I use a 28" 4k monitor with ubuntu 14.04 and it works great(with an nvidia card). One issue is that in gnome 3 the UI scaling cannot be set per monitor so that if you are using a mix of HD and 4K it can become a bit annoying. If you're wanting multiple monitors I recommend upgrading all of them(assuming your graphics card has enough grunt).
My biggest frustration with Linux development is how poor it has made windows development env look in comparison. Every time I have to fire up a windows VM to do some work for some of our clients that still use MS tech I hate it. Before using Linux as a dev environment I honestly thought windows and the associated dev tools were really good. Now using anything else seems like a huge chore.
Try the Asus Zenbook UX305, everything works out of the box with Ubuntu and it's as thin as a Macbook Air but more powerful and with a ridiculously high res screen.
A big issue for me is the completely unnecessary size of most of the products they provide. Why are SQL Server, Visual Studio and Windows itself so big? It takes almost no time at all to provision a dev environment on Linux but hours on Windows for the same result. A concerted effort to slim down their tools and OS is needed IMHO.
Try UbuntuGnome 14.04 LTS, I use it daily and can highly recommend it. I've tried a ton of different OS and UI and always keep coming back to UbuntuGnome
fair point, when I say "really gets it" I mean this is a huge step forward in comparison to the vast majority of enterprise clients that mandate IE. He knows IE is broken and the extra money spent on supporting old versions of IE is better spent somewhere else.
In enterprise environments where most users don't even have admin rights on their machines you need to pick at least one browser that you know will be deployed across all machines in the entire organisation. They chose Chrome(the right choice IMHO). Especially given that people are moving away from using windows choosing something cross platform is a must.
Not to be overly negative but if I had to guess the extensions system will be hobbled and sub-par. This is just based on my years of experience with IE and other MS products.
If it had an extension that could give me the hours of my life back that I have spent trying to support their awful browsers that would be great though.
Unfortunately yes, but one of our enterprise clients has just mandated Chrome only for all their internal apps(their new head of IT really gets it). Another one of our enterprise clients has just allowed all users to run Chrome and/or FF alongside IE. So while it is still around it is losing ground IMHO.
The consumer market is a totally different game though, IE is being crushed in that market. I have made several consumer facing apps in recent years that do not support IE at all, users can still log in but a warning notice is shown informing them it is not tested in IE and they need to upgrade to a "standards compliant browser".
News organisations are already obligated to print retractions when they make mistakes and asking a questions(although it is often used by the media as weasel words) is different to deliberately misleading someone.
In regards to the other two evangelical preachers should probably need to specify in advance that there is significant empirical evidence in direct contradiction to their statements before making them publicly.
In the case of the vaccination debate this should definitely be a crime, there is significant empirical evidence to prove that what anti-vaccination campaigners say is false. There is some precedent for this regarding the claims of chiropractors in the US which went to trial and found that they were lying about the efficacy of their treatments. (Also on a side note why would anyone listen to a completely unqualified "celebrity" over the opinions of someone with a PHD in virology or epidemiology. Most of the anti-vaccination campaigners are not adequately qualified to have an opinion on the matter anyway).
Also I feel that it's whether it is for personal gain is a big factor, if you are just ignorant that is unfortunate but not necessarily malicious.
There are also examples here(in Australia) of companies being fined for misleading the public, a notable example is "balance bracelets" being recalled from sale here due to false claims.
That being said despite the similarities between the two there are some pretty large cultural differences between the US and Australia which may make some of my points moot. In general Australia favours stronger consumer protections and government regulations, a free and independent publicly funded media service(ABC) and very negative political campaign adds often backfire and lower the public perception of the person making the attack rather than the other way around. Additionally Australia does not have any explicit legal guarantees of freedom of speech akin to the US constitution so some forms of speech, such as overt racism, are already illegal and people can be denied entry for public statements which indicate "bad character" such as holocaust denial etc.
Although it's slightly different as I am Australian so it is a different legal system I have strongly believed for a long time that lying for personal gain should be a crime. If it could be proven that a politician, organisation or individual deliberately misrepresented facts for personal gain then this should definitely be considered a crime.
The ability to deliberately lie in order to influence the outcome of important events free of any consequence will always favour those with the loudest voices and the most media influence. In other words if you are the loudest why not lie about everything if there is no possible consequence?
While it could be difficult to prove that someone is lying or that something is untrue in "moral" issues there are many cases where there is empirical data or documentation proving truth, falsehood or knowledge and these are times where deliberate deception could be proven.
Probably widening the debate somewhat and a separate issue but I also feel that selective ignorance should also be punished. For example if you commission 10 reports into something and 9 of them tell you what you don't want to hear and one of them does tell you what you want to hear then you are deliberately ignoring 90% of the expert advice to prop up your point of view. IMHO this is almost as bad.
I have noticed a drop in stability and quality recently. I personally have never owned an apple product, I only use Linux, but I do need to interact with iDevices fairly frequently and some little areas of quality are slipping.
