If you meet the customer's requirements, at the price the customer is willing to pay, when the customer wants to buy, you get the sale. The customer may be unhappy with something you do, but if you meet their requirements, they'll still buy.
There's two sides to this.
1. If most customers don't care *enough* about copy protection, even if they're unhappy with the copy protection, they'll still buy, and put up with it. For you, this is as good as "they don't notice", but thinking this is the *same as* "they don't notice" is dangerous. Because...
2. If you think they don't notice, and you can toughen things up until they start bucking you (because when they start bucking is when you decide they do notice), you're very likely to hit a tipping point. Maybe not this time, but some time. Sony, for example, keeps failing to figure that out. They've lost market share over and over again to products that don't have the same kind of tough DRM they put in to protect their media branch.
So instead of going "customers don't notice", thank whatever you hold holy that the cabal was able to make you aware that some of your customers at least DO notice, learn from that, and treat the dissent as a valuable "canary in a mineshaft" instead of the enemy.
That's not the point at all, and I suspect you know that.
Um, no, actually.
Some people are harder to ignore than others. Some people are easier to ignore than others. Different people have different abilities to ignore different kinds of distractions. Some kinds of distractions are more common than others.
The real point was: you can ignore people on the phone just as easily as you can ignore anybody else talking.
A lot of people *can't* ignore "anyone else talking".
Some people can't ignore folks who are ranting at them.
Some people can't ignore folks who are carrying on half a conversation.
If you can ignore these things, I'm happy for you, really, but you can't generalize from that to "you can ignore people on the phone just as easily as you can ignore anybody else talking". Because that isn't true for everyone, whether it's true for you or not. In a previous job, I got stuck next to a guy who took his voice mail on his speakerphone. And answered it on his speakerphone. Talking loudly to make sure the other guy got the message. It drove me crazy. It didn't bother the guy on the other side of Mr Speakerphone at all.
Now, if it only happened once a year, I wouldn't care much. I'd go work somewhere else that day. If it happened once a week, maybe, it would depend. It happened every day.
On the other hand my experience with annoying cellphone people hasn't been too bad. It bugs me, occasionally, but usually I can ignore it. But I can see how someone who is less capable than me of filtering out that particular kind of distraction could be driven bats by it.
Similarly, my experience with ranting preachers hasn't been that bad. I can't filter them out, but they're so rare I don't care.
If they were as common as people talking on cellphones, I'd go bats.
Now, poor naive me, I assumed you really meant that ranting preachers was a real problem, and people can handle that, so they should be able to handle cellphones. Since that was a misunderstanding, I'll get to the point.
And the point is this.
"The real point was: you can ignore people on the phone just as easily as you can ignore anybody else talking." is bullshit.
Um, roll back a couple of messages. WHERE DO YOU LIVE that having preachers harangue people when they're standing in line is as common as people talking on cellphones. I mean, I used to live in Berkeley, and I still didn't gain the ability to tune out ranting as easily as all that. I mean, outside of Sproul Plaza and Upper Telegraph it wasn't even that common. OK, it was "microbes in the air getting on your skin cutting off human communication WHOOOOOOOO", not sermons, but the principle is the same.
Where do you live that has that high a ranting preacher density?
No, wrong, voice mail is more of a distraction than receiving text messages. Just don't enable the ability to respond to the text message until the car comes to a stop.
More to the ****ing point, the purpose of a computer is to do what I want, not make me do what it wants. If I have to retrain every time someone at Apple gets a bright idea about some new user interface feature, then I might as well just switch to Windows Vista NT 7 Ultra Perfectimundo Consumerism Edition. Except that so far the suck level in Windows has been enough to make me put up wit the suck level in Apple hardware.
"Apple: We don't suck as bad, mostly" just doesn't have the ring of "The computer for the rest of us".
I suppose if I was half my age or had kept up my videogame chops I would be able to reliably put two fingers on the trackpad without, often enough to be frustrating, jiggling the pointer enough that I am no longer in the right place for my right click to do what I needed it to.
My fingers are defective then, because I had this problem on my MBP until I got a third party program that let me use corner taps instead. It's still not perfect, but it works better for me... and a lot cheaper than replacing my fingers.
My completely serious answer to almost all of your complaints is that you should look at Lenovo's Thinkpad offerings.
If they ran OS X I'd have bought one 3 years ago.
The problem is that maybe 1% of the people buying Macbooks are buying them because they like the hardware. For the rest, Thinkpads aren't even an option.
Though the zero button mouse is REALLY making me rethink my attitude towards OSX86.
The current trackpad already supports multiple finger taps, and it so doesn't cut it for me. Tap-to-click-in-the-wrong-place is already not working for me, on any laptop, but at least I haven't been forced to use it.
