From what I can tell, you cannot navigate or search for addresses while in "offline" mode on Google Maps. If you are already navigating or already have search results up, they will remain, but you cannot pre-download a map and start navigation while offline.

This is not a huge issue for me, since I seldom travel where there is no service, but it would be nice to not have to worry about this at all. I do not know whether Nokia Maps is any better - until now that has been rather academic as it had not supported Android :)

The issue is remote desktop with no 3d acceleration. I hate fallback mode, but it's better than nothing for (e.g.) x2go or freenx.

Now I'll need to install something like xfce just for the remote desktop use case. It's hardly the end of the world, but it will definitely be missed.

Yeah - it sure seems like this was a calculated risk to save what is, essentially, a movie prop and tourist attraction; and the wager was in human lives.

Google could afford one hell of a marketing campaign if they wanted to, but I don't see much evidence of this. Why did they not do a full on media blitz at launch?

I can only assume that + is internally still considered a sort of "soft launch" and they won't start mass marketing until they reach feature parity with Facebook. Maybe they're hoping to "seed" Plus with early adopters now, who will make the service more attractive when it "really" launches, but they run the risk of losing a lot of those early adopters before launch even happens

I actually use Plus (and not Facebook) and it's a fine service, but unless they make some major moves to drive adoption very soon, it's just not going to go anywhere in the long term.

You are certainly right, GNOME's future is tied to Shell, and it's very much unclear whether Shell will ever reach the same userbase that GNOME 2 had at its peak. Luckily, we have choice in this space, and I'm glad to see XFCE and friends enjoy increased exposure as a result.

Of course, some of us do like Shell, so the improved hardware support is very welcome. It may be that GNOME becomes a marginalized, oddball UI in time, but I've enjoyed similarly non-mainstream software for years - I mean, I do run Linux on the desktop, after all :)

I'm curious, because I guess I don't understand Slashdot's moderation system, why did I get moderated -1 troll? I was not intending to troll anybody.

I know there's a lot of resistance to GNOME Shell, but it's clearly the future of GNOME (like it or not) and the weird non-3d degraded mode that you get with GNOME 3 + no 3d is something that's not really fit for anybody.

Personally, I really like GNOME Shell and I'm glad to see that it will be supported on older hardware. I always found the decision to completely ignore this hardware to be questionable and damaging to Shell's adoption rate (as if it wasn't going to have a hard enough time to begin with). Surely they could have provided a similar UX without the eye candy for older systems - at least now we have a workaround!

I hear they make videogames, and they have this crazy new console with a 2012. Called a "Wii U" or something. You know, I think they even had another console on the market before this.

I know, I know, the Wii U has less space than a Nomad, so you'd be forgiven for writing it off as "lame," but maybe these spunky upstarts at Nintendo will be worth paying attention to some day. I'm sure they'll never compete with Microsoft or Sony, but hey, you never know.

I suppose I'm something of an oddity, but I really enjoy reviewing products (ranked somewhere in the 4.5k range now). I've always been curious about Vine - there's very little documentation on it - and was really hoping to get in at some point.

I found the 1000 number thrown out in the OP impossible, and I'm glad to hear that it's incorrect. From what I've observed their ranking algorithm is pretty clever, and after an initially rapid increase in ranking I've leveled off, and now my rank oh-so-slowly increases over time.

I've often wondered the most effective way to gain rank in this system; it seems to help if you can make it onto the "top 3" reviews for items which are displayed along with the item on its front page, but after a certain point there seem to be diminishing returns to more votes on individual posts. I've basically just decided to write reviews for everything I buy at Amazon, and hope that I keep moving up.

I guess we all need something to aspire to :)

I would be very, very surprised if they would port Windows to ARM and *not* include something like Apple's Rosetta. Sure, you take a performance hit when running legacy, crusty apps, but considering that those were probably designed for much slower computers originally it hardly matters if you're running them with a hefty performance penalty now. I know I was quite pleased with the PPC -> Intel transition process on my Macbook Pro.

Snapshotting is probably the most compelling feature of either FS for workstation use. Both BTRFS and ZFS are copy-on-write, and they both feature very low overhead, very straightforward snapshotting. That's a feature that almost anybody can utilize.

Aside from that, ZFS features a lot of datacenter-centric goodies that might have some utility on a workstation as well. Realtime (low overhead) compression, realtime (high overhead) deduplication, realtime encryption, easy and fast creation/destruction of filesystems and virtual block devices, and a ton of other odds and ends.

The long take is an old technique with countless excellent examples, but I really love Kubrick's use of them in The Shining. Particularly in two instances: Danny's traversal of the halls on his trike, and meandering through the garden maze towards the end of the film.

These scenes to me are especially captivating because of the motion of the camera through these corridors. It's one thing to have a fixed point camera for a long scene, but it's quite another to have a moving camera for such a long time; the potential missteps are countless. The maze scene in the Shining is notorious for how long it took to complete. The sense of motion and space that this sort of cinematography can provide is really quite spectacular though, and I think it often justifies the effort.

You're right, and the Linux community as a whole has certainly embraced btrfs. If Oracle were to just pull the plug on it, the project would continue in some form (which is more than one could say for opensolaris and ZFS).

The problem as I see it is that Oracle has already shown a willingness to submarine competitors with patents they hold on GPL'd projects. A worst case scenario isn't that btrfs dies; a worst case scenario is that it gets used by Oracle's competitors, and then Oracle decides to go and sue them for patent infringement.

Oracle: Hey, Red Hat... nice filesystem you got there. Shame if something were to... happen to it...