I'd be curious to know if they've tested this out on anyone who's unfamiliar with computers. My gut feeling that icons like:
_ [ ] X
even in ASCII, would be discovered quicker than double-clicking on the title bar. That trick has been around in Windows for as long as I remember, but it took me a good few years before I noticed it.
Don't think I'd be suckered into buying it, even if I didn't realise it was Blender.
When they use all those caps, bold bits, underlines, yellow highlights, "now YOU can blah" (signed by the director of course) etc all in one big wall of content, unless you're already a known guru who just overdoes this style (Steve Gibson), I will automatically think it's spammy crapware anyway and steer well clear anyway.
First they put "Scientists" in quotation marks. Ouch.
"one of the more aggressive attempts at littering in modern times"
"Samsung never explained why it believed it could prove the reliability of its products by scattering them and random bits of paper across the globe"
Oh come on. Get a sense of fun and science and stuff! This is one of the most grumpy-old-fart articles I've read in some time. It doesn't prove much about Samsung's cards... who cares... it proves that they're willing to helps a bunch of geeks pull a fun little stunt. Makes Samsung seem not entirely evil and grumpy, which seems like a good enough image to have.
Although the OP seems to get a good flaming, it has a point, as not everyone is a Slashdot geek. And it just means that those of us who *are* Slashdot geeks get tasked by neighbours/acquaintances/co-workers-outside-of work-time to remove all the dodgy resource hogs, Norton Virus etc (and horrible floaty UI bullshit in the case of Toshiba laptops). Great if that's how you earn your living but a pain when you move on from it.
The thing is, indeed, it's about the money. Duh:) Pre-built machines are, in part, so cheap because they're kind of subsidised by AOL and Symantec and whoever else has paid to throw in their free trial nags. People are generally cheap and will ask "what's your cheapest..." when they walk into the store, and there you have it. Crapware wins because it brings the price down, in much the same way that annoying ads keep the internet mostly free.
Just selling a slightly more expensive machine minus the crap would drive people to the cheaper machines that DO have the crap. Unless you're Apple (their machines come clean but expensive), but that's at the other end of the scale.
This is what I've been wondering too. I thought Debian was pretty much THE official representation of GPL (it has the GNU/ and vRMS and everything). I don't actually know Stallman's views on BSD but I'd have thought he'd probably hate it because it can be used to assist the "evils" of closed source. Seems odd for the very core of the GNU/GPL flagship distro to switch to FreeBSD.
Come on, the worst part of FFXIII was the extraordinarily messy final battle and ending (or in fact anything from when they left Pulse) where it seemed like the developers just gave up and decided to wrap up the game. And it was pretty abrupt too really. If any FF game is ripe for a sequel, this one is.
Besides, I'm waiting to see Sazh use the Lady Luck dress sphere.
While we're on the subject - iOS
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Have my fingers become fatter since around iOS 4.x / iPhone4 or did they screw something up? Even with the original 2G iPhone I recall being able to type quickly and accurately. Now I just seem to hit the wrong letters and trigger mysterious linebreaks all the time - also when doing things like pressing shift, the following key-tap doesn't seem to register.
I know this isn't tech support, just I know Slashdotters tend to be a bit more knowledgable on these matters than the anything-negative-deniers on Apple related forums.
On a more on-topic note, though still iOS, doesn't it just drive you crazy when it autocorrects a word that you know (but it doesn't) so you go back and undo the autocorrect and it autocorrects it *again* and you've hit space before you realised it was about to do so (again). Argh!
I hate to say it and I wish Steve good health but to be brutally honest I think Apple have reached a point where they might be better off without him (if he left not if he died, I'm not callous). He's superb at what he does, but he does it with that massive control freak nature. It's something that he pushes further and further all the time and I think eventually Apple will find out where "the line" is drawn with people as they flock to Android (and who knows what on the desktop) to escape the shackles and the dictating on issues like Blu-ray.
