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Comment Re:What I said about Twitter (Score 1) 169

In the 21st century, people have gotten used to the idea that you don't have to download a client for each protocol.

Have they? Normal people (non-geeks) use "apps" on their mobiles — they use the official Twitter app for Twitter, the official Facebook app for Facebook, and so on.

I don't think they are generally aware of the existence of third-party clients for the services they use, much less multi-protocol clients (e.g. microblogging client that handles Twitter, Identi.ca, etc.; IM client that does AIM, MSN, etc.).

Comment Re:That doesn't make any sense (Score 1) 185

If I go to Google and search for Southwest Airlines, I plan to visit the Southwest Airlines website. Why would Southwest Airlines pay money to Google for an advertisement that tries to get me to visit the Southwest Airlines website?

Most likely. But you could be searching for other information about Southwest Airlines, perhaps third-party reviews. This pushes everything beyond the first search result way down past the "fold."

Comment Re:Ubuntu good for linux? (Score 1) 143

I'm glad for you. But suspend (never really tried hibernate) has always been an on-again, off-again problem for me on three laptops over the years... most of the years were spent using Ubuntu. It'll be working fine, and then seemingly out of nowhere, it'll stop working. Or only work intermittently, as it does now with Debian Jessie (after being fine for my first few months with the ThinkPad). But the huge log file problem is unlike anything I've ever had before.

Comment Re:Ubuntu good for linux? (Score 2) 143

I have absolutely no problem with intelligent discussion with anyone on the pros and cons of Linux, but why do so many of the anti-Linux people make these generalised, sweeping statements about Linux without putting any meat into their points?

Precisely what issues have you seen Linux cause?

"Anti-Linux" is among the least-accurate labels you could use to describe me. However, I've been using it as my primary desktop OS for long enough to develop a memory of a range of bugs that range from "minor annoyance" to "headache" to "complete showstopper." As my Linux knowledge has increased over the last eight years, and as my skills have improved, the issues have become easier to deal with.

However, what is today a "minor annoyance" to me would be a "complete showstopper" for non-techies like, say, my parents. I have a specific example from the last month.

I'm running Debian on a recent model ThinkPad. Things should be pretty smooth, right — geek use these! It's normally not a problem, but surprisingly, there are times that the machine fails to suspend properly. That sucks, but not as badly as what happens next: my root partition suddenly becomes full. It seems my syslog, kern.log and messages files get repeatedly filled with the same error message, until they are each multiple gigabytes in size and the root partition has no free space left. Now, because I've learned things over the years, I wrote a small script with sed that cleans out instances of the error from the log files. The problem is, because my root partition is full, the script can't clean up the files unless some space is first freed up. So I first move some large files to another partition, then run the script. Annoying, but with that and a reboot, it's good as new.

Here's another one from a few years back: I remember having some kind of problem that would cause an error message when logging in to my Gnome desktop. I'd click OK and it would send me back to the login screen. The solution was to edit or delete some file from my home directory before restarting GDM and logging back in. Simple, right? Right... if you know how to use vi or nano or something.

My parents will never, ever have the skills to diagnose and correct a problem like this. They would be completely screwed until I come by to perform a magical 30-second fix. It's not that I don't want to help them; I just can't always be around to fix what to them would be "complete showstoppers."

Comment Re:After Snowden's revelations... (Score 1) 177

You have a point, and this 'mothership' model is what keeps me away from what otherwise seem like cool devices, but remote access is rightly a big part of these. You and I can handle it, but do you really expect normal people to do things like forward ports on their router, know their home IP address and enter it successfully... possibly into their mobile browser? You've lost just about the entire potential market for such a device.

Now, an 'I know what I'm doing and will take things from here' switch built into more mass-market devices would be a beautiful thing.

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