Posts by Robert E A Harvey

themes

If you are going to stick with gnome, you can obtain eye candy either as individual bits or as whole themes from places like http://gnome-look.org/

http://ubuntusatanic.org/ for example has some interesting ideas and a simple explanation of how to load them.

Mostly you can use the package manager to suck them from repositories, like everything else.

If you are not going to stick with gnome, you can try things like

http://www.enlightenment.org/

http://www.afterstep.org/

after installing them you can just pick them as an alternative to your default gnome session when you log in.

But

It's my experience that Dell offer an ubuntu version grudgingly, and at greater cost than the equivalent windoze one. Whether this is to present a facade of choice, or not I cannot imagine.

In a properly free market you could buy the laptop without an OS, and have done with it. As long as you can't, there is something creepy going on.

And as for warranty and support excuses, are they really saying they sell something so flaky that it won't run the commercial OS out of the box? Why should I want it then?

Nah

That's only what the universe wants you to believe

Nothing to see

All black now.

That's quite an interesting idea

An optical broadcast system with a very cheap reciever on existing devices - as long as they are not in your pocket - they just need a way to sell it to you.

How about doctor's surgeries, beeping your cell phone when it is your turn? Railway stations flooding the space with departure data? You could set your gadget up to only recieve your train/route stuff. Take an Ipod to the theatre for subtitles or translations? Simultaneous subtitles for deaf schoolchildren?

All confined to one space/room. Sell it to us like that, and /then/ sell the adverts, and it might catch on, and actually do some good as well as being more marketing noise.

Free love?

I grew up in the 50s and 60s and have a clear memory that Free Love was happening somewhere else. Nowhere near me.

Perhaps climate change is like that. I know it was perishing cold when I took the dogs for a walk last night!

Paris. She ain't free though.

Please

My thoughts exactly. Let greed be met by the consequences. Please.

Display?

I'd have thought that displaying my physcial attributes would get me slung in jail

THE RAYS, THE RAYS

You anticipate my view that the vast majority of archaeology involves 'groundbreaking' in one form or another.

But then I'm such a smart-alec

Absolutely

Getting to the point where the backlight is the biggest consumer of power. So why not make the outer case photovoltaic, and let it top up the battery a bit when not in use?

Or abandon a backlight altogether and have a transparent screen, to be backlit by available light?

planning? BT?

shirley knot?

Anyway my reading is that BT has been threatened that it will have to open up their ducts.

filters

It is possible, of course, that government sites have elabroate filters, so this sort of thing would not be found when searching...

A neat analysis

I agree with all of what you say.

But this 'computer for the rest' space has had loads of people try to occupy it before, in various ways. Think of Amstrad's wierd emailling telephone, or even their cp/m based word processor. The maemo tablets from Nokia, the Texet webpad that Asda had last christmas, Datawind's Pocketsurfer... it goes on.

Apple has the marketing clout and UI design skills to do a better job than any of them. But I think there is a fundamental flaw in the whole idea.

'the rest' will want more from their 'computer for the rest' after a few weeks. If they havn't got one of us as a nephew, they will have watched CSI and want to do what they do with computers. The gloss is going to wear off far to quickly to be a succesful product.

No-one has beaten a path to the door of the predecessors. It doesn't sound like a better mousetrap to me.

Schiphol

I've asked every time I've been through one of these machines at Schiphol if I can see the result. I am always refused 'for privacy reasons'. Now I know that with my weight problem It's been a while since I saw my dangly bits, but I did not realise that they really were 'private parts' even from me.