Seriously, some of their micro-apps are just pointless and a waste of space. Best example: "keyes". Who wants to run a program where two eyeballs are constantly following my mouse around the screen? Seriously...
This was deceitful. It would be no different than if Microsoft gave the smartest guy in the computer science program on campus a laptop with Windows, and paid him to tell everyone how GREAT Microsoft is. Meanwhile, the guy is running linux at home and keeping it a secret. So what happens here? 5 or 10 people who don't know much about computers trust the smart guy as an honest person, and buy Windows based on bad information. 1 month later, when their system is crashing from all the spyware, they ask the smart guy why his system doesn't have any problems. The smart guy shrugs, and walks away, leaving everyone who trusted him screwed.
Let's just examine what actually happened, compared to your hypothetical situation: Gap Inc. pays good-looking people to wear their clothes and talk them up. They do so. Other people raise eyebrows. "Hey, nice duds," they say. "You like? I got them at the Gap! Hip fashions! I love it!" The walking mannequins are lying through their teeth: they actually hate these clothes, but the people asking them don't know any better, and go to the Gap, spending exorbitant amounts of money for mediocre clothes.
My question: other than the fact that the people they asked don't like clothes from the Gap, in what manner were the dupes deceived? These people were perfectly capable of going to the Gap, looking at what was on the rack, and saying, "You know, upon reflection, I believe that these garments aren't really 'hip' and 'happening,' as the youth culture of today is wont to say. In fact, I'm afraid that they look like they were stitched together out of remnants from a carpet sale. I believe I'll go purchase my clothes at Old Navy, whose fashions are better representative of my upbeat, individualistic lifestyle!"
Which is all to say, it's a lot easier for a tech to deceive a non-tech about the relative quality of a technical product than it is for one college kid to deceive another college kid as to what constitutes acceptable clothing. Additionally, people shouldn't get their panties an a twist about clothes.
(Except for Old Navy. The last time I bought a shirt there, a whole swath of fabric surrounding one of the buttons ripped off within a week. F 'em.)
This reminds me of something that happened at the local university. The Gap gave FREE clothing to some better looking people, and PAID these people money to wear the clothing and talk it up...
There's even a term for this practice. It's called "modeling."
Seriously, other than the fact that you weren't offered money/clothes, what's your real beef here? That people wear clothes because they think it will confer some level of coolness to them? Surely you can't just be noticing this now?
I need to read that one again some time. I didn't fully get it the first time.
Don't feel bad. I've read it about three times (the first time, for a college course devoted to it!), and I still don't get all of it. In fact, every once in a while I think that I've lost parts of it that I thought I'd understood before, like filling in a jigsaw puzzle while someone secretly sneaks up and removes pieces you've already placed.
I remember that ad! I was lucky enough to be at West Chester University of PA at the time, and stumbled across a stand where they were giving away 16 oz bottles of the stuff for free. Let me tell you something: you didn't miss a damn thing. It tasted like liquid ass.
But the ad was funny. (And for the record: I think that what the customer at the diner specifically said was, "Surprise me," which led to the whole impromptu Tom Jones concert thing.)
I was on the phone with a recruiter earlier today, and mention of Claria (formerly Gator) came up. He said that it was really difficult to place people there. There were the occasional ones who just didn't recognize the name, but at least half his potential hires went "Claria? They're the people who used to be Gator! I'm not working there! Don't even send them my résumé."
This story, believe it or not, gives me hope. Thanks for sharing it.:)
Canon's Digital Photo Professional (DPP) software, which they include with their DSLRs, is pretty powerful, and includes some nice batch-processing tools. But its interface is annoying.
And their Image Browser! Oh god, my eyes.
Of course, Adobe Bridge isn't any better. In fact, the only image management program I've used recently that I really liked was iView Media Pro, and it's $200, so I'm outta luck there until I can bill some hours at my side job.:)
Let's remake Sherlock (by stealing Konfabulator) and call it Dashboard! Let's replace "Find" with Spotlight! Even though it's just a new search technology, let's change everything about the search interface in Find! It's not better, but it's New New NEW! Different Different DIFFERENT! Yeah!
