Why do I need an OS-specific downloader? Once I've entered in my credit card info or whatever else is needed, why can't they just put up a link that I "right-click" on (or whatever - some of us occasionally use a non-mouse-non-GUI) and use whatever method MY BROWSER uses to download a file?
Because they are trying to compete with iTunes, and iTunes automatically adds tracks that you buy via the ITMS into your iTunes library, complete with all the metadata so you don't need to re-type that stuff. Amazon wants to provide a similarly "seamless" experience, so they use a small app to take the tracks you've bought and integrate them into your Windows Media Player or iTunes library, depending on platform. Note that the downloader is only required if you buy complete albums, single track purchases are downloaded directly.
I find the downloader marginally annoying, since they've been promising a Linux version for months and have yet to deliver it. But I can understand why they see the need to streamline the delivery of bundles of tracks. You'd be amazed at how many non-techie people are completely flummoxed even by simple things like uncompressing a ZIP file. The downloader lets Amazon sell to these people.
Granted, this e-hissy from Anonymous is unlikely to take down the cult or even deal it serious damage, but it does serve to highlight how the traditional big media outlets have been legally hogtied.
The problem is that most non-IE browsers rely on the presence of a DOCTYPE to signal whether the document should be parsed in a strict standards-compliance mode or a loose "quirks" mode. So if you ditch the DOCTYPE you're taking away authors' ability to "opt in" to stricter parsing.
Reducing energy consumption isn't just about saving money, it's about not fucking up the planet too.
People in general don't act on an altruistic basis. They act out of self-interest. So the way to keep them from fucking up the planet isn't to harangue them to turn their computer off, it's to change the pricing of electricity so that the prices correctly reflect the environmental impact.
Mark Pilgrim said it best a year ago
on
Goodbye Cruel Word
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Stop letting great games die because of reviewers, and try the games for yourself.
It's easier for people to "try the games for themselves" if the games aren't shackled to a completely illogical and unncessary requirement that you be running a version of your OS that's so new practically nobody has it. Nobody's going to upgrade their operating system just to play a game, unless your game is a truly historic achievement, and those only come along every ten years or so.
This has nothing to do with TFA per se, but if you're into this stuff you should check out the excellent blog Paleo-Future, which is dedicated to "the future that never was" -- how people in various times over the last 140 years or so have thought the future would look.
You're right that these people exist, but they're not the same thing as neo-conservatives.
Neo-conservatives are a different breed of right-winger. They typically believe in some flavor of what's been called "National Greatness Conservatism" -- the idea that Americans need a Great Crusade against something (anything, really) to drive them away from petty everyday concerns and towards Big Accomplishments.
Many of the "founding fathers" of neo-conservatism were actually liberals who fell away from that ideology in the 1960s and 1970s, disillusioned by what they felt was American liberals' tepid opposition to communism, and found a home in the militant anti-Communist branch of the right wing. The Cold War became their organizing frame, and when Communism disappeared, they decried the nation's turn away from foreign policy, arguing that there were new Great Crusades we should be undertaking instead. They spent the 1990s trying to convince the Clinton Administration to liberate Iraq from Saddam Hussein, for example, without success.
When 9/11 came, they found one they could run with; and since many neocons had risen by then to positions of leadership in the Bush Administration, they successfully pitched a "war on terrorism" as the new cause for National Greatness. The Iraq project that had been their hobby-horse for a decade was taken out of storage and repackaged as "the central front of the war on terror". And the rest is history.
Neo-conservatism has nothing to do with fundamentalist Christianity; in conversation neocons will typically talk down about the fundamentalist wing of their party, seeing them as rubes and hicks. Conversely, fundamentalists feel that the neocons' obsession with foreign policy leads them to ignore domestic social issues that are core to the fundamentalist agenda, like limiting abortion.
The fundamentalists do exist, and they are still strong (watch Mike Huckabee -- a former preacher who has absolutely nothing to say about foreign policy -- in the upcoming primaries if you don't believe me), but they're not the same thing as the neocons. The closest thing to a neocon candidate in 2008 is probably John McCain, who flirted with identifying himself as a "national greatness conservatism" in the past, and who shares their strong foreign policy orientation.