OK, my next OS X Notebook is probably going to be a Thinkpad.
I'll Pay Apple what they want for OS X, I'll buy a Mac Mini and not use it if that's what it takes to make my idiot conscience shut the **** up, but I've had it with Apple's passive-aggressive relationship with multi-button mice.
A few additions... for example there were two major releases of NT 3.x. And some pre-release names:
Major DOS-based Windows:
Windows Windows 2.0 Windows 3.0 Windows 3.11 Windows for Workgroups Windows 95 Windows 98 Windows 98 Second Edition Windows Me
I don't know what kinds of internal numeric designations the post-3.11 versions had, though WfW was 3.11 based. I don't recall exactly how much distinction there was between WfW and Windows 3.11, but there was definitely separate install sets for both.
Major Windows NT releases:
Windows NT 3.1 Windows NT 3.51 Windows NT 4.0 Windows 2000 (NT 5.0, Cairo) Windows XP (5.1) Windows 2003 (5.2) Windows Vista & 2008 (6.0, Longhorn) Windows 7 (6.1, Windows 7)
There's also Pen Windows (a fork of Windows 3.x for tablets) and Windows CE.
Of course, if its about software tools, generally the tools that arent free and open, also don't have multiple sources.
That doesn't make things any simpler... it's more important than ever to understand the differences between "free as in speech" and "free as in beer" and "open source" and "open systems".
There's even free-as-in-speech tools that aren't open in the open-systems sense, because they have a single implementation. Most open-source scripting languages, for example... which makes Live^WJava^WECMAscript one of the most open scripting languages out there despite the lack of a good open command-line implementation because it's got worse runtime-dependance then Modula ever did. And of course in contrast the open-systems software platform - UNIX - is available in multiple open- and closed-source forms.
And Mono itself is an open source implementation of a very proprietary system... and I'm more than a bit concerned about Silverlight now being extended to include "a subset of.NET" when there's no guarantee that subset will match the subset of.NET that Mono implements now and in the future.
Meanwhile Flash is free-as-in-beer but not open-source, but because its scripting is based on the VERY open ECMAscript there's been a lot of work on implementing it to try and turn it into a mostly-open-systems platform.
Then there's proprietary-but-publicly-documented web services like Google's. And closed-and-open-license systems like Qt...
And the people who started the whole open systems thing, and the open source thing, they're all still alive, so I can't really come up with a nice snappy "X-is-spinning-in-his-grave" signoff...
I decided to send them some mail, letting them know that they were setting a bad example, and mail to their contact address got stuck in an SNTP look going through smtp-red001.mail.microsoftonline.com.
As a developer, isn't the point to write better/more robust code?
I used to be platform-agnostic and hardware-agnostic, but after a few rounds of companies pulling platforms out from under me... "better" code that depends on a single vendor is something I have to look long and hard into before I'm going to jump on board. I don't care whether it's called NextStep or.NET, SmallTalk* or BeOS, if it's under the effective control of a single company it's pre-doomed. Over the past 30 years I've been burned too many times to trust ANY proprietary platform.
take better advantage of the rich Internet experience
Another buzz-phrase that was just as scary when it was the rich Desktop experience. That turned into a Microsoft-controlled virus hive. Not going there again.
I tend to use the best tools available
Me too, so long as nobody can pull those tools out from under me because they went out of business or changed their goals. I don't care so much whether it's open source or not, so long as there's multiple sources out there.
In addition, Goldfarb said the new Silverlight 2.0 player comes with a cut-down version of Microsoft's.Net runtime. That means that.Net developers -- Microsoft says there are 4 million of them -- can build Silverlight applications purely through.Net.
So, is this cut-down.NET runtime compatible with the Mono cut-down.NET environment that Moonlight is built on, or not?
My gripe with chrome isn't the missing features, it's the shonky layout. Putting the tab bar at the top doesn't improve the UI, it merely reminds me of Opera's attempt to make its aging MDU user interface into a feature.
I think this is charmingly like the short story, "Lobsters", by Charlie Stross. Except for the neural net simulating hyperintelligent crustaceans, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in 1773, our forefathers weren't fighting for intellectual property rights as they threw cases of tea into the Boston harbor.
Indeed not, they were fighting for smuggling and the slave trade.
If you meet the customer's requirements, at the price the customer is willing to pay, when the customer wants to buy, you get the sale. The customer may be unhappy with something you do, but if you meet their requirements, they'll still buy.
There's two sides to this.
1. If most customers don't care *enough* about copy protection, even if they're unhappy with the copy protection, they'll still buy, and put up with it. For you, this is as good as "they don't notice", but thinking this is the *same as* "they don't notice" is dangerous. Because...
