If they had decided that the signal for NA HD was to be 1080p/30, we'd all be done now.
On the surface that seems much saner than what we have now, but there's a serious problem with that - bandwidth. I imagine the broadcasters wanted the flexibility so they could choose how to best divide up their available channel bandwidth. I'm quite grateful for the fact that my local PBS affiliates are able to cram four virtual channels into one physical over-the-air channel, for example. Much of what's on TV doesn't require 1080p, and it would be hugely wasteful to broadcast it that way. Even my local network affiliates (which frequently broadcast at full 1080i) often have a secondary channel of some sort, like a local weather channel, in 480i. If all these variants weren't in the official standard there would be no guarantee that consumers' equipment could decode a particular format, and the broadcasters wouldn't bother dividing up their bandwidth this way.
Do you really want to live in a society where statisticians (or accountants, for that matter) alone get to decide what's acceptable?
given their use, they are far, far less dangerous than the means they replaced
In theory that's true, but that argument ignores the fact that the police are human. They're overworked, underpaid, and sick to hell of dealing with the dregs of society every day. Less-than-lethal weaponry, unfortunately, often leads to laziness. "Fuck it, this guy won't shut up, I'll just Taser his ass!" In some situations, yes, the police will avoid shooting someone dead because they had the option of the Taser instead. But in others, they might decide to Taser someone just because they mouthed off, or because it's easier than talking them out of some crazy situation, or having to get into a physical confrontation with them. When it becomes relatively risk-free for law enforcement to apply force, they're much more likely to do so, and increasingly often that's going to happen in cases where they really had no business using force to begin with.
This is the same problem we Americans have with war these days. With defense contractors delivering ultra-high-tech weaponry that makes killing people as easy as playing a video game, it makes it a whole lot easier for the American public to not give a shit about, say, an unjust war in Iraq. We need fewer troops to fight a war (thus, no need for a draft), and a larger percentage of them are out of harm's way. Coupled with promises that a war will be quick, cheap ("the invasion of Iraq will pay for itself!"), and easy, the American people just didn't think very hard about what it really meant to go to into Iraq. And now, despite "Mission Accomplished," we've been in Iraq longer than we were in World War II (with no end in sight!), more Americans have died in Iraq than died on 9/11, and only now are we starting to have second thoughts.
The problem is that people think Apple is their friend. This is no doubt a testament to their marketing skills, but the fanboy crowd really needs to get their collective head out of their collective ass about this. Apple is a publicly-traded corporation, with all the financial responsibilities that entails (i.e. they are obligated by law to act in the best interest of their profits). The sooner people get it through their head that Steve Jobs isn't going to stop by their house and do a couple bong hits with them, the sooner they'll stop whining.
That's just like a certain segment of the American population who seems to think that "freedom of religion" means "you can be any kind of Christian you want."
Nice troll, but that's all it is. I'm under no obligation to support someone's business method. That's the beauty of true free market economics - businesses can try to sell to me, but I'm under no obligation to be sold to. If they don't make enough money to support their free content, it'll go away. I'm OK with that.
Or we can look at it another way: their "free" content is a business expense. They spend a certain amount of dollars (in real cash, or time/effort) in an effort to attract ad views, for which they get money. Marketing is a game of averages - not every person who views an ad will click on it, and not everyone who clicks will buy something. But if enough people do buy something, the system is sustainable. And even people who don't view ads can still contribute by increasing the popularity of the site. Ad-blockers are still a small minority, so chances are most people who start visiting a site because they heard about it via word-of-mouth will not be blocking ads, and ultimtely will contribute to the success of the site, and the system as a whole.
Here's another way to look at it: if you own an ad-supported web site and the time you can contribute to working on the site is limited, does it make you more money to bitch about ad-blocking users "stealing" your content and working to block them, or is the return on your time investment higher if you focus on acquiring/generating new content, or marketing?
I don't understand the big deal with ad blocking. Just block sites that abuse their right to advertise by running 'spaz-ads' or other intrusive campaigns, allow other people to provide the services you came there to use.
