A manual transmission still lets you get more power out of the engine you’ve got than an automatic. Not a big deal if you’ve got a ridiculously oversized engine, but still relevant.
Coming from someone who uses computers professionally, everything about windows is a fucking nightmare.
I watch Netflix on my so-called smart TV, and used the net functions on my Blu-Ray player before I bought the TV. I can’t stand watching anything longer than a music video/comedy sketch on a computer. If I didn’t have those, I guess I’d get a Roku or something.
(As far as computers goes, I use Linux, currently on Manjaro after a bunch of distro hopping. Don’t game much at all, don’t need to share big documents with business folk or any of that stuff, so it’s all fine with me.)
For something new that will actually get some significant usage soonish, check Genode OS. Even though I might not be in their target audience, Genode might well become a candidate for a main OS for myself.
Same here normally. I use a TV app for Netflix on my Samsung.
So, Windows 10 is “spyware” followed by complaints about proprietary software, and then recommending Ubuntu? Oh man, the irony here is positively delicious.
Ubuntu perhaps has one of the worst reputations among Linux distributions when it comes to user tracking, proprietary software, and promotion of paid software.
I am familiar with Apple’s contempt for its customers. It’s pretty clear they believe that everyone is too stupid to know what’s good for them, and those who attempt to actually do what they want to do are criminals who must be stopped from running “unauthorized” software on their own goddamn computer (ie Cellphone/iPad). Fuck that noise. It’s fundamentally unreasonable to make it so hard and yes, quite possibly illegal to do what the fuck you want with your own machines.
Eh, I bet most of us here can do most of those things. Just not competently, because all of them take practice to be any good at. I’d probably say my biggest sticking points would be “cooking a tasty meal”, and “comforting the dying” and “fighting efficiently”. I’m sure we’re all able to prepare something we’re not afraid will poison us, and hunger is the best seasoning. I’m sure that most of us can try to comfort the dying, but I’m an atheist, and not a liar, so I don’t really have any comforting words to the dying besides “hey, when it’s over at least your done with all the bullshit”. Fighting efficiently I’m pretty sure I can’t do. Not without a lot of practice, unless you’re talking air-guitar battle or something.
Yep exactly. My Netflix sat there little used until I bought a smart tv. Now, a lot.
I have used lots of different operating systems. I have probably between 50-100 different system and version installs in a box here next to me.
I switched to Linux Mint 17.1 a year ago for my daily-use machine, and I love it. Before that, I was using mostly MacOS from v 8.1 through 10.6.8 for my main box. What bothered me about OS X is how it always gets more locked down. I used to be able to more easily customize applications and set up my filesystem how I liked it. But, increasingly, I was trying to compile Linux software on it as a generic BSD system - which was more of a proprietary PITA than a normal BSD install would be. Also, I upgraded from my G5 tower to a hackintosh which I still use, but it a real hassle to maintain and upgrade compared to Apple-supported hardware.
I do quite a few things on my Mint system which others say it might not be well-suited for:
games - I run Steam on here. Many of my games don’t run on Linux natively. But the ones that do run much better than they do on my Windows 7 partition. This includes all of my Valve games, such as the Half-Life and Portal series. As well as Garry’s Mod, all of the Quake games, and a few others. Since they run better on Linux, I play them on Linux
graphics - I have old-ish versions of most Adobe tools on my Macs, but I have slowly been acclimating myself to Gimp and Inkscape. What might make this easier though is that my graphics work has tended to be monochrome.
CAD - I have used both Fritzing and KiCAD for a couple of years, and they have both run just as (if not more) reliably on Mint as on Windows or OS X. I have done schematic capture, PCB layout, coding, MCU debugging, and it has all worked fine.
Music - I do lots of weird digital music/noise/multimedia work. I have had only minor hiccups in using Linux for “pro audio”, but this comes with the caveat that I am extremely critical of most stereotypical pro-audio workflow. Basically, I think that the traditional DAW + plugins model is a crap way to make music. Much of the most powerful audio software out there can be compiled to run on Linux, OS X, or other POSIX-compliant systems. The only real hitch is driver support. A lot of PCI/PCIe cards simply have no Linux drivers. Many class-compliant USB audio and MIDI interfaces will “just work”.
Setting up my system for audio took me about a day of scratching my head. But even with no specific help or reference, I was able to figure it out. I wanted to use my MOTU Traveller FireWire interface, so I installed FFADO, which is a open, general-purpose FireWire audio driver for some more well-known hardware configurations. I did not expect it to actually work! And I installed the “Jack” audio system and “QJackCtl” as a graphical patcher to connect my audio I/O. I have been doing my audio editing in Audacity and SND, and my sequencing and synthesis in PureData. I am also gradually going to be getting back into SuperCollider, which I haven’t used for a long time. No, it might not be easy to set up the “typical” pro-audio configuration, but some hardware will work, and a lot of the most powerful audio and MIDI software will run. There are some decent-looking DAWs and trackers out there as well. It is not as polished as my Mac setup, but is quite capable and more customizable.