He also has that snippy attitude with customers. Customer Relations is best left to the experts - again it's probably a control freak thing that he communicates with them at all instead of simply redirecting sjobs@apple to Support and trusting them to handle the "zomg I'm going directly to the CEO" cases.
There will be another messiah. A lot of people are keen on Jony Ive.
It's just a game that was lucky enough to become "cool" with kids and the next big thing in school fashion. Youth club leader friend says every kid who is anyone has that game. This is of course also true to a fair extent with adults. I'm sure it's not the first time this kind of thing has happened to some random lucky subject, be it a game or a pop star (Bieber?)
Or to put it more cynically and slashdotty, it is massively overhyped and managed to go viral.
Google then comes back with a page full of spammers who capture the search phrase, steal..er,"consolidate" posts from web forums etc and dump it all in a page full of ads and misleading links. When you finally find something it's difficult to find other applications of the same type to compare against (iusethis helps a little but is not very well maintained). Sometimes the developers don't even want to pay for file hosting so the next battle is with some shitty free file hosting site where you have to play "guess the legitimate download button amongst the 5 that are on the page".
With Synaptic (not so evil when it's Ubuntu, huh?) or the Mac App Store you type in what you are looking for - or browse to a category - and get a list of everything that applies, all in one go, free of digging, free of ads, free of spam. Seems pretty good to me.
Ironically AppFresh itself isn't very fresh - it hasn't been updated since version 0.8 in September 2009. I find that in reality it only works for maybe 40% of applications at best and the developers don't seem interested it continuing it so it seems a dead end really.
I loved the concept though and I hope the App Store does well with replacing it. Apple are great at getting everyone on board to "their way" so it should certainly do better than Appfresh:)
Take a look at how long games are taking to make nowadays, a couple of examples being GT5 and FFXIII.
They probably needed to slow down the release of new consoles to prevent "Duke Nukem Forever Syndrome" where nobody would release their games because there'd always be new technology just around the corner.
Really does depend then. The size of the company I work for is 100 employees and yes, alcohol at lunch time (unless entertaining clients) is classed as Gross Misconduct. I've never known them to snoop on Facebook looking for mention of smoking weed or whatever but it wouldn't entirely surprise me if they were looking for an excuse to get rid of someone.
Pity on the alcohol policy really, as otherwise I'd be down the pub like a shot at lunch time!
Striving for perfection is good; stressing because of a lack of perfection is bad. Pobody's nerfect.
Your employers won't hate you for it, as you're more useful to them there with a balanced perspective than off sick with stress (or there marching around biting heads off)
If a system goes down does it actually matter that much? Sure in something like Air Traffic Control it might (so you'd pester them every HOUR to spend money on backup systems, other preventative means and additional staff - or quit) but in most cases the worst that can happen is the Sales bods get a bit embarrassed because their CRM system is down or whatever. If it happens frequently and damages the company's reputation then sure, you're doing something wrong. If it's just a possibility though then these things happen. If you've done your best and documented as much of you doing your best as you can (CYA) then there's no point getting worked up about it.
Healthy concern is fine as it helps you to keep up with prevention. But any more than that, ask yourself what worrying about it too much will actually *achieve* apart from damage to your own sanity (a company resource, in a way). In all likelihood: nothing. So don't! Take comfort in doing the best of your ability and accept that shit happens.
I don't know what Oracle did, but presumably they don't go around clubbing kittens or anything. Is it really worth losing such useful software over what sounds essentially like a grudge against the company that happened to buy it?
If Oracle are such a vile enemy that you wouldn't like to see the ground they walk on without spitting on it, just use a previous version that hasn't been contaminated with their logo?
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be curious to know if they've tested this out on anyone who's unfamiliar with computers. My gut feeling that icons like:
even in ASCII, would be discovered quicker than double-clicking on the title bar. That trick has been around in Windows for as long as I remember, but it took me a good few years before I noticed it.
Don't think I'd be suckered into buying it, even if I didn't realise it was Blender.
When they use all those caps, bold bits, underlines, yellow highlights, "now YOU can blah" (signed by the director of course) etc all in one big wall of content, unless you're already a known guru who just overdoes this style (Steve Gibson), I will automatically think it's spammy crapware anyway and steer well clear anyway.