I wouldn't be so quick to label Dashboard as a Konfabulator rip-off. At best, you could argue that Konfabulator caused someone at Apple to say, "Hey, remember those widgets we used to develop in NeXTstep? See where these guys have taken the idea? Why did we ever get away from this?"
(Answer: because tons of widgets on the desktop were a huge pain in the butt, and it took a virtual container for them - the Dashboard - to make them non-irritating again.)
But generally I think you hit the nail on the head, and damn are you ever right about Spotlight. From the Ars Technica review of Tiger (note that when he references Finder, he's referring to Spotlight-specific behavior) :
Here's some video of the Finder doing what it does best: confounding user expectations and absolutely hosing any semblance of consistency and statefulness. The movie shows the smart folder from the earlier video... being opened and closed in both metal and non-metal modes. While watching, just try and guess how the window will look when it's re-opened after each of the demonstrated actions. You may need to step through the movie slowly to get a full grasp of the insanity.
[movie here]
Under what set of circumstances does this get to ship? I would love to see the "design document" for Spotlight's integration into the Finder's interface, if such a thing even exists. (I highly doubt that it does.) I'm tempted to say this is par for the course when it comes to Finder windows in Mac OS X. But really, this is way beyond the Finder's standard level of user abuse.
Creating a decent interface to the (really quite powerful) techology behind Spotlight could fuel a budding young shareware developer's career, if it weren't for the fact that you just know Apple is likely to change the whole thing again with 10.5.
I'm kinda shocked to see as many "oh my god, how terrible," and "The same thing happened to me, the bastards" as I am.
Here's the deal: the purpose of delivering two week's notice to an employer is to let them know that you intend to leave. It is a courtesy to allow them to prepare for your immanent departure.
If their preparation involves disabling your access and asking you to leave the premises, that's their prerogative. Unless they actively need you there, why would they continue to employ someone who has no intention of being there another two weeks?
I'm not saying that the company is without responsibility where their employees are concerned: if you were being laid off or fired, I would hope you'd get two week's notice (although I know this is often not the case). But under no circumstances should you feel bad about moving to another job before then, if you can find one.
You do realize that humour requires something to be funny, correct? That simple requirement was clearly not present in any form in the post I replied to.
My friends, we are fighting a war: a war on beating a dead horse.
I'm not sure why Americans see fit to label nearly every struggle a "war". There is the "War" on Drugs, "War" on Terror, and now this "War" on Stupidity that you're babbling about.
Perhaps it is because you have not experienced true war, as much of Europe and the rest of the work has. Sure, you can talk about the American Civil War, but that conflict pales in comparison to the real conflict that Europe witnessed during the first half of the 20th century.
My friends, we are fighting a war: a war on humor.
Actually, I think Aperture will install on the Powerbook. I ran the handy-dandy "Aperture hardware checker" thingy and it told me it would, anyway.
That brings up another issue, though, which is that the system reqs for the program are obviously skewed so that Powerbook users can run it. Under their Minimum System Requirements:
One of the following Macintosh computers: Power Mac G5 with a 1.8 gigahertz (GHz) or faster PowerPC G5 processor 15- or 17-inch PowerBook G4 with a 1.25 GHz or faster PowerPC G4 processor 17- or 20-inch iMac G5 with a 1.8 GHz or faster PowerPC G5 processor
When I read that I automatically translate it to, "whichever of these three product lines cost the most." 'Cause that's how they know you're a pro, see.
1. Capacity. I currently have an iPhoto library which is getting close to 5000 images. On my 1.3 ghz Powerbook, starting the program is painful, and was getting more so quickly due to the fact that I recently started shooting in RAW format. Aperture (supposedly) can support much larger image libraries, and is geared towards a RAW based workflow.
