While there are quite a few people who aren't games testers and talk about game testing being a horrible profession, my friend who is a games tester loves his job, and still spends inordinate amounts of free time playing games as well--I'm therefore a bit skeptical about its use as an example.

It's interesting to note that, in Nautilus, Browser-mode is now the default over Spatial-mode. Years ago, in the 2.0 days with whatever-that-company-was-that-made-Nautilus and the wonderful new HIG and whatnot, the switch to Spatial was heralded as a major improvement and modernization. Now, like many of those huge and bitterly disputed changes, the grand step forward is being reversed with only a slight mention.

And yet, despite the reversal of so many of those improvements, I do think it's making Gnome better; it's just taking a very long time for the idealists of days past to realize that their ideals didn't really work in the real world.

But your argument breaks down here: Had you not paid for an internet connection, you wouldn't have to deal with a non-neutral internet. Everybody is bashing ISPs for the whole tiered service thing, but let me see if I can explain something.

Those ISPs have contracts with a number of companies. Remember Vonage being blocked by an ISP? Ever consider that that ISP probably had an agreement within the telecom part of the company that prevented them from allowing alternate internet telephony services from running on their lines? A neutral internet assists in filesharing, which assists in piracy (I'm not saying that if you fileshare, you pirate) Out of respect for their media providers, they should try to fight piracy.

This isn't a black and white issue.

No, it can't. It's actually bad. The iPod didn't have scrolling that was so close to non-functional that one of the few extensions available is solely for the purpose of replacing it with something else. And that's hardly the worst problem with Wave at the moment: waves that aren't short quickly become hideously slow (it took >1 minute just to open one long wave for me, and it made the interface unusably slow afterwards), deletion and archiving take a long time and aren't conveniently placed, replying and threading works by some odd method of moving the mouse around until one is in just the right place and a little highlighted rectangle appears (the Reply button doesn't thread properly), settings are entirely broken, and so on...

And, of course, we shouldn't forget the development problems. The API is getting better, but is still woefully inadequate. Robots have to use Google's App Engine, which is terribly limiting: I've been unable to do any of the robots I had planned because Google hasn't removed this limitation. And, of course, there's the issue that one is limited to writing only ten robots, and can't even delete old ones.

And the server issues too. There's been quite a bit of hype about federated servers, but for the foreseeable future, Google Wave isn't federated with any other servers––not even Google's own Wavesandbox, where new developers who joined after Sept 30th are stuck, unable to get access to the production server. Some other people have played with the server, now that it's open source, but all that is rather pointless without a client, and there's no serious client available. For that matter, there's no client except the webclient usable for Google's servers, apparently.

If the implementation improves, it will be wonderful, but at the moment, it's hardly usable at all.

I think what many people "don't get" is how they're supposed to use it when it's so hard to get accounts for others. It would be very useful for me if, say, everyone in my research group had an account, but at this point, that seems like something that won't happen until everyone loses interest. At the moment, if it weren't for one or two gadgetry-inclined friends of mine, it would be entirely pointless for me to try to use it, since there wouldn't be anyone for me to talk to; as it is, we can't talk about much, because we'll exclude other friends who haven't been so fortunate or clever.

The two of you are talking about different kinds of GPS devices. Cell phones may well kill the modern GPS devices that are designed to give street directions and sit atop dashboards. I've used Google Maps on my e51 rather than a GPS unit for years.

They certainly won't, however, kill the standalone GPS units Duradin is talking about, which are designed for hiking, sailing, and other more rugged uses than simply driving through town. Google's new offering doesn't apply to those anyway: cell phones have been able to replicate the functions of such devices for quite a while. However, cell phones are, by comparison, incredibly fragile and inappropriate for situations where standalone GPS systems work well: many of my GPS systems are waterproof, and I've dropped one out of a moving car with no repercussions; buttons are often designed to be easy to use with gloves; battery life is significantly higher even when compared to a cell phone in airplane mode; and in general, these sorts of systems are being used where carrying around a cell phone would be completely useless due to lack of service.

There's the possibility that one could combine GPS and a satellite phone, but I don't think the result would be popular. To begin with, if one falls out of a canoe, or off a cliff, or just breaks, it's nice to have lost only one of two.

