Well if we're talking about UIDs, I think I still have the lowest one in this discussion. Not that this really means much.
Someone mentioned Slashdot to me in a primitive aggregation site I worked on for a while and then dropped due to lack of public interest. Maybe I should have stuck with it and thought it through more; on paper, I could have been the previous Digg:-).
Anyway, I gave Slashdot a lower grade than many of the other sites I featured, primarily I think due to the illiteracy of CmdrTaco's writing.
But there was a vitality to the site that kept me coming back, despite its literary deficiencies.
I don't think much has changed, other than the world getting bigger, which affects the number of duplicate submissions and the ability of editors to remember what they'd included before. It might be reasonable to say that human editors don't scale well as things get bigger; that was the problem with Yahoo! as a search engine.
I've looked at Digg, and to be honest I think the problem with it is that there is so much more in terms of articles. Slashdot edits down the raw article count without mercy, which i something I need when I'm busy.
So I like Slashdot, and the comments are still good, so here I am. Sure, I wish CmdrTaco would learn the King's English, but the articles are still pretty interesting... and that's why we're here, no?
While we're here, by the way, what was the article submitter's problem exactly? His writing is incomprehensible and people seem to have successfully rebutted the idea that this problem is what you would think it was when reading his piece.
I can tell you it's real because outsiders have driven it. See the various press reports on the site. Also, the Wikipedia article has more details.
What probably happens is that an inverter takes that DC and makes it into the AC power that runs the motors. This is relatively inexpensive and very efficient with the right equipment. I think much of the drivetrain was outsourced to AC Propulsion, which has designed other functioning electric cars, so it would be pretty shocking (bad pun, sorry) if it was a hoax. The reputation of several well-known names relies on this working.
Another company has executed a similar business plan but for a pickup-style vehicle, so I think it's fair to say the technology exists and is being pursued vigorously.
Really, the new office looks like a nice improvement, although I think those unrelenting huge swathes of blue would get tiring after a while. I wonder if the color scheme is configurable.
But I do ask, does a bulleted list qualify as fancy formatting in your book? I'd call multiple columns fancy formatting but a bulleted list seems like it should be firmly in the basics category. Heck, even HTML 1.0 could do them.
I've been there. It's imperfect, like all places. It's dirty and there are problems with poor food and most people live in miserable conditions.
The women are like women everywhere! Some exquisite, some cute, some ugly. But certainly as a paunchy 44 year old man who time has passed by in the US, the odds of me finding an attractive and loving wife is about 100 times plus better than it is in the US.
It's warm and sunny almost all the time, and they have beautiful tropical plants growing everywhere, and there are nice shopping malls and even good restaurants if you look hard enough.
You have to make compromises in life. Sure, I'd probably like the Florida Keys better. But it would take 10+k/month or more to live there well. If I could live something close to my dream for $2k, that sure looks like a steal, even accepting a lot of problems.
The Filipina attitude is so much better than the gloomy, sad-sack, depressed attitude I see in the US. People in the Philippines make a determined effort to be cheerful even if they are having problems. Here it's the non-stop gloom channel. I'm tired of the gloom channel. It seems like all of America's optimism and verve has faded away.
I'd like to find more of it and I've never seen more of it than in the Philippines, despite the country's many problems and intense poverty.
I loathe seasons. I just want one season, the one that's comfortable. That's why I really should be living in a tropical climate like Florida or the Philippines. My master plan is to get my web site working and then move to the Philippines where you can live well for about $2k a month and there is a huge surplus of young, attractive single women, which I don't think is true anywhere in the US.
It's interesting that you mention the friendly nature of Pittsburghers. It exists, but I have always been more an airy-fairy type than a down to earth type, and so having no fellow airy-fairy types isn't conducive to happiness.
More to the point, I finally found a neighborhood in Los Angeles that's just as you describe Pittsburgh neighborhoods. It's Woodland Hills, South of the Boulevard, in the hills. I knew several of my neighbors and they were all fantastic. I think in general that in Los Angeles, the hills are the place to be. You get a beautiful natural setting and people really pull for each other there. I think it might have to do with some of the hazards (fires, mudslides, etc) that we all face, or just from the fact that we took a special effort to live in a place that's beautiful.
Of course my house cost $428k and would sell for about $550k today. Unfortunately, most of my profit on it got eaten by termites and real estate commissions:-(. I lost my job and had to leave; my best friend's a Pittsburgher and he got me a job here, thus the move.
If it hadn't been for that, I would have been happy staying in Woodland Hills forever, or at least until I could afford Malibu. To give you some perspective, at the time I bought my house for $428k, a drab house in the flats was selling for $349k. By any standard, what I paid was a bargain even though it was 1000 square feet and as you say would probably rent in Pittsburgh for $350 a month.
Redondo Beach is a great place. I don't know how anyone could possibly prefer Pittsburgh to having the beauty of the beach, warm weather, great shopping, etc.
I'm curious as to what you mean by "a dynamic change" - what aspects of it did you find better than LA? I find it so un-dynamic it's not even funny.
I'm stuck here for a few more months still, so I'd love to find something better about the place:-(.
I'm not sure why Pittsburgh makes the list. I'm here and I would rank quality of life as very poor.
* It's a very bad city for singles - most people are married couples or students, and of course the students mate with other students. It's an exceptionally lonely place if you are not in one of the above groups, and of course geeks generally are not.
* Most Pittsburgh residents who are not students or professors in the university are highly conservative in a "hidebound, stick in the mud", anti-intellectual kind of way. This is the kind of place where innovation is treated with suspicion.
