"really? have you heard a lot of rock/punk bands using mandolins in their music?"
Actually, there are only two reasons to use an unexpected instrument in your music:
a) you have a vision that requires inclusion of a specific instrument to achieve ("when I played the progression on my old hammond, it gave me chills. We've got to lay that in.");
b) you're running out of ideas ("what if we started a punk band made entirely of ukulele players? We'll call it Puke-ulele!").
Which artists are doing it for which reasons can be debated for hours. And for what it's worth, the Puke-ulele discussion actually took place.;)
So I have this theory that older performers are being recognized now because the voters are comparing those old albums to the new stuff being released now -- and are recognizing just how great those old albums were compared to today's releases.
Back when those old albums were being compared to each other, of course, they didn't seem all that special...
"The fact that they are successful suddenly makes them crap?"
Strawman. Actually, I think they were suggesting the opposite: that the writer considers their music mediocre, and uses them as an example of the mediocre music being released by the record labels.
I had a great moment with this once; their latest album had come out, and it was 1 in the morning in New Delhi. I was sitting at my laptop, downloading the new album having just paid for it, and thought "holy crap, I'm sitting in new delhi in my underwear buying and downloading a new album I wanted from the united states at 1 in the morning." Just to make it even stranger, I quickly popped in and watched some of a Buster Keaton silent movie DVD. (this is true.)
Hey, thanks for this -- I'm forwarding your suggestions to the development team. I know that, at the very least, they weren't aware of the Machine.Config options for Browsercaps.
Imagine that -- getting a useful and prompt answer to a legitimate question on SlashDot!:)
I don't disagree with your point, but I thought it worth noting that Hyundai (who is a client of the company I work for) actually has some really unique and effective new methods of improving their quality. Obviously I can't say what they are, so you'll have to take my word for it, but one approach in particular is really novel and has resulted in a huge short-term measurable quality increase (as reflected in the latest JD Power survey).
Dunno if this will carry over into long-term quality improvements, and it doesn't automatically make them a "do no evil" company, but I though it might interest you to hear of it.:)
>From a customer perspective, I would rather have one good proprietary solution that serves my needs than a dozen mediocre but interoperable ones.
Ah, but what you'd REALLY prefer (as would we all) is one good solution that serves my needs, but can interoperate with a dozen mediocre ones in case the good solution becomes mediocre or a mediocre solution becomes great in the future. Standards, baby.:)
I'm working on my first.Net project at work, where I have to provide compatible HTML. We spent three hours figuring out all the oddball stuff.Net does to HTML, then I spent a day writing up documentation on it. During the documentation review, we opened a demo page in Mozilla instead of IE, and all the Panel-control-created div tags were replaced with table sets. Imagine our surprise.
As we started digging, we started finding lots more stuff like this; for example, tables get a style of "border-collapse: collapsed" by default in IE, which is a tag that IE uses to tighen up table structures (into non-standard measurements) while other browsers ignore the tag. There's no reason for this tag to be there, except to guarantee that tables will look different in IE as compared to other browsers.
The punch line, of course, is that this "feature" can't be turned off. So now we either have to burn a lot of extra effort to validate multiple sets of rendered HTML, or we have to give up alternative-browser compatibility -- which I am sure was the point in the first place.
(few things microsoftie make me seethe, but this one does...)
You folks are all missing the true danger here, I suspect...
Anti-virus software companies tend to share virus definitions. They race to find them and release them first, but for the most part (not always) they share the definitions for the damaging stuff. This is the only way for these companies to keep up with the flow of viruses. Microsoft has access to this same information.
However, Microsoft also has (a) a vested interest in NOT telling people about viruses until it can plug the hole, (b) the bank account to make their anti-virus product really good AND give it away for free as part of the OS, and (c) the ability to have a big "REPORT A POTENTIAL VIRUS" button on the desktop by default.
As a result, many (not all) viruses would be reported by users directly to Microsoft instead of other companies. Microsoft could then create and quietly distribute a signature to their users, without disclosure to the public or other companies. Their users would be protected, while other companies were still finding out about the virus.
Now, Microsoft also gets a jump on fixing the exploit for this virus, and can sit on it while the other companies first discover the new virus themselves, then share the information with the public.
So now the other companies are scrambling to create a signature. Meanwhile, Microsoft announces that they already have a fix to the exploit (the one they were sitting on) and -bing- here it is -- "we fixed this exploit a few minutes after it was discovered!" they'll say.
