Like graue said, Firefox OS is for phones only. However, installing Firefox was just about the first thing I did when I got my Cr-48. http://i.imgur.com/eCWwJ.png
Has your group taken a serious look at KDE 4? It has reached or exceeded feature parity with KDE 3.5 across the board, it's a lot more stable now than any previous release of KDE ever has been, and it's well supported by RHEL (and SUSE, for that matter). Even though part of the KDE team is putting a lot of work into the tablet interface etc, the system is modular enough that the desktop doesn't suffer for it.
A lot of people tried early version in the 4.x series, and up until about 4.6 or so it was a crashy disaster, but it's really shaped up in the last year or two.
I'd consider the flagrant human rights abuses in the U.A.E. to be a pretty substantial downside. The U.A.E. routinely imprisons rape victims for extramarital sex, imprisons or castrates people convicted of homosexuality. There is little or no protection for freedom of speech or of the press, etc. The U.A.E. would be a terrible country to live and work in, and a low cost of living does nothing to change that.
I don't know, at the time almost everyone way saying they got way more than they were worth. If this were a field with a lot of room for further innovation, I'd tend to agree with you, but social photo sharing? Take the $1B and move on to the next project.
The thing is, most game engines don't even simulate Newtonian physics very accurately; it would be much too computationally expensive to do so. Gravity only works on certain objects and is usually a constant acceleration applied along the vertical Cartesian axis, objects are composed of at most a couple dozen perfectly rigid parts attached together at defined joints, liquids and particles are simulated in batches using only rough heuristics, and so on. If we were to allow arbitrary changes to fundamental physical constants, the game engine would have to simulate the world from the quantum scale up.
That's a hard damn problem. There are some extraordinarily well-funded research groups that are struggling to model any reasonably large number of interactions at that scale. State of the art supercomputing clusters can currently simulate systems of hundreds of thousands of atoms, not even in real-time, and they're still making some assumptions along the way, which might not hold true if you were to arbitrarily modify any fundamental constants.
You could probably write a physics engine that passably pretends to simulate some (non-arbitrary!) changes in fundamental constants. But it would be hard to guess what matter would even look like for different values of, say, Z0.
Every time I join the YouTube HTML5 trial it gets silently turned off and videos start playing in Flash again a week or two later. Does that happen to anyone else?
Yes! I have turned that on many times and I always end up watching flash videos again. I wonder if it had to do with my session cookie expiring. Does anyone know how they toggle this experiment on/off for different users?
I'm in the beta, I've never had to rejoin. Possibly because I'm logged into my Google account, which is linked to my Youtube account. Note that some Youtube videos are still delivered as Flash, I believe is whenever adverts are shown.
As tikhonj mentioned, Emacs evil-mode is very likely exactly what you're looking for. I had considered myself a hardcore vim user, but I felt the call of Slime and org-mode. When I finally took a serious look at Emacs, I became convinced that Emacs with evil-mode is the ultimate editor for vim lovers.
What concerns me about vim emulation modes is the uncanny valley mentioned by another poster. Working in a second-class interface doesn't sound that great.
However, that's pretty strong praise, so I promise I'll give it a shot before trying to birth a new editor into the world.
I've used Emacs for the last 10+ years first with my own custom keybindings and recently with keybindings with 'default' CUA bindings like you find them in almost any other modern application. Before I switched to Emacs I used vi/Vim for almost 10 years. Also, even when I had switched to Emacs I still used Vim on the commandline and on remote servers but not in any advanced way.
I tried out evil-mode a couple of weeks ago just on a lark and I am staying with it. You really get the best of both world[1] this way. It might be a little strange at times but I wouldn't describe the usage as a second-class interface. Just different. I'd rather describe the default Emacs keybindings as a second-class interface :-)
[1] this will not mean much if you've never used Emacs
I think your parent's point was that if the union can guarantee that its members are high-quality, it will have a lot of leverage to negotiate with employers. A union taking that approach doesn't need to stipulate that employers only employ union workers or anything like that; it simply says "all of the best people work for us - if you want to hire them, you have to agree to our terms (re. salary, benefits, working conditions, etc).
"Having a union that endorses members will create a professional body that is superior to non-unioned workers" looks (to me) like an assertion that the value is in the union endorsement (and that it thus create the professional body), as opposed to the workers themselves.
As I've asserted, information workers are valued for their knowledge and problem solving skills, so unless this hypothetical union were going to certify people as having certain knowledge and problem solving skills and include/exclude members based on that certification (or give them a grading level), it will be meaningless as a value indicator to any employer. If I think the level they give me is too low, I won't be likely to stay associated with them. If employers think they rate people too high, they'll avoid them also.
If the "professional" union is just a middleman, I'd prefer not to have it, and I'm fairly certain sure employers wouldn't either.
Of course, professional bodies (outside of trade organizations) exist like this, but they are called consulting companies.
Some people complain about bloat and bad compositing performance under X, but my real problem with X is that it's very insecure. Any program running on a given X server can see any keyboard input to any other program running on the same server by default. As it stands, there's not a practical solution to this.
The Qubes project is interesting in some ways, but I think they're trying to do too much in one go, and as a result the final product doesn't seem very practical. For example, applications can't use hardware accelerated video according to their FAQ [1].
So pardon me while I braindump...
It would be an interesting project to integrate an Android-style permissions permissions system(possibly using SELinux) complete with per-application virtual filesystems (using FUSE) into the system package manager. So, for example, you install a music player, the package manager sets up a virtual filesystem for it that lets the program see its own configuration directory and your music directory, but nothing else. The package manager asks if you'd like to allow network permissions to the music player (for downloading album art or whatever); if yes, a firewall rule is added specifically allowing that process to access the network, if not, none is.
One problem with that kind of system is that a lot of end-user desktop programs are written with the assumption that the entire home directory is fair game. I'm not convinced that's really necessary, though. In case a program occasionally wants to access a file outside of its normal sandbox (say, you just downloaded a podcast into your downloads directory and want to play it with that music player I mentioned previously) you could always have the supervising program ask the user if it's okay to temporarily add that file to the program's sandbox. If it happens in an expected way (e.g. the user clicks on a media file in the file manager) you could safely grant access to the file without explicitly asking the user.
Something like that, on a distro using Wayland as the windowing system (to avoid the gaping security holes in X), would provide 90% of the security that Qubes does with significantly less inconvenience to the user. It would still require a good deal of work for the package maintainers, but perhaps a distro like that could implement something like the AUR [2] so users could do a lot of the packaging work for peripheral packages.
How do you think client-side window decorations impacts this? It seems to me that it would be difficult or impossible to create a secure GUI if every application gets such complete control over user interaction.
