Perfectly happy to only buy working printers. But it does annoy me that printer manufacturers won't tell you which they are.
Even worse, magazine/web site reviews don't every try printers with linux. Even el-reg falls down in this regard.
3010 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2006
I've been a perfectly satisfied Linux user for a very long time. But the desktop developments are beginning to annoy me.
I'm X fan, and have often used the redirection abilities to remote displays for navigation and science systems. I got on perfectly well with the basic windows managers.
Now we have fantastically elaborate desktops, dbus, half a dozen sound managers, and hardware integration is no better. Perhaps the effort has gone in the wrong place?
Half of me thinks that the changes for Gnome3 and the new KDE are good, because innovation is good. But you tell me now that they are copying apple, not breaking new ground? All I know is that things get more complex, harder to understand, but not /better/. I feel much the same about Unity: change is often good, but it isn't working out.
I like the E17 desktop, and get on with that. I like LKCFE or whatever it is called, I use that on a Suse netbook.
Laptops have been getting some really dismal screens lately (768, 800 vertical pixels in many cases) and if people need to rip up and start again, why not change to a left hand menu to restore much needed vertical screen space (I know about Unity)?
But really I feel that the Desktop problem is largely solved until someone comes up with a dramatically different paradigm (like merging the desktop screen and two or three tablets into a single environment). Can we not get some of this astonishingly skilled development effort into finishing a few applications instead? Fix the bugs in Libreoffice/openoffice. Finish at least one of the CAD projects. Why do we have 6 desktops and only one Gimp? Skype has stolen the public space that GPL started. Voice recognition? Access for the blind?
Can we fix all the scruffiness about power up/hibernate/sleep/restore?
How about fixing the printer problem with something similar to ndis netowrk driver handling? get all those dodgy lexmark printers working just using their windows driver disk?
Stop re-inventing the front offside wheel. Fix the other wheels as well.
PAL: because of lack of bandwidth the colours can't fully saturate. Hence Pink-Amber-Lilac
(Yellow was a subtractive term)
NTSC: the hue signal was transmitted so far from the carrier that it was Never Twice Same Colour
The French and Russians used SECAM: System Entirely Contrary (to the) American Method
I was recently in the Philippines, where Skype is a way of life for families talking to fathers working abroad. I have heard a lot of complaints about bad audio, dropped connections, and not being able to make video calls any more.
Skype is having problems. I doubt they are caused by M$ but they might be caused by being taken over. I wonder if it is now harder to get money to get new hardware into the servers?
Elop will balance the dismal performance and share price so that no-one else can splurge on the corpse of Nokia. Only M$ and Apple are likely to have the cash, and I don't think apple shareholders will be keen on buying an M$ house, and even if they think of it, Elop will be there to recommend acceptance to the Nokia board and shareholders.
And not all sales are to people who want them. I recently worked with people from a huge Swedish multi-national who have all been given Lumia, [1] and who are all trying to give them back. One chap has had 3 fail in a month.
Now while there will be equally unwilling users of other brands, I doubt whether most Galaxy users are not volunteers.
[1] I assume the plural of Lumia is Lumia?
I can take old paper books to Oxfam, or to that most perfect of human endeavours, the second-hand book shop. I can exchange them in traveller's libraries in nicer hotels.
When I can do that with eBooks I will be interested.
I'd like to commend Scarthin Books, in Cromford. The Reader's Rest in Lincoln, and Robert Humm in Stamford.
When I were a lad there was a scifi story about using flying boats to get to orbit, slowly spiralling up from the earth's surface with a succession of different engines.
It took a school scienc teacher a few seconds to dismiss the idea in terms of amount of fuel. It takes a rocket 9 seconds to climb the gravity well. The 2 days of the flying boat, acquiring the same amount of potential energy would represent impossible amounts of fuel. This seems the same.