> I think the major distros defaulting to GNOME is not going to end well
I agree. While standardization has its benefits, I think homogeneity also has significant drawbacks. Unfortunately, rare is the Linux desktop environment that gets things right for me. KDE comes close, I guess.
> And my wife long complained "why don't you switch my machine to the nice interface you use" and finally last week I did switch her off of GNOME and she's much happier.
> I agree. While standardization has its benefits, I think homogeneity also has significant drawbacks. Unfortunately, rare is the Linux desktop environment that gets things right for me. KDE comes close, I guess.
I haven't seriously tried KDE, though I've heard lots of good things about it recently. I don't know why Ubuntu chose GNOME over Mate, the latter seems a perfectly fine typical desktop environment paradigm.
> What did you switch her to?
AwesomeWM (which is technically a windows manager and not a desktop environment, but it's full-featured enough to be essentially like a DE), which I keep coming back even after trying other DEs/WMs. I had hesitated to put her on it since its configuration isn't user-friendly (it's a .lua text file..), but I just essentially copied over my configuration, and she's been much happier than on GNOME.
I've recently started playing with i3. It is very nice. I don't know how to do a lot of things. I have to Google how to connect to a new WiFi connection every time on my phone. However, I like it a lot. Worst case scenario, I have to reboot and log in with gnome.
Personally, I am all for standardization and homogeneity. We need standards and homogeneity. I would gladly steamroll over all the people who oppose "monoculture" for the sake of opposing something.
You can't please everyone but I think gnome is the right answer for most people. Don't like something? Come join the discussion at https://gitlab.gnome.org (I hope I got that right)
I haven't used i3 in a long time, but if it's got support for systray icons, you can run the NetworkManager applet and manage your network settings there as you would in any ol' desktop environment.
I do this with awesome, and it works well. It's a one-liner in rc.lua:
> You can't please everyone but I think gnome is the right answer for most people. Don't like something? Come join the discussion at https://gitlab.gnome.org (I hope I got that right)
The problem is I think the deep issues I have with Gnome are not things which are easily fixed, e.g. "stop leaking memory", "don't be a single-threaded Javascript process", "allow me to control workspaces independently on each monitor/screen", &c. &c.
I would love to see Gnome improve though, even if I never end up using it, but I am not currently seeing any obvious signs that this will occur.
> I spent six months working at a Fortune 500 company building a system to give mid-level knowledge workers better access to their data. I've never felt as demotivated as I did when I realized that at the end of they day they were just producing PDFs that were immediately archived away without ever being read by another human.
I've done that exact project for like 6 giant pharma companies.
The problem is that we often think of a company as a single abstract decision-maker.
It isn’t, of course. It’s made up of managers who want to look like they’re doing something big so that they gain status and get a pay raise (“I led the company’s first blockchain initiative!”). It’s made up of employees who want to cover their own asses by recommending that a brand-name consultancy be added to their project. And so on.
Each individual in a corporation acts in accordance with her or his own incentives, which may or may not be well aligned with those of the company’s shareholders.
Not disagreeing but there isn't only the negative side (self-promotion, ass-covering). There are people trying and failing. Life happen: acquisition (you or some of your provider), restructuring, negotiation, strategic changes, key person leaving, new people coming, ... all of that produces little bit of inefficiencies in large organisation.
That's not dissimilar to the food you buy and throw away, the antique furniture you bought planning to restore but never got to it, the stack of book you wanted to read but other things occupy your time.
Similarly, a lot of employees don't really know what the global mission of the company is or what their strategic interests are. I've definitely seen leaders fail to clearly communicate this. When that happens, people fall back to optimizing their local environment or department and that can definitely lead to useless shit or actions which while locally beneficial, actually impede the mission of the company.
Most employees don't really care what the global mission of the company or their strategic interests are. It's whether you can get a decent paycheck with some stability while having a semblance of control and balance. The more you work the more this becomes true.
I will say, as an employee myself, I don't feel like my company cares about me and how well I do as a person. So why should I care about the company and how well it does for its shareholders? It's just an economic transaction between me and the organization; I do whatever they tell me to do for 8 hours, and that's that. If what they're telling me to do hurts them, then that's not really my problem.
I will say, as an employee myself, I don't feel like my company cares about me and how well I do as a person. So why should I care about the company and how well it does for its shareholders?
When you as an individual don't feel any sense of doing better for your organisation. How can an organisation composed of diverse set of people think of your cause?
> managers who want to look like they’re doing something big so that they gain status.
So much this!
I've seen many outsourced multi-million-pound projects that would have been quicker, cheaper, and better as in-house projects for a few hundred thousand.
A senior manager doesn't want "In charge of a £100,000 3-month project" on their CV. They want to be able to write "In charge of a £20,000,000 2-year project". It doesn't matter that the cheap one works and the expensive one doesn't.
Quite a lot of work that's not immediately obvious as useful is producing defensive material.