I've used this method to take notes before, and it works extremely well; it can often even be much faster than taking notes by hand. Just \def or \newcommand anything complicated that shows up frequently as soon as it starts showing up, and keep several of them prewritten at the beginning of the file for anything that shows up commonly throughout classes (I usually have things like \def\f{\frac}, \def\lp{\left(}, \def\rp{\right)}, \def\beq{\begin{equation}, and so on).

For example, in a quantum mechanics course, you might have quite a bit of |\psi> terms. \def\pk{\left|\psi\right>} will give you the same term using only \pk, which will be faster than writing it. Define something similar for the dual, and you can do things like \pb H\pk, which will again be faster than writing. \def and \newcommand can also create commands with arguments, which can be used to great effect.

I would go mad trying to write anything in LaTeX without this method.

Essentially everyone who knows anything about modern version control considers CVS obsolete. Many of the things you discuss in your comment were considered, discussed, and resolved years ago, though different systems went about solving them in different ways.

SVN is essentially CVS with most of the annoying problems fixed, and several other advantages besides. Most other systems are completely different. There are even many people who consider any version control that isn't distributed to be obsolete.

It's rather difficult to describe such things here, however. I'd recommend looking into Darcs, Git, and Mercurial; they're all very different from CVS and ClearCase, and Git and Mercurial can do almost everything you describe and more (there are design decisions that prevent other things from being possible); some of the things you describe don't even make sense in their models. As the article notes, Darcs goes so far as to use a different model of changes.

It's quite probable that the author does consider ClearCase to be obsolete, yes.

I've found that it's typical among any group of operating system fans. I can remember asking "Is there some way for me to change the interface font size?" on an OS X forum, and getting the same sorts of responses: "Why would you want to do that? Apple chose the right font size for you." (assuming your tastes are the same as theirs, and your eyes aren't better than average, and your screen is the same size and type...) For the most part, I've found that OS X fans simply criticize anyone who asks a question that reveals a limitation or fault in OS X, while Linux fans either give some alternate and insufficient solution, or jump into technical explanations that don't necessarily make sense.*

* (actually, with Ubuntu, I've found that fans usually point to explanations written by others even if they don't apply/don't answer the question/aren't understood by those fans; there was one particularly amusing thread on Ubuntuforums where I was admonished for asking about a technical question about fixing a particular bug when there was a workaround in the report, until I pointed out that the workaround was flawed and that if the patronizing forumites had bothered to look at usernames, they would have realized that I wrote the workaround they accused me of ignoring.)

The state school I went to in the US, which generally considered in the top six universities in the world for my field, and is a prestigious university to begin with, cost me less than $8,000 a year, with no scholarship - I was in the worst possible position for finances, actually, because I'm affluent enough that I was above the limit for even tax breaks, much less financial assistance.

So, in my interpretation, the Windows 7 netbook had slightly shorter battery life, and performed slightly worse in all but two benchmarks. One of those two was dealing with "next generation gaming performance" that really isn't point of netbooks, and the other was essentially identical to the XP performance.

And the conclusion the reviewers take from this is that Windows 7 is good? Just because it isn't as bad as Vista, and isn't too much worse than XP?

With these sorts of results, XP is going to be with us for a long time. Why is it so hard for Microsoft to make something comparable?

That takes a while. I'm still waiting for mine, since I thought they would actually read the proposals, instead of just slowly giving out accounts first-come-first-serve, and so wasn't part of the initial rush.

Or like themselves during the late nineties: I seem to recall a poor relationship with developers being one of the major reasons cited for the fall of Apple during that era.

While everyone here is arguing with you about whether the CC licence does, in fact, have the problems you bring up, I feel it necessary to point out that the whole article and summary are completely wrong: Wikipedia allows several licences that are more restrictive than the "most permissive Creative Commons license." Most of the acceptable licences require that derivative works be licensed under the same terms (CC-by-sa, FAL, GFDL, etc). Some of the licences have requirements that are so onerous as to make practical legal reuse impossible: the GFDL is a good example of this. In those cases, you would certainly not lose future rights to the photograph, because even though it would be theoretically possible for others to legally use the photos, few would actually be able to.

Unfortunately, it seems the article is mainly fear-mongering, and the summary, despite linking to Wikipedia policy, was apparently written by someone who didn't read that policy.

Probably not very many, but how many "carriers" will pop up that have terrible or no service, no contracts, no phone subsidies, and either no locking or a "call us to unlock" policy?

I expect it wouldn't be hard to make a "carrier" that would essentially be a store for unlocked phones that would otherwise be far more expensive.