For me, it's somewhat a matter of principle, and somewhat a matter of personal "brain wiring."
The "brain wiring" part is that I seem to have a very hard time filtering out background noise or distractions of any sort. I have a bitch of a time trying to carry on a conversation in a noisy bar, for example. It isn't that my hearing is a problem - it's actually quite good - it's that my brain is easily distracted by other inputs. If I'm in a room full of people talking, my attention diverts to whoever just spoke loudest or otherwise caught my ear. I end up hearing about 3 words of every conversation within earshot. If I concentrate very hard I might be able to overcome it, but that takes a lot of mental effort for me and it's stressful. As far as web site advertising goes, the same thing happens to me visually. If there's some brightly-colored ad on the screen, it tends to pull my attention away from what I'm there to read. If it's blinking or moving or something, that's even worse.
The "principle" thing breaks down into a few sub-categories: I resent others trying to control or track me (especially for their own profit), I hate wasted bandwidth and slow page loads, and I resent the steady commercializaion of all visible space.
The "control and tracking" piece is the one that bothers me the most. Advertisers are in the business of mind control, pure and simple. And they're very, very good at it. I haven't watched TV commercials since I was a young kid (before DVR's I'd simply mute the audio), yet I know entirely too much about commercials for my taste. I "get" the references when people talk about them, and I hate it. I don't want my perceptions manipulated by commercial interests, but it's inescapable. Many of us would like to think we're too sophisticated to be subject to such things, but we're not. Advertisers know the human mind very well, and they use every trick possible to manipulate us at every turn. Well, this is me, opting out. They can fuck off. They are the enemy.
The privacy implications of widespread ad networks bothers me, too. If I don't stop them, they plant their cookies, track me from site to site, and eventually associate my bit-trail with my name, address, etc. I can't imagine why I, or anyone else, wouldn't have a problem with this, and it's almost shocking to me that most people don't care.
The "wasted bandwidth" and slow page loads are pretty much self-explanatory. The less work my browser has to do, the faster pages will render. Even a few tens of milliseconds can make the difference between a "snappy" and a "sluggish" feel to the whole web-browsing experience. And despite the fact that I have broadband and run FasterFox, there's still a limit to how many simultaneous connections a browser will make to a given site, and if they're all tied up loading ad-crap and "rounded-corner" graphics, things get god-awful slow.
My problem with the commercialization of all visible space is a purely personal one. Things like billboards are bad enough, but now they have giant LED image-changing billboards, and ads are cropping up in places like the space above urinals in men's rooms and on the lines in parking lots. I'm not trying to say advertisers don't have a right to be in business or to do their thing, but it does bother the hell out of me that ads are appearing in more and more public spaces. I can't stop that, but I sure as hell can do my best to keep them out of my private spaces. I spend a lot of time online, and I go to significant lengths to filter crap from my net connection as a result. I do the same with TV. I don't want to be one of those snobs who takes every opportunity to brag that they don't own a TV. But I don't want to be infected with advertising memes either. So I own a DVR and I skip commercials religiousl
I'm not saying nobody should ever use SMART; I'm just saying it's not a very good indicator of when a hard drive is going to fail. You can be sure if you get a SMART error that you should replace the drive, but don't think that the absense of SMART errors means the drive is healthy. That's all. The only way I feel comfortable protecting data is: 1) RAID, 2) nightly backups.
I was going to say that I was waiting for someone to invent the whore-o-scope - a device for scoping out whores. Then I remembered that the webcam had already been invented.
Heh... This reminds me of the Jesus freaks here in the US who think that "freedom of religion" means "you're free to be any kind of Christian you like."
You know this is Slashdot, right? And, what, you're surprised that a lot of people here are chanting "MythTV!" every time Tivo gets brought up? You think you'll get them to stop by bitching about it? Yeah, good luck with that.