Far-fetched? Well, consider that the antivirus software community will already be weakened by users who choose the free Microsoft solution over their own, which means fewer people collecting and studying new viruses. As the community shrinks, it will take them longer to discover and share new virus signatures, which will lose them still more customers.
In other words, this is a really good business decision for Microsoft.
If you're really not keen on doing this, as you say in your post, then the answer is "however much money required to make it appealing to you."
Let's face it: this isn't your business. Your rates aren't beholden to creating a profit, or covering costs, or stockholders, or being competitive. Since that's the case, the only factor that should effect your fees is whether or not you'll be sufficiently motivated to do a good job.
You're making the assumption that Microsoft truly believes what they say about interoperability and whatnot. Also that they believe they're still capable of making better products. If either (or both) of those assumptions is incorrect, then it might be safe to say they're blowing smoke while going right on doing what they've always done, and knowingly so.
The trouble with this approach is the same as the trouble with preserving old videotape material, something I used to be involved in.
I worked for a museum that preserved such materials, and always wanted to establish a program not just to copy older videotape to newer analog formats (which already existed) but to copy and RE-copy those digital tapes on a two-year cyclical program; the digital data wouldn't degrade during the transfer, and by essentially replacing the media containing the data on a regular basis, we'd have a good chance of saving the material long-term.
I never got approval for a simple reason: tape stock is expensive, staff is expensive, and coordination of such an effort requires diligence. Similarly, you could use CD-R/DVD-R to back up your material and re-burn the discs on an ongoing rotation, but most people don't have that kind of discipline even if they have the money.
For me personally, I've found the best approach is to maintain the data on a redundant RAID array, with occasional backup to DVD-R. This way, the data itself will outlive the death of individual local drives, while the DVD-R only needs to serve as a short-term disaster-recovery solution.
Of course, once my critical dataset gets large enough to require more than a few DVD-Rs, I'll probably get lazy...aren't we about due for a new format by now?;)
Interesting (I hope) side note about team size -- sometimes a difference of a single person can make or break you.
Case in point: I built several marketing Flash pieces (yeah, I know, I know) over a year with the same pool of people. We'd form a three-man team and go to town, with the team made up of different people from the pool. Things seemed fine, and the pieces were good.
Then one day, I teamed up with a SINGLE other person. We'd worked together before, but only on a three-man team. As a two-man team, we got a ton done in a short period of time, and the quality of our work (technical and creative) was far, far above anything we'd done before.
In our case, it was our ability (as a two-man team) to say "I own the tech" and "I own the creative", and negotiate on the fly like so: "Hey, what do you want to do creatively here?" "Do creatively EXACTLY THIS" or "Hey, what do you want to do creatively here?" "I have no preference, do whatever is technically best." With a third person on the team, everything required negotiation, and it was getting in the way.
About a year later, another group of two guys worked together on a similar project, and it once again went tremendously well compared to their previous work. About a month ago, same thing. Now, finally, we're making the two-man approach mandatory for these projects.
Hmm. The thing is, if the person has a great idea for a feature, and the Firefox team says "fuck off", the Firefox team's attitude (expressed or implied) does not change the quality of the idea. If it's a mediocre idea that you'd drop just because you're not part of the "team", then it probably isn't a good idea -- and if it's a truly great idea, you'll either do it yourself to a personal fork of the code or you'll do it for another project. You can't let your own judgement be clouded by whether or not a clique of people approves; that's quite high-school.
>they drive away people who want to help but are unsure of their abilities.
Here's the thing: Firefox is a project that everyone wants to work on, and there are a huge pile of projects that have trouble finding developers. It only makes sense that if you're unsure of your abilities, you should go work for a smaller project (one that's less visible and less demanding) where your inexperience is more likely to be tolerated. Once you've learned your chops, you can either work hard to make THAT project a success (in which case the Firefox team -- and many, many others -- will notice you) or go work on another project that needs you (or start your own).
Let's face it: people want to work on Firefox because it's cool, and that's ok, but when you've got a huge pool of people to choose from it's best for the project to choose the best of those people -- and for that, you need a reputation and a track record to qualify.
I like your signature, about the instructions on the 7-11 muffin. Similarly, I recent bought (and promptly consumed) a bottle of Frog's Leap wine, and found on the bottom of the label "Open other end".