* The winter isn't all that cold compared to the rest of the East Coast, but it's much colder than Los Angeles, drab and extremely depressing. Living here on the whole is a mild depressant and little about the place is capable of remedying that problem.
* The dreadful road network will take you anywhere you want to go, slowly. The two-lane winding roads and hills look cool, especially in the summer, but they make navigation confusing and slow, and one heavy truck ahead of you can ruin your whole trip. A sporty car is rewarding to drive here; don't get a pickup truck like the locals do.
* An unusually large percentage of food establishments are of exceptionally poor quality. Pizza is vile. There are a couple of great places like Pan Asia on Route 51 and Cambodi-can and Thai me up on the Southside. But most food is all but inedible. The locals are not discriminating and will not be reliable guides in finding the best places. You have to find them yourself.
* Real estate prices are reasonable, but your house won't be anything special. Tract homes in California, especially on the hills, are so superior to tract homes here, whether on the hills or not, that the comparison is embarassing. Homes were designed in a practical, no-nonsense way that ignored the mamby-pamby virtues of orienting houses for views or even putting in non-puny windows.
* Real estate taxes are very high. A $500,000 house in California has lower taxes than a $100,000 house in Pittsburgh. Buyer beware, and note that there are several different kinds of taxes (school tax, township tax, etc, etc).
Google probably wanted to find an academically sound place with low real estate prices. That's here. But it's a lousy place to live. I'm still working on my formula to escape, and I can only recommend, in the strongest possible terms, that you not move here. You'll be as miserable as I am, and you don't want that.
D
(To be fair, I loathe cold weather [temperature under 65degF during winter] with a passion and that's a huge strike against this place for me.)
Re:Not the best but "good enough"
on
Premiere Back on Mac
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The price of that bundle is pretty much giving away Premiere Pro when you consider the cost of Photoshop, After Effects and the other programs in the bundle. From a marketing point of view, it was important for them to get Premiere back to the Mac, since without that there is no "all inclusive" bundle.
In the Mac world, the Premiere brand name may have been mortally wounded by version 4.2, which was out forever and was excruciatingly bad - the interface was awful, it had horrifying sound sync problems, etc. Most Apple premiere users dumped the Adobe product like the trash it was and moved to Final Cut as soon as it was introduced. To give you an idea of how awful Premiere was, it cost $699 and Final Cut was $999. Nobody bought the $699 program; everyone saved their pennies and paid $999 for FCP.
Usually the cheap version of anything has its defenders; not with Premiere versus Final Cut.
In the Windows world at that time there were few good or even decent choices, so Premiere, bad as it was, soldiered on until Premiere Pro. Of course this explains why video editors are heavily tilted towards Macs. The competition was so abysmal in the Windows world that a very high percentage of editors switched.
(Of course the big exception is Avid, but that's a completely different universe from Premiere/FCP. Avid has a vertical cliff face learning curve and only those who have its keystrokes etched in their fingers are going to use it.)
So now Adobe wants to be back in the game but I doubt that many FCP editors will consider returning. But they will enjoy the bundle with After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator and a whole bunch of other goodies anyway, since the pro bundle is very close in price to the Pro version of AE alone.
So the bundle will sell. Whether people will use Premiere is another matter.
Last time I looked at OpenOffice, it was even uglier than Word!
Oops.
I'm afraid that brand is forever tarnished from an effort to use it instead of Word at an ex-employer's some years back. It couldn't even read fairly simply formatted Word documents successfuly. They looked awful, and immediate outrage among all my internal customers caused me to switch back immediately:-(.
It's probably at least somewhat better by now, but I have a long memory about this sort of thing.
You know, that's really pretty clever. I like it a lot.
Pages uses Cocoa text boxes and lets me use Emacs text editing keyboard shortcuts to edit text. That leaves me pretty much wedded to Cocoa applications. So I love Safari and hate FireFox. Well, I hated FireFox 1.5. FireFox 2.0 seems to have restored them (albiet not by using the prettier Cocoa widgets). Hurrah!
But I digress, since I doubt that Word is going to follow suit. Unless they do, I'm always going to prefer editing in pages, which also has a really nice and clean stylesheet system.
The gene pool is not supplied by the people who succeed financially, who buy that lovely $1,500,000 house in Woodside or glorious $3,500,000 beach cottage in Newport Beach. People like that have between one and two kids, trending towards one. Or even zero.
They are no match for the deeply conservative, creationist couple in the Midwest that struggles to get by with a $96,000 house, drives a rusty pickup instead of a gleaming Tesla roadster and has six children.
It's the people who have six kids who determine the gene pool. And they are the "resistant to change" types, not the "embrace change" types. In fact, many of the "embrace change" types have embraced the "zero population growth" idea halfway to extinction.
That might have been a bit too deep for this discussion, but I think it's something worth thinking about when you start talking about gene pools. The people you think are winning may in fact be losing. Big-time.
I'll bet a lot more Slashdotters are Tesla Roadster/Woodside house types than five children types. I know I am.
Anyway, on the much more trivial (but on topic) subject of the ribbon, I suspect this will at least somewhat reduce the use of keyboard shortcuts because they are not "in your face". At the same time, I remember that Word version 5.5 had a very easy to use style/formatting system and version 6 made it about double the complexity without any significant benefit. A return to a simpler style sheet system that's less confusing will help virtually everyone using Word.
I just hope they fix the crummy font rendering on the Mac. My favorite font (Optima) looks terrible in Word, glorious on Pages. Guess which word processor I use.
