20 November 2013

cinnamon 2.0.12 on ubuntu 13.10

Having in the past few days heard loads of praise of the Cinnamon 2 Linux desktop environment, from both friends and strangers, and now that installing Cinnamon 2 on Ubuntu no longer breaks Unity, I've decided to try it out on my primary Ubuntu desktop.

So, using the method below, I've started testing. A review of some sort should follow...

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gwendal-lebihan-dev/cinnamon-stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cinnamon

UPDATE (several hours later):

So far, I'm happy enough with Cinnamon-2.0. It seems to run with a smaller footprint, more stability and more functionality and configuration options than you get with the latest Unity and Gnome-Shell.

I did get a few random lock-ups during early reckless tweaking, but I've seen no recurrences since I stopped messing around with extensions, desklets and applets (some of them still only properly tested with earlier versions of Cinnamon).

Now, after several hours of work, the impression I'm left with is all positive.

In terms of workflow, I did find myself missing a few features of Unity's Dash and HUD, but the old desktop metaphors still seem to work better for me overall. And though this might have more to do with my long term familiarity with those, I also think it has something to do with a general lack of maturity in the newer approaches to the desktop environment being worked on.

Its still early days, but if nothing major shows up, I could very easily stick with Cinnamon as the desktop option I choose most often at login - at least until the others grow up a bit.

NEXT UPDATE (... in the morning)

I think I'm changing my mind .. The new day has found me missing Unity's simplicity and that task orientated Dash and HUD..  Ah well, I'll decide later, but just now I felt crowded and in my own way - I'm writing this after logging back into Unity ... maybe for a long while...



LATEST UPDATE (... two weeks later)

I've settled in to using and liking them both - with Unity ahead in the number of times it gets chosen at login.

24 June 2013

speaking evolution

I still really like the idea that ..

if I say out loud, my mother's mother's mother's mother's.... and keep going non-stop for about a 1000 years - I'll eventually be speaking about amoebae

----------------------
at 3 mother's per second
--------------------------
it's a 1000 years to amoebae, and a 100 000 years to bacteria
--------------------------
Btw, if you too are doubting the scale of that 1000 year estimate, its not just an exaggeration. I'm using a conservative estimate of 10^11 (100000000000) generations between me and my amoebae ancestors - based on very small times between generations for the first 400 million years of animal life. A number so mind-bending in size, that it will take 1000 years to count to at 3 times a second

13 June 2013

slow burning fuse (?)

got it here : https://www.facebook.com/TheSlowBurningFuse

those aliens again

So I know most of you don't need to hear this (?) 
but even though alien life, in even just the observable universe alone, is a mathematical certainty, the chances of us sharing the same bit of space-time and therefore being able to meet any aliens, might very well be extremely (maybe even impossibly) low.

----
Especially if Einstein's cosmic speed limit holds - and there's no indication that it won't.

12 March 2013

anarchy too, must be built

building intelligence



Jeff Hawkins again, this time in a googtechtalk. 1hr.  

Like in his earlier videos and book, he gives the best explanation of the neocortex i've heard so far --the neocortex is a hierarchical temporal memory system, implemented as a sparse distributed representation.

See earlier posts on this:
http://jaysenn.blogspot.com/2012/10/grokking-htm-for-ai.html
http://jaysenn.blogspot.com/2007/07/intelligence-is-prediction.html

11 February 2013

property should come with a warning

WARNING: The accumulation of property, wealth, and general luxury, has been known to (frequently) cause severely negative changes in ideology.

03 February 2013

scared into fascism

Is the fear of new threats, that might be introduced by upcoming technological revolutions, being used to argue for this trend to fascism and anti-privacy we're seeing such a drastic increase in? ..

..like the possible large scale threats that single individuals might present in a world with both synthetic biology and a free and open internet ...

if so, how do we argue otherwise?

09 January 2013

and still never meet the neighbours

















Recent results from the Kepler space telescope and studies of nearby solar-mass stars, suggest that nearly one in four stars like the sun could have Earth-size planets.

That's anything between 10-100 billion earth-like planets in our Milky Way
The Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years in diameter.

That's big enough, so that even with 100 billion earth-like planets,
and a reasonable percentage of them producing life,
and a percentage of those producing intelligent life,
and a percentage of those surviving for long enough to explore space ...
It's still possible to never, ever, meet the neighbours!
:(