Interesting note about credit card swiping vs. manual entry, and identity theft. If a store swipes a card, and it turns out to be a fraudulent charge, it's the bank that takes the hit -- but if the store manually keys in the card, the store has to take the hit.
This was explained to me after my wife and I suffered THREE separate instances of fraudulent transactions on three separate bank cards with three separate numbers, all in a period of about four months. The idea is to prevent stores from keying in any old random number that someone provides with an "I forgot my card" excuse, secure in the knowledge that the bank would take the hit if it was a rip-off.
Incidentally, we started having the problems after switching banks in Chicago (the first time, I hadn't even received my card yet!) and the problems stopped as soon as we changed banks again. Not surprisingly, the bank manager had no interest -- and I mean NO interest whatsoever -- in pursuing the persons responsible. I always assumed it was an inside job. Four years later we visited, and the bank had shut down.
You know, it's funny, but more often than not if I go into the local Ralph's (california) and say "I do not have a Ralph's card", the cashier just scans their own little card in for me.
Then again, I spend most of my time buying at Trader Joe's, because they have what I want at good prices. You know, those things that really make a customer loyal, the way those "loyalty cards" don't.
Agreed. This one even made me start to tell my wife about it, then stop and say "nah, it's a stupid geeky hacky thing that you won't care about but makes me giddy. See? I'm learning!"
1. Is it illegal where you live (and by "you" I mean "anyone reading this") to publish a newspaper with a classified ad section, if some (or even many) of those classified ads are for "massage" services that are thinly-veiled prostitution services? Assuming you live somewhere that prostitution is illegal, of course.
2. Is it illegal where you live to publish a newspaper that exists only to advertise prostitution services?
3. If the answer to the first is no, and the second is yes, is this likely because in the first case the newspaper has substantial non-illegal uses, while in the second the newspaper exists only to promote illegal services, or is it something else?
Slashdot Mirror
"really?
;)
have you heard a lot of rock/punk bands using mandolins in their music?"
Actually, there are only two reasons to use an unexpected instrument in your music:
a) you have a vision that requires inclusion of a specific instrument to achieve ("when I played the progression on my old hammond, it gave me chills. We've got to lay that in.");
b) you're running out of ideas ("what if we started a punk band made entirely of ukulele players? We'll call it Puke-ulele!").
Which artists are doing it for which reasons can be debated for hours. And for what it's worth, the Puke-ulele discussion actually took place.
So I have this theory that older performers are being recognized now because the voters are comparing those old albums to the new stuff being released now -- and are recognizing just how great those old albums were compared to today's releases.
Back when those old albums were being compared to each other, of course, they didn't seem all that special...
"The fact that they are successful suddenly makes them crap?"
Strawman. Actually, I think they were suggesting the opposite: that the writer considers their music mediocre, and uses them as an example of the mediocre music being released by the record labels.
Knee + Jerk == Reaction.
Last I checked they were still selling, through their own website They Might Be Downloads.
I had a great moment with this once; their latest album had come out, and it was 1 in the morning in New Delhi. I was sitting at my laptop, downloading the new album having just paid for it, and thought "holy crap, I'm sitting in new delhi in my underwear buying and downloading a new album I wanted from the united states at 1 in the morning." Just to make it even stranger, I quickly popped in and watched some of a Buster Keaton silent movie DVD. (this is true.)
Hey, thanks for this -- I'm forwarding your suggestions to the development team. I know that, at the very least, they weren't aware of the Machine.Config options for Browsercaps.
:)
Imagine that -- getting a useful and prompt answer to a legitimate question on SlashDot!
>or Hyundai advertising their reliability.
:)
I don't disagree with your point, but I thought it worth noting that Hyundai (who is a client of the company I work for) actually has some really unique and effective new methods of improving their quality. Obviously I can't say what they are, so you'll have to take my word for it, but one approach in particular is really novel and has resulted in a huge short-term measurable quality increase (as reflected in the latest JD Power survey).
Dunno if this will carry over into long-term quality improvements, and it doesn't automatically make them a "do no evil" company, but I though it might interest you to hear of it.
That solitare game started with either Corel or Caldera, can't remember which...
>From a customer perspective, I would rather have one good proprietary solution that serves my needs than a dozen mediocre but interoperable ones.
:)
Ah, but what you'd REALLY prefer (as would we all) is one good solution that serves my needs, but can interoperate with a dozen mediocre ones in case the good solution becomes mediocre or a mediocre solution becomes great in the future. Standards, baby.