There are a lot of people who have extreme difficulty with change. This is especially true of people who live outside of California and a handful of other tech-oriented communities, because people who love change tend to gravitate towards people like them who live in those places.
I moved to Pittsburgh from Caifornia for work reasons and although the work reasons have worked out well, observing a culture so resistant to change and new ideas has been a huge shock. So much so that I've been trying to figure out a good way to get out while saving my business interests since practically the day I got here.
I share this with you because I think almost everyone on Slashdot deeply underestimates the negative impact of change on real people. I think these people deserve more sympathy than they are getting here.
That being said, I never really liked menu interfaces, preferring something more like the ribbon/toolbar concept. However, I can see one interesting downside.
One of the advantages of the old menu interface was that the menu options have keyboard shortcuts next to them, making them relatively easy to learn.
Is there an equivaent to this on the ribbon? It seems almost entirely mouse dependent based on the pictures.
(As a Mac user I couldn't simply get the demo and try it out).
The problem is that people like "those horrid profiles" or they would not build them that way, and a huge cottage industry would not have been created based on them (i.e. freeweblayouts.net, pimpmyspace, etc).
If you consider how difficult it is to explain to people how to cut and paste from one place to another, you can appreciate how much effort people are wiling to go through to create one of those profiles.
I've created my own social networking site, and after a great deal of thought, I decided to support the myspace "standard" for style. My system gobbles up a myspace style and effectively translates it into my own style system. What I wanted to do was create a "happy medium" between myspace's anarchy and the greater professionalism of Web 2.0 sites, which all wind up looking alike.
I don't know how feasible interchange is between social networking sites in any event, since they have such a different idea of what a profile is. Try copying a myspace profile over to Tribe and I don't think you'd see a lot left of it over there. To enable export requires standardization, and I think standardization would be a bad thing for the creativity that lives in the space.
In other words, I'm somewhat against interoperability, not on monopoly grounds but on artistic ones. Each site should have its own individual feel and be able to create a unique environment. If we're just copying data between sites, then we lose that individuality and look completely alike. Differences between the sites are the only reasons to use more than one; I think if we elimiinate those differences, we're in trouble.
We are, of course, talking about people in the first world.
Although third worlders are more advanced than you think. There are plenty of TVs and DVD players even in very poor households. I remember going to a tin shack in the Philippines and seeing a TV and DVD player in a prominent position in the living room. There are plenty of places, even retail stores, where you can buy pirated DVDs cheap. I talked to a cable TV magnate - a very nice man - who told me that the content providers were blowing it because they didn't scale the prices of content to where it was being sold. That is, you can sell a DVD for $20 or cable service for $99 a month in the USA but in the Philippines people will pay $ 2, or $ 8, and it's a strain for him to get people to pay even that much.
There's also indoor plumbing. It may not be as clean as we see in the US, but it exists, and works.
Don't sell the third world short. It may surprise you.
I have to say that the universe of people who visit the FSF's site and don't know Vista exists has to be pretty small, if not non-existant.
I will give the Microsoft marketing machine sufficient credit to say that most people know Vista exists, even if they are not sure what it is or what it does.
I was talking to someone who wants to buy a new computer soon and when I started explaining that she should get a computer that was "Windows Vista Premium ready" and not just "Windows Vista capable", her eyes glazed over and you could tell she was having a hard time following me. Those names seem to sow more confusion than anything else. Surely "capable" means it should run all features? And premium ready, that sounds like it's ready for a subscription service or something.
I think she's going to stick with Windows XP.
That's a clear failure of Microsoft marketing in my book.
You are right. I did not express myself clearly, and I apologise for that.
Here's what I meant to say, broken down a little better.
* Sure, almost everyone buys/rents a movie or two every year. * But the fanatics, who buy/rent/go to a movie or two every month, or even every week, are maybe 10% of the population, and they amount to 80% or more of the profits. * If you take the top 1-2% of the total population, then, who used to buy half the movies and now just download them, you're at about 20% of their core customers, and that can really hurt.
So although 1-2% of the population is not a big percentage by number of people, it turns out to be a very high percentage of actual sales.
... because most people don't understand what the FSF cares about, and it's likely they never will.
For most people, you shove a DVD into a DVD player and if it works, that's all they need.
Most of the people who do care are on Slashdot, and so it's easy to think of it as a huge bunch of folks, but I'd say about 1% of the population uses file sharing networks and maybe 2% of the population actually sees the problems with DRM. Now, that's a huge number of people, and a large percentage of the number of people interested in owning music or movies, so it's important to both producers and consumers of entertainment. But it's never going to be the dominant issue for more than a tiny handful of people.
It's not enough to swing an election, so with politicla issues the RIAA has a huge advantage, and from what I can see, they use it ruthlessly.
I think the FSF did a very nice job with BadVista.org . The site's very well done. But I think they will mainly be preaching to the choir.
I think a lot of the reason is that it feels to us like Vista is a bad stumble and so we're enthusiastic about reading the bad news.
Also, there is a vocal minority of people who don't hate Microsoft who want to defend Vista.
This makes for lively discussions and good theater, and that's why people come here.
So have a seat, grab a bag of popcorn and enjoy.
(Personally I think almost no upgrades will be sold, but people will buy new computers with it at somewhat higher rates than normal, just because the purchases were postponed for Vista's sake, and people like getting the latest and greatest, be it ever do disappointing for most).
