Exactly. There are already enough places for ultra-snobs to live in a self-imposed police state.
Land is made to be used and not to act as a pure resale item. Here in Vegas, where I live now, it's gotten way out of hand. Things are growing extremely fast such that land that was rural just a couple years ago is now inside of town (sometimes in the middle of town even). You spend half a million dollars on a [crappy] house with a small yard (in the middle of the freaking desert) and you have people telling you what color of mail box you can have. I worked for a company that made solar screens for a while and it was silly. HOA's will sometimes ban the screens even though they look nice, cool your house, and reduce your power bills. Heaven forbid that all the houses in the neighborhood don't look exactly alike. I hate cookie cutter neighborhoods myself. How is that any fun? It just reminds you that your expensive house was built cheap.
When I lived in the country I saw some of this HOA crap starting to pop up in my area. I was going to buy one place but then it turned out they wanted to force you to build a 3000sq ft home within 6 months and the home had to be positioned where they wanted it and be of the design they specified. Are they freaking kidding me? This was so far out that no other buildings were within miles. I didn't want my house to be of that design and I didn't want to be told what to do so I just told them to piss off.
You will care if your car breaks down in the middle of no where and you can't get a call out. Especially when those coverage holes cover many square miles. I've lived in rural areas and I absolutely hate the poor coverage.
Actually - putting up more towers is what I'd call a good solution. Put up less visible towers with less range but put more of them up so that you still cover as much area. So, every hilltop is exactly what is needed.
We survived for several thousand years without indoor plumping, electrical appliances, and air conditioning. Should I expect you to move into a teepee just because I find your house ugly? Personally I do find most houses ugly so I'd be at least as likely to dislike your house in my view as I would be some tower. And roads. THOSE are ugly. Freaking roads every which way covered in horrible noisy, dangerous, smelly, polutting cars. If we have to get rid of something we survived without for thousands of years then why not do away with cars and eight lane highways? Or even fences. Fences always pissed me off when I lived in the country. You'd be in the middle of no where enjoying mother nature and bam there is a horrible barbed wire fence in your way. All over the freaking place. (Usually along the before mentioned roads too.) Maybe we could get rid of those too.
I have no idea what the law is but I've lived a lot of my life in rural Missouri and Arkansas and I know that they mostly just let the waste from cow, pig, and chicken farms run off into the otherwise clean water of their local streams. Pretty nasty if you like to swim in or drink from that water but there isn't a lot you can do about it.
THAT is something to complain about because it does impact public health and is honestly just discusting. Compared to that I don't see how a stupid tower more or less, even if covered in annoying lights, really matters.
Of course now I live in Las Vegas so I'm used to towers covered in stupid blinking lights. I wonder how many of those people who complain about a cell tower in their neighborhood come to Vegas and think these huge towers of light are great.:)
My problem was more with cows. As stupid as cows may be they always seem to find the weak points in a fence and just happen to come over and eat your best veggies from your garden.:)
Yeah I can see how bright strobe lights would be annoying in general. I've never seen a cell tower that was especially tall. Not comapred to a tv tower at least. I'd think the red lights would be enough. Or if you must then have the red lights and only switch on the bright lights if something large (not bird sized) comes to close to the tower.
I've lived next to a pig farm. It sucked but I didn't try to tell them they couldn't have pigs.
Farming, I think, does have more reasons for some controls. There should be some control as to the waste output of farms. I've seen to many that just dump their sewage into the local water system without any treatment or anything.
My experience with living in rural areas is that you always live next to a junkyard. You always have some enighbor who thinks it's a good idea to have 50 scrap cars, a few refridgerators, etc spread across their property. Again it is none of my business as long as they aren't imposing a safety risk to the community.
If you're not creating a danger to others and you're on your own land then you should be left alone. I hate community nitpicking. Home Owner's groups are the worst. Noooo you can't build your kids a tree house.. that might look tacky and lower land values. Doh. Then you have endless hassles over installing solar or wind power because neighbors don't like the way it looks. Who cares if it's better for the enviroment.:p
At least that is a real, valid, complaint that could be taken into account and done something about. Just not building towers isn't a solution. Building towers that don't pollute the night skies though is a solution. I assume they use lights for safety reasons? (Planes etc). What do radio and tv station towers do to reduce this problem?