2. Metadata. Ever tried keywording images in iPhoto? It is a massive pain in the ass. The only interface for assigning keywords is a multiple-checkbox window that requires a free 3rd-party plugin to make it remotely useful. (Kudos to that developer, by the way). Aperture fixes this by making keyword entry much easier, although according to the review, it badly breaks the EXIF keywords.
To answer another one of your questions: This thing don't got layers. But it's not really intended as an image editing application. Aperture is supposed to be used in conjunction with other editing software, like photoshop. It's supposed to help you keep your images and your million or so versions of them better organized: if you're familiar with Adobe Bridge, it's a bit like that. It's a good thing that it's not a full fledged image editing application, though: reviewer notes that a lot of the most frequently used editing tools that are in the program are lacking (noise reduction and sharpening, for example).
Anyway: feh, seems to be the overall impression of the reviewer, and feh would have to be my verdict too until some of the oversights he notes are addressed. In the meantime, I highly recommend that you check out iView Media Pro, which seems to be less buggy, but just as featureful, and costs less than half as much.
The Slashdot summary has more info than the linked article, but the impressive thing is that the Slashdot summary still is only barely written in complete sentences. I mean, I'm a sysadmin with about ten years of experience, I've been reading Slashdot for years, and not only can I not understand what the article says, I'm not even sure what it's supposed to be about. Someone not flagging spyware when they should? Or tagging it as spyware when it shouldn't? Or... christ, I give up. Not worth it.
Amen where the Flash stuff is concerned. Still, I think their own philosophy of the niche the software was supposed to occupy required that approach. They were/are pushing flash as the ultimate rich media supplement to web pages, in many cases capable of supplementing HTML entirely. To pursue a tack like that without providing at least the same data acquisition tools would have been ludicrous.
The Kottke summary linked in the writeup cites Tim Bray as saying that he thinks Flash will be phased out, since it hasn't been a signficant source of revenue for MM. Personally, I think that's unlikely: at the worst, it will be folded into another product. But when people think of MM, they think of Flash and Dreamweaver first, and dropping one or the other couldn't be viewed as anything but admission of defeat, in my opinion.
Back in the late 90s, when I was learning PHP, I shot a message off to an MM newsgroup asking if anyone had developed any Dreamweaver extensions supporting PHP. At the time, PHP's user base was small, but growing rapidly - I'd say that in terms of size and growth, it occupied about the same point that Ruby on Rails does now (only PHP wasn't as hyped). I received a note back from a Macromedia staffer who asked if I was interested in signing on to help develop those extensions. I was a little shocked, and sent him a polite response thanking him, but had to demur since their domain model for handling stuff like PHP was internally represented in Javascript, and I didn't yet have the chops for it.
I'm not entirely sure it's fair to say that their support for PHP is bad. It's actually a very open ended language, and one which doesn't impose much in the way of structure on developers, so it's presentation in Dreamweaver had to be equally open-ended. That left it feeling... kinda limp, for lack of a better term. If they wanted to, I'm reasonably certain that they could make DW into the Best Damn Rails Environment Ever, but we'll see.
According to Microsoft, the new anti-virus application known as Windows OneCare Live is 'like taking your PC in for a tune up at the service station'.
Yeah. Now there's a trip to the service station I'd like to see.
"So, what kind of car is it?"
"It's an '03 Nissan Maxima."
"And... you say there's some kind of problem with the steering?"
"Well, yeah. Actually, it ran great for about twelve minutes, then it seemed to just take on a life of its own and started trying to run other cars off the road."
(pause)
"I don't think it'll pass inspection like this."
Re:Wow.. this is so like.. 1997
on
Skype 2.0 Adds Video
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Wow. You have a very different memory of 1997 than I do.