Wrong. I have a system on my desk with integrated graphics that was bought about 6 months ago. Entry-level 2.ghz Pentium IV. 80gb hard drive. The thing's lightning fast on XP. (Of course it helps that the fellow I borrowed it from never used it, and I only use it for compatibility testing, so it has no malware on it).
Vista's upgrade advisor laughs at it and says it's fated to run Vista Basic, forever. And that only if I upgrade the memory from 512mb to 1gb.
I did find this a little peculiar. I wonder where the information came from and whether it even has any foundation in truth.
The only time I've noticed this kind of giddy enthusiasm for new developments is at Apple rumor sites, and that's because Apple customers love Macs and the MacOS.
After the disaster that was Vista's development, how could you possibly believe in Vienna, anyway? I think it will be a long, long time, if ever, before Microsoft tries taking a clean sheet approach to development.
Most Apple fans are more than happy to give them $129 every year or so to upgrade. They understand software costs money to make and in return they get good support, a nice package and so on.
Steve Jobs is not a stupid man. He knows many of these fans wouldn't upgrade or wouldn't buy the software if it had irritating protections built onto it. Furthermore, they would become less fannish then, and he surely doesn't want that.
What this means is that MacOS X is only pirated by those who can't afford $129. He's not going to sell to those people anyway, so he really doesn't care that much. If he lets them upgrade, at least they'll keep buying his hardware, which is what he REALLY cares about.
Since Steve's biggest strength is customers who love the company, I really don't think he's going to do product activation. It's really not in his interest.
You are ignoring, or perhaps you have simply forgotten, the fact that the new Zune uses its own DRM and will not operate under the old "open" DRM standard. Songs bought on the old PlaysForSure standard will not work on the Zune, and I have to assume (although I don't think it's stated anywhere) that songs bought in Zune Marketplace wil not work under PlaysForSure.
I think it's fair to say that Apple DRM is clean and the conditions are the same universally. Apple recognized that was what customers needed in order to accept DRM, and the Microsoft model of giving content providers total control over usage rights was not going to work.
Microsoft's DRM, on the other hand, lets content providers specify usage rights, meaning you have to read the fine print on every song you purchase to make sure you can use it as you wish.
Certainly the differences between Apple and Microsoft's DRM indicate that there is wiggle room in the negotiations with content providers for rights, and that Steve Jobs has worked very hard to minimize the downside of DRM for consumers.
Now, Steve may be forced to implement these restrictions on Blu-Ray playback because they are mandated by the Blu-Ray standard itself. I don't think it makes sense to blame him or Apple for conditions that are being imposed from outside.
But I'm not sure if I would be as alarmed by this as others have been.
The original article about the restrictions in Vista made it clear that they would not apply unless protected content was in the computer. So if you want to see your screen as it should be seen, simply refrain from using your computer with a Blu-Ray DVD in it. I think the major consequence of this will be that people will not use their computers as DVD players, or at least they will not use their computer for any other function while it is playing a protected DVD.
Since most people don't try to do other things while watching movies on their computer, I'm not sure if this restriction is that onerous for most people.
It's also worth noting that this might not have been the wisest course of action on the part of the content companies. It seems to me that the most likely result of this content protection is to ensure that most people will not purchase Blu-Ray DVDs. I know that I would not. If the standard fails to sell videos, the protection scheme may be the culprit and future standards will have to change to no DRM or at least adopt a less burdensome system.
When I tried the various competing smartphones, I liked the Blackberry the best. If I were buying one today, I think I'd go for the Blackberry Pearl, although I'd have to test its keyboard again to make sure. I thought that phone was just beautifully designed. Pity the ssh implementation is $95. Ouch.
But as it is, I'm going to wait for the iPhone, assuming it's announced soon, and then compare. I would be pretty surprised if I would wind up with the Pearl after seeing the iPhone, but of course time will tell.
I think that if it's disclosed, and the blogger continues to write, his bias will become pretty clear and whatever change he makes will be clear too.
Many, many years ago, I ran an anti-Microsoft web site and Microsoft contacted me and sent me Windows NT 4.0. It was less bad than Windows95, but it didn't change my opinion and my site remained as it was. They just told me that they wanted me to have their latest stuff, so that I could write honestly about it. I respeted that.
Truthfully, I think Microsoft did this to solve a curious little problem. Most bloggers aren't rich, and they're going to try and run Windows Vista on a computer that can barely run XP. So give them a gift, so they can run Vista the way it was meant to be run.
To amplify this a bit, I have a Windows PC right next to my PowerBook that's less than six months old. I ran the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor on it and it sort of wimpered and slunk off with a "Vista Basic once you upgrade it to 1GB RAM from 512MB" recommendation. It's blazing fast running XP, with a 2.8ghz Pentium IV. An Apple computer of the same vintage would have no trouble at all running Tiger or Leopard.
I think most bloggers are not going to be influenced by the gifts per se, but they will be nicer about Vista since they have a machine on which it will run well, which they might well otherwise not be able to obtain.
I'm not sure if that's good or bad, fair or unfair. After all, most people on the ground nowadays are buying $799 laptops that do not have a prayer of running Vista. But truthfully, I think there's enough information about Vista's performance out there for people to be able to make up their own minds, and so Microsoft's efforts will have little genuine impact.
I'm glad the bloggers will at least get some cool free stuff. We all like that. It's a pity that Apple's legendary customer loyalty makes steps like this entirely superflurous for the likes of me who would not mind a free MacBook Pro at all:-).
Slashdot Mirror
Well if we're talking about UIDs, I think I still have the lowest one in this discussion. Not that this really means much.
:-).
... and that's why we're here, no?
