bilban

Appoint experts and practice Science?

You certainly aren't alone!

Perhaps we sometimes expect too much. You don't listen to music to remember the lyrics, you just enjoy it. And you can enjoy and discard a piece of writing too.

You can easily idle away time. Right now I'm procrastinating.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: A Study in Scarlet.

You can kind of use Wikipedia like this.

It would be nice though if all content had an audit trail, which you could trace through to the original sources. Could be quite enlightening.

I remember this site envisioned the idea of realising original content:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/

Quite how you measure that though... I always liked the idea.

Impartiality and being un-biased are different things.

Does that mean it takes one abuse of an account to take down a hugely popular domain name?

That spam must have been terrible.

How about something like the Finger Protocol?

I'd use them immediately given command line tools, and open protocols/apis.

Excuse me for asking, but when we speak of revenue - we aren't speaking of profits are we? (I'm from the UK.)

We have no idea of the net income for those divisions, as the expenses are missing.

I'd have thought, the cost of advertising would be far less than producing say a hardware unit like an iPhone.

I'd expect the wedges to be different if we saw the charts listing profits, and that would be more interesting. Or am I missing something?

I have used the keyboard navigation extension with Chrome, not sure if it's the same one.

The Chrome extension works well by default for a touch typist by setting the shortcuts to be available by typing two letter key codes, but you can change that from what I remember to numbers too.

Give Lynx and W3m a whirl they are both worth a look in. Lynx's numbered links mode is fantastic, to set it, you need to go to options>keypad mode.

The other browser, that makes link navigation a lot easier is Opera, use shift and arrows, to move around the links.

I love the above interface so much, it's so simple, and could easily be mimicked with a trackball and a touch pad such as that on the Blackberry. The Blackberry utilises a similar method for it's nav and menus and it's very easy, quick and intuitive to use.

Of course you could place the directions on the home row, for touch typists too. But I guess you can do something similar with Vimperator etc.

I read your blog post, and firsts thoughts were that shift and arrows could be used for OS UI navigation as well. Tiling window managers work well for me, but I have a lot of trouble with keyboard navigation in applications, mainly due to inconsistencies. Something as simple as moving from text pane, to toolbar, to sidebar - can require - some dexterous moves using function keys.

Hitting escape, and then moving around the UI with arrow keys would be much easier. Hit escape twice to move up the application stack. Hit the menu key - for context sensitive menu, hit escape->menu for app menu and so on.

Tabbed browsing for me is a real curse, as there is so much inconsistency between applications. This should be the preserve of window managers. So back to your blog post. Why haven't the best parts of some of the esoteric window managers propagated through to the mainstream OSs?

Interestingly tabbed browsing is what won me over to Opera and Firefox in the first place - the desktop OSs should have picked up on this earlier. It's a hack, to get around a poor desktop UI.

Back to Mozilla, why have they barely touched or been creative with the UI for the last decade? The native implementation of tabbed browsing is nothing but horrendous. I'm hoping some of this will be picked up with 'Pancake'!

I wouldn't agree that you can easily see a title in a tab! I'd rather a meta key that would bring up the info about the page easily - which listed the URI etc. But the title should remain at the forefront.

Just read the small blurb, and it doesn't really give much away. I do think Mozilla are right to challenge current paradigms, and I long for a bit of innovation.

The browser UI needs a chronic refresh, and thinking about what else the browser can do, is certainly worthy of consideration.

I personally would like to see the browser take on the challenge of navigation better.

I was confined to a 133MHZ text based machine for six months - and I happily learnt to navigate the web with Lynx - by using its keyboard shortcut-ted numbered links! It was amazing how easy it all felt, and it's something I've longed to see as an option in a browser ever since. This one thing alone would make using my Kindle's browser - bearable.

More repulsive than what's already there.

I recently considered ditching my cheapo freeview hard disk recorder (UK - Brand Digihome) and replacing it with a media box. I tried out a few distros and open source solutions, but they all had their faults in one way or another. I tried XBMC, Boxee, Myth etc on various distros on moderate hardware, and in the end - I decided it just wasn't worth the headache.

So I see a need for something that's easy as pie to use with abundant features. But why not improve and contribute to existing projects?

You mention that the Unity interface is poorly suited for 10ft interaction - you couldn't be more right. Am I the only one left in the world without a cinema display? Just watch the interface demo over at Ubuntu to see how much it sucks. It helps to be able to read type on the screen for tux sake. It's so amateurish.

That's not to say that your list isn't surmountable, and that there isn't a better interface out there yet to be untapped.

i think i could quite easily boycott hollywood. I would prefer to read a book any day of the week than induldge in that hype machine.

Why constrain the definition of an ebook to something analogous to ink and paper?

Thanks - but it is pretty darn low already.

I think you should just leave it down to your desktop defaults, that should ideally be configurable in one place.

It's annoying going through each app setting them up individually.

Each to their own.

I can't read a white background unless I'm in a very bright room. Off whites are better for me. But personally I prefer light on dark. But it's a personal thing.

I rue the day the browser default background colour changed from being light grey to white.

I switch to light on dark depending on ambient conditions, my study is really gloomy and I work at night, so a bright screen blinds me.

On OSX10.4 at least I use the accessibility switch for this - sadly the anti aliasing looks worse with a dark background.

How about if an ebook about Jimi Hendrix contained video and audio content too? Something that went beyond the print version?

Yeah and you can't just pass on your ebooks to a charity shop.

I have a kindle, and I have yet to buy any books for it and wonder if I ever will. To tell you the truth the whole DRM thing is a complete put off for me.

Though I do love reading from the e-reader. I have it loaded up with the classics, but still buy in books in print.

I love the idea of electronic books though. But it should be easy for me to just hand one over to say a partner to read.

It would be nice if Gnome 2, worked without crashing gnome-panel erratically on my desktop!

Damn it! The new Gmail is broken for me on Firefox Nightly on Debian Squeeze AMD64. I can't open any messages!

I don't ever bother with screen savers, as I think they are a waste of cpu cycles - I just blank (turn off/standby) the monitor.

I was hoping that this was a deliberate move by Canonical to save energy.

However, I was a little puzzled to not find it there.

The one thing, and this might have changed, that really annoys me with Gnome, is that the network manager panel applet, doesn't seem to have an equivalent in the menu system. That's the thing that lists your wireless networks etc.

Although I don't use the menu's that often, and I hate digging down into menus - I find they are really useful for reminding myself quickly which programs I have installed. I only really noticed this when I tried out Unity. I had no feeling of what was installed or what was not. For example I went to install transmission - and then found it was already there after I had dug through to the software center. That feels really wrong.

Thanks for pointing out the alt-tab switch change. That's really annoying - as I use workspaces to group apps, so I can switch between them more efficiently.

What I was trying to say with the above post. Was you get a little extra gloss with Unity3D, but it's not over the top. And the 2D fallback isn't miles away.

I have noticed that 2D does look uglier in places - like modal popups - that are not at all in keep with the rest of the interface. Which reminds me of the kde shutdown window - which is also fugly.