In my world, current video communication systems that work over the public internet are superior by orders of magnitude to their ancestors in terms of signal quality. That's in large measure due to the better availability of bandwidth across the board (and yes: contrary to your assertion, even upstream connectivity is faster than it was back then, unless you want to compare an upstream speed of, say, 385 kbps to your old 56K. modem.)
I'm not a video expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I was peripherally involved in testing and evaluating video-via-network between 1997 and June of this year. In '97 we were swearing at CUSeeMe; in 2000, we were experimenting with video over ATM; by 2005 we were using everything from NetMeeting to dedicated Polycom systems with auto tracking cameras. Trust me, it's better now.
Hey kids! Your uncle Sammy here, with a fun rainy-day Slashdot activity for you!
First: take an article which revolves around a pun, just like this one, to deliver a message which has a different meaning than the headline would suggest.
Next: Pick a comment-karma threshold. Two or three ought to do it!
Last: Count how many of the people at that level have completely missed the point of the article: specifically, that the "Goto" in the writeup is not a GOTO statement, but rather the name of a programmer named Kazushige Goto; that this particular distinction is supposed to be considered a bit of ironic humor; and, that this is, in fact, the reason that Hemos posted it "from the we're-punny-this-morning dept."
Slashdot Mirror
La plus ca change...
Let's just examine what actually happened, compared to your hypothetical situation: Gap Inc. pays good-looking people to wear their clothes and talk them up. They do so. Other people raise eyebrows. "Hey, nice duds," they say. "You like? I got them at the Gap! Hip fashions! I love it!" The walking mannequins are lying through their teeth: they actually hate these clothes, but the people asking them don't know any better, and go to the Gap, spending exorbitant amounts of money for mediocre clothes.
My question: other than the fact that the people they asked don't like clothes from the Gap, in what manner were the dupes deceived? These people were perfectly capable of going to the Gap, looking at what was on the rack, and saying, "You know, upon reflection, I believe that these garments aren't really 'hip' and 'happening,' as the youth culture of today is wont to say. In fact, I'm afraid that they look like they were stitched together out of remnants from a carpet sale. I believe I'll go purchase my clothes at Old Navy, whose fashions are better representative of my upbeat, individualistic lifestyle!"
Which is all to say, it's a lot easier for a tech to deceive a non-tech about the relative quality of a technical product than it is for one college kid to deceive another college kid as to what constitutes acceptable clothing. Additionally, people shouldn't get their panties an a twist about clothes.
(Except for Old Navy. The last time I bought a shirt there, a whole swath of fabric surrounding one of the buttons ripped off within a week. F 'em.)
There's even a term for this practice. It's called "modeling."
Seriously, other than the fact that you weren't offered money/clothes, what's your real beef here? That people wear clothes because they think it will confer some level of coolness to them? Surely you can't just be noticing this now?
Don't feel bad. I've read it about three times (the first time, for a college course devoted to it!), and I still don't get all of it. In fact, every once in a while I think that I've lost parts of it that I thought I'd understood before, like filling in a jigsaw puzzle while someone secretly sneaks up and removes pieces you've already placed.
Still worth the effort, though.
I remember that ad! I was lucky enough to be at West Chester University of PA at the time, and stumbled across a stand where they were giving away 16 oz bottles of the stuff for free. Let me tell you something: you didn't miss a damn thing. It tasted like liquid ass.
But the ad was funny. (And for the record: I think that what the customer at the diner specifically said was, "Surprise me," which led to the whole impromptu Tom Jones concert thing.)
This story, believe it or not, gives me hope. Thanks for sharing it.
Hee. If the stories about Ballmer are true, it was more likely, "Here we go again."
Look, I don't care how damn hot the girl is, I'm not going to watch The View with her, let alone enjoy it.
Canon's Digital Photo Professional (DPP) software, which they include with their DSLRs, is pretty powerful, and includes some nice batch-processing tools. But its interface is annoying.
:)
And their Image Browser! Oh god, my eyes.