Someone mentioned Slashdot to me in a primitive aggregation site I worked on for a while and then dropped due to lack of public interest. Maybe I should have stuck with it and thought it through more; on paper, I could have been the previous Digg
Anyway, I gave Slashdot a lower grade than many of the other sites I featured, primarily I think due to the illiteracy of CmdrTaco's writing.
But there was a vitality to the site that kept me coming back, despite its literary deficiencies.
I don't think much has changed, other than the world getting bigger, which affects the number of duplicate submissions and the ability of editors to remember what they'd included before. It might be reasonable to say that human editors don't scale well as things get bigger; that was the problem with Yahoo! as a search engine.
I've looked at Digg, and to be honest I think the problem with it is that there is so much more in terms of articles. Slashdot edits down the raw article count without mercy, which i something I need when I'm busy.
So I like Slashdot, and the comments are still good, so here I am. Sure, I wish CmdrTaco would learn the King's English, but the articles are still pretty interesting
While we're here, by the way, what was the article submitter's problem exactly? His writing is incomprehensible and people seem to have successfully rebutted the idea that this problem is what you would think it was when reading his piece.
D
I can tell you it's real because outsiders have driven it. See the various press reports on the site. Also, the Wikipedia article has more details.
What probably happens is that an inverter takes that DC and makes it into the AC power that runs the motors. This is relatively inexpensive and very efficient with the right equipment. I think much of the drivetrain was outsourced to AC Propulsion, which has designed other functioning electric cars, so it would be pretty shocking (bad pun, sorry) if it was a hoax. The reputation of several well-known names relies on this working.
Another company has executed a similar business plan but for a pickup-style vehicle, so I think it's fair to say the technology exists and is being pursued vigorously.
Hope that helps.
D
Really, the new office looks like a nice improvement, although I think those unrelenting huge swathes of blue would get tiring after a while. I wonder if the color scheme is configurable.
But I do ask, does a bulleted list qualify as fancy formatting in your book? I'd call multiple columns fancy formatting but a bulleted list seems like it should be firmly in the basics category. Heck, even HTML 1.0 could do them.
D
I've been there. It's imperfect, like all places. It's dirty and there are problems with poor food and most people live in miserable conditions.
The women are like women everywhere! Some exquisite, some cute, some ugly. But certainly as a paunchy 44 year old man who time has passed by in the US, the odds of me finding an attractive and loving wife is about 100 times plus better than it is in the US.
It's warm and sunny almost all the time, and they have beautiful tropical plants growing everywhere, and there are nice shopping malls and even good restaurants if you look hard enough.
You have to make compromises in life. Sure, I'd probably like the Florida Keys better. But it would take 10+k/month or more to live there well. If I could live something close to my dream for $2k, that sure looks like a steal, even accepting a lot of problems.
The Filipina attitude is so much better than the gloomy, sad-sack, depressed attitude I see in the US. People in the Philippines make a determined effort to be cheerful even if they are having problems. Here it's the non-stop gloom channel. I'm tired of the gloom channel. It seems like all of America's optimism and verve has faded away.
I'd like to find more of it and I've never seen more of it than in the Philippines, despite the country's many problems and intense poverty.
D
I loathe seasons. I just want one season, the one that's comfortable. That's why I really should be living in a tropical climate like Florida or the Philippines. My master plan is to get my web site working and then move to the Philippines where you can live well for about $2k a month and there is a huge surplus of young, attractive single women, which I don't think is true anywhere in the US.
:-(. I lost my job and had to leave; my best friend's a Pittsburgher and he got me a job here, thus the move.
It's interesting that you mention the friendly nature of Pittsburghers. It exists, but I have always been more an airy-fairy type than a down to earth type, and so having no fellow airy-fairy types isn't conducive to happiness.
More to the point, I finally found a neighborhood in Los Angeles that's just as you describe Pittsburgh neighborhoods. It's Woodland Hills, South of the Boulevard, in the hills. I knew several of my neighbors and they were all fantastic. I think in general that in Los Angeles, the hills are the place to be. You get a beautiful natural setting and people really pull for each other there. I think it might have to do with some of the hazards (fires, mudslides, etc) that we all face, or just from the fact that we took a special effort to live in a place that's beautiful.
Of course my house cost $428k and would sell for about $550k today. Unfortunately, most of my profit on it got eaten by termites and real estate commissions
If it hadn't been for that, I would have been happy staying in Woodland Hills forever, or at least until I could afford Malibu. To give you some perspective, at the time I bought my house for $428k, a drab house in the flats was selling for $349k. By any standard, what I paid was a bargain even though it was 1000 square feet and as you say would probably rent in Pittsburgh for $350 a month.
D
Redondo Beach is a great place. I don't know how anyone could possibly prefer Pittsburgh to having the beauty of the beach, warm weather, great shopping, etc.
:-(.
I'm curious as to what you mean by "a dynamic change" - what aspects of it did you find better than LA? I find it so un-dynamic it's not even funny.
I'm stuck here for a few more months still, so I'd love to find something better about the place
D
I'm not sure why Pittsburgh makes the list. I'm here and I would rank quality of life as very poor.
* It's a very bad city for singles - most people are married couples or students, and of course the students mate with other students. It's an exceptionally lonely place if you are not in one of the above groups, and of course geeks generally are not.
* Most Pittsburgh residents who are not students or professors in the university are highly conservative in a "hidebound, stick in the mud", anti-intellectual kind of way. This is the kind of place where innovation is treated with suspicion.
