bk

Indenting works for multiple rows at once, but moving them up/down does not. This would be a key feature for reorganizing nested outline sections.

Also, since I just used the demo, does sharing allow others to edit or only to view?

Here's what I really want:

# Top 3 Desktop

- Place tracker (or whatever it is these days) search bar into the panel by default. Allow easy mapping to a key combination (e.g. win-space though that clashes with gnome-do). Not having an intuitive desktop search is really sinful.

- Allow me to define apps to (auto-)open in specific workspaces. This would make getting back into things after a reboot much faster.

- Sound - midi is just broken (on my machine) - alsa, jack, etc. I don't get it - this should just work. Midi matters for music production and learning (e.g. even for just playing guitar tabs).

# Other desktop

- Desktop zoom - it's overall done right, but please give me option (like in OS X) to move the zoomed area only when I touch the edge of the screen rather than keeping the mouse pointer centered in the zoomed area.

- Tomboy notes are quick and easy, esp. in conjunction with gnome-do and ubuntu one. However, they lack features (export, tagging), and they occasionally freeze on sync/crash, so not the most stable (no data loss yet though). They don't handle copy & paste well (bad html for lists if I remember correctly).

- No good evernote client. The current version runs ok in Wine though, so not super major.

- If you remap ctrl-alt-backspace, please tell me what the remapping is. Also, I've gotten into swap hell occasionally, and there was no way to force an efficient shutdown of a memory-hogging app, thus forcing hard resets, which have actually led to data loss on an ntfs partition that I keep for win7 interoperability.

- Don't mute the microphone after reboot. It makes for weird skype phone calls.

- Nautilus: add default "open terminal here" context menu

- For less geeky users: Make Ubuntu Software Center more prominent, also expand the choices in "Synaptic > Edit > Mark packages by task" and put them in Software Center as well. (e.g. graphics design, music, etc.)

- On my machine HDMI connections to an external monitor don't work. VGA gives me a headache because of artifacts (can't screw connector into notebook port).

# My biggest wish by 1000x

- Improve power management for notebooks. I bought a notebook with a long battery life, but I get roughly half the battery life on Ubuntu vs Win 7. I know this is hard, but this is seriously where Linux lags by far the most behind Win and OS X. This issue has the biggest potential to drive me away from Ubuntu/Linux again. If Win 7 had multiple workspaces, a visible desktop search, and an OS X like zoom function, I'd be tempted to put a small CLI linux in a virtual machine for coding and run Windows, just for the extended battery life.

- Also power-related: flash plugin CPU usage and stability are abysmal. It crashes all the time, across Chrome tabs (b/c flash is a shared process). So having a video open in a tab and opening another site with flash on it can kill the (paused) video in the other tab. This happens multiple times per day. Also flash ads/widgets in several tabs == hot laptop. My most frequent terminal command is "killall npviewer.bin". Java (plugins at least) has similar issues (very high CPU usage for apps that hardly do anything).

edit: title has been updated since my comment

I have a UL80vt running Ubuntu 9.10 and get around 5hrs on that with the screen at full brightness (b/c brightness control only works with reboot). It also uses the nvidia dedicated graphics afaik (it has hot-switchable dual graphics under windows).

As a humorous side note, the following quote really reminded me of the cadence of http://friedisms.tumblr.com/

"We want to throw work overboard, not our sanity or our sleep. Late nights are a sign of scope failure. Hero mode is a sign of scope failure. You can’t compartmentalize burnout. Yes, we start new iterations every two weeks, but burnout carries over. The scope hammer helps eliminate burnout."

Quick thoughts:

Linux on the desktop should be rebranded as Linux on the laptop. I haven't used a desktop for at least 6 years. This relates directly to what my main impression is: For power users, using Linux feels superior in almost every regard, except hardware support.

This is bitter-sweet, because installing/purging apps effortlessly from repositories, keeping a system up to date, and having good usability is fantastic, but the paper cuts are there - brightness adjustment doesn't work, skype video failed suddenly, can't configure touchpad fully (disable tapping, use side-scrolling, etc.). Battery life is noticeably inferior to Win/OS X.

Also, buying PC hardware is a nightmare - way too many models, with terrible nomenclature. Models with entirely different processors, etc. have almost the same name, etc.

I dream of a "Linux Apple" - a company that sells a small but smart range of laptops (even at a premium) with a selection of hardware that guarantees that a major linux distro will run on it without paper cuts. Companies like System76 fail - their machines are too heavy and the battery life sucks (same for others, not singling them out).

