, and later their Cinnamon shell (a fork of Gnome 3) took it a step further. This is the sort of flexibility I wish Ubuntu had, but it seems they're content to stick with Unity and the base Gnome 3, and in the last year that's cost them a huge number of power-users, and likely will continue to do so.
It's been around 10 or 11 years now since I stopped watching TV. The ridiculous monthly costs combined with the facts that 2/3 of the channels are uninteresting and those that are are filled with up to 40% commercial time, I just thought to myself one day "Why am I paying for this?"
Since canceling my cable, I chose to watch shows that I was interested in by on-line streaming or by just getting the DVDs, and that's worked out great so far. The added perk is that I'm not exposed to ANY commercials at all. The big Telco's have got to come to the realization sooner or later that embracing the more modern ways of media distribution is a lot more profitable and beneficial than constantly opposing them. They seem to forget that it is the consumer than "wants" the shows, and their job to deliver what the consumer wants, not what they think the consumer wants.
If they don't step into the 21st century soon, more and more folks are just going to do what I did and stop giving them any money at all. Personally... I think it was one of the best things I've ever done; I haven't a clue where I'd find time to sit in front of a TV nowadays.
I don't really get this one myself. I see it a lot in the Niagara region of Ontario; farmers absolutely opposed to wind turbines as well as solar farms. They state a number of baseless reasons as mentioned above like - my favourite being health concerns. Do they think they're radioactive or something? Or that they put out electromagnetic interference akin to a neutron star? Or that the Solar farms take up valuable farm land (currently sitting unused).
Any technology has its downsides - green energy is not 100% green, nor is it any cheaper than the old-school methods of power generation - that at least is cold hard fact. What these folks don't seem to understand is that this the inevitable future. As fossil-fuel-based power generation diminishes, it has to be replaced with something and we have only so many of those "something's" that we can resort to at the current time. Wind Turbines, solar and hydro-electric plants will -have- to be built unless the protesters happens to invent a newer and better means of fulfilling 21st century power needs. It's a simple reality that they really need to endeavour to understand. In fact, if they had taken as much time to read up on it as they did to make a protest sign, they'd probably realize how silly their protest was.
Even though it's barely out of the gates, I tried out Cinnamon, a fork of Gnome3 by the folks that brought us Mint Linux. MUCH better than the base Gnome3.
To keep things short, one could say the biggest point of contention with Gnome3 was how radically different it was from Gnome2, moving from a task-centric way of managing the shell to an application centric method. While great for a novice, this tended to frustrate a lot of power users. Cinnamon allows more flexibility in the shell's method of focus on tasks and applications, essentially letting the user pick whatever point on the scale they prefer. It's a good approach - perhaps the best approach.
I don't know if it's offered for Fedora or Red Hat based Linux's in package form, but you could build it from source if need be.
A lot of folks tend to banter back and forth over classic vs. the more modern metro and metro-like shells (such as Unity or the iOS, or Andriod). What it really comes down to is the type of user behind the computer. The more modern mobile/touch interfaces like Metro are an application-centric approach that caters best to a user who is interested in doing a specific thing quickly and easily. Older interface types with taskbars, window lists and so on are task-centric shells that cater more to power-users and/or administrators who tend to have a lot of things going on at once, and who need to be able to manage all the open applications with ease.
As such, task-centric shells are likely to always be preferred by the one group while the more average user will prefer the updated shells (even if some of them will initially complain about the need to relearn things). The most effective way to manage this situation is simple - just make sure to offer both worlds.
A good example of this is that recently Mint Linux made the move to Gnome 3, and with it, a more Application-centric shell. They provided a number of applets, and soon after a fork of Gnome 3 (Cinnamon), that were able to offer the user either extreme, and even multiple points between the two shell types. Ubuntu, on the other hand, did not really offer a choice and forced the users' hands in shifting to Unity. The result was a very large shift in popularity to Mint as the current preferred Linux distribution (as seen on Distrowatch's listings). As long as Microsoft offers a choice, I think they'll be able to keep both worlds happy. Well... as happy as can be expected for running Windows anyway.
"The medium is the massage." -- Crazy Nigel