I don't have any ideological axe to grind on this issue. I have DirecTivo, I've been a Tivo user since 2001, and I'm considering the new $299 HD Tivo. But I'm also a fan of open-source/free software, run Linux desktops on all my PC's, and have the necessary hardware and skills to do MythTV. And right now, I'm leaning toward the MythTV solution. But I can totally understand (and I'm even tempted by) the "it-just-works-and-works-well" aspect of Tivo.
But I'm also sick to hell of the trend toward loss of control for the consumer over all hardware and software. Tivo may be Linux-based, but it's still a proprietary system. I'm also sick of the constant encroachment of advertising into our lives, and even the stupid one-line promo options on Tivo's main menu annoy me. There has been talk about Tivo introducing more ad functionality, which I'm quite certain will happen as Tivo-the-company struggles to survive. If anything, more control will be taken away over time, the monthly fee will increase, and eventually Tivo will probably get bought out. Already I've heard that they've outsourced their customer service, and that it's gone completely to shit since. So I'm extra hesitant to get anywhere near a new Tivo at this point.
Yes, MythTV requires some hacking to make it work. But what I get in exchange is freedom and control. I'm fully confident that the loss of zap2it's program guide information will be worked around. Screen-scraping isn't as bad as people make it out to be - I've actually done a lot of it for my day job. As for MythTV not being able to record encrypted HD cable, I don't care about that, either! I'm planning on ditching cable altogether, one way or another. I'm not going to turn into one of those elitist pricks who never misses a chance to tell everyone how he doesn't own a TV. But I am going to cut back on my TV watching, and stop paying corporations I hate for the privilege of being bombarded by their ads and locked into their contracts.
Back in 96/97, I worked at a public university. The bosses wouldn't let us name our new file servers Beavis & Butt-head. We ended up naming them Elvis and Hendrix, thereby starting a trend of naming servers after rock stars who died of drug overdoses. Ahh, good times...
You realize your attitude is "part of the problem," right? At least if "the problem" is defined as "getting more end users to accept and use open-source software."
I'm fine with new ways of doing things as long as they're optional, at least in the beginning. And, sure, if they catch on hugely (like tabbed browsing, for example), make 'em the default and maybe even phase out the old way of doing things. But as an end user, I shouldn't be forced to learn a whole new way of doing things just because it's the cool new thing to do in geek circles. I am a geek, and it's mildly to severely irritating to me, depending on the circumstances. For people who aren't geeks (i.e. most of the population), it's a huge disincentive to use open-source products. All too often the developers are focused on the gee-whiz aspect of things and can't be bothered to design a decent, consistent user interface, or even fix known, long-standing bugs. It's one of the few remaining impediments to widespread acceptance of open source software, but it's a huge one. Yes, I know some people don't care if open source software becomes more widely accepted, but I do. So I'm going to do what the rest of us geeks here at Slashdot do and post my opinion. I don't expect everyone to suddenly agree with me, but maybe a few readers will see my point and give the problem some thought. And maybe if that happens enough times, some developers will stop worrying quite so much about 3D spinning-cube desktop eye candy and graphical, framebuffer-mode Linux installers and start concentrating on usability, stability, performance and documentation.
Boy, I do so love when some chickenshit AC comes out of the woodwork to tell me what an asshole I am, especially when they decide to misinterpret what I wrote.
I don't feel entitled to anything. I feel annoyed by forced changes, and changes for the sake of change alone (as in, when the new way of doing things has roughly the same number and scale of drawbacks and advantages as the old way). Hey, change all you want! Just don't be surprised when your users grumble because you, the developer, have changed something because you were bored.
I'm with you on the Gnome thing, though. I don't have a strong opinion about desktop environments for Linux, but I prefer KDE for serious desktop work and Xfce for a more lightweight environment. Gnome isn't anything I want to use on a regular basis. It's a shame that no other open-source Linux IM client seems to offer what Pidgin does. Maybe it's time I looked at Kopete again.
