Comment Re:Mint Update Hell? (Score 1) 627
Well, at least with linux we have the choice to switch to whatever we want
Well, at least with linux we have the choice to switch to whatever we want
When I have several Firefox windows open and want to access one, there is no way to go directly to it.
Fair enough. Personally, I like that behaviour (I have so many windows open all the time that I'd never have any space for a description left in a taskbar if I had one (hell, I often have so many PDFs open at once that even when they do their expose-thing I can't find the window I want
Hell, want to launch more than one instance of the Calculator? It cannot be done.
Actually, you can do this one -- just middle-click on a dock icon to launch a new instance (the middle-click-opens-new-window paradigm is standard in many apps, so it shouldn't be a surprise). It's a minor point, though.
I guess I'm lucky/unlucky in that Unity fits my brain absolutely perfectly -- it's by far my favourite WM ever (and I've used pretty much every WM that was ever written for X over the years). Both the dock and the dash make my life so much faster, it's not funny. But I agree it's not a very customisable WM (and I'm not sure why either -- Shuttleworth and his design-gurus are clearly very particular!)
I agree, but I feel that the reduced ownership and lower costs of production and distribution should be reflected in the price.
Well, I agree with that too
With regards to your first point, I do hope that ebooks will eventually move to a DRM-free format just as has happened with digital music. But we'll see
ooking for something which is easy to configure and doesn't hide my windows...
How does Unity hide your windows??
My point was simply that people shouldn't begrudge paying for ebooks
I don't know if other people are as cheap as me, but I sure can see how once you find Project Gutenberg you might purchase a lot less at $15/pop.
Personally I quite like supporting authors whose works I enjoy by buying their books. I have this naive theory that if enough people buy their books, they might write some more. But maybe I'm just dreaming
(Not dissing PG for a minute, incidentally, and more power to it -- but there's times when the classics don't cut it)
you can't lend them easily to your friends or resell them, you can't rent them from the local library, depending on the device used, annotating or marking the pages is not effective and can't easily be shared between two people reading the same book at the same time (keep slowly browsing through to get to the current page)
Am I the only person who removes DRM from their ebooks?? (I mean, seriously, this is
What we should be pushing for is DRM-free ebooks at purchase, of course. A switch from DRM to DRM-free formats eventually happened with music files so I have every hope that it will happen with ebooks as well.
The real reason to me to get a kindle over a table for reading is simply the weight difference. The tablets I held would be uncomfortable compared to a 6" kindle which easily weighs the same as or less than a fiction paperback.
Dunno
Thankfully, neither a kindle nor a 7" tablet is particularly bulky or heavy, so when I travel I carry both.
There's really no nicer way to say it... ebooks, in their current form, are a miserable failure for anything besides reading novels from start to finish.
Um, I think reading novels (and non-fiction books) is the market. E-readers obviously can't replace reference works that you need to jump around randomly in -- page turns are far too slow on e-Ink.
Much of it is just due to underpowered hardware. 2D text isn't sexy like photorealistic rendered 3D, but realtime font rendering at high quality is a demanding (and unappreciated) task in its own right.
Why on earth would you need any better font rendering than freetype happily provides?
Of course, "anecdote" isn't the singular form of "data"
Not to split hairs, but an anecdote is very much a single point of data.
I think you were looking for "the plural of anecdote isn't data", which isn't quite the same thing
Maybe so, but it seems silly in retrospect. That original Mac changed everything -- there just wasn't much software for it in 1985.
Wasn't referring to the specs, just the coolness. (plus ça change, and all that
Oh, the IIc was *the* computer of the mid-80s. My family only had an "Orange" (an Apple ][ clone)
Nothing's ever been as amazing as that first Apple ][ clone, though -- I still remember my Dad teaching me to code in BASIC when I must have been four or five, and the thrill of
10 PRINT "HELLO!"
20 GOTO 10
RUN
No computer before or since has been so welcoming, so encouraging, so
What's more concerning is that Tim Cook just came out and said that Apple wouldn't be considering larger screen sizes in the foreseeable future. I'm not entirely sure what I think about 5" phone screens either, but trying to deny they're not popular is as stupid as trying to deny that 7" tablet screen sizes aren't popular.
It seems too me that ever since the iPhone 4 Apple has reacted to the loss of its market share by not daring to change anything. The phone design is still the same (nearly three years old now, and it wasn't even a very attractive or practical design to begin with) and the screen is the same width (which feels too small and cramped to me, now that I'm used to larger Android screens). It's like they're caught in the headlights and don't dare move, not realising that standing still is what's killing them.
Out of interest, does either have an IPS screen? It's the low-viewing-angle hideous TN screens that drive me to distraction, and I don't know why more manufacturers don't care about screen quality. Even Apple seems to be slipping with their latest laptops.
I would have thought that viewing photos and watching movies on laptops is pretty common these days, so screen quality *should* be important to people.
To do nothing is to be nothing.