The thing about cell towers is that they aren't especially dangerous and they don't produce noise or polution or much of anything anyone should bitch about. This sounds like pure technophobia to me. They can't even come up with a reasonable complaint about why they don't want the towers near them.
If you don't want something in your line of sight then buy all the land around where you live. Otherwise fuck off. Stop telling other people what they can and can't do with their own land.
Most things Flash is used for can be done without it just as easily. Kind of annoying when developers force you to have Flash for what your web browser could do anyway. With SVG that'll mean there is practically no reason to use Flash while there, as always, are lots of reasons not to use Flash.
SVG really does offer a whole different, and better, level of scriptablity that Flash just doesn't offer.
Who said you were paying for it? It costs no more for two people to use a network than for one to use it.
Or is the rule that you can say whatever you want so long as you have enough money to say it? That would be the American way. It's not okay to have a dictator or royality but it's perfectly okay to get the same, or worse, effect by allowing money to make all the rules.
I think they should offer the dial-up speeds free and only charge for the higher speeds. That way every citizen has access as well as visitors but they can still make a profit off the deal.
The federal governments job is to ensure civil liberties. The local government should be more involved with helping citizens manage their day to day life. That includes utilities, schools, roads, and emergency services.
I'd consider Internet access a civil liberty anyway as it's required to fully exercise your right to freedom of speech in this age.
I think the craze of the near future is going to be active gaming. DDR, the Eye-Toy, etc are just the beginning. I think we're going to see mobile games that respond to your physical location as well as physical activity.
I think gaming is going to merge into our real life enviroments. Your cell phone may beep with a message from other players as you follow the GPS coordinates on your PDA. A hologram might be projected over the scene and you'll be required to battle with it. A camera might watch your movements to decide how the game should react to you.
Once we reach ultra-realism in games then improvements will be in portability, I/O, and networking.
I worked for Tiger for about a year and am (distantly) related to the owner. Trust me, they're dirtier than what they're being blamed for. Their policy is to make every customer buy an extender warranty but to never honor them. When I worked there they didn't even have a framework setup to make it possible to honor them. Oh yeh - good customer service there.
I'd call Mac OS X a train wreck. It's interface can barely be called usable and it fights tooth and nail to keep from doing the things it needs to do. It drives me nuts that people rant on about how good OS X is. Pbbt maybe if they've only used Windows. Examples? Why the hell can you mount an ftp site as a drive but there is no way to write to the drive even if you supplied the needed username and password? Why can't you alt-tab (or open apple-tab) through ALL open windows? Why do home, end, page up, and page down not work correctly? Why does the finder bring the whole system to a crawl if it gets fscked up? Why does the system feel the need to change the screen resolution if you boot up with your monitor turned off? Why does the middle mouse button not work in half my applications? The dock is just retarted. It has a lot of gee-whiz factor but it isn't very usable. Why does the default theme hide the title-bar icons under colored fobs that you can't see past until you hover your cursor over them? Why can't you even just pick a background color of your choice? It's just hard to find the window you're looking for when you have a lot of apps open - not helped any by the tendacy of OS X to only show you one of an apps windows when flipping through those windows. Why do so many apps open windows BEHIND the currently focused window when you activate them? Why is there no decent FTP client for OS X? I've tried more than half a dozen and they all suck. (Today I lost three days work because one of these decided to erase my files from the server without asking for permission first. I'm just a little bitter. Of course if it were my server I'd be okay.. I make backups every hour. *sigh*) Argh I could rant on for hours about the evils of the Mac UI and how bad so many of it's apps are.
To me, Windows is more like a nucleur waste dump. It might glow in pretty colors and breed some interesting stuff but in the end it'll still kill you. Windows is a truely horrible operating system. If I sound like OS X annoys me then don't even get me started on Windows. At least OS X can handle software installation in a way that isn't completely moronic. More than I can say for Windows. Any OS that asks you to reboot after software installation obviously has something wrong with it.