Good point. I do not use my Mac for development anymore. Only inasmuch as I am working in pure software programming, but still not much. If there is any i/o, then I am using Linux. The Mac way of dealing with installs of modules wastes my time. I can just install them and they work in Linux. On Mac, I have to fight about 75% of the time to get simple additions to work. So Mac is for a different purpose now, like the Adobe apps and the smooth basic operations like email and browsing for research.
No, it doesn’t. You are thinking of old slush boxes. Modern dual-clutch autos, hybrids and cvts do not lose power compared to a manual gearbox.
The mac port of inkscape is, in my opinion, unusable.
Same here. Last time I tried the Mac port was about 2.5 years ago. It was so crude that I LOLed trying to use it. And I don’t even mind apps just looking ugly or dated to the extreme. I’ll mess around with some old Motif, OpenStep, or Tck/Tk UI without a pause. But that port was a total mess. I was never able to get the OS X ports of KiCAD to run reliably either.
But I have used Inkscape on Mint a few times with no bugginess. It seems to work fine, apart from me not quite knowing what I am doing.
but if they get a Ubuntu PC at the end of the course - why not use some of the time so the new computer owners have a chance to get familiar with the box and add some customizing to the classes program?
I think it’s a good idea to include Windows in the classes, though this doesn’t have to fill all the time of the course.
Perhaps I wasn’t specific enough. The power is the same, and the power curve is the same, the problem is the transmission not knowing to downshift when you want to accelerate. Thus, you can get more acceleration, faster, when you want it, with a manual transmission. This was abundantly obvious with my last car, and when I test drove a manual vs a cvt for my new car, was still clearly the case.
This. You’ll never see a more infected Windows machine than the machine of a 13 year old whose parents don’t train them to “avoid installing every god damned toolbar and app you find on the internet.” The problem is, computer-illiterate adults are often raising children who end up being just as tech-illiterate as they are. Kids are wonderful little sponges at picking up new technology, but they’re also naive and foolish, and without the correct training end up growing up into a new generation of idiot users.
As to this thread - I’m in the “use the tool that works for you” camp, myself. Also don’t really understand all the hate for Windows 10, aside from the privacy concerns (which don’t really concern me, particularly, but I can understand others who are more concerned about those kinds of things - in which case, as mentioned above, you might want to reconsider using Ubuntu). It’s been as fast or faster for me than Windows 7 ever was, particularly when it comes to reboot and wake-from-hibernation times, and since I never used things like the Start Menu in Windows 7 (start->type name of app I want to use, run it), Windows 10 is just about identical in my everyday usage scenarios. For that matter, Windows 8.1 (fuck you, Windows 8) was too. Classic Shell is the bomb, incidentally, for those of you in non-Windows-7 land who want Windows 7 functionality back.
Yeah I have been loving win10, it is way peppier than 7 was. I actually got some non FUD info on the privacy settings and promptly turned them off during the update which was not all that hard to do just you know actually read the dialog boxes. I don’t have a cloud account with them so no tying my local login to that.
Heck I updated pretty much right away as it was available day 1 for me and I had nothing better to do that evening. The new UI is nice even if the start menu tiles are kinda big for my liking but I have been doing the keyboard thing of of win key, type name of app forever now and that still works just fine. I should give Edge a chance at my default browser one of these days.
I think my only beef has been them ditching windows media player which I honestly like quite a bit. Happily it didn’t get removed so I still use it for my audio player of choice as VLC is still kinda lacking in UI and not so easy to just say hey play everything with a randomly generated list. All the replacements seem to be iTunes clones and I never really like the UI for iTunes.
[quote=“WearySky, post:198, topic:71542”]
You’ll never see a more infected Windows machine than the machine of a 13 year old whose parents don’t train them to “avoid installing every god damned toolbar and app you find on the internet.”
[/quote]You are wrong. Their parents are going to be worse. Every time I visit my parents I have to ask them why they have so many toolbars in their browser. They had seven toolbars to search the internet but still went to google.com to do so.
They didn’t remove WMP in Windows 10, did they? Just “Windows Media Center” - which hadn’t been updated for ages any way.
My big beef with them actually revolves around Media Player as well, though. I actually installed an “N” version of Windows (missing Windows Media Player) when I installed Windows 10, with a fresh MSDN install because I always do fresh installs any way (gives me a chance to cull the apps that I installed years ago and never use any more, and only install the ones I currently need) - I don’t watch enough videos on my computer to need anything more than VLC’s barebones UI provides. Turns out, though, that the N version of Windows is also missing a bunch of extra video library files that OTHER media-related apps need, so I needed to go and install it separately any way. Next time around I’ll be installing the full version. That’s what I get for thinking I can beat the system by leaving out something that I think I don’t need.
My wife’s 13 year old sister had the same issue, as did her 18 year old cousin. Shitloads of toolbars installed (with the malware to go with them), and never actually used any of the toolbars, or even any idea of how the toolbars got there in the first place. Clueless people are clueless, regardless of age. “Click the OK button without reading, anything to get rid of the popup window” seems to be the default behaviour in both age groups.
I don’t think it is there for fresh installs but I could be wrong. I could swear I read it was gone along with media center. The upgrade left it there but it wants to use the Groove apps for audio/video by default and they are mostly okay. There is now a windows dvd app and I can’t play dvds with WMP anymore and the dvd app is pretty bad.