2. If you think they don't notice, and you can toughen things up until they start bucking you (because when they start bucking is when you decide they do notice), you're very likely to hit a tipping point. Maybe not this time, but some time. Sony, for example, keeps failing to figure that out. They've lost market share over and over again to products that don't have the same kind of tough DRM they put in to protect their media branch.
So instead of going "customers don't notice", thank whatever you hold holy that the cabal was able to make you aware that some of your customers at least DO notice, learn from that, and treat the dissent as a valuable "canary in a mineshaft" instead of the enemy.
That's not the point at all, and I suspect you know that.
Um, no, actually.
Some people are harder to ignore than others. Some people are easier to ignore than others. Different people have different abilities to ignore different kinds of distractions. Some kinds of distractions are more common than others.
The real point was: you can ignore people on the phone just as easily as you can ignore anybody else talking.
A lot of people *can't* ignore "anyone else talking".
Some people can't ignore folks who are ranting at them.
Some people can't ignore folks who are carrying on half a conversation.
If you can ignore these things, I'm happy for you, really, but you can't generalize from that to "you can ignore people on the phone just as easily as you can ignore anybody else talking". Because that isn't true for everyone, whether it's true for you or not. In a previous job, I got stuck next to a guy who took his voice mail on his speakerphone. And answered it on his speakerphone. Talking loudly to make sure the other guy got the message. It drove me crazy. It didn't bother the guy on the other side of Mr Speakerphone at all.
Now, if it only happened once a year, I wouldn't care much. I'd go work somewhere else that day. If it happened once a week, maybe, it would depend. It happened every day.
On the other hand my experience with annoying cellphone people hasn't been too bad. It bugs me, occasionally, but usually I can ignore it. But I can see how someone who is less capable than me of filtering out that particular kind of distraction could be driven bats by it.
Similarly, my experience with ranting preachers hasn't been that bad. I can't filter them out, but they're so rare I don't care.
If they were as common as people talking on cellphones, I'd go bats.
Now, poor naive me, I assumed you really meant that ranting preachers was a real problem, and people can handle that, so they should be able to handle cellphones. Since that was a misunderstanding, I'll get to the point.
And the point is this.
"The real point was: you can ignore people on the phone just as easily as you can ignore anybody else talking." is bullshit.
Thanks for listening.
Um, roll back a couple of messages. WHERE DO YOU LIVE that having preachers harangue people when they're standing in line is as common as people talking on cellphones. I mean, I used to live in Berkeley, and I still didn't gain the ability to tune out ranting as easily as all that. I mean, outside of Sproul Plaza and Upper Telegraph it wasn't even that common. OK, it was "microbes in the air getting on your skin cutting off human communication WHOOOOOOOO", not sermons, but the principle is the same.
Where do you live that has that high a ranting preacher density?
YOU KILLED THE FLYING SPAGHETTI MONSTER!
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/exploration/resources/wormgrunt_harvest_800.jpg
It's like ignoring the street preacher screaming about how we're all going to hell. You only notice it if you pay attention to it.
Wow, where do you live that you've invariably got one of those every time you're standing in line?
No, wrong, voice mail is more of a distraction than receiving text messages. Just don't enable the ability to respond to the text message until the car comes to a stop.
But what about passengers?
More to the ****ing point, the purpose of a computer is to do what I want, not make me do what it wants. If I have to retrain every time someone at Apple gets a bright idea about some new user interface feature, then I might as well just switch to Windows Vista NT 7 Ultra Perfectimundo Consumerism Edition. Except that so far the suck level in Windows has been enough to make me put up wit the suck level in Apple hardware.
"Apple: We don't suck as bad, mostly" just doesn't have the ring of "The computer for the rest of us".
I suppose if I was half my age or had kept up my videogame chops I would be able to reliably put two fingers on the trackpad without, often enough to be frustrating, jiggling the pointer enough that I am no longer in the right place for my right click to do what I needed it to.
My fingers are defective then, because I had this problem on my MBP until I got a third party program that let me use corner taps instead. It's still not perfect, but it works better for me... and a lot cheaper than replacing my fingers.
My completely serious answer to almost all of your complaints is that you should look at Lenovo's Thinkpad offerings.
If they ran OS X I'd have bought one 3 years ago.
The problem is that maybe 1% of the people buying Macbooks are buying them because they like the hardware. For the rest, Thinkpads aren't even an option.
Though the zero button mouse is REALLY making me rethink my attitude towards OSX86.