To be fair, I have a bitch list about my OS of choice, Linux, too. Such as why nobody has yet bothered to make a single, unified, extensible, flexible programming interface to configuring Linux boxes that is easy and powerful both. I'm not talking UI - I mean an API. There should be a standard service running that takes speaks XML-RPC and can allow systems and services to be managed and configured. This would allow programmers to write different interfaces for managing these systems without having to mess with the internals of 5000 different programs. We could finally see some improvement. Why don't distros give you tools to reconfigure your system that are as easy to use as those that they now provide to install your system? X is a major pain to reconfigure in most cases but it's easy enough to install and configure initally. This is just silly. Why is there still no decent support for user-level filesystems and why aren't these filesystems bundled by default? ftpfs, sshfs, etc should definately be included. KDE and Gnome shouldn't need their own virtual filesystem layers. Why aren't there filesystems for managing file reversions, verifying files are not duplicated, managing meta data, etc. This is Unix where everything is supposed to be a fricken file. Have they forgotten that?
If there was a source of non-DRM none-pirated movies I'd definately buy from it. I think DRM and region coding are things consumers should refuse to accept. Let's create a consumer rights group to fight these things. Even if we have to buy from France or even create our own company, or open content project, to produce movies.
Usually I just refuse to obey such requirements. I don't mind raising a fuss when my school tries to require I buy software when a free alternative exists. Recently one of my classes was telling all students they had to spend $35 for a program. I looked at it first.. it was nothing but a telnet console with some fancy looking gui. Duh. Obviously I refused to buy it.
Maybe not pathetic but definately annoying. I'd consider crashes that can lose user data to be among the most highest on my todo list of fixes and I hope most other developers feel the same way. Visual glitches or even program crashes don't compare with lossing data.
This reminds me of an discussion I had the other day about why applications, usually, still don't backup user data frequently without needing to be told? It'd seem to have minimal impact on system resources and it'd be a lifesaver for many users who are unfortunate enough to have the program (or machine) die before they remember to save. It'd be great for users editing that make a mistake and want to back up. WHY don't apps do this? The user I was talking with was actually using a Mac and asked why, if Mac's JUST WORK(tm), they don't do this simple step? I couldn't agree more.. although I'd like to see open source developers make a push in this area first. Lead by example. This is the kind of little features that people get hooked on and then expect everyone else to offer too. Every app that deals with user data should do auto-backups.
Not having a favicon is one of the first things I see that tells me how poorly done a website is. If a lil icon doesn't popup in the tab, before I actually look at the page, then I can be pretty sure it's not a professional quality site.
I wish I could do more with things like favicons using stylesheets. It'd be cool to make them match the stylesheet's color scheme.
Re:How about doing something actually useful ?
on
Next Generation X11
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· Score: 1
You mean like the nice Mac 'feature' of changing my screen resolution when I boot up before turning on the monitor? Yeah, great idea. Annoys the shit out of me.
Not that improvments couldn't be made. Just don't follow the example set by Windows or MacOS.
But it doesn't infect all the other software you're distributing. You can include GPL and non-GPL together in a distribution without their licenses infected each other.
It depends how they are embeded. If they are somehow deep linked then I can see this being true. If they are just included as a convienence then I think it'd not be true.
Does PDF actually link somewhere inside the files rather than just including them inside the PDF document? If so, why?
You can include a copy of the font with your document, even stored internally, and it isn't deep linking. You'd actually need to meddle with the font internals for this to become an issue.
Almost exactly the response I'd planned.. rather than include my own I'll add a few comments to yours..
The interesting thing about a wireless public utility is that it can be friendly to the public throwing up their own WiFi AP's to relay the connection to places that otherwise might not work. This could, and should, work with the community to bring wireless access to every part of the city. The utility only needs to run a connection to major points throughout the city and then encourage people to set up public WiFi points to pad out the coverage. It'd be great if they even offered the appropiate mesh APs for sell, pre-configured, at wholesale price for those who wanted to help pad out coverage in their area.
I do think that such a public utility should be paid for by taxes rather than on a metered basis. That way people will be free to share their connections as much as possible which will be beneficial to everyone. It's that freedom that will really allow WiFi as a public service to outstrip it as a private service.