Of course, Adobe Bridge isn't any better. In fact, the only image management program I've used recently that I really liked was iView Media Pro, and it's $200, so I'm outta luck there until I can bill some hours at my side job.
I wouldn't be so quick to label Dashboard as a Konfabulator rip-off. At best, you could argue that Konfabulator caused someone at Apple to say, "Hey, remember those widgets we used to develop in NeXTstep? See where these guys have taken the idea? Why did we ever get away from this?"
(Answer: because tons of widgets on the desktop were a huge pain in the butt, and it took a virtual container for them - the Dashboard - to make them non-irritating again.)
But generally I think you hit the nail on the head, and damn are you ever right about Spotlight. From the Ars Technica review of Tiger (note that when he references Finder, he's referring to Spotlight-specific behavior) :
Creating a decent interface to the (really quite powerful) techology behind Spotlight could fuel a budding young shareware developer's career, if it weren't for the fact that you just know Apple is likely to change the whole thing again with 10.5.
I'm kinda shocked to see as many "oh my god, how terrible," and "The same thing happened to me, the bastards" as I am.
Here's the deal: the purpose of delivering two week's notice to an employer is to let them know that you intend to leave. It is a courtesy to allow them to prepare for your immanent departure.
If their preparation involves disabling your access and asking you to leave the premises, that's their prerogative. Unless they actively need you there, why would they continue to employ someone who has no intention of being there another two weeks?
I'm not saying that the company is without responsibility where their employees are concerned: if you were being laid off or fired, I would hope you'd get two week's notice (although I know this is often not the case). But under no circumstances should you feel bad about moving to another job before then, if you can find one.
My friends, we are fighting a war: a war on beating a dead horse.
And clearly, we have lost.
Or, at least, Cyric has lost. I'm outtie.
My friends, we are fighting a war: a war on humor.
And clearly, we have lost.
My friends, we are fighting a war: a war on stupidity.
And clearly, we are losing.
That brings up another issue, though, which is that the system reqs for the program are obviously skewed so that Powerbook users can run it. Under their Minimum System Requirements:
When I read that I automatically translate it to, "whichever of these three product lines cost the most." 'Cause that's how they know you're a pro, see.
I think you mean, "Brillant!" And that was Java.
How Aperture differs from iPhoto:
1. Capacity. I currently have an iPhoto library which is getting close to 5000 images. On my 1.3 ghz Powerbook, starting the program is painful, and was getting more so quickly due to the fact that I recently started shooting in RAW format. Aperture (supposedly) can support much larger image libraries, and is geared towards a RAW based workflow.
2. Metadata. Ever tried keywording images in iPhoto? It is a massive pain in the ass. The only interface for assigning keywords is a multiple-checkbox window that requires a free 3rd-party plugin to make it remotely useful. (Kudos to that developer, by the way). Aperture fixes this by making keyword entry much easier, although according to the review, it badly breaks the EXIF keywords.
To answer another one of your questions: This thing don't got layers. But it's not really intended as an image editing application. Aperture is supposed to be used in conjunction with other editing software, like photoshop. It's supposed to help you keep your images and your million or so versions of them better organized: if you're familiar with Adobe Bridge, it's a bit like that. It's a good thing that it's not a full fledged image editing application, though: reviewer notes that a lot of the most frequently used editing tools that are in the program are lacking (noise reduction and sharpening, for example).
Anyway: feh, seems to be the overall impression of the reviewer, and feh would have to be my verdict too until some of the oversights he notes are addressed. In the meantime, I highly recommend that you check out iView Media Pro, which seems to be less buggy, but just as featureful, and costs less than half as much.
The Slashdot summary has more info than the linked article, but the impressive thing is that the Slashdot summary still is only barely written in complete sentences. I mean, I'm a sysadmin with about ten years of experience, I've been reading Slashdot for years, and not only can I not understand what the article says, I'm not even sure what it's supposed to be about. Someone not flagging spyware when they should? Or tagging it as spyware when it shouldn't? Or... christ, I give up. Not worth it.