One thing that bugs me about software in general, and open-source in particular, is this constant need for developers to change things just for the sake of changing them. "This way is better!" they'll say, but really, it isn't. When is "good enough" just plain good enough? When I upgrade to the next release of Ubuntu, for example, I don't want to be forced to re-learn all the software I knew and develop new habits just because someone decided it would be cooler if it worked differently.
Case in point: GAIM/Pidgin. When I first switched from Windows to Linux on my desktop I switched from the "official" IM clients (ICQ and Yahoo) to GAIM. But I had to retrain myself to use control-enter to send an IM, rather than tab-space (tab to move my focus from the text-entry box to the "send" button, space to "click" the button without using the mouse). This key combination worked in all the official clients, but GAIM couldn't be configured to use it. I liked being able to embed newlines in my IM's using just the enter key, so I didn't want that to be my "send" key. So I retrained myself. Fine; I'm willing to make compromises.
But now the new GAIM/Pidgin comes along and, oh, hey, guess what? You can't configure it to use control-enter to send any more! No more embedding newlines with a simple enter key press! Nope, that's not the "right" way to do it! And remember that send button? The one that was so handy every time you just had to go to the mouse to teach the built-in spell-checker all those words or acronyms it didn't know? Well, that's gone, too! It, too, was the "wrong" way to do things. No, there's only one right way, and that way is to send using the bare enter key, embed newlines with control-enter, and never, ever click a "send" button. So now I have to retrain myself yet again. Thanks, guys.
So apparently that's what's happening with Firefox now, too. The concept of history and bookmarks, which is perfectly fine and has been since NCSA Mosaic, is now uncool. No, it needs to be replaced with something else. And if I don't like it I need to suck it up and just take the time to completely revise my work habits! 'Cause some basement-dwelling, self-appointed God of Computing said so, I guess.
I really don't mind change. I welcome it! But I want to be able to change on my terms, not someone else's. I took to tabbed browsing like a fish to water, if you'll pardon the cliche. But nobody forced it down my throat. And I'm getting pretty goddamned sick of developers forcing these things down our throats just 'cause it's the "next big thing." I'm a geek, too, and I love playing with computers just for the hell of it. But I also use computers as tools to accomplish other things, and I don't need my software getting in my goddamned way.
Well, see, if you hadn't angered the computer gods by refusing to use your shift key, they wouldn't have smote you in such a fashion. Think about that next time, mmkay?
I run a full-blown install of MediaWiki on a small server behind my firewall. I wanted to learn MediaWiki markup and I thought it would be a useful tool for organizing and annotating all the crap I come across on the web that I'm going to want to find later.
I also wrote a sort of pico-Google in PHP/MySQL a couple years back, and I still use that regularly. It's a sort of searchable bookmark database. I feed it a URL, it goes out to the page and sucks down all the text, normalizes it, and breaks it into keywords. It then stores the keywords in the database. It's got well over 3,000 pages in it at this point and even on my little 1 GHz machine with 512M of RAM, it hauls ass. I used to have a separate component that went out and checked each link every night to see if it had moved or changed, but I gave up on that part when I decided the whole thing needed a rewrite anyway. And, as is typical for these hobby projects, I haven't yet gotten around to it. I want to implement multi-word text-string searching (i.e. searching for "a string of words in quotes"), a few Google-esque functions like inurl:, and make the interface not look like total crap the way it does now. Maybe someday...
So, at this point, if there's information I consider especially worth saving or looking at, I dump it into my personal Wiki. If it's something I just think I might want to use later for some reason, I throw it in the bookmark database.
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If they had decided that the signal for NA HD was to be 1080p/30, we'd all be done now.
On the surface that seems much saner than what we have now, but there's a serious problem with that - bandwidth. I imagine the broadcasters wanted the flexibility so they could choose how to best divide up their available channel bandwidth. I'm quite grateful for the fact that my local PBS affiliates are able to cram four virtual channels into one physical over-the-air channel, for example. Much of what's on TV doesn't require 1080p, and it would be hugely wasteful to broadcast it that way. Even my local network affiliates (which frequently broadcast at full 1080i) often have a secondary channel of some sort, like a local weather channel, in 480i. If all these variants weren't in the official standard there would be no guarantee that consumers' equipment could decode a particular format, and the broadcasters wouldn't bother dividing up their bandwidth this way.