While yes a Union would curb management excess, it also tends to retard employee excellence.
Creative people can have unions and still have room for individual excellence. Just look at the writers that are on strike; the fact that most writers are living from job to job hasn't prevented superstars like J.J. Abrams (who is a WGA member) from building empires.
I don't know... I guess I just prefer the free agency of it all.
Speaking of Free Agency, baseball players have a union too, and nobody's sitting around waiting for A-Rod to die so that they can move up.
A union reflects the people who organize it. Creative workers organize unions that leave their members plenty of room for creativity and individual achievement, but that still allow them to pull together when they are getting the shaft (as the writers have been).
You absolutely can, and you wouldn't be the first, either. Check out WashTech (represents technical workers in Washington State) and Alliance@IBM (represents IBM employees) for some examples and inspiration.
O RLY? HTML is probably the most widely deployed document format in the entire history of computing (after ASCII plaintext, which I'm not sure counts as a "format"). An unknowably huge number of documents are authored in it every day. All but a tiny fraction are successfully retrieved and rendered by millions of clients ranging from dual-core desktop PCs to mobile phones.
It's one thing to say "HTML is ugly" (to which I'd agree) or "HTML needs extending" (I'd agree with that too) but "HTML needs fixing"? Really? Is there anybody in the planet who wants to publish something online today but can't because of problems with HTML?
Yep, Apple sure did everything they could to let people know that Boot Camp-on-Tiger was unstable software that shouldn't be used except if you were willing to lose all your data. That's why they didn't feature "Now you can run Windows too!" prominently on all their advertising.
HTML and DOC are pretty popular formats, I dare say, yet you can only read them by converting them into the Kindle's proprietary format (Mobi). That isn't any more "open" than Sony's audio players used to be; for a long time those players were advertised as "MP3" players, but you could only play MP3s by first converting them to Sony's proprietary ATRAC format. That was a dumb idea for Sony and it's dumb for Amazon too.
Also, note that perhaps the single most popular format for electronic documents - PDF - isn't even supported via conversion.
And here's at least one case where Mozilla did not, in fact, call the shots: Bug 364297. (I'd link directly to Bugzilla but they don't accept links from/.)
Quote from the bug:
Per contract requirements with Google, we need to make Google our default home
page and search provider in CJKT locales.
For the home page. This may involve simply changing the DNS entries rather than
the builds themselves.
For the search engine, we need to select Google as the default.
(Emphasis above is mine. "CJKT locales" is shorthand for China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Prior to this bug being filed these locales' default search provider had been Yahoo.)
How do you define best? How do you make it a non-subjective? Do you determine they're best because they're the most preferred by users?
People forget where Firefox came from. It was not focus grouped (or even planned, really) by Mozilla. At the time, Mozilla was still almost exclusively funded by AOL, and their primary focus was the Mozilla Suite - a browser/email client/HTML editor/IRC client monolith that had lots of promising features, but was too complex and geek oriented to catch on with the general public.
Firefox exists because in 2002 Blake Ross (along with Dave Hyatt) got fed up with the code bloat and designed-by-committee UI of the old Suite, and decided to start a skunkworks-style OSS project to create the anti-Suite: a lean, fast, browser-and-nothing-else tool using the core Mozilla code but jettisoning most of the complexity that had arisen in the Suite over time.
Back then it was called "Phoenix" (as in, rising from the ashes of Mozilla). The search bar showed up very early in Phoenix's life: Phoenix 0.2, to be exact, released in October 2002. And when the search bar landed, it used Google as its engine.
Because Phoenix was Ross' and Hyatt's personal project, design decisions in those days basically came down to whatever they thought was best. They chose Google for the search engine because in 2002 Google was waaaaaay ahead of the competition in search. Heck, back in those days Yahoo licensed Google Search rather than rolling their own!
This was literally years before Google offered Mozilla a red cent for search traffic. In 2002 Google was still 2 years away from going public and had nothing like the cash mountain it has today. They certainly weren't running around throwing tens of millions at browser programmers' side projects.
