So put that version out as a separate installer. Call it the "Marty McFly Time Machine Edition" or something.
Seriously, they could have at least put all those files in a subdirectory so that you didn't have to wade through them all to find the setup executable. On Win32 it invariably showed up at the bottom of the list, so you'd open the folder and be confronted with a long list of files that double-clicking did nothing. D'oh! A little organization would have improved the install experience greatly...
The 2.0 beta install experience is much cleaner -- the ZIP has a nice setup.msi, you double click, it goes. No more of the kajillion files (which were a real drawback of 1.x).
Lucas is not a visionary, not a brilliant writer or storyteller. He made some interesting but amateurish films in the 70's...
You can't be referring to American Graffiti, can you? Because that was actually a damn good movie. #77 on the AFI list of the 100 best American films ever, no less.
It doesn't matter if there have been any abuses or not.
What matters is whether the potential is there for abuse or not.
America has stayed free for 200+ years because her people learned a lesson earlier than most others: you don't wait for the secret police to show up at your door to start demanding your rights. Because by then it's too late.
You can do this right now using DropCash. Here's an example of one developer using it to see if there's anyone willing to pay for the development of a new feature to his popular Movable Type plugin. There's no reason why you couldn't set up a DropCash box for any feature request and then just post the link in Bugzilla...
If Seamonkey felt like the ideal Web browser to you, then there's no reason to switch.
Firefox is for the 99.98% of the world that looked at Seamonkey and said "No thanks".
Where Seamonkey is complex, Firefox is streamlined. Where Seamonkey is highly tweakable, Firefox is not (unless you add extensions). Where Seamonkey does everything but make toast, Firefox does one thing: browse the Web.
Note that I am not saying that any of these things make Firefox "good" and Seamonkey "bad". They just appeal to different people -- and Seamonkey's design philosophy just didn't appeal to enough people to get it to critical mass in the marketplace.
Firefox deliberately runs in the opposite direction from Seamonkey because Seamonkey did not appeal to the vast majority of potential users. There needed to be a browser that appealed to those folks too -- as Blake Ross puts it, a Gecko browser "for Mom" -- and that's Firefox.
Google Desktop runs as an http server on localhost. Anyone with enough access to get to the index could more easily query the Google interface directly for whatever they are interested in.
So if you know the IP address of the PC of your Evil Office Nemesis down the hall, could you actually run your own searches against his index just by constructing the appropriate URL pattern? (Assuming that you're both on the same LAN, and not running local firewalls on your PCs - - you know, the typical office setup.) Or am I tinfoil-hatting here?
The idea isn't to recognize every single worthy hacker out there. It's to recognize many worthy hackers who would otherwise never get recognition.
Even if you do this for years and only cover less than 1% of the total number of deserving hackers, you're still helping promote a huge number of great projects, which is a net win no matter how you slice it. Of course you're not going to be able to cover everybody. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
And I would argue that if something like this ends up focusing primarily on people contributing to projects like KDE, GNOME, etc. it'd be missing the point. Jon's column was about the huge number of tiny, useful projects out there that are maintained by one or a few dedicated people, toiling away in obscurity. KDE doesn't need the exposure, these projects do.
The Slashdot audience is probably better positioned to recognize the true "unsung heroes of OSS" than anyone else.
So -- hey editors, you listening? -- why don't we have a monthly nomination for Unsung Hero of the Month? Let readers send in their candidates, along with a pitch for why they should be featured as an Unsung Hero; then have the editors pick the best pitch, and give that developer a front-page interview on Slashdot.
Heck, maybe even throw in some ad space for his/her project (we're all in this OSS thing together right?). You could probably even have a corporate sponsor pick up the tab for the ad space (the cost would be pretty low, and you could offer them naming rights -- make it, say, the "IBM Open Source Unsung Hero of the Month").
Then archive the interviews in a section of their own (just like "Developers", "Your Rights Online", etc.) so that once there's a bunch of these in the archives they can serve as a kind of Hall of Fame.
This would help introduce people to a whole range of great OSS projects they might otherwise never discover, and give the developers the "ego payment" that for so many folks is the only real reimbursement they get for their hard work...
When I had to call them the one time my system had determined I changed hardware too much, it took about 1 minute for them to give me the hash I needed. I don't consider that bad at all.
I don't care if it takes.0001 picoseconds and happens automagically in response to my brainwaves.
It's not an issue of convenience. It's an issue of principle.
I swap hardware in and out of my PC all the time. More importantly, I reserve the right to swap hardware in and out of my PC whenever I damn well please.