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Exactly. There are already enough places for ultra-snobs to live in a self-imposed police state.
Land is made to be used and not to act as a pure resale item. Here in Vegas, where I live now, it's gotten way out of hand. Things are growing extremely fast such that land that was rural just a couple years ago is now inside of town (sometimes in the middle of town even). You spend half a million dollars on a [crappy] house with a small yard (in the middle of the freaking desert) and you have people telling you what color of mail box you can have. I worked for a company that made solar screens for a while and it was silly. HOA's will sometimes ban the screens even though they look nice, cool your house, and reduce your power bills. Heaven forbid that all the houses in the neighborhood don't look exactly alike. I hate cookie cutter neighborhoods myself. How is that any fun? It just reminds you that your expensive house was built cheap.
When I lived in the country I saw some of this HOA crap starting to pop up in my area. I was going to buy one place but then it turned out they wanted to force you to build a 3000sq ft home within 6 months and the home had to be positioned where they wanted it and be of the design they specified. Are they freaking kidding me? This was so far out that no other buildings were within miles. I didn't want my house to be of that design and I didn't want to be told what to do so I just told them to piss off.
You will care if your car breaks down in the middle of no where and you can't get a call out. Especially when those coverage holes cover many square miles. I've lived in rural areas and I absolutely hate the poor coverage.
Actually - putting up more towers is what I'd call a good solution. Put up less visible towers with less range but put more of them up so that you still cover as much area. So, every hilltop is exactly what is needed.
We survived for several thousand years without indoor plumping, electrical appliances, and air conditioning. Should I expect you to move into a teepee just because I find your house ugly? Personally I do find most houses ugly so I'd be at least as likely to dislike your house in my view as I would be some tower. And roads. THOSE are ugly. Freaking roads every which way covered in horrible noisy, dangerous, smelly, polutting cars. If we have to get rid of something we survived without for thousands of years then why not do away with cars and eight lane highways? Or even fences. Fences always pissed me off when I lived in the country. You'd be in the middle of no where enjoying mother nature and bam there is a horrible barbed wire fence in your way. All over the freaking place. (Usually along the before mentioned roads too.) Maybe we could get rid of those too.
I have no idea what the law is but I've lived a lot of my life in rural Missouri and Arkansas and I know that they mostly just let the waste from cow, pig, and chicken farms run off into the otherwise clean water of their local streams. Pretty nasty if you like to swim in or drink from that water but there isn't a lot you can do about it.
:)
THAT is something to complain about because it does impact public health and is honestly just discusting. Compared to that I don't see how a stupid tower more or less, even if covered in annoying lights, really matters.
Of course now I live in Las Vegas so I'm used to towers covered in stupid blinking lights. I wonder how many of those people who complain about a cell tower in their neighborhood come to Vegas and think these huge towers of light are great.
My problem was more with cows. As stupid as cows may be they always seem to find the weak points in a fence and just happen to come over and eat your best veggies from your garden. :)
Yeah I can see how bright strobe lights would be annoying in general. I've never seen a cell tower that was especially tall. Not comapred to a tv tower at least. I'd think the red lights would be enough. Or if you must then have the red lights and only switch on the bright lights if something large (not bird sized) comes to close to the tower.
I've lived next to a pig farm. It sucked but I didn't try to tell them they couldn't have pigs.
:p
Farming, I think, does have more reasons for some controls. There should be some control as to the waste output of farms. I've seen to many that just dump their sewage into the local water system without any treatment or anything.
My experience with living in rural areas is that you always live next to a junkyard. You always have some enighbor who thinks it's a good idea to have 50 scrap cars, a few refridgerators, etc spread across their property. Again it is none of my business as long as they aren't imposing a safety risk to the community.
If you're not creating a danger to others and you're on your own land then you should be left alone. I hate community nitpicking. Home Owner's groups are the worst. Noooo you can't build your kids a tree house.. that might look tacky and lower land values. Doh. Then you have endless hassles over installing solar or wind power because neighbors don't like the way it looks. Who cares if it's better for the enviroment.
At least that is a real, valid, complaint that could be taken into account and done something about. Just not building towers isn't a solution. Building towers that don't pollute the night skies though is a solution. I assume they use lights for safety reasons? (Planes etc). What do radio and tv station towers do to reduce this problem?