In other words: Ross and Hyatt chose Google because at the time the decision was a no brainer. Every other search engine was so much worse than Google at returning relevant results that choosing any of them would have been putting the user's needs second, which was contrary to the whole point of Phoenix/Firefox.
Of course, today the quality of competing engines has mostly caught up, so if they were making the decision today maybe they'd have chosen differently, who knows. But it's a mistake to project the conditions of the world today back upon decisions made five years ago. The tech landscape was very different then.
If the reviewer gives a score for both then I can understand which he/she feels is better and by what margin.
Except that the scores aren't derived from any kind of objective framework, so comparing the scores of two games really isn't meaningful. Maybe the reviewer's wife isn't giving him any that week and he's ticked off, so all his scores are 10% lower. Maybe his favorite American Idol contestant won that week and all his scores are 7% higher. The scores aren't scientific; they're completely subjective. That makes comparing one score to another an apples-to-oranges type of comparison.
(Metacritic filters some of this out by using an average score across many reviewers, which should help make it clearer which ones are outliers. But that doesn't really make up for the essential subjectivity of numeric scores.)
If you're into this stuff, I recommend subscribing to the GFW Radio podcast; it's by the editors of Games for Windows Magazine (the mag that used to be known as Computer Gaming World), and they frequently discuss how they evaluate games and various upsides and downsides of different review methodologies. (GFW used to feature numeric scores for games, but they recently dropped them, for essentially the reason I outlined above.)
They DON'T WANT your data living on your server. They want it living on THEIR server. The whole point of Gmail is to funnel whole new categories of data into THEIR SERVERS.
The attractive front end is just bait to get you to agree to dump your data into their servers. If they let you use your own server it would defeat the purpose of engineering the attractive front end in the first place.
He's probably better known these days as the guy who writes the "Fake Steve Jobs" blog. He wrote it anonymously for more than a year, picking up a not-inconsiderable audience (including both the real Steve Jobs and Bill Gates), until his identity was uncovered this past summer. Forbes rolled writing FSJ into his portfolio, and he has a Fake Steve book coming out this month.
Slashdot Mirror
Because they are trying to compete with iTunes, and iTunes automatically adds tracks that you buy via the ITMS into your iTunes library, complete with all the metadata so you don't need to re-type that stuff. Amazon wants to provide a similarly "seamless" experience, so they use a small app to take the tracks you've bought and integrate them into your Windows Media Player or iTunes library, depending on platform. Note that the downloader is only required if you buy complete albums, single track purchases are downloaded directly.
I find the downloader marginally annoying, since they've been promising a Linux version for months and have yet to deliver it. But I can understand why they see the need to streamline the delivery of bundles of tracks. You'd be amazed at how many non-techie people are completely flummoxed even by simple things like uncompressing a ZIP file. The downloader lets Amazon sell to these people.
For real. I was just talking about this with a friend the other day. For one example, check out the cover of Time magazine's issue of May 6, 1991.
Can you imagine a major national newsmagazine running this cover today?
The problem is that most non-IE browsers rely on the presence of a DOCTYPE to signal whether the document should be parsed in a strict standards-compliance mode or a loose "quirks" mode. So if you ditch the DOCTYPE you're taking away authors' ability to "opt in" to stricter parsing.
People in general don't act on an altruistic basis. They act out of self-interest. So the way to keep them from fucking up the planet isn't to harangue them to turn their computer off, it's to change the pricing of electricity so that the prices correctly reflect the environmental impact.
"Here's the basic problem: you're writing a text editor. Stop doing that. It's 2007."
It's easier for people to "try the games for themselves" if the games aren't shackled to a completely illogical and unncessary requirement that you be running a version of your OS that's so new practically nobody has it. Nobody's going to upgrade their operating system just to play a game, unless your game is a truly historic achievement, and those only come along every ten years or so.
This has nothing to do with TFA per se, but if you're into this stuff you should check out the excellent blog Paleo-Future, which is dedicated to "the future that never was" -- how people in various times over the last 140 years or so have thought the future would look.