Tasers are statistically harmless...
Do you really want to live in a society where statisticians (or accountants, for that matter) alone get to decide what's acceptable?
given their use, they are far, far less dangerous than the means they replaced
In theory that's true, but that argument ignores the fact that the police are human. They're overworked, underpaid, and sick to hell of dealing with the dregs of society every day. Less-than-lethal weaponry, unfortunately, often leads to laziness. "Fuck it, this guy won't shut up, I'll just Taser his ass!" In some situations, yes, the police will avoid shooting someone dead because they had the option of the Taser instead. But in others, they might decide to Taser someone just because they mouthed off, or because it's easier than talking them out of some crazy situation, or having to get into a physical confrontation with them. When it becomes relatively risk-free for law enforcement to apply force, they're much more likely to do so, and increasingly often that's going to happen in cases where they really had no business using force to begin with.
This is the same problem we Americans have with war these days. With defense contractors delivering ultra-high-tech weaponry that makes killing people as easy as playing a video game, it makes it a whole lot easier for the American public to not give a shit about, say, an unjust war in Iraq. We need fewer troops to fight a war (thus, no need for a draft), and a larger percentage of them are out of harm's way. Coupled with promises that a war will be quick, cheap ("the invasion of Iraq will pay for itself!"), and easy, the American people just didn't think very hard about what it really meant to go to into Iraq. And now, despite "Mission Accomplished," we've been in Iraq longer than we were in World War II (with no end in sight!), more Americans have died in Iraq than died on 9/11, and only now are we starting to have second thoughts.
The problem is that people think Apple is their friend. This is no doubt a testament to their marketing skills, but the fanboy crowd really needs to get their collective head out of their collective ass about this. Apple is a publicly-traded corporation, with all the financial responsibilities that entails (i.e. they are obligated by law to act in the best interest of their profits). The sooner people get it through their head that Steve Jobs isn't going to stop by their house and do a couple bong hits with them, the sooner they'll stop whining.
That's just like a certain segment of the American population who seems to think that "freedom of religion" means "you can be any kind of Christian you want."
The subject line says it all.
Nice troll, but that's all it is. I'm under no obligation to support someone's business method. That's the beauty of true free market economics - businesses can try to sell to me, but I'm under no obligation to be sold to. If they don't make enough money to support their free content, it'll go away. I'm OK with that.
Or we can look at it another way: their "free" content is a business expense. They spend a certain amount of dollars (in real cash, or time/effort) in an effort to attract ad views, for which they get money. Marketing is a game of averages - not every person who views an ad will click on it, and not everyone who clicks will buy something. But if enough people do buy something, the system is sustainable. And even people who don't view ads can still contribute by increasing the popularity of the site. Ad-blockers are still a small minority, so chances are most people who start visiting a site because they heard about it via word-of-mouth will not be blocking ads, and ultimtely will contribute to the success of the site, and the system as a whole.
Here's another way to look at it: if you own an ad-supported web site and the time you can contribute to working on the site is limited, does it make you more money to bitch about ad-blocking users "stealing" your content and working to block them, or is the return on your time investment higher if you focus on acquiring/generating new content, or marketing?
I don't understand the big deal with ad blocking. Just block sites that abuse their right to advertise by running 'spaz-ads' or other intrusive campaigns, allow other people to provide the services you came there to use.
For me, it's somewhat a matter of principle, and somewhat a matter of personal "brain wiring."