The thing about cell towers is that they aren't especially dangerous and they don't produce noise or polution or much of anything anyone should bitch about. This sounds like pure technophobia to me. They can't even come up with a reasonable complaint about why they don't want the towers near them.
If you don't want something in your line of sight then buy all the land around where you live. Otherwise fuck off. Stop telling other people what they can and can't do with their own land.
Most things Flash is used for can be done without it just as easily. Kind of annoying when developers force you to have Flash for what your web browser could do anyway. With SVG that'll mean there is practically no reason to use Flash while there, as always, are lots of reasons not to use Flash.
SVG really does offer a whole different, and better, level of scriptablity that Flash just doesn't offer.
Who said you were paying for it? It costs no more for two people to use a network than for one to use it.
Or is the rule that you can say whatever you want so long as you have enough money to say it? That would be the American way. It's not okay to have a dictator or royality but it's perfectly okay to get the same, or worse, effect by allowing money to make all the rules.
I think they should offer the dial-up speeds free and only charge for the higher speeds. That way every citizen has access as well as visitors but they can still make a profit off the deal.
The federal governments job is to ensure civil liberties. The local government should be more involved with helping citizens manage their day to day life. That includes utilities, schools, roads, and emergency services.
I'd consider Internet access a civil liberty anyway as it's required to fully exercise your right to freedom of speech in this age.
I think the craze of the near future is going to be active gaming. DDR, the Eye-Toy, etc are just the beginning. I think we're going to see mobile games that respond to your physical location as well as physical activity.
I think gaming is going to merge into our real life enviroments. Your cell phone may beep with a message from other players as you follow the GPS coordinates on your PDA. A hologram might be projected over the scene and you'll be required to battle with it. A camera might watch your movements to decide how the game should react to you.
Once we reach ultra-realism in games then improvements will be in portability, I/O, and networking.
When I worked for them they used a home edition of M$ Access as the backend to their website. It was pretty funny actually.
I worked for Tiger for about a year and am (distantly) related to the owner. Trust me, they're dirtier than what they're being blamed for. Their policy is to make every customer buy an extender warranty but to never honor them. When I worked there they didn't even have a framework setup to make it possible to honor them. Oh yeh - good customer service there.
I'd call Mac OS X a train wreck. It's interface can barely be called usable and it fights tooth and nail to keep from doing the things it needs to do. It drives me nuts that people rant on about how good OS X is. Pbbt maybe if they've only used Windows. Examples? Why the hell can you mount an ftp site as a drive but there is no way to write to the drive even if you supplied the needed username and password? Why can't you alt-tab (or open apple-tab) through ALL open windows? Why do home, end, page up, and page down not work correctly? Why does the finder bring the whole system to a crawl if it gets fscked up? Why does the system feel the need to change the screen resolution if you boot up with your monitor turned off? Why does the middle mouse button not work in half my applications? The dock is just retarted. It has a lot of gee-whiz factor but it isn't very usable. Why does the default theme hide the title-bar icons under colored fobs that you can't see past until you hover your cursor over them? Why can't you even just pick a background color of your choice? It's just hard to find the window you're looking for when you have a lot of apps open - not helped any by the tendacy of OS X to only show you one of an apps windows when flipping through those windows. Why do so many apps open windows BEHIND the currently focused window when you activate them? Why is there no decent FTP client for OS X? I've tried more than half a dozen and they all suck. (Today I lost three days work because one of these decided to erase my files from the server without asking for permission first. I'm just a little bitter. Of course if it were my server I'd be okay.. I make backups every hour. *sigh*) Argh I could rant on for hours about the evils of the Mac UI and how bad so many of it's apps are.
To me, Windows is more like a nucleur waste dump. It might glow in pretty colors and breed some interesting stuff but in the end it'll still kill you. Windows is a truely horrible operating system. If I sound like OS X annoys me then don't even get me started on Windows. At least OS X can handle software installation in a way that isn't completely moronic. More than I can say for Windows. Any OS that asks you to reboot after software installation obviously has something wrong with it.
