I also strongly disagree with his point and I'll explain why: If a society finds itself with an overabundance of qualified, educated people, the correct response is not to try and cut down on the overabundance, but to start doing more interesting things.
I'm guessing you aren't in the educational sector, and haven't been for some time.
College is a joke these days. The students have serious entitlement complexes and professors have been worn down by their demands to the point where they'll give in most of the time. Or, if the professor sticks to their guns, they'll retire early (for multiple reasons--one, their classes don't fill up due to the perception of them being a bad teacher, or two, they simply can't take it anymore.) This has been an ongoing and increasing trend for at least the past 15 years at least.
I graduated with a computer science degree 10 years ago from a state school. Most of the people in my class couldn't program their way out of a paper bag, and forget about understanding classical computer science (which is mostly math, anyway.) They copied off of each other, begged the teachers for grades, made up excuses for their late and shoddy work, and ended up passing.
These days, the kids barely show up to class unless there are attendance points. When they do show up, they play on their cell phones. They demand class notes and complain to the department head when they don't get them (even if there are none available.) They also complain if you demand that they know anything that's not in the book. It's really sickening.
No, the truth is that we have too many college graduates because too many professors pass students who have no business even being there. That means that we don't have a surplus of educated people, but a bunch of people lowering the bar for everyone. But the article gets one thing right--I sure as hell don't want to be paying for these wastes of flesh to be getting degrees.
Does Hulu DRM? There are Hulu rippers out there, and while it's possible that they are extracting keys and decrypting the stream, more likely the DRM is just obscurity.
Thanks for the suggestions. I was trying it on my Mac, so it was a brand new install. That said, when I got home and tried it on my PC, I couldn't even connect to Steam. I'm wondering if there are just some sporadic problems going on.
If I manage to connect in the next few days, I'll close the ticket and stop worrying.:)
They can still take away access to your legally purchased games. This is actually one of the most unreasonable DRM schemes in existence.
Spoken by someone who is waiting to hear if they disabled his account, if his account got hacked, or what, since he's unable to log in with the new client.
It seems like this is a terrible idea. Decentralization is nice in theory, but it's really hard to do in practice. How do I know where my friends are on dynamic IPs? You either need trackers or some static place to host the data.
If this gains popularity, it will be amongst a few large brokers. A handful of sites will offer Diaspora accounts, and you're in largely the same boat as now except that you can jump ship if one of them becomes tyrannical. Though if you want to keep your friends who are on that server, you'll still be sending your information over. So maybe this is even worse--your information in the hands of several medium-sized companies (any of whom could share it) instead of one large company.
Most likely, though, this will be relegated to geeks and small one- or two-account servers spread out all over the place. If all of your friends are geeks, great. If not, you'll either alienate yourself or stay on with Facebook in order to keep up with them.
I imagine you could do a lot with gestures. Two fingers swipe down from the top of the screen to display the menu, etc.
Though that said, I don't think traditional menus transfer well into touch interfaces anyway, so the top bar might be completely different in a touch-environment.
I think Apple's multitasking solution looks pretty good. I think it's touch the home button and hold to bring up the menu of running applications. Something like that (could be a gesture, or a special place on the screen, or whatever) to bring up such a menu would probably work well in this environment rather than a permanent bar.
I hide both of my panels by default. The entire screen is then devoted to whatever I'm working on. The only thing I lose is the clock.
Heck, most of the time, I use keyboard-shortcuts to switch between applications, so I don't even need the bottom panel. The top panel is mostly useful for the clock and easy access to NetworkManager. If I could have a shortcut that displayed the time via libosd and a better application-level network manager, I could do away with the panels entirely.
It's a standard. Various people make implementations, some open-source, some closed source. I have to say I honestly don't understand your point here. Are you trying to say that without patents, more implementations would be closed source?
I think if there weren't patents, all of the implementations would be closed-source, and the specification only given to people who license it.