* The winter isn't all that cold compared to the rest of the East Coast, but it's much colder than Los Angeles, drab and extremely depressing. Living here on the whole is a mild depressant and little about the place is capable of remedying that problem.
* The dreadful road network will take you anywhere you want to go, slowly. The two-lane winding roads and hills look cool, especially in the summer, but they make navigation confusing and slow, and one heavy truck ahead of you can ruin your whole trip. A sporty car is rewarding to drive here; don't get a pickup truck like the locals do.
* An unusually large percentage of food establishments are of exceptionally poor quality. Pizza is vile. There are a couple of great places like Pan Asia on Route 51 and Cambodi-can and Thai me up on the Southside. But most food is all but inedible. The locals are not discriminating and will not be reliable guides in finding the best places. You have to find them yourself.
* Real estate prices are reasonable, but your house won't be anything special. Tract homes in California, especially on the hills, are so superior to tract homes here, whether on the hills or not, that the comparison is embarassing. Homes were designed in a practical, no-nonsense way that ignored the mamby-pamby virtues of orienting houses for views or even putting in non-puny windows.
* Real estate taxes are very high. A $500,000 house in California has lower taxes than a $100,000 house in Pittsburgh. Buyer beware, and note that there are several different kinds of taxes (school tax, township tax, etc, etc).
Google probably wanted to find an academically sound place with low real estate prices. That's here. But it's a lousy place to live. I'm still working on my formula to escape, and I can only recommend, in the strongest possible terms, that you not move here. You'll be as miserable as I am, and you don't want that.
D
(To be fair, I loathe cold weather [temperature under 65degF during winter] with a passion and that's a huge strike against this place for me.)
The price of that bundle is pretty much giving away Premiere Pro when you consider the cost of Photoshop, After Effects and the other programs in the bundle. From a marketing point of view, it was important for them to get Premiere back to the Mac, since without that there is no "all inclusive" bundle.
In the Mac world, the Premiere brand name may have been mortally wounded by version 4.2, which was out forever and was excruciatingly bad - the interface was awful, it had horrifying sound sync problems, etc. Most Apple premiere users dumped the Adobe product like the trash it was and moved to Final Cut as soon as it was introduced. To give you an idea of how awful Premiere was, it cost $699 and Final Cut was $999. Nobody bought the $699 program; everyone saved their pennies and paid $999 for FCP.
Usually the cheap version of anything has its defenders; not with Premiere versus Final Cut.
In the Windows world at that time there were few good or even decent choices, so Premiere, bad as it was, soldiered on until Premiere Pro. Of course this explains why video editors are heavily tilted towards Macs. The competition was so abysmal in the Windows world that a very high percentage of editors switched.
(Of course the big exception is Avid, but that's a completely different universe from Premiere/FCP. Avid has a vertical cliff face learning curve and only those who have its keystrokes etched in their fingers are going to use it.)
So now Adobe wants to be back in the game but I doubt that many FCP editors will consider returning. But they will enjoy the bundle with After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator and a whole bunch of other goodies anyway, since the pro bundle is very close in price to the Pro version of AE alone.
So the bundle will sell. Whether people will use Premiere is another matter.
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Last time I looked at OpenOffice, it was even uglier than Word!
:-(.
Oops.
I'm afraid that brand is forever tarnished from an effort to use it instead of Word at an ex-employer's some years back. It couldn't even read fairly simply formatted Word documents successfuly. They looked awful, and immediate outrage among all my internal customers caused me to switch back immediately
It's probably at least somewhat better by now, but I have a long memory about this sort of thing.
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You know, that's really pretty clever. I like it a lot.
Pages uses Cocoa text boxes and lets me use Emacs text editing keyboard shortcuts to edit text. That leaves me pretty much wedded to Cocoa applications. So I love Safari and hate FireFox. Well, I hated FireFox 1.5. FireFox 2.0 seems to have restored them (albiet not by using the prettier Cocoa widgets). Hurrah!
But I digress, since I doubt that Word is going to follow suit. Unless they do, I'm always going to prefer editing in pages, which also has a really nice and clean stylesheet system.
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Ah, but you may be wrong about this!
The gene pool is not supplied by the people who succeed financially, who buy that lovely $1,500,000 house in Woodside or glorious $3,500,000 beach cottage in Newport Beach. People like that have between one and two kids, trending towards one. Or even zero.
They are no match for the deeply conservative, creationist couple in the Midwest that struggles to get by with a $96,000 house, drives a rusty pickup instead of a gleaming Tesla roadster and has six children.
It's the people who have six kids who determine the gene pool. And they are the "resistant to change" types, not the "embrace change" types. In fact, many of the "embrace change" types have embraced the "zero population growth" idea halfway to extinction.
That might have been a bit too deep for this discussion, but I think it's something worth thinking about when you start talking about gene pools. The people you think are winning may in fact be losing. Big-time.
I'll bet a lot more Slashdotters are Tesla Roadster/Woodside house types than five children types. I know I am.
Anyway, on the much more trivial (but on topic) subject of the ribbon, I suspect this will at least somewhat reduce the use of keyboard shortcuts because they are not "in your face". At the same time, I remember that Word version 5.5 had a very easy to use style/formatting system and version 6 made it about double the complexity without any significant benefit. A return to a simpler style sheet system that's less confusing will help virtually everyone using Word.
I just hope they fix the crummy font rendering on the Mac. My favorite font (Optima) looks terrible in Word, glorious on Pages. Guess which word processor I use.