Windows Product Activation limits this right by labeling me an Evil Pirate if I modify my system too much, or in the "wrong" way, and forcing me to grovel to Microsoft for permission to use my own computer again.
This is unacceptable no matter how "convenient" they make the groveling process. I simply do not accept the premise that they have the right to lock me out of my PC based on how I modify the hardware. I don't want my computer playing cop.
It's for this reason that I've kept my Windows box at home on Windows 2000, which has no such onerous "gotchas". When Windows 2000 becomes an untenable platform (which by all appearances will be Real Soon Now), it would be nice if there was a version of Windows that was compatible with my principles. If not, I'll wipe the disk and run Fedora full time, or buy a Mac.
If it comes to that, it'll be a shame; there are a lot of nice things about the Windows environment for the home user, and I'll miss being able to play the latest games. But there are some things that are simply not negotiable, and "I own my system" is one of them.
Re:Apple better off on there own
on
Apple to Buy TiVo?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Really, why would Apple want Tivo? Last I heard tivo was starting to fall on hard times.
Yeah, Apple would never base a product on tech they got by buying a company that had fallen on hard times.
That's why when it came time to design OS X, they made sure to start by buying a thriving, market-leading company with tons of customers: NeXT!:-)
BlockBuster's service is constantly faster. They claim the post office notifies them of which movies are sent for return and cross ship. This gives me a couple more rental periods each month.
Netflix used to do the same thing (cross-shipping). They even had a button on each disc in your queue that said "I've mailed this one back" that you could click to let them know you'd dropped it in the mail, and they'd release the next one right then.
After a while the buttons disappeared though. I can only assume that people were abusing them -- saying they'd mailed something back when they hadn't, to turn a 3-movie plan into a 4-movie plan for some short period of time.
It was actually commented when the WHAT-WG was first founded that if they had thought a moment about the acronym, they'd have named it the "Web Hypertext Application Technology Task Force" instead... (go ahead, spell it out)
Oh no, no more reading the PDF version of "War and Peace" while playing Doom3.
Seriously, if you're not playing a game at that moment and you have reasonably modern 3D hardware, don't you probably have a whole lot of GPU cycles free to burn?
He's "SOL" according to Blizzard, who have an obvious interest in convincing people that the rights granted to them by the EULA are not actually granted to them when they become inconvenient to Blizzard.
An impartial third party familiar with contract law may well have a different interpretation than Blizzard does.
Yeah, it's not security I would worry about -- it's being able to keep up with the Joneses as regards the Windows platform.
Example: right now my main use for Windows is as a gaming platform, which I imagine is true for a lot of people. For gaming, Windows 2000 is pretty much functionally equivalent to Windows XP, since things like driver updates, DirectX revisions, etc. are all made available for both 2000 and XP.
Microsoft could force a lot of people to confront the XP upgrade boogeyman just by deciding to no longer extend this courtesy. We're already seeing this in a few places -- like Windows Media Player 10, which is XP-only.
So far the XP-only things have all been optional packages; those of us on 2000 can survive just fine with Windows Media Player 9, for example. But if they start cutting 2000 users off from non-optional stuff -- not security fixes, which they say they'll keep coming, but all the various upgrades you need to keep your system current with the "Windows platform" -- then it won't be long until the utility of 2000 will become quite limited.
I say the same thing, but for Windows 2000. I have yet to find a show stopper at home to upgrade to XP.
Me neither -- I'm still running Win2K at home quite happily too. However, it's worth noting that Microsoft has at least one potential "show stopper" in the works for us: according to Microsoft's Windows lifecycle roadmap, "mainstream support" for Windows 2000 Professional will be discontinued on June 30 of this year. After that date only "extended support" will be available (through 2010).
What's the distinction? According to the lifecycle FAQ, here's what those terms mean:
Mainstream support includes all the support options and programs that customers receive today, such as no-charge incident support, paid incident support, support that is charged on an hourly basis, support for warranty claims, and hotfix support...
Extended support includes all paid support options and security-related hotfix support that is provided at no charge. Hotfix support that is not security-related requires a separate extended hotfix support contract to be purchased within 90 days after mainstream support ends.
From a practical home-user perspective, this means that you won't be seeing any more Service Packs or updates for Win2K Pro, unless they are to fix a specific security issue. So it'll be interesting to see whether things like new versions of DirectX continue to be provided for 2000 after this summer or not. Anyone out there with more experience on how Microsoft EOL's products who can shed light on what the prospects for things like that are?
Slashdot Mirror
So put that version out as a separate installer. Call it the "Marty McFly Time Machine Edition" or something.