I'm working on my first .Net project at work, where I have to provide compatible HTML. We spent three hours figuring out all the oddball stuff .Net does to HTML, then I spent a day writing up documentation on it. During the documentation review, we opened a demo page in Mozilla instead of IE, and all the Panel-control-created div tags were replaced with table sets. Imagine our surprise.
As we started digging, we started finding lots more stuff like this; for example, tables get a style of "border-collapse: collapsed" by default in IE, which is a tag that IE uses to tighen up table structures (into non-standard measurements) while other browsers ignore the tag. There's no reason for this tag to be there, except to guarantee that tables will look different in IE as compared to other browsers.
The punch line, of course, is that this "feature" can't be turned off. So now we either have to burn a lot of extra effort to validate multiple sets of rendered HTML, or we have to give up alternative-browser compatibility -- which I am sure was the point in the first place.
(few things microsoftie make me seethe, but this one does...)
You folks are all missing the true danger here, I suspect...
Anti-virus software companies tend to share virus definitions. They race to find them and release them first, but for the most part (not always) they share the definitions for the damaging stuff. This is the only way for these companies to keep up with the flow of viruses. Microsoft has access to this same information.
However, Microsoft also has (a) a vested interest in NOT telling people about viruses until it can plug the hole, (b) the bank account to make their anti-virus product really good AND give it away for free as part of the OS, and (c) the ability to have a big "REPORT A POTENTIAL VIRUS" button on the desktop by default.
As a result, many (not all) viruses would be reported by users directly to Microsoft instead of other companies. Microsoft could then create and quietly distribute a signature to their users, without disclosure to the public or other companies. Their users would be protected, while other companies were still finding out about the virus.
Now, Microsoft also gets a jump on fixing the exploit for this virus, and can sit on it while the other companies first discover the new virus themselves, then share the information with the public.
So now the other companies are scrambling to create a signature. Meanwhile, Microsoft announces that they already have a fix to the exploit (the one they were sitting on) and -bing- here it is -- "we fixed this exploit a few minutes after it was discovered!" they'll say.
Far-fetched? Well, consider that the antivirus software community will already be weakened by users who choose the free Microsoft solution over their own, which means fewer people collecting and studying new viruses. As the community shrinks, it will take them longer to discover and share new virus signatures, which will lose them still more customers.
In other words, this is a really good business decision for Microsoft.
If you're really not keen on doing this, as you say in your post, then the answer is "however much money required to make it appealing to you."
Let's face it: this isn't your business. Your rates aren't beholden to creating a profit, or covering costs, or stockholders, or being competitive. Since that's the case, the only factor that should effect your fees is whether or not you'll be sufficiently motivated to do a good job.
You're making the assumption that Microsoft truly believes what they say about interoperability and whatnot. Also that they believe they're still capable of making better products. If either (or both) of those assumptions is incorrect, then it might be safe to say they're blowing smoke while going right on doing what they've always done, and knowingly so.
The trouble with this approach is the same as the trouble with preserving old videotape material, something I used to be involved in.
;)
I worked for a museum that preserved such materials, and always wanted to establish a program not just to copy older videotape to newer analog formats (which already existed) but to copy and RE-copy those digital tapes on a two-year cyclical program; the digital data wouldn't degrade during the transfer, and by essentially replacing the media containing the data on a regular basis, we'd have a good chance of saving the material long-term.
I never got approval for a simple reason: tape stock is expensive, staff is expensive, and coordination of such an effort requires diligence. Similarly, you could use CD-R/DVD-R to back up your material and re-burn the discs on an ongoing rotation, but most people don't have that kind of discipline even if they have the money.
For me personally, I've found the best approach is to maintain the data on a redundant RAID array, with occasional backup to DVD-R. This way, the data itself will outlive the death of individual local drives, while the DVD-R only needs to serve as a short-term disaster-recovery solution.
Of course, once my critical dataset gets large enough to require more than a few DVD-Rs, I'll probably get lazy...aren't we about due for a new format by now?
Interesting (I hope) side note about team size -- sometimes a difference of a single person can make or break you.
Case in point: I built several marketing Flash pieces (yeah, I know, I know) over a year with the same pool of people. We'd form a three-man team and go to town, with the team made up of different people from the pool. Things seemed fine, and the pieces were good.
