bithush
Born on April 11, 2014•423 Karma
I do not agree with restriction of information that has been publicly funded. It should be in the public domain for the better of humanity. It shouldn't matter who funded it, you pay it forward and maybe one day a country that had access to your countries research does something that your country can use and so the circle goes again.
FOSS enabled me to learn about programming computers with zero cost (other than the hardware of course). Sure the paid closed source tools are probably "better" (usually that mostly means prettier) but it amazes me that anyone on earth can grab a free Linux distro and it will come with access to a huge collection of software that will allow that person to learn and better themselves. In the developed world that doesn't really seem all that amazing. I mean most people would just buy a Mac and go to an expensive university but in a lot of the world where money and education are close to non-existent it is truly incredible.
I am glad we live in a world with FOSS and with people who are extremely passionate about it (EFF, RMS, etc.). It puts pressure on the big software companies to not be total bastards. Imagine a world where only the elite educated had access to the software tools needed to drive innovation. A world controlled by Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Intel, Google, Oracle, etc.
[0] Okay now somebody will point out an edge case ;)
Although Linux support has been getting a lot better for gaming, admittedly.
[0]https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Steam_under_Linux
I work Ubuntu Based, Fedora, and Arch have had no issues on these.
I watch all the new Atom packages as they are released, which is taking more and more of my time, and I have been shocked at how many languages there are. There are many many weird languages I've never heard of.
You might have to add some of the syntax highlighting etc, but there are packages for most languages available directly in the built in package manager.
Also the camera in the 6P is excellent which is a lovely surprise for a Nexus! It holds up well, better in some situations, to the brand new S7 Edge camera in my experience (my father has the S7 Edge so this was actual personal experience).
My ideal machine would be something along the lines of - fanless Intel CPU, 14" 1080p or better IPS display, excellent backlit keyboard with TrackPoint, 12+ hour battery life for 60% screen brightness and wifi, 3+ USB ports, 512+GB fastest local storage possible (so PCIe x4/M.2 or something). I don't care for anything else although I would take an HDMI or DP out and Bluetooth if possible :)
(I'd rather disable the fan in software so I could turn it on as needed but have not gotten that to work.)
I was hoping I would be able to things like the following -
* backup Fizz Buzz project (and have it intelligently backup the Fizz Buss Visual Studio project to a default location)
* open Fizz Buzz issue 131 (and have it open a browser to the github issue tracker to the correct issue #)
* email the Fizz Buzz project plan to Jim (you can *kind of* do this but it hardly ever works as you would want)
* open Fizz Buzz todo.txt when I next login
* copy the Fizz Buzz project plan to my Dropbox projects folder
Considering most (all?) of these things could be done with PowerShell cmdlets it is annoying there is no way to script Cortana via PowerShell in such a way.
Maybe one day.
As far as I can tell it is not [yet?] possible to integrate features from a classic Win32 application into Cortana to do things like I listed. Shame as that would have been very cool.
My examples are very specific to my domain for sure but they were just some examples for my use, the general concept of using Cortana as an actual digital assistant to automate/speedup boring and often done tasks.