The apple TV we use in the office for playing music has not worked correctly since the last firmware update and really struggles with streaming and the new MBP we purchased recently had a bug where the keyboard and mouse would randomly stop working(fixed in an update). These aren't huge problems but I think they are not something that would have occurred a few years ago.
That being said if you don't want to make the switch to linux then the apple/unix ecosystem is still much better than the current windows options but I think apple is losing its reputation for quality as it moves from being a high end luxury product to a standard.
It's mainly things like the lack of a good package manager for provisioning, inexplicably large installers, sub-par automation, inscrutable GUI's packed with useless features, having to RDP into a server to perform basic tasks rather than just using SSH, massive bloat(why is everything so huge?), a general disregard for dev ops.
Also I find the licencing really irritating when creating VMs and servers. In the end thinking something "feels" old and clunky is a subjective perception but every time I use MS products it feels like they were created with little or no insight or knowledge into what anyone else is doing, leading to a lot of NIH syndrome.
Absolutely garbage browsers are also a big problem, I know IE 10 is passable but in 4 years when it hasn't been updated and people using Win7 and 8 are stuck using it, it will be the IE6 of its day.
Don't get me wrong, I used MS products basically exclusively for the first 5 years of my developer career, and still use them a fair bit now, and thought it was amazing, it's not until you move outside that bubble and start using better tools and methodologies that you realise how far behind they are.
I don't think people hate MS, they just don't even think about them. Whenever I am at tech events(usually web related ones) MS isn't openly criticised, they're not even discussed as an option.
I spend about 50% of my time developing .net apps and the other half on linux/web stuff so I'm pretty familiar with the MS tech stack and it always feels very clunky and outdated.
MS hasn't created a really compelling consumer product since the Xbox and they have just totally lost consumer mindshare, they are the slow, clunky old thing you use at work because you have to, not the thing you buy when spending your own money.
In my view the future is(at least in the medium term) Linux on the server and mobile devices, Unix on the laptop/desktop in the form of OSX and maybe MS on the console and Windows running legacy systems and some servers.
I'm not a particular fan of Apple either(I've never purchased any of their products) and only use Linux(Ubuntu) and Windows in a VM but it seems to me consumers just don't care about MS any more and I'm not sure that MS has the skills to change that.
100% agree, I have extensive experience with both and I would never recommend .net to anyone. Unfortunately many of the larger companies I do work for will only use it. In general the SOE of an organisation is usually defined by non-tech people and "no one ever got fired for recommending microsoft". So I find that these larger organisations are hobbled by using sub-par tools, hopefully this will change in the next 10 years or so though.
Having been a dev for 10 years, 5 of which were almost exclusively using .net and the other half using open source web tech I feel like I can add something to the discussion. I've recently got back into .net for a couple of recent projects after a few years away from it. First off c# is awesome, it's a great language.
The main problem I have have with it is the clunkiness of the tools. Windows itself is pretty poor as a server OS and dev environment(IMHO), it's unnecessarily heavy, has too many useless features, is difficult to automate, and more. Powershell is ok but not really as simple/powerful/portable as bash. SQL server I guess is ok as a db engine but using it is clunky(again feature bloat really hobbles it). I find getting an environment set up with vagrant, capistrano etc. with windows much more complex than it needs to be.
Also one of the really noticeable differences is the overall quality of the community. It's much harder to find good answers to problems when using .net/Windows than with other environments and platforms in my experience. In general I find .net devs more interested in maintaining the status quo than exploring new ideas and tech(massive generalisation but I'm sure I can't be the only one to notice this). Also nearly every tutorial about modern web tech is written for *nix environments as the general community support and interest in .net/Windows seems to be non-existent.
An observation that I've noticed lately when attending tech events and conferences is that Windows just isn't even on the radar. It's not that people actively dislike it or openly criticise it, it's just not even considered or discussed, it's old tech, it's boring, it's clunky.
I don't use Ubuntu because I'm cheap, I use it because it's the best tool for the job. I think in general Ubuntu users are going to be developers(read have expendable income to spend on gadgets). I think making a play for the high end is the smart move, create a device everyone wants and aspires to own and they will sell themselves. Also if your main market is developers(as I'm assuming it is for the Edge) then you need to blow them away with a beautifully designed high end device to get them to buy it and then start developing the app ecosystem.
I have worked remotely for companies in other countries for extended periods of time quite a bit. I'm Australian but have worked remotely for companies in Canada from Australia for over a year, I have worked for companies in the UK while living in Canada and Australia for over 18 months. I have also worked for Australian companies from Nepal. In addition to this I have spent time travelling around various parts of Europe and Asia while working remotely for companies in Australia and the UK.
It's definitely doable and provides great freedom in your lifestyle. The different timezones can get a bit annoying though, the time difference between the UK and Australia is 11 hours so I would often find myself on Skype calls until 5am local time.
Using good collaboration tools like google docs and hangouts/skype really make this all go a bit easier. In some places around Asia(particularly Nepal, Burma etc.) internet can be a bit sketchy so it can be difficult to get fast turnaround times on communication/bug fixes etc.