The Devil's Advocate would say that H.264 would likely not have become ubiquitous if the creators knew that they wouldn't be able to patent it. It almost certainly wouldn't be as open as it is now. Do you think that Linux would have native H.264 playback if the MPEG-LA had to resort to close-sourcing it rather than relying on patents to protect their codec?
We don't need to get rid of the patents in H.264--what we need is sane licensing. There should be at most two licenses--one covering encoding and one covering decoding. Better would be one license covering both uses, but then they couldn't make it cheap enough to include a decoder in every computer while still making good money from the relative few who produce content with it.
And most devices which don't run Flash also don't have front-facing cameras, so even if Flash was released tomorrow for Android, iPhone, and iPad, most people still wouldn't be able to use e.g. Chat Roulette.
There's a difference between "could be done" and "could be done easily." HTML5+Javascript could be used to make Super Mario Crossover. Hell, a good chunk of Actionscript is ECMAscript, which is basically just Javascript.
Adobe produces tools to make it easier to create SWFs. No one yet makes tools to do the same for HTML5+JS.
It's not a matter of capability, it's a matter of difficulty.
No doubt. I'm really eager to see how those feel. I expect to see system designers taking some cues from the iPad, and I really hope that touch-scroll is one of them.
Most of the tablets I played with a few years ago were pretty lousy (and scroll wasn't implemented for dragging on the screen--at least, not in any settings I could find.)
Slashdot's audience has a high number of geeks in it. Geeks are stereotypically terrible at estimating how the general public thinks about technology. Most geeks prefer flexibility to something which "just works"--and most people (geeks included) project their own desires on the general population. As a species, we tend to think that faceless others are like us until proven wrong.
Of course, the derisiveness after the fact is just delusional. Or perhaps it's a defense mechanism stemming from being so different from so many people (those people being the 1million+ who want an iPad.)
That's perfectly fine. "Better" is highly subjective in cases like these. The point is that there are a whole lot of people on Slashdot who think that Windows is an inferior product. It would be wise to keep in mind that pure marketshare isn't the only indicator to use when determining if you have a successful product.
Its sold more than most touch based Tablet PCs. I would say that indicates its a better product than those.
Whenever someone says this, I feel obligated to point out that Windows sells better than every other desktop OS combined. Does that indicate that Windows is a better product than Ubuntu Linux, Red Hat Linux, OS X, etc?
I haven't seen anyone mention scrolling yet, so I'll chime in. Scrolling on an iPad is quick, easy, and intuitive in ways I could never imagine when using a touchpad (or even a mouse.) It's difficult to describe why it feels so right--I think it has something to do with being both more precise and more natural. If you've played with a Surface and moved photos and documents around, it's a very similar feeling.
I make do with a regular mouse on my machines. I try to avoid using the touchpad on my netbook because it's small, cramped, and finicky. There are probably better touchpads on other netbooks, but I think they all suffer from the size issue.
Tapping is even marginally better than clicking, since to click you have to move the mouse pointer to the right place and then press the button. On a small touchpad, this can get irritating, lead to misclicks, etc.
It's a slippery slope, however there is no other good reason for a.xxx domain. The "you can filter it!" argument is pointless if pornographic sites aren't required to stay off of the other TLDs.
A 6 month release cycle doesn't mean a 6 month support cycle. You get 18 months of security updates for each regular release. You get something like 3.5 years of support for LTS desktop, and 5 years of support for LTS server.
The only OS vendor I know of who does better is Microsoft, who will EOL Server 2003 in a few months, and who still hasn't EOL Windows XP after nearly 9 years. Of course, XP is an extreme example--Vista will probably get about 6 years of support.
Slashdot Mirror
A ridiculous semantic argument that detracts from the point. If it was stolen, but not Apple's, they still have no claim to it.
I also strongly disagree with his point and I'll explain why: If a society finds itself with an overabundance of qualified, educated people, the correct response is not to try and cut down on the overabundance, but to start doing more interesting things.
