Posts by Doctor Syntax 42272 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
We already have brains. We may not understand how they do it but we have a good understanding of the results it can produce. A much better effort would be to look at what the human brain finds difficult and make products that help with those tasks. But that sounds remarkably like what we've been doing all these years with so much existing software.
Back in the distant past - 1980s, 1990s - I worked in an environment where we had a small team working on Unix/RDBMS (mine), another on VAX/VMS and another on IBM type stuff all handling different aspects of the business. I'm not sure about the last two but in my area we didn't really differentiate between development and operations; our technical knowledge applied to both operations (which wasn't all that onerous) and development, and user support informed our knowledge of our part of the business which was essential for development. Back then it was just what we did - it didn't need a special name.
Only in the last few years before retirement was I in a mostly Windows shop where operations and development were separate. It made life harder, at least from a development point of view, not least because of the amount of ceremony involved in handing stuff over. Oddly enough the ceremony was suddenly set aside any time we had to look at the operational system to sort out the crap data my client's client (one of the Usual Suspects) had sent because their favoured Indian outsourcer had rotated in another lot of XML-deficient staff on short term visas.
I wonder if combining the two has somehow become special because of the notion that you have to crank out new stuff on a daily or even hourly basis.
A late cousin-in-law was reputed to occasionally go over a roundabout to save time. And, no, that's nothing to do with him being late - he lived into his 90s. At one stage he owned a car I'd have loved to have had a drive in - a Bristol 406. The family were also keen on caravanning (takes all sorts) and wrote to Bristol for advice about fitting a tow bar. The body was aluminium on a chassis that stopped somewhere about the back axle. They wrote back to say if he worked it out could he let them know. As he co-owned an engineering works he did work it out.
If it's part of the distro the correct way is to open the distro's S/W installer (Synaotic in my case), search and click. You only run the install as admin, unlike some of the S/W on my old Windows VM (I occasionally look to remind myself on what I'm missing).
What an odd comment.
All KDE settings are handled by the System Settings GUI. S/W installation from the distro is handled by Synaptic. Admittedly I usually handle upgrades from the command line because apt update;apt upgrade is simply slicker than fiddling with a GUI. Definitely better than messing with that registry thing.
And I've only seen one full screen launcher - that's on Ubuntu. I suppose there has to be one for those who like the app-centric smartphone approach to working but there are alternatives for those who have a document-centric approach to working, minimalists or pretty well any way you want. One size doesn't fit all and, in the Unix/Linux world, it doesn't have to.
You should give it a try instead of relying on random internet posts you might have read.
"using them like taxis, instead of being something personal"
Good luck with getting your subscription car to take you to work in rush hour when everyone else wants to do the same. In order to guarantee that your subscription will approximate to that of owning a car except for the addition of somebody's profit. Unless the pattern of usage changes the number of vehicles , the need to store them outside of peak demand and the consequent economics won't change.
