This was one of the reasons older offices had printer rooms. Smell, noise, dust and printing mistakes stayed out of sight. I wish more people did this now, because these printers while greatly improved are still smelly, noisy, dusty, greasy and prone to spit out bad jokes, spam, misplaced personal data and "best of" Slashdot trolls, at least in this office.
It's a sad but iron fact of life that market viability and not the quality of the end product defines what lives and what ends up with the Amiga and other good ideas in the storeroom of history. This doesn't mean I like it. In fact, I'd like to live in a society where superior engineering was accepted over superior marketing. Any ideas? Will move, if there's even dialup internet access.
Emotions are part of human life. Most business and email communication is too starchy now for emotion, which wasn't always the case, if you look at how clear letters from 100 years ago were. Most people are also emotionally easily inflamed, and so we're all afraid that others are flaring up or running off to cry over their Wellbutrin. We need emotions for online communication and yes, they're overused, but until we find a better way to communicate "mood" or "emotion" email, IM, blogs and forums will be dependent upon the icky little emoticons we've come to loathe.
I'm glad they decided to stand up for their students. College is (like it or not) partially a parent-replacement, and a good parent tries to discipline their kids before handing them over to the legal system for pirating a few bucks worth of thoughtless major label tunes. I am much more likely to send my kid to University of Kansas now!
I'm surprised it took them this long. If they can look into what packets are being sent, they're going to sort them according to desirability, which is defined in the context of their bottom line profits. That is fair play under capitalism, although I think most of it find it disturbing, but then again, we don't have to see the havoc caused by abject morons downloading petabytes of pornography every night while updating their myspace pages with another 400 youtube videos.
Finally, someone tells what web developers have known for years: optimizing the site is not a matter of splitting your content into as many images as possible over an enterprise app, but good clean design and code.
For years, as a web designer, every time I got ready to deploy I encountered some nitwit who would say, "You're going to break up that giant image, aren't you? We can put it on nine servers!" -- creating organizational havoc, a completely unmanageable asset mess of a project, and driving everyone nuts. The Souders-Yahoo approach is different. He suggests the obvious, which is have fewer page elements, stick them into the HTML code if possible, and trim that ragged mess of Java and CSS.
Also, as a technical writer, I'm impressed whenever someone gets paid to write down the obvious.
Microsoft designs software like GM builds cars: for the average person, which is defined by having average needs. For checking email, web surfing, and using Quicken, Windows is the better product. For those with either far broader needs, or much more specialized ones, there's Linux or FreeBSD. However, Kolivas makes a good point: Linux has not adapted to the desktop paradigm and so alienates many potential users with its somewhat doctrinaire requirement that they learn entirely new ways of doing common tasks.
XP is a good, level building block that's safe for almost everyone (if they run Opera as their browser, haha). Vista's the next generation. We don't need another Windows; we need better versions of the windowses we already have. But definitely put Julie Larsen-Green on the interface, because the mishmash of PARC and X-Windows has grown old already!
Roger Waters was born on Sept. 6, 1944. According to this Pink Floyd FAQ this is an error, and the correct birth date is September 6, 1943, as confirmed by Mark Fenwick, Roger Waters' manager. That is the date found in the wikipedia article Roger Waters.
This means there's going to be a lot of people out there making stupid choices, whether this is one of them or not (disclaimer: I don't particularly dislike Vista, and have never had a reason to buy a Macintosh). At least they're not demanding a more user-friendly OS.
Surveys are useless. You take part of a target group, figure out what they're doing, and assume everyone else is the exact same way. Alexa is just as useless as those political opinion surveys where they call up 1,607 drunk housewives, basement dwellers, drug dealers and homeless pedophiles and ask who they'd vote for tomorrow. Junk data. GIGO
This reminds me of another company that made technically superior products that were so quirky, hard to use, weird-looking and goofy corporate that almost no one bought them even though the engineering was profound. Microsoft is the new Texas Instruments.
The UG is not a thing of the past. The problem with a LUG is that it's balkanized. Make it a cross between a Windows User Group, a Linux User Group, a general computer hobbyist club and a programmer's hobbyist group, like 2600 or PerlMongers, and you'll be able to draw in anyone who wants to use a computer. This in turn will benefit Linux as it will show it as a competitive and viable option that is easy to install and use. The specific UG is dead; long live the generalized UG.
But as the articles you didn't read pointed out, they're not: they're hiring 10,000 drones because they're cheap and interchangable, not because they're smart!
Before you accuse others of something they didn't do, try understanding their point of view. It really works!
There is no shortage of IT workers, especially good ones, but companies make more profit off of young workers and foreign workers they can treat like slaves. See To H1-B or not to H-1B?. And in the minds of many experienced project managers, quality of worker's intelligence and experience are more important than having 10,000 interchangable drones as Google seems to want. See Smart and Gets Things Done.