Then one day, I teamed up with a SINGLE other person. We'd worked together before, but only on a three-man team. As a two-man team, we got a ton done in a short period of time, and the quality of our work (technical and creative) was far, far above anything we'd done before.
In our case, it was our ability (as a two-man team) to say "I own the tech" and "I own the creative", and negotiate on the fly like so: "Hey, what do you want to do creatively here?" "Do creatively EXACTLY THIS" or "Hey, what do you want to do creatively here?" "I have no preference, do whatever is technically best." With a third person on the team, everything required negotiation, and it was getting in the way.
About a year later, another group of two guys worked together on a similar project, and it once again went tremendously well compared to their previous work. About a month ago, same thing. Now, finally, we're making the two-man approach mandatory for these projects.
But YOU just spelled them correctly, so they're back in!
Of course, you did misspell f***ing... (heh)
Hmm. The thing is, if the person has a great idea for a feature, and the Firefox team says "fuck off", the Firefox team's attitude (expressed or implied) does not change the quality of the idea. If it's a mediocre idea that you'd drop just because you're not part of the "team", then it probably isn't a good idea -- and if it's a truly great idea, you'll either do it yourself to a personal fork of the code or you'll do it for another project. You can't let your own judgement be clouded by whether or not a clique of people approves; that's quite high-school.
>they drive away people who want to help but are unsure of their abilities.
Here's the thing: Firefox is a project that everyone wants to work on, and there are a huge pile of projects that have trouble finding developers. It only makes sense that if you're unsure of your abilities, you should go work for a smaller project (one that's less visible and less demanding) where your inexperience is more likely to be tolerated. Once you've learned your chops, you can either work hard to make THAT project a success (in which case the Firefox team -- and many, many others -- will notice you) or go work on another project that needs you (or start your own).
Let's face it: people want to work on Firefox because it's cool, and that's ok, but when you've got a huge pool of people to choose from it's best for the project to choose the best of those people -- and for that, you need a reputation and a track record to qualify.
Off-topic, but...
I like your signature, about the instructions on the 7-11 muffin. Similarly, I recent bought (and promptly consumed) a bottle of Frog's Leap wine, and found on the bottom of the label "Open other end".
Well, if they were smart (they being Apple) they'd just buy TiVo.
>You're not Miss Marple...
I seriously considered registering a new account under the name Miss_Marple, just to make the joke, but it's late and I'm tired.
Interesting note about credit card swiping vs. manual entry, and identity theft. If a store swipes a card, and it turns out to be a fraudulent charge, it's the bank that takes the hit -- but if the store manually keys in the card, the store has to take the hit.
This was explained to me after my wife and I suffered THREE separate instances of fraudulent transactions on three separate bank cards with three separate numbers, all in a period of about four months. The idea is to prevent stores from keying in any old random number that someone provides with an "I forgot my card" excuse, secure in the knowledge that the bank would take the hit if it was a rip-off.
Incidentally, we started having the problems after switching banks in Chicago (the first time, I hadn't even received my card yet!) and the problems stopped as soon as we changed banks again. Not surprisingly, the bank manager had no interest -- and I mean NO interest whatsoever -- in pursuing the persons responsible. I always assumed it was an inside job. Four years later we visited, and the bank had shut down.
On preview: no pun intended.
You know, it's funny, but more often than not if I go into the local Ralph's (california) and say "I do not have a Ralph's card", the cashier just scans their own little card in for me.
Then again, I spend most of my time buying at Trader Joe's, because they have what I want at good prices. You know, those things that really make a customer loyal, the way those "loyalty cards" don't.
Agreed. This one even made me start to tell my wife about it, then stop and say "nah, it's a stupid geeky hacky thing that you won't care about but makes me giddy. See? I'm learning!"
Quick, someone Godwin this thing so we can get back on topic! Gee whiz, what is this, MetaFilter?
I have three sincere questions:
1. Is it illegal where you live (and by "you" I mean "anyone reading this") to publish a newspaper with a classified ad section, if some (or even many) of those classified ads are for "massage" services that are thinly-veiled prostitution services? Assuming you live somewhere that prostitution is illegal, of course.
2. Is it illegal where you live to publish a newspaper that exists only to advertise prostitution services?
3. If the answer to the first is no, and the second is yes, is this likely because in the first case the newspaper has substantial non-illegal uses, while in the second the newspaper exists only to promote illegal services, or is it something else?