I'm guessing you aren't in the educational sector, and haven't been for some time.
College is a joke these days. The students have serious entitlement complexes and professors have been worn down by their demands to the point where they'll give in most of the time. Or, if the professor sticks to their guns, they'll retire early (for multiple reasons--one, their classes don't fill up due to the perception of them being a bad teacher, or two, they simply can't take it anymore.) This has been an ongoing and increasing trend for at least the past 15 years at least.
I graduated with a computer science degree 10 years ago from a state school. Most of the people in my class couldn't program their way out of a paper bag, and forget about understanding classical computer science (which is mostly math, anyway.) They copied off of each other, begged the teachers for grades, made up excuses for their late and shoddy work, and ended up passing.
These days, the kids barely show up to class unless there are attendance points. When they do show up, they play on their cell phones. They demand class notes and complain to the department head when they don't get them (even if there are none available.) They also complain if you demand that they know anything that's not in the book. It's really sickening.
No, the truth is that we have too many college graduates because too many professors pass students who have no business even being there. That means that we don't have a surplus of educated people, but a bunch of people lowering the bar for everyone. But the article gets one thing right--I sure as hell don't want to be paying for these wastes of flesh to be getting degrees.
And now they have two apps to maintain. Given Apple's reluctance to approve cross-platform apps, they probably have two separate codebases.
Does Hulu DRM? There are Hulu rippers out there, and while it's possible that they are extracting keys and decrypting the stream, more likely the DRM is just obscurity.
I was trying from a new installation (the Mac client.) And last I tried from Windows, their servers will down.
Thanks for the suggestions. I was trying it on my Mac, so it was a brand new install. That said, when I got home and tried it on my PC, I couldn't even connect to Steam. I'm wondering if there are just some sporadic problems going on.
If I manage to connect in the next few days, I'll close the ticket and stop worrying. :)
They can still take away access to your legally purchased games. This is actually one of the most unreasonable DRM schemes in existence.
Spoken by someone who is waiting to hear if they disabled his account, if his account got hacked, or what, since he's unable to log in with the new client.
It seems like this is a terrible idea. Decentralization is nice in theory, but it's really hard to do in practice. How do I know where my friends are on dynamic IPs? You either need trackers or some static place to host the data.
If this gains popularity, it will be amongst a few large brokers. A handful of sites will offer Diaspora accounts, and you're in largely the same boat as now except that you can jump ship if one of them becomes tyrannical. Though if you want to keep your friends who are on that server, you'll still be sending your information over. So maybe this is even worse--your information in the hands of several medium-sized companies (any of whom could share it) instead of one large company.
Most likely, though, this will be relegated to geeks and small one- or two-account servers spread out all over the place. If all of your friends are geeks, great. If not, you'll either alienate yourself or stay on with Facebook in order to keep up with them.
I imagine you could do a lot with gestures. Two fingers swipe down from the top of the screen to display the menu, etc.
Though that said, I don't think traditional menus transfer well into touch interfaces anyway, so the top bar might be completely different in a touch-environment.
I think Apple's multitasking solution looks pretty good. I think it's touch the home button and hold to bring up the menu of running applications. Something like that (could be a gesture, or a special place on the screen, or whatever) to bring up such a menu would probably work well in this environment rather than a permanent bar.
I hide both of my panels by default. The entire screen is then devoted to whatever I'm working on. The only thing I lose is the clock.
Heck, most of the time, I use keyboard-shortcuts to switch between applications, so I don't even need the bottom panel. The top panel is mostly useful for the clock and easy access to NetworkManager. If I could have a shortcut that displayed the time via libosd and a better application-level network manager, I could do away with the panels entirely.
It's a standard.
Various people make implementations, some open-source, some closed source.
I have to say I honestly don't understand your point here. Are you trying to say that without patents, more implementations would be closed source?
I think if there weren't patents, all of the implementations would be closed-source, and the specification only given to people who license it.