I know that for some it is tempting to label things that hit loyalty centers as trolls, but look rationally at the situation: this post is not intended as a troll.
Its point is that HTML 5 is a welcome fix to the mess created by cross-browser CSS.
If people have troubling accepting that due to emotional immaturity (see: fanboism, brand loyalty, fanaticism) I can only suggest that this is the reason for Slashdot's continued reliance on meta-moderation.
Good points and I'm glad to see this get the discussion it merits. Backward-engineering the IE display model is a little bit tedious, but not rocket science; the Opera guys did it very quickly and accurately. There are many things I would like to blame MS for, but I'd like to note that Netscape was far from error-free, and at the time, IE was a breath of fresh air, although that's hard to believe. I'm still not enamored of any browser, although Opera is the best I've found. None are really GREAT pieces of software in the way that, say, Lightspeed C for the Mac was in its day, or ProTERM on the Apple//e, or TextPad on a modern Windows machine.
This is progress, because it's based more on reality than on the usual spacy navel-gazing that defines our standards.
After Mosaic faded out, Netscape was the dominant browser, but around 1997 it fell behind in implementing new features. Because it was more stable (!) and did allow for newer features that weren't in the "official HTML playbook" but were demanded by consumers, Microsoft IE took over as the dominant browser. This was not least of all because those of us earning a living making web pages needed to implement these new features demanded by our customers, and Netscape tried to thwart us, being every bit as controlling as Microsoft is reputed to be. They would not implement necessary innovations in layout and media presentation, and their browser was flaky, so everyone and their dog shifted to IE.
IE took over and "ad hoc" implemented what it could and what corporate politics allowed. It was far from perfect but it was better than any other option. Some years later, after IE had gained dominance, a small team brought us Firefox. This new browser tried to rewrite history by claiming it was the guardian of the "one true standard," the Word of the W3C, et al. It seems deliberately designed to ignore the changes in the world of designing web pages brought about by six years of IE dominance.
The result is a cross-browser coding disaster, and as a web developer of 15 years' experience, I blame Firefox more than IE. Both sides have their own model, and IE can't change, because it must uphold its backward compatibility. Firefox, on the other hand, is a completely incompatible standard that reflects W3C standards written after IE gained market dominance, in some cases. It is needlessly combative and in my view, destructive to those who make pages and the consumer. (Opera, on the other hand, has a saner view: it views IE 5-6 as a de facto standard and adapts, a striking maturity the FireFox developers should find intriguing).
HTML 5 is a chance for both sides to fix their sites on something productive. We can for once develop the standard before the browser, and make it work cross-platform, saving web developers years of frustrating and most of all BORING xbrowser code fixes. Also, we can finally admit to each other that while CSS is neat, the original HTML model made more sense for developers and is still more stable than CSS.
That's my statement, and I'm sticking by it, after being a Gopher administrator, FTP publisher, early Web site creator/server admin and independently employed Website creator for fifteen years.
If you can't trust your government, no amount of amendments, laws and regulatory oversight committees will save you. (Hint: I'm not saying to trust the government.)
You pay to be alive in this world. You pay for your housing. You pay for electricity. You pay for amorphous, ambiguous licenses like insurance and taxes, without seeing any real benefit unless disaster strikes. You pay for internet access. As a result, the consumer is skittish about anything free, presupposing that somewhere along the line, something was stolen (some would argue that since F/OSS is often clone software of major packages, IP was stolen, but as of yet that's not a legal distinction). What the consumer needs is an article on pcworld.com re-assuring them that no theft has happened in the reverse engineering and creation of codecs.
This is a hard one for non-native English speakers, because "lose" is pronounced so bizarrely it sounds like it needs two Os. However, "loose" is how we describe poor security, and "lose" is what happens when I try to play one of these newfangled video games. FYI, FWIW.
Last time I checked, their CPUs were erratic, their chipsets flaky and their reputation mainly derived from making cash register and micro-PC machines that were for one-app use and no manic power user antics. Has VIA improved?
We could either have one great product, or many competing small products. I think the main reason people start distros is to want to "own" some innovation or another. As a result, Linux remains a confusing minefield to the average user. Maybe it's time that F/OSS get what it wanted in Linus, a King, who can then divide between the worthy and the worthless and get the consumer a single answer.
Projects with unclear goals, and unclear measurements for success, tend toward failure. Unfortunately, committees tend to design exclusively these, because being vague is how you keep your job. In case a project fails, describe it vaguely, so you can blame someone else and move on. This motif is repeated through human society, even politics. Who's to say the Iraq war wasn't one of those 31% of scope-creep, vague-goal projects?