Yeah I can't speak for the grandparent but I think he's utilising this thing called "humour"?
Cows are destroying the planet! Better eat more beef! - that sort of thing.
Give or take an hour. But I'd say you can't have seen what many programmers get away with scot free...
First they put "Scientists" in quotation marks. Ouch.
"one of the more aggressive attempts at littering in modern times"
"Samsung never explained why it believed it could prove the reliability of its products by scattering them and random bits of paper across the globe"
Oh come on. Get a sense of fun and science and stuff! This is one of the most grumpy-old-fart articles I've read in some time. It doesn't prove much about Samsung's cards... who cares... it proves that they're willing to helps a bunch of geeks pull a fun little stunt. Makes Samsung seem not entirely evil and grumpy, which seems like a good enough image to have.
Because they get paid a fortune to do so
Precisely that.
Although the OP seems to get a good flaming, it has a point, as not everyone is a Slashdot geek. And it just means that those of us who *are* Slashdot geeks get tasked by neighbours/acquaintances/co-workers-outside-of work-time to remove all the dodgy resource hogs, Norton Virus etc (and horrible floaty UI bullshit in the case of Toshiba laptops). Great if that's how you earn your living but a pain when you move on from it.
The thing is, indeed, it's about the money. Duh :)
Pre-built machines are, in part, so cheap because they're kind of subsidised by AOL and Symantec and whoever else has paid to throw in their free trial nags. People are generally cheap and will ask "what's your cheapest..." when they walk into the store, and there you have it. Crapware wins because it brings the price down, in much the same way that annoying ads keep the internet mostly free.
Just selling a slightly more expensive machine minus the crap would drive people to the cheaper machines that DO have the crap. Unless you're Apple (their machines come clean but expensive), but that's at the other end of the scale.
This is what I've been wondering too. I thought Debian was pretty much THE official representation of GPL (it has the GNU/ and vRMS and everything). I don't actually know Stallman's views on BSD but I'd have thought he'd probably hate it because it can be used to assist the "evils" of closed source. Seems odd for the very core of the GNU/GPL flagship distro to switch to FreeBSD.
I wouldn't blame him. Slashdot finally works well on Mobile Safari! Yay!
Great work.
Come on, the worst part of FFXIII was the extraordinarily messy final battle and ending (or in fact anything from when they left Pulse) where it seemed like the developers just gave up and decided to wrap up the game. And it was pretty abrupt too really. If any FF game is ripe for a sequel, this one is.
Besides, I'm waiting to see Sazh use the Lady Luck dress sphere.
Have my fingers become fatter since around iOS 4.x / iPhone4 or did they screw something up? Even with the original 2G iPhone I recall being able to type quickly and accurately. Now I just seem to hit the wrong letters and trigger mysterious linebreaks all the time - also when doing things like pressing shift, the following key-tap doesn't seem to register.
I know this isn't tech support, just I know Slashdotters tend to be a bit more knowledgable on these matters than the anything-negative-deniers on Apple related forums.
On a more on-topic note, though still iOS, doesn't it just drive you crazy when it autocorrects a word that you know (but it doesn't) so you go back and undo the autocorrect and it autocorrects it *again* and you've hit space before you realised it was about to do so (again). Argh!
I hate to say it and I wish Steve good health but to be brutally honest I think Apple have reached a point where they might be better off without him (if he left not if he died, I'm not callous). He's superb at what he does, but he does it with that massive control freak nature. It's something that he pushes further and further all the time and I think eventually Apple will find out where "the line" is drawn with people as they flock to Android (and who knows what on the desktop) to escape the shackles and the dictating on issues like Blu-ray.
He also has that snippy attitude with customers. Customer Relations is best left to the experts - again it's probably a control freak thing that he communicates with them at all instead of simply redirecting sjobs@apple to Support and trusting them to handle the "zomg I'm going directly to the CEO" cases.
