* Posts by homercycles

8 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Mar 2010

Satya Nadella spoke with Australian PM about opportunities created by pay-for-news-plan. Zuck called the Treasurer for a chat, too

homercycles

They can still use plain hyperlinks

Google and Facebook can still link to things without having to pay a cent: just use an ordinary hyperlink (you know, "a href"). But they're scraping sites and snatching images to present a more enticing offering, which is where they're straying onto news media's turf. They don't want to offer an ordinary hyperlink because it's boring and would make Facebook posts and Google's new sites look cheap, so why not pay a bit for that? If not, I'm happy to use Bing (in fact, I made it my default last week; it's perfectly fine, no biggie).

Is the government's NBN policy changing your vote? Greens Senator Scott Ludlam thinks so

homercycles

Vote Greens? Never!

The Greens will have us all picking berries and praying to Gaia before collecting twigs off the ground before we're allowed to burn them for heat in the winter time (whilst we sit there whipping ourselves for actually trying to get warm!).

The market will provide broadband, and it's not the tax payer's job to do that. I can get ADSL2 and it's quite adequate. If I have a business venture that requires more bandwidth, I can damn well pay for it. The rest of Australia shouldn't have to subsidise me. And while I'm at it, the government should stop subsidising everybody else with their hand out, too!

Windows 8: Not even Microsoft thinks businesses will use it

homercycles
Happy

Good thing for Linux

Whilst many will probably just buy a Mac and empty their wallets in the process, this could be a good thing for Linux in the Enterprise. It might finally give them a chance to realise that much of their stuff is now in the cloud anyway, and the free Office offering is probably good enough for most. Bye bye, Windows. You won't be missed. Don't let the door hit you on the way out :-)

Ubuntu seeks Android-packin' Windows deserters

homercycles
WTF?

You must be doing something wrong

...because I have scanners and printers that either don't work (period) on Windows 7 64-bit or for which you need to download humungous drivers. If you have such devices that don't work on Linux then perhaps you're using some bizarro serial-port requiring special parity bits printer or something, or perhaps you're using some evil proprietary HP SCSI scanner card.

Having said that: Unity can shove off. It's disgusting. I'll be sticking with Lucid Lynx until the next LTS release or I'll go back and give KDE another try (having left it when 4.0 came out).

Google targets Internet Explorer shops with Chrome admin controls

homercycles
Thumb Up

Puts them ahead of Firefox, I have to admit

Packaing and deploying Firefox for a corporate install is a pain in the neck, but was worth doing to avoid IE or at least give users a choice. It's good to see Google are taking the needs of enterprises seriously, unlike Mozilla, I'm sorry to say.

Novell keeps Unix copyrights from Microsoft

homercycles
Linux

Never been a better time for Debian

Since the Novell/Microsoft deal four years ago, Shuttleworth increasingly using Ubuntu as some bizarre plaything, Mandriva's never ending financial uncertainties, and Fedora's short life-cycles with low maintenance periods, we may as well all just go back to the big grand-daddy of them all now and stop messing with the lesser offshoots and poor imitations, and just use Debian. It's the one distro you can count always to remain pure and never become somebody else's pawn. And with Debian Squeeze due this Christmas/New Year, it's the perfect time to vote with our distro-switching!

(FYI: I'm currently using Ubuntu 10.04 but its future as a normal person's O/S now seems uncertain)

Ubuntu demotes Gnome for Unity netbook look

homercycles
FAIL

Unity unsuitable for desktop use

I downloaded the 10.10 netbook version today and let's just say that if this will become the new default desktop, bye bye Ubuntu. I'm sure I'll try to re-gnomify it before completely running away screaming but I doubt such a dumbed-down interface is going to win too many converts. In fact, it'll probably scare away a large chunk of Ubuntu's hard-won user base more than it wins dummy converts.

Some applications use the Mac-style menu at the top, and others have the menu at the top of the application window. Clicking on the file manager "tile" or whatever that square is called results in a full screen kiosk-looking window. And being able to tell the difference between what's running and what's not is about as intuitive as a Mac. In short, if Mark Shuttleworth wants a Mac, then why doesn't he just buy one, and leave GNOME alone? I used to hate GNOME but since the KDE 4 fiasco I've grown to quite like it, but there is absolutely no way I'm going to put up with a sidebar thingy that is as bad as the Mac dock, or worse!

The problem with the sidebar/dock thing is that it's difficult to tell what you've opened since turning on the machine and what's just waiting to be activated. And determining the application with focus will require a magnifying glass or an update to my glasses! The GNOME panel at the bottom is great because it's empty unless I've gone and started something, and the more I start, the more it adds, and switching between different windows in different applications is a breeze. Now I have a bunch of coloured squares, and everything is now at least two clicks away.

After 2.5 years 100% linux usage at home after escaping Windows, it's probably time I grew up and become a Debian user if Ubuntu is going the way of stupidity.

Nerd alert: First Lucid Lynx Ubuntu beta fun

homercycles
Thumb Up

GNOME continues war on features, sadly

I've been using Ubuntu since 8.10, now, having been driven to it by KDE 4.0, but I have to say that GNOME's continued war against features is having me wonder if KDE is now up to snuff. Removing the path-bar button is just spitefulness, and Evolution *still* to this very day has no way to configure it to return to the Inbox after deleting a message. It's the small things that really get me mad, not the overall polish (of which there's plenty). And Empathy is NO substitute for Pidgin. Empathy is a part of the war on features, alas, but I'm sure they'll keep Pidgin packaged for quite some time (I hope).