Seriously, they could have at least put all those files in a subdirectory so that you didn't have to wade through them all to find the setup executable. On Win32 it invariably showed up at the bottom of the list, so you'd open the folder and be confronted with a long list of files that double-clicking did nothing. D'oh! A little organization would have improved the install experience greatly...
The 2.0 beta install experience is much cleaner -- the ZIP has a nice setup.msi, you double click, it goes. No more of the kajillion files (which were a real drawback of 1.x).
You can't be referring to American Graffiti , can you? Because that was actually a damn good movie. #77 on the AFI list of the 100 best American films ever, no less.
It doesn't matter if there have been any abuses or not.
What matters is whether the potential is there for abuse or not.
America has stayed free for 200+ years because her people learned a lesson earlier than most others: you don't wait for the secret police to show up at your door to start demanding your rights. Because by then it's too late.
Dude. WTF is up with that "Batman: Dead End"? I was following along OK until it suddenly started throwing in Aliens and Predators for some reason.
"After three minutes it goes nutso". You weren't kidding!
You can do this right now using DropCash. Here's an example of one developer using it to see if there's anyone willing to pay for the development of a new feature to his popular Movable Type plugin. There's no reason why you couldn't set up a DropCash box for any feature request and then just post the link in Bugzilla...
The answer to "Why Firefox?" is simple.
If Seamonkey felt like the ideal Web browser to you, then there's no reason to switch.
Firefox is for the 99.98% of the world that looked at Seamonkey and said "No thanks".
Where Seamonkey is complex, Firefox is streamlined. Where Seamonkey is highly tweakable, Firefox is not (unless you add extensions). Where Seamonkey does everything but make toast, Firefox does one thing: browse the Web.
Note that I am not saying that any of these things make Firefox "good" and Seamonkey "bad". They just appeal to different people -- and Seamonkey's design philosophy just didn't appeal to enough people to get it to critical mass in the marketplace.
Firefox deliberately runs in the opposite direction from Seamonkey because Seamonkey did not appeal to the vast majority of potential users. There needed to be a browser that appealed to those folks too -- as Blake Ross puts it, a Gecko browser "for Mom" -- and that's Firefox.
Forget GDS. What you want is Lookout -- a free tool that indexes and searches Outlook PSTs in no time flat.
It actually makes Outlook almost usable! Which is saying something.
So if you know the IP address of the PC of your Evil Office Nemesis down the hall, could you actually run your own searches against his index just by constructing the appropriate URL pattern? (Assuming that you're both on the same LAN, and not running local firewalls on your PCs - - you know, the typical office setup.) Or am I tinfoil-hatting here?
Not nearly as many as his sister Pootie.
The idea isn't to recognize every single worthy hacker out there. It's to recognize many worthy hackers who would otherwise never get recognition.
Even if you do this for years and only cover less than 1% of the total number of deserving hackers, you're still helping promote a huge number of great projects, which is a net win no matter how you slice it. Of course you're not going to be able to cover everybody. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
And I would argue that if something like this ends up focusing primarily on people contributing to projects like KDE, GNOME, etc. it'd be missing the point. Jon's column was about the huge number of tiny, useful projects out there that are maintained by one or a few dedicated people, toiling away in obscurity. KDE doesn't need the exposure, these projects do.
The Slashdot audience is probably better positioned to recognize the true "unsung heroes of OSS" than anyone else.
So -- hey editors, you listening? -- why don't we have a monthly nomination for Unsung Hero of the Month? Let readers send in their candidates, along with a pitch for why they should be featured as an Unsung Hero; then have the editors pick the best pitch, and give that developer a front-page interview on Slashdot.
Heck, maybe even throw in some ad space for his/her project (we're all in this OSS thing together right?). You could probably even have a corporate sponsor pick up the tab for the ad space (the cost would be pretty low, and you could offer them naming rights -- make it, say, the "IBM Open Source Unsung Hero of the Month").
Then archive the interviews in a section of their own (just like "Developers", "Your Rights Online", etc.) so that once there's a bunch of these in the archives they can serve as a kind of Hall of Fame.
This would help introduce people to a whole range of great OSS projects they might otherwise never discover, and give the developers the "ego payment" that for so many folks is the only real reimbursement they get for their hard work...
Wha? Why on earth should they reinvent the wheel?
Does having IBM projects on Sourceforge diminish the value of the other projects hosted there somehow?
Why spend money building Yet Another Online Source Code Repository, when they could save that money and put it into improving their OSS projects?