The "brain wiring" part is that I seem to have a very hard time filtering out background noise or distractions of any sort. I have a bitch of a time trying to carry on a conversation in a noisy bar, for example. It isn't that my hearing is a problem - it's actually quite good - it's that my brain is easily distracted by other inputs. If I'm in a room full of people talking, my attention diverts to whoever just spoke loudest or otherwise caught my ear. I end up hearing about 3 words of every conversation within earshot. If I concentrate very hard I might be able to overcome it, but that takes a lot of mental effort for me and it's stressful. As far as web site advertising goes, the same thing happens to me visually. If there's some brightly-colored ad on the screen, it tends to pull my attention away from what I'm there to read. If it's blinking or moving or something, that's even worse.
The "principle" thing breaks down into a few sub-categories: I resent others trying to control or track me (especially for their own profit), I hate wasted bandwidth and slow page loads, and I resent the steady commercializaion of all visible space.
The "control and tracking" piece is the one that bothers me the most. Advertisers are in the business of mind control, pure and simple. And they're very, very good at it. I haven't watched TV commercials since I was a young kid (before DVR's I'd simply mute the audio), yet I know entirely too much about commercials for my taste. I "get" the references when people talk about them, and I hate it. I don't want my perceptions manipulated by commercial interests, but it's inescapable. Many of us would like to think we're too sophisticated to be subject to such things, but we're not. Advertisers know the human mind very well, and they use every trick possible to manipulate us at every turn. Well, this is me, opting out. They can fuck off. They are the enemy.
The privacy implications of widespread ad networks bothers me, too. If I don't stop them, they plant their cookies, track me from site to site, and eventually associate my bit-trail with my name, address, etc. I can't imagine why I, or anyone else, wouldn't have a problem with this, and it's almost shocking to me that most people don't care.
The "wasted bandwidth" and slow page loads are pretty much self-explanatory. The less work my browser has to do, the faster pages will render. Even a few tens of milliseconds can make the difference between a "snappy" and a "sluggish" feel to the whole web-browsing experience. And despite the fact that I have broadband and run FasterFox, there's still a limit to how many simultaneous connections a browser will make to a given site, and if they're all tied up loading ad-crap and "rounded-corner" graphics, things get god-awful slow.
My problem with the commercialization of all visible space is a purely personal one. Things like billboards are bad enough, but now they have giant LED image-changing billboards, and ads are cropping up in places like the space above urinals in men's rooms and on the lines in parking lots. I'm not trying to say advertisers don't have a right to be in business or to do their thing, but it does bother the hell out of me that ads are appearing in more and more public spaces. I can't stop that, but I sure as hell can do my best to keep them out of my private spaces. I spend a lot of time online, and I go to significant lengths to filter crap from my net connection as a result. I do the same with TV. I don't want to be one of those snobs who takes every opportunity to brag that they don't own a TV. But I don't want to be infected with advertising memes either. So I own a DVR and I skip commercials religiousl
I'm not saying nobody should ever use SMART; I'm just saying it's not a very good indicator of when a hard drive is going to fail. You can be sure if you get a SMART error that you should replace the drive, but don't think that the absense of SMART errors means the drive is healthy. That's all. The only way I feel comfortable protecting data is: 1) RAID, 2) nightly backups.
I've seen lots of hard drive failures, and only once has SMART ever given me any indication of a problem. I consider it pretty much pointless now.
I was going to say that I was waiting for someone to invent the whore-o-scope - a device for scoping out whores. Then I remembered that the webcam had already been invented.
Jokes like that are the reason I desperately wish that technology had advanced to the point where I could punch someone in the nuts via the internet.
Yeah, it's quite important to know the distinction between "lose" and "loose" when testicles are involved.
Heh... This reminds me of the Jesus freaks here in the US who think that "freedom of religion" means "you're free to be any kind of Christian you like."
You know this is Slashdot, right? And, what, you're surprised that a lot of people here are chanting "MythTV!" every time Tivo gets brought up? You think you'll get them to stop by bitching about it? Yeah, good luck with that.