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There are a lot of people who have extreme difficulty with change. This is especially true of people who live outside of California and a handful of other tech-oriented communities, because people who love change tend to gravitate towards people like them who live in those places.
I moved to Pittsburgh from Caifornia for work reasons and although the work reasons have worked out well, observing a culture so resistant to change and new ideas has been a huge shock. So much so that I've been trying to figure out a good way to get out while saving my business interests since practically the day I got here.
I share this with you because I think almost everyone on Slashdot deeply underestimates the negative impact of change on real people. I think these people deserve more sympathy than they are getting here.
That being said, I never really liked menu interfaces, preferring something more like the ribbon/toolbar concept. However, I can see one interesting downside.
One of the advantages of the old menu interface was that the menu options have keyboard shortcuts next to them, making them relatively easy to learn.
Is there an equivaent to this on the ribbon? It seems almost entirely mouse dependent based on the pictures.
(As a Mac user I couldn't simply get the demo and try it out).
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The problem is that people like "those horrid profiles" or they would not build them that way, and a huge cottage industry would not have been created based on them (i.e. freeweblayouts.net, pimpmyspace, etc).
If you consider how difficult it is to explain to people how to cut and paste from one place to another, you can appreciate how much effort people are wiling to go through to create one of those profiles.
I've created my own social networking site, and after a great deal of thought, I decided to support the myspace "standard" for style. My system gobbles up a myspace style and effectively translates it into my own style system. What I wanted to do was create a "happy medium" between myspace's anarchy and the greater professionalism of Web 2.0 sites, which all wind up looking alike.
I don't know how feasible interchange is between social networking sites in any event, since they have such a different idea of what a profile is. Try copying a myspace profile over to Tribe and I don't think you'd see a lot left of it over there. To enable export requires standardization, and I think standardization would be a bad thing for the creativity that lives in the space.
In other words, I'm somewhat against interoperability, not on monopoly grounds but on artistic ones. Each site should have its own individual feel and be able to create a unique environment. If we're just copying data between sites, then we lose that individuality and look completely alike. Differences between the sites are the only reasons to use more than one; I think if we elimiinate those differences, we're in trouble.
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We are, of course, talking about people in the first world.
Although third worlders are more advanced than you think. There are plenty of TVs and DVD players even in very poor households. I remember going to a tin shack in the Philippines and seeing a TV and DVD player in a prominent position in the living room. There are plenty of places, even retail stores, where you can buy pirated DVDs cheap. I talked to a cable TV magnate - a very nice man - who told me that the content providers were blowing it because they didn't scale the prices of content to where it was being sold. That is, you can sell a DVD for $20 or cable service for $99 a month in the USA but in the Philippines people will pay $ 2, or $ 8, and it's a strain for him to get people to pay even that much.
There's also indoor plumbing. It may not be as clean as we see in the US, but it exists, and works.
Don't sell the third world short. It may surprise you.
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I have to say that the universe of people who visit the FSF's site and don't know Vista exists has to be pretty small, if not non-existant.
I will give the Microsoft marketing machine sufficient credit to say that most people know Vista exists, even if they are not sure what it is or what it does.
I was talking to someone who wants to buy a new computer soon and when I started explaining that she should get a computer that was "Windows Vista Premium ready" and not just "Windows Vista capable", her eyes glazed over and you could tell she was having a hard time following me. Those names seem to sow more confusion than anything else. Surely "capable" means it should run all features? And premium ready, that sounds like it's ready for a subscription service or something.
I think she's going to stick with Windows XP.
That's a clear failure of Microsoft marketing in my book.
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You are right. I did not express myself clearly, and I apologise for that.
Here's what I meant to say, broken down a little better.
* Sure, almost everyone buys/rents a movie or two every year.
* But the fanatics, who buy/rent/go to a movie or two every month, or even every week, are maybe 10% of the population, and they amount to 80% or more of the profits.
* If you take the top 1-2% of the total population, then, who used to buy half the movies and now just download them, you're at about 20% of their core customers, and that can really hurt.
So although 1-2% of the population is not a big percentage by number of people, it turns out to be a very high percentage of actual sales.
Did that make help?
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... because most people don't understand what the FSF cares about, and it's likely they never will.
For most people, you shove a DVD into a DVD player and if it works, that's all they need.
Most of the people who do care are on Slashdot, and so it's easy to think of it as a huge bunch of folks, but I'd say about 1% of the population uses file sharing networks and maybe 2% of the population actually sees the problems with DRM. Now, that's a huge number of people, and a large percentage of the number of people interested in owning music or movies, so it's important to both producers and consumers of entertainment. But it's never going to be the dominant issue for more than a tiny handful of people.
It's not enough to swing an election, so with politicla issues the RIAA has a huge advantage, and from what I can see, they use it ruthlessly.
I think the FSF did a very nice job with BadVista.org . The site's very well done. But I think they will mainly be preaching to the choir.
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I think a lot of the reason is that it feels to us like Vista is a bad stumble and so we're enthusiastic about reading the bad news.
Also, there is a vocal minority of people who don't hate Microsoft who want to defend Vista.
This makes for lively discussions and good theater, and that's why people come here.
So have a seat, grab a bag of popcorn and enjoy.
(Personally I think almost no upgrades will be sold, but people will buy new computers with it at somewhat higher rates than normal, just because the purchases were postponed for Vista's sake, and people like getting the latest and greatest, be it ever do disappointing for most).
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Wrong. I have a system on my desk with integrated graphics that was bought about 6 months ago. Entry-level 2.ghz Pentium IV. 80gb hard drive. The thing's lightning fast on XP. (Of course it helps that the fellow I borrowed it from never used it, and I only use it for compatibility testing, so it has no malware on it).
