I know that I can print to XPS right now, but I can't print to PDF without paying 300 bones (standard edition) or 449 (professional).
Let me introduce you to PDFCreator -- free, open source printing to PDF. If you want to create interactive forms and such, the Adobe software is worth the money; but for simple PDF printing, all you need is PDFCreator. (Or OpenOffice, for that matter, which has "Save to PDF" built in.)
You're thinking of the rel attribute itself, which indeed has been part of the semantics of HTML forever and ever. But using rel="nofollow" as a flag for search engines is much newer.
Lots of comments from people saying that Google can't or shouldn't be censoring their imagery. In case you weren't aware, they already are.
Here's a Google Earth KMZ file that will show you the US Naval Observatory, in Washington, DC. Zoom in on it and you'll notice that all the territory within a set radius of the observatory has been pixellated out of the otherwise clear image.
There are other obscured sites in DC and other places too; I'll leave finding them as an exercise for the reader. But the point is that they are already hiding some sensitive locations from users, so it's not unreasonable for people to ask what the criteria are, or why military bases shouldn't be included.
It's a development name. It's boring to say 'firefox 3' and more fun to say 'gran paradiso'.
It also makes it clear that it's not for public consumption. If you called it "Firefox 3 Alpha 1" you'd have tons of Firefox fanboys rushing to download the "latest" version of their favorite browser. Firefox versions that don't carry the "Firefox" name aren't ready for prime time; labeling them differently sends that message.
You don't have to take their word for it; you can grab the complete software stack and test it yourself, if you want. The OLPC team provide OS images that you can use to run the software in any x86 virtualization platform (they recommend qemu, but people have it running in VMWare and Parallels as well).
It's worth checking out just to see their new "Sugar" UI -- which is pretty cool IMHO.
The most notable thing about this whole thread is that somebody apparently thinks posting "Hesh wants jalapeno poppers" deserves a +1, Informative (!)...
Historically, Starbucks has done a great job at balancing new ideas with efficiency, says Frances Frei, a professor at Harvard business school who has studied the company. A classic example: the way it trains us to order in Starbucks jargon, grande this and half-caff that. Serving tens of thousands of possible drink combinations would be an operational nightmare were it not for a regimented logic to ordering, a marketing flourish that helps establish the atmosphere of an Italian café.
It's a good article -- lots of interesting tidbits about the decisions that drive their operations.
Assuming the block on your school district is the same type as the one being discussed here, you can still "add good content". You just need to create a Wikipedia user account and do it while logged in. The block only stops contributions from non-logged-in users.
You probably aren't the target market for something like this then. There is a segment of the market that chooses what car to buy based on the number and placement of the cupholders, believe it or not -- they're a more likely target...
Absolutely correct. You can, in fact, download the original version of VisiCalc -- the original spreadsheet program, released for MS-DOS in 1981 -- and run it, unmodified, in Windows XP.
Could it be possible that people that aren't you actually prefer their "monolithic" clients?
Or could it be that the particular monolithic client you speak of comes pre-installed on 99% of office PCs, and is the standard for 99% of corporate IT departments?
Most people don't have any choice about the e-mail program they use for most of the day, so there's not a lot we can tell about user preferences based just on the number of copies of a given program in use.
why make consumers pay hundreds of dollars for something they aren't going to use?!
Nobody's making consumers buy PS3s. If the consumers are dumb enough to pay a premium for something they'll never use, is Sony supposed to not sell it to them?
No they're not. There is an "AJAX API", but it isn't really a replacement for the old SOAP API in any meaningful sense. I posted an explanation why on Scripting News yesterday. Basically, the AJAX "API" is just a blob of Javascript that returns HTML in response to a form POST -- HTML that includes advertisements -- and you're obligated by the Terms of Use to display that HTML unmodified. That's very different from the SOAP API, which returned raw data you could format and display however you liked.
An AJAX interface like this is a great thing for a lot of users, from bloggers to small web site operators, because it allows them to add search to their sites with a few lines of JavaScript and markup and no real coding at all; however, the gate has slammed shut and the data is once again locked away outside the reach of anyone who wanted to do anything else.
I don't think your example cuts the way you intend it to.
For a lot of tasks, Notepad is all the editor you need (where "editor" is defined as a non-WYSIWYG text processor). For making a quick change to a config file, Notepad works just as well as Vim does.