I don't have any ideological axe to grind on this issue. I have DirecTivo, I've been a Tivo user since 2001, and I'm considering the new $299 HD Tivo. But I'm also a fan of open-source/free software, run Linux desktops on all my PC's, and have the necessary hardware and skills to do MythTV. And right now, I'm leaning toward the MythTV solution. But I can totally understand (and I'm even tempted by) the "it-just-works-and-works-well" aspect of Tivo.
But I'm also sick to hell of the trend toward loss of control for the consumer over all hardware and software. Tivo may be Linux-based, but it's still a proprietary system. I'm also sick of the constant encroachment of advertising into our lives, and even the stupid one-line promo options on Tivo's main menu annoy me. There has been talk about Tivo introducing more ad functionality, which I'm quite certain will happen as Tivo-the-company struggles to survive. If anything, more control will be taken away over time, the monthly fee will increase, and eventually Tivo will probably get bought out. Already I've heard that they've outsourced their customer service, and that it's gone completely to shit since. So I'm extra hesitant to get anywhere near a new Tivo at this point.
Yes, MythTV requires some hacking to make it work. But what I get in exchange is freedom and control. I'm fully confident that the loss of zap2it's program guide information will be worked around. Screen-scraping isn't as bad as people make it out to be - I've actually done a lot of it for my day job. As for MythTV not being able to record encrypted HD cable, I don't care about that, either! I'm planning on ditching cable altogether, one way or another. I'm not going to turn into one of those elitist pricks who never misses a chance to tell everyone how he doesn't own a TV. But I am going to cut back on my TV watching, and stop paying corporations I hate for the privilege of being bombarded by their ads and locked into their contracts.
I was just checking out Tivo's $299 HD unit yesterday. It absolutely states that it supports over-the-air antenna-based recording.
Back in 96/97, I worked at a public university. The bosses wouldn't let us name our new file servers Beavis & Butt-head. We ended up naming them Elvis and Hendrix, thereby starting a trend of naming servers after rock stars who died of drug overdoses. Ahh, good times...
"Juuulian! What the fack is up with these shopping carts? They got little facking clampers on 'em and the fackin' wheels don't work!"
God, I love that show. And God bless Bittorrent, or I'd never have seen anything but a single season of it, censored, on BBC America.
That was my first thought, too. "Hey, I can stand under some power lines with a fluorescent tube and it'll light up. Can I have a grant now?" Heh...
You realize your attitude is "part of the problem," right? At least if "the problem" is defined as "getting more end users to accept and use open-source software."
I'm fine with new ways of doing things as long as they're optional, at least in the beginning. And, sure, if they catch on hugely (like tabbed browsing, for example), make 'em the default and maybe even phase out the old way of doing things. But as an end user, I shouldn't be forced to learn a whole new way of doing things just because it's the cool new thing to do in geek circles. I am a geek, and it's mildly to severely irritating to me, depending on the circumstances. For people who aren't geeks (i.e. most of the population), it's a huge disincentive to use open-source products. All too often the developers are focused on the gee-whiz aspect of things and can't be bothered to design a decent, consistent user interface, or even fix known, long-standing bugs. It's one of the few remaining impediments to widespread acceptance of open source software, but it's a huge one. Yes, I know some people don't care if open source software becomes more widely accepted, but I do. So I'm going to do what the rest of us geeks here at Slashdot do and post my opinion. I don't expect everyone to suddenly agree with me, but maybe a few readers will see my point and give the problem some thought. And maybe if that happens enough times, some developers will stop worrying quite so much about 3D spinning-cube desktop eye candy and graphical, framebuffer-mode Linux installers and start concentrating on usability, stability, performance and documentation.
Boy, I do so love when some chickenshit AC comes out of the woodwork to tell me what an asshole I am, especially when they decide to misinterpret what I wrote.
I don't feel entitled to anything. I feel annoyed by forced changes, and changes for the sake of change alone (as in, when the new way of doing things has roughly the same number and scale of drawbacks and advantages as the old way). Hey, change all you want! Just don't be surprised when your users grumble because you, the developer, have changed something because you were bored.