To be fair, I have a bitch list about my OS of choice, Linux, too. Such as why nobody has yet bothered to make a single, unified, extensible, flexible programming interface to configuring Linux boxes that is easy and powerful both. I'm not talking UI - I mean an API. There should be a standard service running that takes speaks XML-RPC and can allow systems and services to be managed and configured. This would allow programmers to write different interfaces for managing these systems without having to mess with the internals of 5000 different programs. We could finally see some improvement. Why don't distros give you tools to reconfigure your system that are as easy to use as those that they now provide to install your system? X is a major pain to reconfigure in most cases but it's easy enough to install and configure initally. This is just silly. Why is there still no decent support for user-level filesystems and why aren't these filesystems bundled by default? ftpfs, sshfs, etc should definately be included. KDE and Gnome shouldn't need their own virtual filesystem layers. Why aren't there filesystems for managing file reversions, verifying files are not duplicated, managing meta data, etc. This is Unix where everything is supposed to be a fricken file. Have they forgotten that?
If there was a source of non-DRM none-pirated movies I'd definately buy from it. I think DRM and region coding are things consumers should refuse to accept. Let's create a consumer rights group to fight these things. Even if we have to buy from France or even create our own company, or open content project, to produce movies.
Usually I just refuse to obey such requirements. I don't mind raising a fuss when my school tries to require I buy software when a free alternative exists. Recently one of my classes was telling all students they had to spend $35 for a program. I looked at it first.. it was nothing but a telnet console with some fancy looking gui. Duh. Obviously I refused to buy it.
Maybe not pathetic but definately annoying. I'd consider crashes that can lose user data to be among the most highest on my todo list of fixes and I hope most other developers feel the same way. Visual glitches or even program crashes don't compare with lossing data.
This reminds me of an discussion I had the other day about why applications, usually, still don't backup user data frequently without needing to be told? It'd seem to have minimal impact on system resources and it'd be a lifesaver for many users who are unfortunate enough to have the program (or machine) die before they remember to save. It'd be great for users editing that make a mistake and want to back up. WHY don't apps do this? The user I was talking with was actually using a Mac and asked why, if Mac's JUST WORK(tm), they don't do this simple step? I couldn't agree more.. although I'd like to see open source developers make a push in this area first. Lead by example. This is the kind of little features that people get hooked on and then expect everyone else to offer too. Every app that deals with user data should do auto-backups.
Not having a favicon is one of the first things I see that tells me how poorly done a website is. If a lil icon doesn't popup in the tab, before I actually look at the page, then I can be pretty sure it's not a professional quality site.
I wish I could do more with things like favicons using stylesheets. It'd be cool to make them match the stylesheet's color scheme.
Sex: 0
Sex: 1
You figure out which is male and which is female.
You mean like the nice Mac 'feature' of changing my screen resolution when I boot up before turning on the monitor? Yeah, great idea. Annoys the shit out of me.
Not that improvments couldn't be made. Just don't follow the example set by Windows or MacOS.
But it doesn't infect all the other software you're distributing. You can include GPL and non-GPL together in a distribution without their licenses infected each other.
It depends how they are embeded. If they are somehow deep linked then I can see this being true. If they are just included as a convienence then I think it'd not be true.
Does PDF actually link somewhere inside the files rather than just including them inside the PDF document? If so, why?
You can include a copy of the font with your document, even stored internally, and it isn't deep linking. You'd actually need to meddle with the font internals for this to become an issue.
Almost exactly the response I'd planned.. rather than include my own I'll add a few comments to yours..
The interesting thing about a wireless public utility is that it can be friendly to the public throwing up their own WiFi AP's to relay the connection to places that otherwise might not work. This could, and should, work with the community to bring wireless access to every part of the city. The utility only needs to run a connection to major points throughout the city and then encourage people to set up public WiFi points to pad out the coverage. It'd be great if they even offered the appropiate mesh APs for sell, pre-configured, at wholesale price for those who wanted to help pad out coverage in their area.
I do think that such a public utility should be paid for by taxes rather than on a metered basis. That way people will be free to share their connections as much as possible which will be beneficial to everyone. It's that freedom that will really allow WiFi as a public service to outstrip it as a private service.