Bah, Mr. Show beat you to that idea years ago.
You're right that these people exist, but they're not the same thing as neo-conservatives.
Neo-conservatives are a different breed of right-winger. They typically believe in some flavor of what's been called "National Greatness Conservatism" -- the idea that Americans need a Great Crusade against something (anything, really) to drive them away from petty everyday concerns and towards Big Accomplishments.
Many of the "founding fathers" of neo-conservatism were actually liberals who fell away from that ideology in the 1960s and 1970s, disillusioned by what they felt was American liberals' tepid opposition to communism, and found a home in the militant anti-Communist branch of the right wing. The Cold War became their organizing frame, and when Communism disappeared, they decried the nation's turn away from foreign policy, arguing that there were new Great Crusades we should be undertaking instead. They spent the 1990s trying to convince the Clinton Administration to liberate Iraq from Saddam Hussein, for example, without success.
When 9/11 came, they found one they could run with; and since many neocons had risen by then to positions of leadership in the Bush Administration, they successfully pitched a "war on terrorism" as the new cause for National Greatness. The Iraq project that had been their hobby-horse for a decade was taken out of storage and repackaged as "the central front of the war on terror". And the rest is history.
Neo-conservatism has nothing to do with fundamentalist Christianity; in conversation neocons will typically talk down about the fundamentalist wing of their party, seeing them as rubes and hicks. Conversely, fundamentalists feel that the neocons' obsession with foreign policy leads them to ignore domestic social issues that are core to the fundamentalist agenda, like limiting abortion.
The fundamentalists do exist, and they are still strong (watch Mike Huckabee -- a former preacher who has absolutely nothing to say about foreign policy -- in the upcoming primaries if you don't believe me), but they're not the same thing as the neocons. The closest thing to a neocon candidate in 2008 is probably John McCain, who flirted with identifying himself as a "national greatness conservatism" in the past, and who shares their strong foreign policy orientation.
Creative people can have unions and still have room for individual excellence. Just look at the writers that are on strike; the fact that most writers are living from job to job hasn't prevented superstars like J.J. Abrams (who is a WGA member) from building empires.
Speaking of Free Agency, baseball players have a union too, and nobody's sitting around waiting for A-Rod to die so that they can move up.
A union reflects the people who organize it. Creative workers organize unions that leave their members plenty of room for creativity and individual achievement, but that still allow them to pull together when they are getting the shaft (as the writers have been).
You absolutely can, and you wouldn't be the first, either. Check out WashTech (represents technical workers in Washington State) and Alliance@IBM (represents IBM employees) for some examples and inspiration.
I love how the first sentence is:
O RLY? HTML is probably the most widely deployed document format in the entire history of computing (after ASCII plaintext, which I'm not sure counts as a "format"). An unknowably huge number of documents are authored in it every day. All but a tiny fraction are successfully retrieved and rendered by millions of clients ranging from dual-core desktop PCs to mobile phones.
It's one thing to say "HTML is ugly" (to which I'd agree) or "HTML needs extending" (I'd agree with that too) but "HTML needs fixing"? Really? Is there anybody in the planet who wants to publish something online today but can't because of problems with HTML?
Yep, Apple sure did everything they could to let people know that Boot Camp-on-Tiger was unstable software that shouldn't be used except if you were willing to lose all your data. That's why they didn't feature "Now you can run Windows too!" prominently on all their advertising.
Oh, wait.
HTML and DOC are pretty popular formats, I dare say, yet you can only read them by converting them into the Kindle's proprietary format (Mobi). That isn't any more "open" than Sony's audio players used to be; for a long time those players were advertised as "MP3" players, but you could only play MP3s by first converting them to Sony's proprietary ATRAC format. That was a dumb idea for Sony and it's dumb for Amazon too.
Also, note that perhaps the single most popular format for electronic documents - PDF - isn't even supported via conversion.
Yes.
No. FF3 includes "Places", a new SQLite-based backend for managing things like bookmarks.
No it isn't.