I'm with you on the Gnome thing, though. I don't have a strong opinion about desktop environments for Linux, but I prefer KDE for serious desktop work and Xfce for a more lightweight environment. Gnome isn't anything I want to use on a regular basis. It's a shame that no other open-source Linux IM client seems to offer what Pidgin does. Maybe it's time I looked at Kopete again.
One thing that bugs me about software in general, and open-source in particular, is this constant need for developers to change things just for the sake of changing them. "This way is better!" they'll say, but really, it isn't. When is "good enough" just plain good enough? When I upgrade to the next release of Ubuntu, for example, I don't want to be forced to re-learn all the software I knew and develop new habits just because someone decided it would be cooler if it worked differently.
Case in point: GAIM/Pidgin. When I first switched from Windows to Linux on my desktop I switched from the "official" IM clients (ICQ and Yahoo) to GAIM. But I had to retrain myself to use control-enter to send an IM, rather than tab-space (tab to move my focus from the text-entry box to the "send" button, space to "click" the button without using the mouse). This key combination worked in all the official clients, but GAIM couldn't be configured to use it. I liked being able to embed newlines in my IM's using just the enter key, so I didn't want that to be my "send" key. So I retrained myself. Fine; I'm willing to make compromises.
But now the new GAIM/Pidgin comes along and, oh, hey, guess what? You can't configure it to use control-enter to send any more! No more embedding newlines with a simple enter key press! Nope, that's not the "right" way to do it! And remember that send button? The one that was so handy every time you just had to go to the mouse to teach the built-in spell-checker all those words or acronyms it didn't know? Well, that's gone, too! It, too, was the "wrong" way to do things. No, there's only one right way, and that way is to send using the bare enter key, embed newlines with control-enter, and never, ever click a "send" button. So now I have to retrain myself yet again. Thanks, guys.
So apparently that's what's happening with Firefox now, too. The concept of history and bookmarks, which is perfectly fine and has been since NCSA Mosaic, is now uncool. No, it needs to be replaced with something else. And if I don't like it I need to suck it up and just take the time to completely revise my work habits! 'Cause some basement-dwelling, self-appointed God of Computing said so, I guess.
I really don't mind change. I welcome it! But I want to be able to change on my terms, not someone else's. I took to tabbed browsing like a fish to water, if you'll pardon the cliche. But nobody forced it down my throat. And I'm getting pretty goddamned sick of developers forcing these things down our throats just 'cause it's the "next big thing." I'm a geek, too, and I love playing with computers just for the hell of it. But I also use computers as tools to accomplish other things, and I don't need my software getting in my goddamned way.
Well, see, if you hadn't angered the computer gods by refusing to use your shift key, they wouldn't have smote you in such a fashion. Think about that next time, mmkay?
I run a full-blown install of MediaWiki on a small server behind my firewall. I wanted to learn MediaWiki markup and I thought it would be a useful tool for organizing and annotating all the crap I come across on the web that I'm going to want to find later.
I also wrote a sort of pico-Google in PHP/MySQL a couple years back, and I still use that regularly. It's a sort of searchable bookmark database. I feed it a URL, it goes out to the page and sucks down all the text, normalizes it, and breaks it into keywords. It then stores the keywords in the database. It's got well over 3,000 pages in it at this point and even on my little 1 GHz machine with 512M of RAM, it hauls ass. I used to have a separate component that went out and checked each link every night to see if it had moved or changed, but I gave up on that part when I decided the whole thing needed a rewrite anyway. And, as is typical for these hobby projects, I haven't yet gotten around to it. I want to implement multi-word text-string searching (i.e. searching for "a string of words in quotes"), a few Google-esque functions like inurl:, and make the interface not look like total crap the way it does now. Maybe someday...
So, at this point, if there's information I consider especially worth saving or looking at, I dump it into my personal Wiki. If it's something I just think I might want to use later for some reason, I throw it in the bookmark database.
There's no need to predict the future when you can control it instead.
No, but they do still live in their parents' basement.