two minds

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.

>eliminating the need to institute the fee at this time

s/need/greed/

If high pixel counts catch on we might finally get away from laptops 790 or 900 pixels high

I still don't get this category. Zoom, super zoom and bridge cameras seem much more appropriate for the intended market.

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?

At the end of the road I grew up on is an old Victorian building, now turned into flats.

At one time it was the country's largest manufacturer of blackboard chalk, and later produced yellow acrylic lenses for driving goggles.

Things change, this happens. Have you tried to buy a Gasogene lately?

Is it me, or is anyone else uncomfortable with el reg puffing product in the guise of news stories?

testing? that's what customers do, surely?

2nd hand trade

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.

Sold

If it speaks with her voice, I'm sold.

A real start trek talking computer? How could I resist?

flying boats

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.

I'm sorry, but the headline is too obtuse for me. Is there an 'on' missing as word 3?

Not wanted here

I have loads of ways to get on the interenet. If my TV offers me net access, but then only shows me a tiny part of it I shall regard it as broken.

115 to 131 MeV

That's a pretty big hole to keep searching in!