No, Apple's plan for the desktop is apparently to abandon it as unprofitable-enough. :(
The current trackpad already supports multiple finger taps, and it so doesn't cut it for me. Tap-to-click-in-the-wrong-place is already not working for me, on any laptop, but at least I haven't been forced to use it.
OK, my next OS X Notebook is probably going to be a Thinkpad.
I'll Pay Apple what they want for OS X, I'll buy a Mac Mini and not use it if that's what it takes to make my idiot conscience shut the **** up, but I've had it with Apple's passive-aggressive relationship with multi-button mice.
Gee, and it took me a whole 10 seconds to download and install Silverlight 2.0
What part of "not supported" do you fail to understand?
A few additions... for example there were two major releases of NT 3.x. And some pre-release names:
Major DOS-based Windows:
Windows
Windows 2.0
Windows 3.0
Windows 3.11
Windows for Workgroups
Windows 95
Windows 98
Windows 98 Second Edition
Windows Me
I don't know what kinds of internal numeric designations the post-3.11 versions had, though WfW was 3.11 based. I don't recall exactly how much distinction there was between WfW and Windows 3.11, but there was definitely separate install sets for both.
Major Windows NT releases:
Windows NT 3.1
Windows NT 3.51
Windows NT 4.0
Windows 2000 (NT 5.0, Cairo)
Windows XP (5.1)
Windows 2003 (5.2)
Windows Vista & 2008 (6.0, Longhorn)
Windows 7 (6.1, Windows 7)
There's also Pen Windows (a fork of Windows 3.x for tablets) and Windows CE.
Of course, if its about software tools, generally the tools that arent free and open, also don't have multiple sources.
That doesn't make things any simpler... it's more important than ever to understand the differences between "free as in speech" and "free as in beer" and "open source" and "open systems".
There's even free-as-in-speech tools that aren't open in the open-systems sense, because they have a single implementation. Most open-source scripting languages, for example... which makes Live^WJava^WECMAscript one of the most open scripting languages out there despite the lack of a good open command-line implementation because it's got worse runtime-dependance then Modula ever did. And of course in contrast the open-systems software platform - UNIX - is available in multiple open- and closed-source forms.
And Mono itself is an open source implementation of a very proprietary system... and I'm more than a bit concerned about Silverlight now being extended to include "a subset of .NET" when there's no guarantee that subset will match the subset of .NET that Mono implements now and in the future.
Meanwhile Flash is free-as-in-beer but not open-source, but because its scripting is based on the VERY open ECMAscript there's been a lot of work on implementing it to try and turn it into a mostly-open-systems platform.
Then there's proprietary-but-publicly-documented web services like Google's. And closed-and-open-license systems like Qt...
And the people who started the whole open systems thing, and the open source thing, they're all still alive, so I can't really come up with a nice snappy "X-is-spinning-in-his-grave" signoff...
I decided to send them some mail, letting them know that they were setting a bad example, and mail to their contact address got stuck in an SNTP look going through smtp-red001.mail.microsoftonline.com.
Oh my.
As a developer, isn't the point to write better/more robust code?
I used to be platform-agnostic and hardware-agnostic, but after a few rounds of companies pulling platforms out from under me... "better" code that depends on a single vendor is something I have to look long and hard into before I'm going to jump on board. I don't care whether it's called NextStep or .NET, SmallTalk* or BeOS, if it's under the effective control of a single company it's pre-doomed. Over the past 30 years I've been burned too many times to trust ANY proprietary platform.
take better advantage of the rich Internet experience
Another buzz-phrase that was just as scary when it was the rich Desktop experience. That turned into a Microsoft-controlled virus hive. Not going there again.
I tend to use the best tools available
Me too, so long as nobody can pull those tools out from under me because they went out of business or changed their goals. I don't care so much whether it's open source or not, so long as there's multiple sources out there.
But flip through the site and check out the functionality.
I'm sorry, but you're making me more interested in what McCain's got to say.
In addition, Goldfarb said the new Silverlight 2.0 player comes with a cut-down version of Microsoft's .Net runtime. That means that .Net developers -- Microsoft says there are 4 million of them -- can build Silverlight applications purely through .Net.
So, is this cut-down .NET runtime compatible with the Mono cut-down .NET environment that Moonlight is built on, or not?
My gripe with chrome isn't the missing features, it's the shonky layout. Putting the tab bar at the top doesn't improve the UI, it merely reminds me of Opera's attempt to make its aging MDU user interface into a feature.
Thoughts?
I think this is charmingly like the short story, "Lobsters", by Charlie Stross. Except for the neural net simulating hyperintelligent crustaceans, of course.
Sounds like you shouldn't hack on the night of the full moon. :)
It looks like it's going to be aluminum and may have no firewire ports.