Vista's upgrade advisor laughs at it and says it's fated to run Vista Basic, forever. And that only if I upgrade the memory from 512mb to 1gb.
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I did find this a little peculiar. I wonder where the information came from and whether it even has any foundation in truth.
The only time I've noticed this kind of giddy enthusiasm for new developments is at Apple rumor sites, and that's because Apple customers love Macs and the MacOS.
After the disaster that was Vista's development, how could you possibly believe in Vienna, anyway? I think it will be a long, long time, if ever, before Microsoft tries taking a clean sheet approach to development.
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It's really very simple.
Apple has fans.
Most Apple fans are more than happy to give them $129 every year or so to upgrade. They understand software costs money to make and in return they get good support, a nice package and so on.
Steve Jobs is not a stupid man. He knows many of these fans wouldn't upgrade or wouldn't buy the software if it had irritating protections built onto it. Furthermore, they would become less fannish then, and he surely doesn't want that.
What this means is that MacOS X is only pirated by those who can't afford $129. He's not going to sell to those people anyway, so he really doesn't care that much. If he lets them upgrade, at least they'll keep buying his hardware, which is what he REALLY cares about.
Since Steve's biggest strength is customers who love the company, I really don't think he's going to do product activation. It's really not in his interest.
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You are ignoring, or perhaps you have simply forgotten, the fact that the new Zune uses its own DRM and will not operate under the old "open" DRM standard. Songs bought on the old PlaysForSure standard will not work on the Zune, and I have to assume (although I don't think it's stated anywhere) that songs bought in Zune Marketplace wil not work under PlaysForSure.
I think it's fair to say that Apple DRM is clean and the conditions are the same universally. Apple recognized that was what customers needed in order to accept DRM, and the Microsoft model of giving content providers total control over usage rights was not going to work.
Microsoft's DRM, on the other hand, lets content providers specify usage rights, meaning you have to read the fine print on every song you purchase to make sure you can use it as you wish.
Certainly the differences between Apple and Microsoft's DRM indicate that there is wiggle room in the negotiations with content providers for rights, and that Steve Jobs has worked very hard to minimize the downside of DRM for consumers.
Now, Steve may be forced to implement these restrictions on Blu-Ray playback because they are mandated by the Blu-Ray standard itself. I don't think it makes sense to blame him or Apple for conditions that are being imposed from outside.
But I'm not sure if I would be as alarmed by this as others have been.
The original article about the restrictions in Vista made it clear that they would not apply unless protected content was in the computer. So if you want to see your screen as it should be seen, simply refrain from using your computer with a Blu-Ray DVD in it. I think the major consequence of this will be that people will not use their computers as DVD players, or at least they will not use their computer for any other function while it is playing a protected DVD.
Since most people don't try to do other things while watching movies on their computer, I'm not sure if this restriction is that onerous for most people.
It's also worth noting that this might not have been the wisest course of action on the part of the content companies. It seems to me that the most likely result of this content protection is to ensure that most people will not purchase Blu-Ray DVDs. I know that I would not. If the standard fails to sell videos, the protection scheme may be the culprit and future standards will have to change to no DRM or at least adopt a less burdensome system.
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I have never, even once, heard this one on the million Apple rumor sites I visit.
Please cite some kind of source before tossing this kind of explosive into the discussion.
Thank you.
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When I tried the various competing smartphones, I liked the Blackberry the best. If I were buying one today, I think I'd go for the Blackberry Pearl, although I'd have to test its keyboard again to make sure. I thought that phone was just beautifully designed. Pity the ssh implementation is $95. Ouch.
But as it is, I'm going to wait for the iPhone, assuming it's announced soon, and then compare. I would be pretty surprised if I would wind up with the Pearl after seeing the iPhone, but of course time will tell.
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I think that if it's disclosed, and the blogger continues to write, his bias will become pretty clear and whatever change he makes will be clear too.
:-).
Many, many years ago, I ran an anti-Microsoft web site and Microsoft contacted me and sent me Windows NT 4.0. It was less bad than Windows95, but it didn't change my opinion and my site remained as it was. They just told me that they wanted me to have their latest stuff, so that I could write honestly about it. I respeted that.
Truthfully, I think Microsoft did this to solve a curious little problem. Most bloggers aren't rich, and they're going to try and run Windows Vista on a computer that can barely run XP. So give them a gift, so they can run Vista the way it was meant to be run.
To amplify this a bit, I have a Windows PC right next to my PowerBook that's less than six months old. I ran the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor on it and it sort of wimpered and slunk off with a "Vista Basic once you upgrade it to 1GB RAM from 512MB" recommendation. It's blazing fast running XP, with a 2.8ghz Pentium IV. An Apple computer of the same vintage would have no trouble at all running Tiger or Leopard.
I think most bloggers are not going to be influenced by the gifts per se, but they will be nicer about Vista since they have a machine on which it will run well, which they might well otherwise not be able to obtain.
I'm not sure if that's good or bad, fair or unfair. After all, most people on the ground nowadays are buying $799 laptops that do not have a prayer of running Vista. But truthfully, I think there's enough information about Vista's performance out there for people to be able to make up their own minds, and so Microsoft's efforts will have little genuine impact.
I'm glad the bloggers will at least get some cool free stuff. We all like that. It's a pity that Apple's legendary customer loyalty makes steps like this entirely superflurous for the likes of me who would not mind a free MacBook Pro at all
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