The Devil's Advocate would say that H.264 would likely not have become ubiquitous if the creators knew that they wouldn't be able to patent it. It almost certainly wouldn't be as open as it is now. Do you think that Linux would have native H.264 playback if the MPEG-LA had to resort to close-sourcing it rather than relying on patents to protect their codec?
We don't need to get rid of the patents in H.264--what we need is sane licensing. There should be at most two licenses--one covering encoding and one covering decoding. Better would be one license covering both uses, but then they couldn't make it cheap enough to include a decoder in every computer while still making good money from the relative few who produce content with it.
Exactly. It's like creating furniture with a SawStop table saw and the patent holders expecting to get a cut of everything you make with it.
You should buy the right to use the patented technology, and that should be the end of it.
No substitute? What about a native application?
And most devices which don't run Flash also don't have front-facing cameras, so even if Flash was released tomorrow for Android, iPhone, and iPad, most people still wouldn't be able to use e.g. Chat Roulette.
There's a difference between "could be done" and "could be done easily." HTML5+Javascript could be used to make Super Mario Crossover. Hell, a good chunk of Actionscript is ECMAscript, which is basically just Javascript.
Adobe produces tools to make it easier to create SWFs. No one yet makes tools to do the same for HTML5+JS.
It's not a matter of capability, it's a matter of difficulty.
You can't unlock the door from the passenger side?
No doubt. I'm really eager to see how those feel. I expect to see system designers taking some cues from the iPad, and I really hope that touch-scroll is one of them.
Most of the tablets I played with a few years ago were pretty lousy (and scroll wasn't implemented for dragging on the screen--at least, not in any settings I could find.)
Slashdot's audience has a high number of geeks in it. Geeks are stereotypically terrible at estimating how the general public thinks about technology. Most geeks prefer flexibility to something which "just works"--and most people (geeks included) project their own desires on the general population. As a species, we tend to think that faceless others are like us until proven wrong.
Of course, the derisiveness after the fact is just delusional. Or perhaps it's a defense mechanism stemming from being so different from so many people (those people being the 1million+ who want an iPad.)
That's perfectly fine. "Better" is highly subjective in cases like these. The point is that there are a whole lot of people on Slashdot who think that Windows is an inferior product. It would be wise to keep in mind that pure marketshare isn't the only indicator to use when determining if you have a successful product.
I'll leave this right here:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20000898-245.html
Its sold more than most touch based Tablet PCs. I would say that indicates its a better product than those.
Whenever someone says this, I feel obligated to point out that Windows sells better than every other desktop OS combined. Does that indicate that Windows is a better product than Ubuntu Linux, Red Hat Linux, OS X, etc?
I haven't seen anyone mention scrolling yet, so I'll chime in. Scrolling on an iPad is quick, easy, and intuitive in ways I could never imagine when using a touchpad (or even a mouse.) It's difficult to describe why it feels so right--I think it has something to do with being both more precise and more natural. If you've played with a Surface and moved photos and documents around, it's a very similar feeling.
I make do with a regular mouse on my machines. I try to avoid using the touchpad on my netbook because it's small, cramped, and finicky. There are probably better touchpads on other netbooks, but I think they all suffer from the size issue.
Tapping is even marginally better than clicking, since to click you have to move the mouse pointer to the right place and then press the button. On a small touchpad, this can get irritating, lead to misclicks, etc.
It's a slippery slope, however there is no other good reason for a .xxx domain. The "you can filter it!" argument is pointless if pornographic sites aren't required to stay off of the other TLDs.
Ah, you're right. I was neglecting Extended Support.
A 6 month release cycle doesn't mean a 6 month support cycle. You get 18 months of security updates for each regular release. You get something like 3.5 years of support for LTS desktop, and 5 years of support for LTS server.
The only OS vendor I know of who does better is Microsoft, who will EOL Server 2003 in a few months, and who still hasn't EOL Windows XP after nearly 9 years. Of course, XP is an extreme example--Vista will probably get about 6 years of support.