And here's at least one case where Mozilla did not, in fact, call the shots: Bug 364297. (I'd link directly to Bugzilla but they don't accept links from /.)
Quote from the bug:
(Emphasis above is mine. "CJKT locales" is shorthand for China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Prior to this bug being filed these locales' default search provider had been Yahoo.)
People forget where Firefox came from. It was not focus grouped (or even planned, really) by Mozilla. At the time, Mozilla was still almost exclusively funded by AOL, and their primary focus was the Mozilla Suite - a browser/email client/HTML editor/IRC client monolith that had lots of promising features, but was too complex and geek oriented to catch on with the general public.
Firefox exists because in 2002 Blake Ross (along with Dave Hyatt) got fed up with the code bloat and designed-by-committee UI of the old Suite, and decided to start a skunkworks-style OSS project to create the anti-Suite: a lean, fast, browser-and-nothing-else tool using the core Mozilla code but jettisoning most of the complexity that had arisen in the Suite over time.
Back then it was called "Phoenix" (as in, rising from the ashes of Mozilla). The search bar showed up very early in Phoenix's life: Phoenix 0.2, to be exact, released in October 2002. And when the search bar landed, it used Google as its engine.
Because Phoenix was Ross' and Hyatt's personal project, design decisions in those days basically came down to whatever they thought was best. They chose Google for the search engine because in 2002 Google was waaaaaay ahead of the competition in search. Heck, back in those days Yahoo licensed Google Search rather than rolling their own!
This was literally years before Google offered Mozilla a red cent for search traffic. In 2002 Google was still 2 years away from going public and had nothing like the cash mountain it has today. They certainly weren't running around throwing tens of millions at browser programmers' side projects.
In other words: Ross and Hyatt chose Google because at the time the decision was a no brainer. Every other search engine was so much worse than Google at returning relevant results that choosing any of them would have been putting the user's needs second, which was contrary to the whole point of Phoenix/Firefox.
Of course, today the quality of competing engines has mostly caught up, so if they were making the decision today maybe they'd have chosen differently, who knows. But it's a mistake to project the conditions of the world today back upon decisions made five years ago. The tech landscape was very different then.
Boy, that would bite!
Bugs that sit around for six years without getting fixed? Who do these guys think they are, Mozilla or something?!?
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45375 enjoy :) (Not linked b/c Bugzilla blocks referrals from /.)
Except that the scores aren't derived from any kind of objective framework, so comparing the scores of two games really isn't meaningful. Maybe the reviewer's wife isn't giving him any that week and he's ticked off, so all his scores are 10% lower. Maybe his favorite American Idol contestant won that week and all his scores are 7% higher. The scores aren't scientific; they're completely subjective. That makes comparing one score to another an apples-to-oranges type of comparison.
(Metacritic filters some of this out by using an average score across many reviewers, which should help make it clearer which ones are outliers. But that doesn't really make up for the essential subjectivity of numeric scores.)
If you're into this stuff, I recommend subscribing to the GFW Radio podcast; it's by the editors of Games for Windows Magazine (the mag that used to be known as Computer Gaming World), and they frequently discuss how they evaluate games and various upsides and downsides of different review methodologies. (GFW used to feature numeric scores for games, but they recently dropped them, for essentially the reason I outlined above.)
Why would they do this? What's in it for Google?
They DON'T WANT your data living on your server. They want it living on THEIR server. The whole point of Gmail is to funnel whole new categories of data into THEIR SERVERS.
The attractive front end is just bait to get you to agree to dump your data into their servers. If they let you use your own server it would defeat the purpose of engineering the attractive front end in the first place.
To be precise, the 1,000,000 Americans weigh twice as much.
And that similar application would run on OS X and Linux as well as Windows, right? Oops.
He's probably better known these days as the guy who writes the "Fake Steve Jobs" blog. He wrote it anonymously for more than a year, picking up a not-inconsiderable audience (including both the real Steve Jobs and Bill Gates), until his identity was uncovered this past summer. Forbes rolled writing FSJ into his portfolio, and he has a Fake Steve book coming out this month.