In Notepad, you open the program and start typing. Very intuitive for new/untrained users. In Vim, you can't start typing until you figure out how to turn on Insert mode. Very un-intuitive.
Notepad on Windows is like Vim on *nix: it's the only editor that is always guaranteed to be there.
So: Notepad isn't as powerful as Vim/Emacs, but that doesn't mean it's not useful -- just that its utility is mostly for basic, low-end tasks where overall power is less important than a quick time-to-completion.
And come to think of it, you could say the same thing about MySQL vis a vis PostgreSQL -- though the MySQL developers have done a better job at scaling up their product than Microsoft has with Notepad.
Or just that the groupthink and/or drive from Sun (who pay for the vast majority of OOo development) currently tend towards emulating Microsoft.
Good post. It's worth noting that Mozilla didn't really break free of the "following the leader" problem until they were officially dumped by Netscape/AOL. It seemed like the end of the project at the time, but it ended up giving them the freedom to innovate, and led to Firefox, which has been an enormous success.
If you care about the user experience after the sale, simplicity still wins. If all you care about is separating the man from his money, slather on the complexity.
I'd go a step further and say that you could potentially even make an argument for simplicity if all you care about is the bottom line -- even if features drive sales.
Why? Because features add complexity, and complexity drives up costs in at least two ways:
Failure rates -- simple things are easier to debug/test, so they tend to not break down as much (assuming you're doing your due diligence and not using customers as beta testers).
Support -- simple things don't require you to staff phone banks to explain to befuddled users how to use them.
The sales boost you get from adding Toolbar Button #12,185 to Microsoft Word may look less impressive when you look at it from a customer-lifecycle-cost perspective.
Right, because your grand-daddy's rifle is really going to help against tanks and automatic weaponry.
I dunno, the Iraqis seem to be doing a pretty good job on that score using AK-47s (a sixty-year-old weapon) and homemade roadside bombs. Having the Latest and Greatest doesn't buy you much when you can't tell who the enemy is.
In another sign of Google Inc.'s growth from start-up to corporate behemoth, the company's top executives said Thursday that they had begun telling engineers to stop launching so many new services and instead focus on making existing ones work together better.
The shift is a major departure from Google's previous strategy of launching new services rapid-fire and highlights the 8-year-old company's struggle to stay focused during swift growth...
Google admitted this year that its internal audits discovered that the company had been spending too much time on new services to the detriment of its core search engine.
(Emphasis mine)
So it would appear that the days of "putting out new shiny toys" are coming to an end, to be replaced by days of consolidation and integration. That's a good decision from a business perspective, IMO (Google's product line is a mess), but it does mean that engineers' jobs at Google are going to start being less like academia-with-stock-options and more like a real job.
If you look closely at most ATMs (at least the ones I've seen) you'll notice that all the keys and informational placards have Braille stamped on them so the blind/vision-impaired can read them. Many ATMs these days also have a headphone jack where you can plug in a standard set of headphones and have the system read the screen to you.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me introduce you to PDFCreator -- free, open source printing to PDF. If you want to create interactive forms and such, the Adobe software is worth the money; but for simple PDF printing, all you need is PDFCreator. (Or OpenOffice, for that matter, which has "Save to PDF" built in.)
It's more due to the fact that Linden Lab (the company behind Second Life) hired a really good PR agency that packaged the story up with a bow for reporters.
Shouldn't we get an apology from the /. "editors", since they swallowed Vigurie's spin hook line and sinker -- not once, but twice?
(Of course, since they apparently don't read the comments, where many people pointed out the truth on this issue, I expect the answer is probably no.)
Because all the major search engines have agreed to respect "nofollow". In other words, it works the same way robots.txt does.
No it doesn't.
You're thinking of the rel attribute itself, which indeed has been part of the semantics of HTML forever and ever. But using rel="nofollow" as a flag for search engines is much newer.
Lots of comments from people saying that Google can't or shouldn't be censoring their imagery. In case you weren't aware, they already are.
Here's a Google Earth KMZ file that will show you the US Naval Observatory, in Washington, DC. Zoom in on it and you'll notice that all the territory within a set radius of the observatory has been pixellated out of the otherwise clear image.
Why? Because the Vice President lives at the Naval Observatory.
There are other obscured sites in DC and other places too; I'll leave finding them as an exercise for the reader. But the point is that they are already hiding some sensitive locations from users, so it's not unreasonable for people to ask what the criteria are, or why military bases shouldn't be included.