How is any of this "rude"?
I don't care if it takes .0001 picoseconds and happens automagically in response to my brainwaves.
It's not an issue of convenience. It's an issue of principle.
I swap hardware in and out of my PC all the time. More importantly, I reserve the right to swap hardware in and out of my PC whenever I damn well please.
Windows Product Activation limits this right by labeling me an Evil Pirate if I modify my system too much, or in the "wrong" way, and forcing me to grovel to Microsoft for permission to use my own computer again.
This is unacceptable no matter how "convenient" they make the groveling process. I simply do not accept the premise that they have the right to lock me out of my PC based on how I modify the hardware. I don't want my computer playing cop.
It's for this reason that I've kept my Windows box at home on Windows 2000, which has no such onerous "gotchas". When Windows 2000 becomes an untenable platform (which by all appearances will be Real Soon Now), it would be nice if there was a version of Windows that was compatible with my principles. If not, I'll wipe the disk and run Fedora full time, or buy a Mac.
If it comes to that, it'll be a shame; there are a lot of nice things about the Windows environment for the home user, and I'll miss being able to play the latest games. But there are some things that are simply not negotiable, and "I own my system" is one of them.
Yeah, Apple would never base a product on tech they got by buying a company that had fallen on hard times.
That's why when it came time to design OS X, they made sure to start by buying a thriving, market-leading company with tons of customers: NeXT! :-)
Netflix used to do the same thing (cross-shipping). They even had a button on each disc in your queue that said "I've mailed this one back" that you could click to let them know you'd dropped it in the mail, and they'd release the next one right then.
After a while the buttons disappeared though. I can only assume that people were abusing them -- saying they'd mailed something back when they hadn't, to turn a 3-movie plan into a 4-movie plan for some short period of time.
It was actually commented when the WHAT-WG was first founded that if they had thought a moment about the acronym, they'd have named it the "Web Hypertext Application Technology Task Force" instead... (go ahead, spell it out)
Wow. Sounds like you all need a bigger country.
:-)
Oh no, no more reading the PDF version of "War and Peace" while playing Doom3.
Seriously, if you're not playing a game at that moment and you have reasonably modern 3D hardware, don't you probably have a whole lot of GPU cycles free to burn?
He's "SOL" according to Blizzard, who have an obvious interest in convincing people that the rights granted to them by the EULA are not actually granted to them when they become inconvenient to Blizzard.
An impartial third party familiar with contract law may well have a different interpretation than Blizzard does.
That's gotta be the most acronyms I've ever seen in one paragraph. I'd forgotten what it's like to do business with DoD :)
Just thought I'd mention that ActivistCash.com is a site run by the "Center for Consumer Freedom" -- a front group for the restaurant, bar, and food processing industries (which probably has something to do with why the site is so focused on PETA and Mothers Against Drunk Driving). Among their other projects, CCF has campaigned in the past against the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
Just a point of reference to help you evaluate the information presented there.
Yet.
Yeah, it's not security I would worry about -- it's being able to keep up with the Joneses as regards the Windows platform.
Example: right now my main use for Windows is as a gaming platform, which I imagine is true for a lot of people. For gaming, Windows 2000 is pretty much functionally equivalent to Windows XP, since things like driver updates, DirectX revisions, etc. are all made available for both 2000 and XP.
Microsoft could force a lot of people to confront the XP upgrade boogeyman just by deciding to no longer extend this courtesy. We're already seeing this in a few places -- like Windows Media Player 10, which is XP-only.
So far the XP-only things have all been optional packages; those of us on 2000 can survive just fine with Windows Media Player 9, for example. But if they start cutting 2000 users off from non-optional stuff -- not security fixes, which they say they'll keep coming, but all the various upgrades you need to keep your system current with the "Windows platform" -- then it won't be long until the utility of 2000 will become quite limited.
Me neither -- I'm still running Win2K at home quite happily too. However, it's worth noting that Microsoft has at least one potential "show stopper" in the works for us: according to Microsoft's Windows lifecycle roadmap, "mainstream support" for Windows 2000 Professional will be discontinued on June 30 of this year. After that date only "extended support" will be available (through 2010).
What's the distinction? According to the lifecycle FAQ, here's what those terms mean:
From a practical home-user perspective, this means that you won't be seeing any more Service Packs or updates for Win2K Pro, unless they are to fix a specific security issue. So it'll be interesting to see whether things like new versions of DirectX continue to be provided for 2000 after this summer or not. Anyone out there with more experience on how Microsoft EOL's products who can shed light on what the prospects for things like that are?