There will be another messiah. A lot of people are keen on Jony Ive.
It's just a game that was lucky enough to become "cool" with kids and the next big thing in school fashion. Youth club leader friend says every kid who is anyone has that game. This is of course also true to a fair extent with adults. I'm sure it's not the first time this kind of thing has happened to some random lucky subject, be it a game or a pop star (Bieber?)
Or to put it more cynically and slashdotty, it is massively overhyped and managed to go viral.
Google then comes back with a page full of spammers who capture the search phrase, steal..er,"consolidate" posts from web forums etc and dump it all in a page full of ads and misleading links. When you finally find something it's difficult to find other applications of the same type to compare against (iusethis helps a little but is not very well maintained). Sometimes the developers don't even want to pay for file hosting so the next battle is with some shitty free file hosting site where you have to play "guess the legitimate download button amongst the 5 that are on the page".
With Synaptic (not so evil when it's Ubuntu, huh?) or the Mac App Store you type in what you are looking for - or browse to a category - and get a list of everything that applies, all in one go, free of digging, free of ads, free of spam. Seems pretty good to me.
Ironically AppFresh itself isn't very fresh - it hasn't been updated since version 0.8 in September 2009. I find that in reality it only works for maybe 40% of applications at best and the developers don't seem interested it continuing it so it seems a dead end really.
I loved the concept though and I hope the App Store does well with replacing it. Apple are great at getting everyone on board to "their way" so it should certainly do better than Appfresh :)
Bit of a war monger that one. Keep it away from Cardassians (especially Damaaaaaaaaaaaar)
Don't see the fuss myself, they all look the same to me.
Take a look at how long games are taking to make nowadays, a couple of examples being GT5 and FFXIII.
They probably needed to slow down the release of new consoles to prevent "Duke Nukem Forever Syndrome" where nobody would release their games because there'd always be new technology just around the corner.
Really does depend then. The size of the company I work for is 100 employees and yes, alcohol at lunch time (unless entertaining clients) is classed as Gross Misconduct. I've never known them to snoop on Facebook looking for mention of smoking weed or whatever but it wouldn't entirely surprise me if they were looking for an excuse to get rid of someone.
Pity on the alcohol policy really, as otherwise I'd be down the pub like a shot at lunch time!
Striving for perfection is good; stressing because of a lack of perfection is bad. Pobody's nerfect.
Your employers won't hate you for it, as you're more useful to them there with a balanced perspective than off sick with stress (or there marching around biting heads off)
If a system goes down does it actually matter that much? Sure in something like Air Traffic Control it might (so you'd pester them every HOUR to spend money on backup systems, other preventative means and additional staff - or quit) but in most cases the worst that can happen is the Sales bods get a bit embarrassed because their CRM system is down or whatever. If it happens frequently and damages the company's reputation then sure, you're doing something wrong. If it's just a possibility though then these things happen. If you've done your best and documented as much of you doing your best as you can (CYA) then there's no point getting worked up about it.
Healthy concern is fine as it helps you to keep up with prevention. But any more than that, ask yourself what worrying about it too much will actually *achieve* apart from damage to your own sanity (a company resource, in a way). In all likelihood: nothing. So don't! Take comfort in doing the best of your ability and accept that shit happens.
Is this a USA thing?
If there was any evidence at all of drug usage in our job or probably just about any other I know of in the UK, it'd be instant dismissal?
No need to apologise. Chill.
What, strapped to it?
I guess with all the paranoia about security staff supposedly caring about its size, they must've been afraid to look!
I don't know what Oracle did, but presumably they don't go around clubbing kittens or anything. Is it really worth losing such useful software over what sounds essentially like a grudge against the company that happened to buy it?
If Oracle are such a vile enemy that you wouldn't like to see the ground they walk on without spitting on it, just use a previous version that hasn't been contaminated with their logo?
Though I'm not sure what a Changeling wants with an MMO anyway when they have half the galaxy to play with.
Oh wait, wrong "Star" series...
NVidia achieved that years ago.
Seems like a good idea.. well in principal anyway