It's a different story to say "we analyzed a market and decided against pursuing those opportunities because of x, y and z" (an activity that produces lots of shelves full of reports) than to say "we didn't pursue some opportunities and we never bothered to look into it" (an activity that never occurred because nobody was filling shelves with reports).
"Give me everything we know about foo" is only possible if somebody has been collecting shelves full of things over time.
The book goes into it a bit. Some of it is status (i.e. people wanting others working under them, even if it's pointless work), other times it's to claim they care about something even if they don't (imagine a company that pretends to care about their employees wellness, they could hire a wellness consultant and ignore the recommendations).
My workplace just went through that very thing. We had a company-wide review of employees attitudes, remuneration, equipment, the works. They released a letter telling us they were going to begin a few months later, starting with pay raises and equipment upgrades - and then did nothing. It's a year on from the initial review, and I guess they managed to complete their goal: stave off the riots for a while by letting the minions feel heard.
Step 1: senior management asks for some numbers
Step 2: report produced. Management reads the executive summary.
Step 3: someone trying to look busy asks for an update. Report is updated manually, because it was never designed to be automated.
Step 4: report continues to be produced for years after anyone stops reading it.
Some people get hired between step 3 and 4 and might never make the mental connection to step 1.
Step 5. Consultants get hired to digitalise the process of reporting.
Now a good consultant can make the leap to step 1 and start redirecting value to something else. A shitty consultant milks the company for $ without ever undermining the sorry people stuck at step 3.
I'd say that the people who get paid based on the bottom line have that goal. Not their employees, they want to be paid well themselves, and work with people they like, and probably a hundred other things before they worry about the bottom line.
I would guess it would depend on the company. If it's small enough that an employee feels they can have a meaningful impact on the company financials (say, maybe <= 10 people in the company), then I would guess so.
If, on the other hand, your company of 500 employees introduces profit-sharing, then there's probably no point to even trying. Too many decision makers pulling in too many politically motivated directions.
If co-ops are any indication, yes. I like the Mars Trilogy model in theory, where corporations are gradually replaced with small co-ops that are all employee owned, and then they collaborate with other small groups on an ad-hoc basis to get things done. I don't think that's entirely practical, but I do think it's a great outcome to aim for and is far short of socialism.
> is it fair to say things are this way due to no gun control?
I don't think so. Maryland isn't the most restrictive state when it comes to firearm policy[1], but it's a long distance from "no gun control." I'm also not certain that the chance of armed encounters is terribly high in Bethesda, though I'm uncertain if those crime statistics are recorded or what terms I should use to search for them. To give a comparison, the homicide rate per capita (which I suspect would correlate to some extent with police interaction with armed individuals) in Montgomery County (where Bethesda is) was 1.4/100,000 in 2016 [2]. For Australia at large, the rate is 1.0/100,000 [3], so pretty comparable. These police officers don't seem to operate in an area that is notably more dangerous/violent than Australia.
I do, however, think the issue is cultural. Many police officers in the US seem to perceive that they are in danger 24/7, and this effects how they interact with people on a daily basis. There is a preference for an overwhelming show of force even when it's absolutely uncalled for. This probably contributes to a feedback loop that causes the general population and the police to trust each other less and be more confrontational. And I don't seem to be alone in identifying this as a problem; if you search for problems with police culture in the US, you will find a large body of criticism for the default behavior of police officers.
Yes, I think you're right that the police attitude (and the way that makes the public respond) is a big part of the problem.
This discussion always makes me think of Robert Peel's principles of "policing by consent", amazingly forward-looking given that they were drawn up in the early 19th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles
The UK doesn't follow these principles perfectly (for example, there are still tensions between the police and racial minorities) but they're mostly in the right ballpark. It seems from news reports that most US police forces don't even try -- the police see themselves more as being in conflict with the community.
Bush and Trump both will be remembered for a long time. We’ve only had 45 presidents, the English learn about god knows how many insignificant kings in school, so the notion that two of your least favorite presidents will be forgotten in short order seems to be wishful thinking.
That's because there has never been a <$999 MacBook. If you purely start to look at the Ultrabook segment then MacBooks have an absolutely staggering market share.
Yep his blog and books are great. Incidentally I started looking into Dart yesterday. Seems like a comfy language, more so than Typescript in my opinion.
I do, it's pretty much a necessity in an open office where I'm surrounded by several people talking loudly into several different conference calls on speakerphone.
Right now I use Beyerdynamic DT770s because I heard they were very comfortable (I wear glasses, and I hate in ear phones). The ear cups are fantastic but the headband digs into my scalp. So I'm on the search as well.
If they're totally fine apart from the headband, you should find the padding of the headband is removable. You might find eg. Canford do a variation on the part, or you could use some alternative of your choosing.
Never heard of it, couldn't tell you anything about it - it's not one you see in movies / on flags / what-have-you (indeed the IRA are rarely seen in movies full stop - perhaps because they were allegedly Hollywood-funded?)
There have been a handful of indie games lately doing things in the same style, but nothing that seems quite polished enough yet.