I'm not so sure, and I wouldn't really characterize this as a move towards thin clients even if things are becoming more cloud-centric.

This is really about the computer market maturing and computers becoming consumer devices and converging on what the average consumer wants which is to consume (media and app content) and be entertained. The only folks who really want computers vs computer based appliances are hard code geeks and we're a tiny minority.

It's only a recent thing that you can pack enough technology into a small portable package to make a really compelling "internet appliance", but now that it's happened, it's hard to see what would make people want to go back to clunky difficult to maintain desk-bound computers.

Does anyone know why the default menus are so oddly organized - such as the catch-all "Other" sub-menu being in the middle of the menu, and containing important stuff like the Update Manager and Synaptic Package Manager?

Is this menu organization something Mint is inheriting from GNOME 3? In Mint 11 the system stuff was in some System menu where you more expect to find it.

I was expecting the menu to be cleaned up during the Mint 12 beta, but it's still there know in what appears to be the release version.

Well, the desktop in general, Windows included, is rapidly becoming inconsequential other than for business use. The non-business computer market is rapidly moving to smartphones, tablets and laptops - all smaller screen devices where a traditional screen-real-estate-hungry user interface isn't the best option. This is the market that Ubuntu is obviously targeting with Unity, and Android and Windows also appear to be moving in the same direction - Windows 8 and Ice Cream Sandwich UIs both are geared towards small-screen appliance-type use.

But, that said, there's always going to be a demand for a more traditional general purpose compute devices, for development work if nothing else, and for that use Linux always has been a great option, and only getting better with age, even if the path it's taking is a little uncertain. RIP Ubuntu. Long live Linux Mint!

Huh?

There's no need to make an copy of class (not instance) specific information per instance, but that doesn't change the fact that the constructor is the cleanest place to do it, otherwise you'd need to explicity initialize each type of class before use.

The overhead of in-constructor global initialization is minimal - just test/set a static member initialized flag.

All you need for a meta object system/etc is an appropriate QObject base class to replace the moc & Q_OBJECT preprocessor kluges. Wanting to avoid standard C++ features like RTTI and dynamic_cast in favor of Qt-specific hacks is a horrible case of no-invented-here syndrome. Just stick to the standard language facilities, please.

One obvious way to cleanly implement introspection without preprocessor hackery would be to have each object's constructor register it's method in an appropriate way with the proposed QObject base class.

When Qt was first implemented it was *perhaps* excusable, given the state of template, STL, etc support in target compilers, to use preprocessor hackery, but for many years now that's been an invalid excuse. Sure it would be considerable work to change Qt into a truly native C++ library and ditch moc, etc, but there's no valid *technical* reason why it couldn't be done.

If you're in Arizona then Grand Canyon is a must (just unbelievably huge), but another really interesting place to visit is Petrified Forest National Park - full of fossilized (petrified) trees laying as they fell.

http://www.petrified.forest.national-park.com/

Try Linux Mint Debian Xfce (rolling update) edition. Just tried it myself this weekend (looking to get away from Ubuntu because of Unity) and first impressions are very good.

Xfce is basically like Windows XP - just a bottom menu/task bar, and the rest of the screen free to put icons on.

About the only other really low latency service (and by this I mean service where 20ms becomes significant) is supercomputing

Well, there's program trading. There was a story a couple of days ago of a new $300M transatlantic cable being laid whose sole purpose is to reduce transit times (latency) by 6ms from the current 60ms. The consumers for this are hedge funds/etc doing program trading - the article said that a large hedge fund might make $100M/yr extra from a 1ms data advantage.

Hopefully the US economy will recover now that the geeks can get back to work and stop browsing /.

I checked Google news maybe a minute after I felt it (in NJ) and was impressed to see they had it already. Not sure hos fast these things travel hence how long after it hit in VA.

I'm in Pearl River, NY - right beside northern NJ - and we felt it on the 6th floor of our building. I was sitting at my desk and first thought someone was behind me pushing my chair as a joke.

Once you've represented the lawn area as a tessellation of (slightly overlapping) lawnmower-sized patches, then isn't this just the traveling salesman problem - visit all patches with the least distance traveled?

This is a classic NP problem... if the problem size (N) is too large to fully evaluate (in this case 6 acres = 29,000 square yards, tractor area = 1 square yard, so N = 29,000 which is rather large for this type of problem), then heuristics are you're friend.

The optimal solution, which would only apply for a circular lawn, is obviously a spiral pattern. For an irregular shape lawn one obvious heuristic would be to decompose the lawn area into a set of various sized circular blobs and do each of these in an expanding spiral pattern, then onto the next.

A similar heuristic would be to start by spiraling inwards around the entire lawn, and "recurse" into smaller areas when they (via having narrow "neck" entrances) are about to be cut off from the main spiral - specifically when the neck has been reduced to two tractor widths wide (one path in, one path out). In fact, this may well be the optimum strategy, particularly as it takes advantage of the specific problem topology rather than being a generic traveling salesman heuristic.

Please send cash to SpinyNorman c/o Slashdot if this makes you money!

The changes appear due to Larry Page (one of the founders) having this year taken over from Eric Schmidt as CEO. Obviously he'd not have done it if he intended to run the company the same way, and he's made a number of moves in the direction of more focus.

Huh?

A decent attention span is obviously a prerequisit for most jobs, but it's no substitute for experience.

Someone with raw talent has the potential to be great, but it's only experience that will make them so (assuming their raw talent includes the ability to learn from experience).

Remember - the best 40yr old programmers have raw talent plus 20years of experience. The best 20yr old progammers *only* have the raw talent.

First off, 60-70% isn't crippled - you'd only notice the difference for an app that was stretching the graphics card to the max (i.e. games), and we're talking Linux here... not exacly famous as a high-perf gaming platform regardless of what drives you're running.

Secondly, for a complex piece of software like this you don't just beat on the competition at first attempt - it's an ongoing process of learning and experimentation. 60-70% is totallty usable today, and tomorrow it'll be faster...

Finally, I don't share your faith that the proprietary driver is optimally designed and coded and is therefore squeezing max ("100%") performance out of the hardware. Who knows how efficient it is, especially since AMD's doesn't have any incentive to keep improving older drivers - there going to always be moving on to the next one.