Slashdot Mirror
This was one of the reasons older offices had printer rooms. Smell, noise, dust and printing mistakes stayed out of sight. I wish more people did this now, because these printers while greatly improved are still smelly, noisy, dusty, greasy and prone to spit out bad jokes, spam, misplaced personal data and "best of" Slashdot trolls, at least in this office.
It's a sad but iron fact of life that market viability and not the quality of the end product defines what lives and what ends up with the Amiga and other good ideas in the storeroom of history. This doesn't mean I like it. In fact, I'd like to live in a society where superior engineering was accepted over superior marketing. Any ideas? Will move, if there's even dialup internet access.
Replacement hood emblems are really expensive, and it didn't say they would be in the sales pamphlet.
Emotions are part of human life. Most business and email communication is too starchy now for emotion, which wasn't always the case, if you look at how clear letters from 100 years ago were. Most people are also emotionally easily inflamed, and so we're all afraid that others are flaring up or running off to cry over their Wellbutrin. We need emotions for online communication and yes, they're overused, but until we find a better way to communicate "mood" or "emotion" email, IM, blogs and forums will be dependent upon the icky little emoticons we've come to loathe.
I'm glad they decided to stand up for their students. College is (like it or not) partially a parent-replacement, and a good parent tries to discipline their kids before handing them over to the legal system for pirating a few bucks worth of thoughtless major label tunes. I am much more likely to send my kid to University of Kansas now!
I'm surprised it took them this long. If they can look into what packets are being sent, they're going to sort them according to desirability, which is defined in the context of their bottom line profits. That is fair play under capitalism, although I think most of it find it disturbing, but then again, we don't have to see the havoc caused by abject morons downloading petabytes of pornography every night while updating their myspace pages with another 400 youtube videos.
Finally, someone tells what web developers have known for years: optimizing the site is not a matter of splitting your content into as many images as possible over an enterprise app, but good clean design and code.
For years, as a web designer, every time I got ready to deploy I encountered some nitwit who would say, "You're going to break up that giant image, aren't you? We can put it on nine servers!" -- creating organizational havoc, a completely unmanageable asset mess of a project, and driving everyone nuts. The Souders-Yahoo approach is different. He suggests the obvious, which is have fewer page elements, stick them into the HTML code if possible, and trim that ragged mess of Java and CSS.
Also, as a technical writer, I'm impressed whenever someone gets paid to write down the obvious.
Microsoft designs software like GM builds cars: for the average person, which is defined by having average needs. For checking email, web surfing, and using Quicken, Windows is the better product. For those with either far broader needs, or much more specialized ones, there's Linux or FreeBSD. However, Kolivas makes a good point: Linux has not adapted to the desktop paradigm and so alienates many potential users with its somewhat doctrinaire requirement that they learn entirely new ways of doing common tasks.
XP is a good, level building block that's safe for almost everyone (if they run Opera as their browser, haha). Vista's the next generation. We don't need another Windows; we need better versions of the windowses we already have. But definitely put Julie Larsen-Green on the interface, because the mishmash of PARC and X-Windows has grown old already!
Roger Waters was born on Sept. 6, 1944. According to this Pink Floyd FAQ this is an error, and the correct birth date is September 6, 1943, as confirmed by Mark Fenwick, Roger Waters' manager. That is the date found in the wikipedia article Roger Waters.
One dubious source swapped with another. I think I'll stick to Britannica, which has an excellent track record, better than Wikipedia's dubious history of plagiarism, forgery, slander and editorializing.
This means there's going to be a lot of people out there making stupid choices, whether this is one of them or not (disclaimer: I don't particularly dislike Vista, and have never had a reason to buy a Macintosh). At least they're not demanding a more user-friendly OS.
Surveys are useless. You take part of a target group, figure out what they're doing, and assume everyone else is the exact same way. Alexa is just as useless as those political opinion surveys where they call up 1,607 drunk housewives, basement dwellers, drug dealers and homeless pedophiles and ask who they'd vote for tomorrow. Junk data. GIGO
This reminds me of another company that made technically superior products that were so quirky, hard to use, weird-looking and goofy corporate that almost no one bought them even though the engineering was profound. Microsoft is the new Texas Instruments.
The UG is not a thing of the past. The problem with a LUG is that it's balkanized. Make it a cross between a Windows User Group, a Linux User Group, a general computer hobbyist club and a programmer's hobbyist group, like 2600 or PerlMongers, and you'll be able to draw in anyone who wants to use a computer. This in turn will benefit Linux as it will show it as a competitive and viable option that is easy to install and use. The specific UG is dead; long live the generalized UG.
I don't.
But as the articles you didn't read pointed out, they're not: they're hiring 10,000 drones because they're cheap and interchangable, not because they're smart!
Before you accuse others of something they didn't do, try understanding their point of view. It really works!