It would be really nice if you could break down or explain how you got this press. A lot of people build products but have no idea how to work the PR angle, particularly with the traditional press.

Sucks. Will be interesting to see how this unfolds.

As an example of what I was trying to express, in the last German national election, 2% of Germans voted for the Pirate Party, which was running essentially as an interest group for personal freedom and privacy.

The previous grand coalition government had used the specter of child pornography to legislate secret Australia-style black-lists. People stood up by signing a petition against this and risked being labeled "pro-child porn".

The newly formed (more liberal) coalition abandoned this project during their negotiations, with the Chancelor expressly pointing out the surprising 2% success of the Pirate Party.

This is a case where stupidity was being undone, because of civic engagement.

As I said, pick your battles and don't become a cynic. (Not trying to imply you are, just generally speaking). Cheers. :)

Side note: I appreciate a good rant once in a while, so I don't take any issue with your original post.

At the same time, reasonable people need to speak up about and work on important issues, because it affects the opportunity cost of those in power. If there is zero (perceived) opposition, it becomes cheaper to create more restrictions.

As soon as one of those is discovered at an airport, according to your reasoning about the TSA's rationales, they would have to and should cavity search every passenger.

The real questions underlying a topic like this are:

Why do the people have so little say in their own security?

Why do people accept being separated, rudely interrogated, strip-searched, subjected to (unconstitutionally) secret laws and regulations, etc.?

Why are expert opinions completely ignored?

Just because it's "rational" for the TSA/US Government to cover their asses doesn't mean people shouldn't make a fuss about it. Democracy and liberty vitally depend on people making a (meaningful) fuss.

It's easy for me to outline how a great piece of software X is supposed to function, but I'm still surprised every time how much more work ends up going into the actual implementation compared to the conceptual simplicity of the design. So, similar to "writing is thinking" I believe that "coding is thinking" as well.

    "Talk is cheap. Show me the code."
    - Linus Torvalds

OS X is nice, but since I deploy on linux it's easier to just have the same platform on both. Besides Textmate and Dictionary I don't use any os x specific programs anyway.

Seems like Linux is still behind in terms of getting the most battery life out of laptops, though.

btw - does anyone have a good light-weight, long battery life laptop recommendations that will run Linux (most likely Ubuntu) well?

2. For abandoned projects, salvage the scraps - publish the drafts or parts of them, open-source your code (unless it still holds significant value, but don't overestimate the potential value).

3. You seem ambitious and not easily discouraged - both valuable characteristics. So keep trying, but be on the lookout for blind spots, and patterns in your failed projects. Distill your strengths and preferences and see how you can apply them best, and work around your weaknesses.

4. Make sure you're not someone else's "useful idiot" (and obviously, don't exploit others).

5. As others have mentioned here - enjoy your life, seriously! Don't race to the presumed finish line. (Read Philip Greenspun's article on early retirement). You should always strive to pursue something that you find personally meaningful. What's the big picture of what all your efforts are really for? Sitting in a vault of cash by yourself like Scrooge McDuck won't make you happy.

6. Unless you want to become an academic or consultant/i-banker, don't worry too much about your GPA, but meet and work with as many people as possible. Make friends and test-drive them for productive pursuits. College (and I guess grad school) are statistically almost the last stops for finding co-founders. Just look at startups you respect, and look up the founders' stories - the vast majority met at the latest at university.

I've thought about similar businesses, and avoiding being cut out always seems like a hard-to-solve problem.

I would really appreciate if you guys could give an explanation without me having to rent a place to test-drive the process. :)

PS: It's nothing personal, (I use stackoverflow all the time, it and serverfault are tremendously useful).

I was wondering that too. Imagine if a composer in pre-digital history had figured out something like that and as a final "chord" to a piece had let the piano speak a word.

Literally awesome.

A rank order list without variance is meaningless. The differences between the categories are very small. They are most likely not statistically significant.

1. There are now more obese people than starving people in the world. The diseases that are killing those overweight people are largely nutritional in origin (heart disease, diabetes, at least some cancers).

2. The EU (and I assume the US/Canada as well) are destroying agricultural products en masse, due to subsidized overproduction.

3. Population growth is rapidly decelerating - the largest countries in the world have or are rapidly approaching "first world" birth rates. Western Europe is shrinking.

Borlaug did phenomenal work for his historical period, however, looking at it in a historical timeframe, we should remain aware that the parameters of our world are constantly changing, and thus it's not that simple.

Personally, I think it requires a careful look at the political and economic production and distribution systems around the agriculture and food industries. The whole "granola hippie" versus "libertarian corporatist" debate is simply a huge distraction that misses the point.