Surgeons don't wear scrubs outside of the O.R. As soon as they step out of surgery, the scrubs come off and they're back in their nice preppy clothes. The reason for their scrubs is because they're cheap and sterile which is required to keep their patients alive. Airline pilots wear officer's uniforms which signify rank and authority. I seriously doubt that the management intends to give the helpdesk guys ultimate power to dictate over everyone else in the building. So neither of these applies in this case. This is much more comparable to a janitor or fast food worker.

As someone who started on the "Help Desk" I remember what I used to wear to work, tattered jeans, t-shirts, etc. Now that I have progressed in my IT career which is to the point where Business casual and the suit are the norm. I also happen to work for a Fortune 500 company that has a healthy work hard to play hard mentality. Anyways, Our Help Desk is also visible but as I look at some of those people I tend to be judgemental by what they are wearing. I Shouldnt be I was once like them. But I guess at some point I succumbed to the corporate culture. /shrug I wouldnt be upset too much of the change. Remember you want to dress for the job you want not the one you have. :)

The latency problem is of course the most apparent and thus the most discussed but there are others.

One I wonder about is what kind of servers they are supposedly using. The problem is that modern games demand a modern GPU to look good. The kind of processing needed cannot be done on any sort of reasonable processor in realtime. Also, GPUs aren't really set up to work in parallel these days. What I mean is if you try to have a system with multiple GPUs and running multiple 3D games on them, you are going to find that doesn't really work. That sort of thing is coming, DX11 generation hardware is much better at multi-tasking and such, but it requires apps to be rewritten for it and still isn't there.

So what it comes down to is that to run a modern 3D game, well you have to have a desktop system more or less. You need to have a system running Windows with a powerful GPU at its disposal, and it needs to be tasked to running that one game.

Well that isn't a situation I'm seeing as working real well for a hosted business model. You have a whole bunch of individual desktop machines set up that then load up the software and whatever handles the encoding.

If they are claiming they are doing it with "virtualization" then I'm saying they are "lying." As it happens, doing virtualization related things is a big part of my job, so I'm fairly up on the tech. When it comes to 3D with VMs there are two things that are true of every technology that supports it:

1) It doesn't work real well. It is on the slow side, and there are bugs of various sorts. It is for sure usable, but nobody is going to confuse it for being 100% good to go, and newer games are the thing it has the most trouble with.

2) It requires a 3D card on the host. All of the virtualizaiton solutions do 3D by processing the guest 3D calls and translating them in to 3D calls to the host. 3D hardware is then needed to do the actual rendering.

I'm afraid I don't buy that these random guys have a more advanced technology than VMWare, Sun, Microsoft, and so on. If you could easily virtualize a system and emulate full modern 3D in software, well they'd be doing it. Hell, MS would be interested in doing it non-virtualized. Be a cool selling point of a new Windows if you didn't need a GPU anymore.

So the only way I see this working is lots and lots of systems with big graphics cards in them. This I do not see as a profitable proposition, even assuming all the rest of it works flawlessly.

I'm not defending Gnome in any way. Personally I've always found their defaults and UI design non-intuitive. However, one of the things I've always believed is that "ease of use" is more subjective than we imagine. People new to the Linux desktop may find it counter-intuitive compared to the Windows desktop they've used for years.

But imagine if we were blank slates with no pre-conceived notions of how a desktop should behave?

For example, when I sort things in a desk drawer, I don't put my pens near my printer because they both start with the same letter or they both put images on paper. I put labels on my DVDs and MiniDV tapes and I label the items themselves, not the box where I put them in. In short, I mix all types of media. The current desktop metaphor completely breaks this free-form approach that many of use have. I don't think it's a technical barrier; just that people are used to doing things a certain way.

So, though I don't agree with Gnome decisions I do give them credit for trying to do new things (as difficult and bizarre as those decisions can be).

Actually I personally in my long kde time always found Konqueror superior to total commander in everything except that much of the goodyness was hidden behind kio::slaves (sftp://blabla for instance)
and in shortcuts, you could reach various notworked filesystem you could split and tab as youd like and etc... but it took time to learn it, most of the functionality was not obvious.
I never missed total commander in Linux, on OSX however... sure there is pathfinder, but it is not the same!

The 1024x600px screen built into my laptop, or the 1360x768px screen I use when I take it home?

A dolphin clone? By reverting to a behavior that Nautilus had before Dolphin even existed? How's that work exactly?

They're all clones of Midnight Commander if you want to play that game.

Signal strength alone does not guarantee the ability to make/receive calls. Even if your mobile is registered in the network, making and receiving calls depends on the availability of various scarce resources, namely:

1. a "slot" on the over-the-air network (# of active connections per cell is limited)
2. a "switching path" inside your operators network
3. a "switching path" inside one or more transfer networks (owned by someone else)
4. a "switching path" inside the network the caller/callee is connected to
5. a "slot" on the over-the-air network on the others side (if the caller/callee is mobile)

In case of "lots of missed calls" in a particular area (your home) one could assume that

• your home cell is overcrowded (all slots in use) or
• there is a bottleneck in the upstream network

Note: outgoing calls should have the same problems; if they "fail less" it could be because your operator has chosen to reserve a (possibly large?) percentage of the slots/lines for outgoing calls. (Which obviously reduces the chances of incoming calls even more)

You no longer have to pay a premium with Intel either. I've noticed that Intel recently began adding their "Virtualization Technology" to all new CPU models, even their entry-level Celeron and Pentium Dual-Core lines. Example: this $53 Celeron E3200 at Newegg.

I think Intel did this in response to Microsoft's announcement of Windows 7's "Windows XP Mode" and its requirement of on-CPU virtualization technology. AMD also recently started adding their "AMD-V" to their previously-excluded Sempron line of CPUs. Newegg has one for just $40.

For a long time (since the Pentium D days), Intel had a confusing market segmentation strategy where some models had it and some didn't, even within the same CPU family (Pentium D, Core 2 Duo). In contrast, after AMD-V was introduced, AMD added it to all of their newly released Athlon 64 and x2 CPUs (but not Sempron). And after the Core 2 Duo was introduced and kicked major butt, AMD dramatically dropped their prices, resulting in cheap AMD virtualization platforms.

Anyhoo, AMD isn't the only option anymore for cheap virtualization.

Who says WWW unless they intentionally mean World Wide Web? People just say goto google.com or wikipedia.com. Yes, I know wikipedia is under the .org domain, but the .com works just fine. Same with slashdot.com for slashdot.org. So, I say skip the web. as well.

Putting Wine on Linux netbooks is not a good idea.
1. It gives a false impression of Linux as an inferior no cost alternative to run your Windows apps.
2. It provides compatibility with many forms of Windows malware.
3. It reduces the pressure on the user to find open source alternatives.

One of the underlying questions is: with the millions of hours of music we already made, what benefit does it bring us to have even more music?

If you're a 80's music fan, then you already have everything you need ;-)

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that if person A has a restraining order against person B, then person B is not likely to be on person A's friend list.

They may want to change this page then. This looks like a promise:

And if you're wondering, yes, archive.org does have a backup copy of that page.

On the desert-solar thing, It turns out you need to clean the mirrors frequently, which requires water, which requires energy to bring in since there is little in the desert. It's a big problem.