There is no shortage of IT workers, especially good ones, but companies make more profit off of young workers and foreign workers they can treat like slaves. See To H1-B or not to H-1B?. And in the minds of many experienced project managers, quality of worker's intelligence and experience are more important than having 10,000 interchangable drones as Google seems to want. See Smart and Gets Things Done.
I know that for some it is tempting to label things that hit loyalty centers as trolls, but look rationally at the situation: this post is not intended as a troll.
Its point is that HTML 5 is a welcome fix to the mess created by cross-browser CSS.
If people have troubling accepting that due to emotional immaturity (see: fanboism, brand loyalty, fanaticism) I can only suggest that this is the reason for Slashdot's continued reliance on meta-moderation.
Good points and I'm glad to see this get the discussion it merits. Backward-engineering the IE display model is a little bit tedious, but not rocket science; the Opera guys did it very quickly and accurately. There are many things I would like to blame MS for, but I'd like to note that Netscape was far from error-free, and at the time, IE was a breath of fresh air, although that's hard to believe. I'm still not enamored of any browser, although Opera is the best I've found. None are really GREAT pieces of software in the way that, say, Lightspeed C for the Mac was in its day, or ProTERM on the Apple //e, or TextPad on a modern Windows machine.
This is progress, because it's based more on reality than on the usual spacy navel-gazing that defines our standards.
After Mosaic faded out, Netscape was the dominant browser, but around 1997 it fell behind in implementing new features. Because it was more stable (!) and did allow for newer features that weren't in the "official HTML playbook" but were demanded by consumers, Microsoft IE took over as the dominant browser. This was not least of all because those of us earning a living making web pages needed to implement these new features demanded by our customers, and Netscape tried to thwart us, being every bit as controlling as Microsoft is reputed to be. They would not implement necessary innovations in layout and media presentation, and their browser was flaky, so everyone and their dog shifted to IE.
IE took over and "ad hoc" implemented what it could and what corporate politics allowed. It was far from perfect but it was better than any other option. Some years later, after IE had gained dominance, a small team brought us Firefox. This new browser tried to rewrite history by claiming it was the guardian of the "one true standard," the Word of the W3C, et al. It seems deliberately designed to ignore the changes in the world of designing web pages brought about by six years of IE dominance.
The result is a cross-browser coding disaster, and as a web developer of 15 years' experience, I blame Firefox more than IE. Both sides have their own model, and IE can't change, because it must uphold its backward compatibility. Firefox, on the other hand, is a completely incompatible standard that reflects W3C standards written after IE gained market dominance, in some cases. It is needlessly combative and in my view, destructive to those who make pages and the consumer. (Opera, on the other hand, has a saner view: it views IE 5-6 as a de facto standard and adapts, a striking maturity the FireFox developers should find intriguing).
HTML 5 is a chance for both sides to fix their sites on something productive. We can for once develop the standard before the browser, and make it work cross-platform, saving web developers years of frustrating and most of all BORING xbrowser code fixes. Also, we can finally admit to each other that while CSS is neat, the original HTML model made more sense for developers and is still more stable than CSS.
That's my statement, and I'm sticking by it, after being a Gopher administrator, FTP publisher, early Web site creator/server admin and independently employed Website creator for fifteen years.
If you can't trust your government, no amount of amendments, laws and regulatory oversight committees will save you. (Hint: I'm not saying to trust the government.)
You pay to be alive in this world. You pay for your housing. You pay for electricity. You pay for amorphous, ambiguous licenses like insurance and taxes, without seeing any real benefit unless disaster strikes. You pay for internet access. As a result, the consumer is skittish about anything free, presupposing that somewhere along the line, something was stolen (some would argue that since F/OSS is often clone software of major packages, IP was stolen, but as of yet that's not a legal distinction). What the consumer needs is an article on pcworld.com re-assuring them that no theft has happened in the reverse engineering and creation of codecs.
loose ground
This is a hard one for non-native English speakers, because "lose" is pronounced so bizarrely it sounds like it needs two Os. However, "loose" is how we describe poor security, and "lose" is what happens when I try to play one of these newfangled video games. FYI, FWIW.
Last time I checked, their CPUs were erratic, their chipsets flaky and their reputation mainly derived from making cash register and micro-PC machines that were for one-app use and no manic power user antics. Has VIA improved?
We could either have one great product, or many competing small products. I think the main reason people start distros is to want to "own" some innovation or another. As a result, Linux remains a confusing minefield to the average user. Maybe it's time that F/OSS get what it wanted in Linus, a King, who can then divide between the worthy and the worthless and get the consumer a single answer.
Projects with unclear goals, and unclear measurements for success, tend toward failure. Unfortunately, committees tend to design exclusively these, because being vague is how you keep your job. In case a project fails, describe it vaguely, so you can blame someone else and move on. This motif is repeated through human society, even politics. Who's to say the Iraq war wasn't one of those 31% of scope-creep, vague-goal projects?