It also makes it clear that it's not for public consumption. If you called it "Firefox 3 Alpha 1" you'd have tons of Firefox fanboys rushing to download the "latest" version of their favorite browser. Firefox versions that don't carry the "Firefox" name aren't ready for prime time; labeling them differently sends that message.
You don't have to take their word for it; you can grab the complete software stack and test it yourself, if you want. The OLPC team provide OS images that you can use to run the software in any x86 virtualization platform (they recommend qemu, but people have it running in VMWare and Parallels as well).
It's worth checking out just to see their new "Sugar" UI -- which is pretty cool IMHO.
How much time do you want to spend SSH'ing from a terminal without a keyboard?
The most notable thing about this whole thread is that somebody apparently thinks posting "Hesh wants jalapeno poppers" deserves a +1, Informative (!)...
I think you mean: Hesh wants jalapeno poppers!
Time magazine actually answered this question in a recent article about the challenges Starbucks is grappling with as it tries to grow even larger:
It's a good article -- lots of interesting tidbits about the decisions that drive their operations.
Assuming the block on your school district is the same type as the one being discussed here, you can still "add good content". You just need to create a Wikipedia user account and do it while logged in. The block only stops contributions from non-logged-in users.
You probably aren't the target market for something like this then. There is a segment of the market that chooses what car to buy based on the number and placement of the cupholders, believe it or not -- they're a more likely target...
Absolutely correct. You can, in fact, download the original version of VisiCalc -- the original spreadsheet program, released for MS-DOS in 1981 -- and run it, unmodified, in Windows XP.
Or could it be that the particular monolithic client you speak of comes pre-installed on 99% of office PCs, and is the standard for 99% of corporate IT departments?
Most people don't have any choice about the e-mail program they use for most of the day, so there's not a lot we can tell about user preferences based just on the number of copies of a given program in use.
Nobody's making consumers buy PS3s. If the consumers are dumb enough to pay a premium for something they'll never use, is Sony supposed to not sell it to them?
No they're not. There is an "AJAX API", but it isn't really a replacement for the old SOAP API in any meaningful sense. I posted an explanation why on Scripting News yesterday. Basically, the AJAX "API" is just a blob of Javascript that returns HTML in response to a form POST -- HTML that includes advertisements -- and you're obligated by the Terms of Use to display that HTML unmodified. That's very different from the SOAP API, which returned raw data you could format and display however you liked.
Another observer hit the nail on the head yesterday:
That was my point -- that the best tool does not always map to the tool with the most features.
I don't think your example cuts the way you intend it to.
So: Notepad isn't as powerful as Vim/Emacs, but that doesn't mean it's not useful -- just that its utility is mostly for basic, low-end tasks where overall power is less important than a quick time-to-completion.
And come to think of it, you could say the same thing about MySQL vis a vis PostgreSQL -- though the MySQL developers have done a better job at scaling up their product than Microsoft has with Notepad.
Good post. It's worth noting that Mozilla didn't really break free of the "following the leader" problem until they were officially dumped by Netscape/AOL. It seemed like the end of the project at the time, but it ended up giving them the freedom to innovate, and led to Firefox, which has been an enormous success.
I'd go a step further and say that you could potentially even make an argument for simplicity if all you care about is the bottom line -- even if features drive sales.
Why? Because features add complexity, and complexity drives up costs in at least two ways:
The sales boost you get from adding Toolbar Button #12,185 to Microsoft Word may look less impressive when you look at it from a customer-lifecycle-cost perspective.
I dunno, the Iraqis seem to be doing a pretty good job on that score using AK-47s (a sixty-year-old weapon) and homemade roadside bombs. Having the Latest and Greatest doesn't buy you much when you can't tell who the enemy is.
From the LA Times, Oct. 6 -- "Google Puts Lid on New Products":
(Emphasis mine)
So it would appear that the days of "putting out new shiny toys" are coming to an end, to be replaced by days of consolidation and integration. That's a good decision from a business perspective, IMO (Google's product line is a mess), but it does mean that engineers' jobs at Google are going to start being less like academia-with-stock-options and more like a real job.
If you look closely at most ATMs (at least the ones I've seen) you'll notice that all the keys and informational placards have Braille stamped on them so the blind/vision-impaired can read them. Many ATMs these days also have a headphone jack where you can plug in a standard set of headphones and have the system read the screen to you.