Er. Yes.
I should have known skipping the coffee this morning was a bad idea.
Well... yeah. You're right. :)
I still think they were probably right about the "rich media supplement" thing, but "supplementing HTML entirely" bit was never gonna happen.
Amen where the Flash stuff is concerned. Still, I think their own philosophy of the niche the software was supposed to occupy required that approach. They were/are pushing flash as the ultimate rich media supplement to web pages, in many cases capable of supplementing HTML entirely. To pursue a tack like that without providing at least the same data acquisition tools would have been ludicrous.
The Kottke summary linked in the writeup cites Tim Bray as saying that he thinks Flash will be phased out, since it hasn't been a signficant source of revenue for MM. Personally, I think that's unlikely: at the worst, it will be folded into another product. But when people think of MM, they think of Flash and Dreamweaver first, and dropping one or the other couldn't be viewed as anything but admission of defeat, in my opinion.
Back in the late 90s, when I was learning PHP, I shot a message off to an MM newsgroup asking if anyone had developed any Dreamweaver extensions supporting PHP. At the time, PHP's user base was small, but growing rapidly - I'd say that in terms of size and growth, it occupied about the same point that Ruby on Rails does now (only PHP wasn't as hyped). I received a note back from a Macromedia staffer who asked if I was interested in signing on to help develop those extensions. I was a little shocked, and sent him a polite response thanking him, but had to demur since their domain model for handling stuff like PHP was internally represented in Javascript, and I didn't yet have the chops for it.
I'm not entirely sure it's fair to say that their support for PHP is bad. It's actually a very open ended language, and one which doesn't impose much in the way of structure on developers, so it's presentation in Dreamweaver had to be equally open-ended. That left it feeling... kinda limp, for lack of a better term. If they wanted to, I'm reasonably certain that they could make DW into the Best Damn Rails Environment Ever, but we'll see.
Yeah. Now there's a trip to the service station I'd like to see.
"So, what kind of car is it?"
"It's an '03 Nissan Maxima."
"And... you say there's some kind of problem with the steering?"
"Well, yeah. Actually, it ran great for about twelve minutes, then it seemed to just take on a life of its own and started trying to run other cars off the road."
(pause)
"I don't think it'll pass inspection like this."
Wow. You have a very different memory of 1997 than I do.
In my world, current video communication systems that work over the public internet are superior by orders of magnitude to their ancestors in terms of signal quality. That's in large measure due to the better availability of bandwidth across the board (and yes: contrary to your assertion, even upstream connectivity is faster than it was back then, unless you want to compare an upstream speed of, say, 385 kbps to your old 56K. modem.)
I'm not a video expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I was peripherally involved in testing and evaluating video-via-network between 1997 and June of this year. In '97 we were swearing at CUSeeMe; in 2000, we were experimenting with video over ATM; by 2005 we were using everything from NetMeeting to dedicated Polycom systems with auto tracking cameras. Trust me, it's better now.
I counted at least a dozen, and that's when there were only 60 comments in the story. I found that funny.
And, for the record:
1. Whining about missing the joke.
2. Explaining a joke about missing the joke.
3. Making a joke about missing the joke.
I was guilty of 3, and am now also guilty of 2, but have not yet been guilty of 1. I think.
Hey kids! Your uncle Sammy here, with a fun rainy-day Slashdot activity for you!
First: take an article which revolves around a pun, just like this one, to deliver a message which has a different meaning than the headline would suggest.
Next: Pick a comment-karma threshold. Two or three ought to do it!
Last: Count how many of the people at that level have completely missed the point of the article: specifically, that the "Goto" in the writeup is not a GOTO statement, but rather the name of a programmer named Kazushige Goto; that this particular distinction is supposed to be considered a bit of ironic humor; and, that this is, in fact, the reason that Hemos posted it "from the we're-punny-this-morning dept."
Hours of fun for everyone!