What are they personally giving up (in more specific terms than just "privacy")?
The right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures? The right to freely associate with whomever they want without a governmental chaperone?
What are they personally gaining?
A mildly warm fuzzy feeling and not much else. There's no way for the public to know whether the tactics the NSA are using will ever be effective in preventing a terrorist attack. There's no way for the public to even know whether the tactics the NSA are using are the tactics they SAY they're using.
you *have* to be interoperable with the market leader's file formats and software.
That's true of the majority player in the market, too.
How do you think Microsoft's sales would do if they announced that the next version of Office would not be able to read or write any existing Word or Excel files, not even via converters?
America isn't known for its outstanding education system.
Not as far as its public education system goes, and especially not in science and mathematics. But as far as post-secondary universities go, the United States is better represented than any other country in the top n rankings. That would seem to indicate that a contest targeted at university-level computer science students would similarly have a large US representation.
Anyway, I don't know if it even makes sense to try to draw any broad conclusions from the one data point we have, namely, the results of this single competition. There's a lot of factors beyond country of origin that may have affected the rankings of this, or any, contest.
This software, although it contains tons of closed source code, is based on open source code and contains literally hundreds and hundreds of free software packages. Apple would never have succeeded in creating such a feature-rich operating system in the time it took to make it without the availability and use of such open source code.
I agree, the status of OS X as a mixture of open and closed source code, depending on which allows for more expedient development, has been a boon to Apple. Linspire should consider adopting a similar philosophy... oh. Right.
At the end of a slippery slope, we find a situation where: Linux will be locked into outdated but unchangable kernel schemes, for fear of breaking it's hordes of proprietary device drivers.
And this would be worse than a situation where the kernel is free to evolve however it needs, but the system can only run in VGA mode because no better device drivers--proprietary or not--were ever released?
It's not like 99% of keyed systems were very secure. Except for the newer laser/dimple keys, thieves are going to easily get into your car.
A rock through the window defeats even the newer laser/dimple key systems.
The benefit of using a laptop, though, is that the thief doesn't have to engage in suspicious-looking activities like reaching through shattered safety glass on a car with a shrieking alarm, or fidgeting over the door lock with a bobby pin. Now they can just park a cargo van next to the target car, and sit in the back packet-sniffing to their heart's content without a passerby raising an eyebrow.
For the developers and consumers, the coolest features [of Vista] are Aero Glass, Indigo, Avalon, Net 2.0 and the rest of the WinFX framework.
I know "Aero Glass" is the name of the latest flavor of UI eye candy. I guess that's pretty cool, maybe. The rest of that stuff, I have no idea what it is or why I would need it as a consumer.
The initial shortage of [Xbox 360] units happened because of simultaneous world wide release.
Which still demonstrates "an exhibition of poor planning and bad business intelligence gathering" on MS's part. Perhaps Dvorak is actually right, just for the wrong reasons.
Microsoft has indeed shown lack of vision by concentrating not on where its strength laid, the operating system, but instead parleying with the competitors in 'side ventures' it had expanded to.
Just like Google is showing lack of vision by developing products that aren't search engines.
Just like IBM showed lack of vision by selling a "personal" computer that competed with Commodore and Osbourne rather than concentrating on their mainframe support and services business.
Just like IBM showed lack of vision by developing mainframe computers rather than selling typewriters and adding machines!
Indeed it is often when a company moves BEYOND where its strength lays that it demonstrates true vision.
They might pay 1/10 the rent of a B&M business, because they don't care if they're in the crappy part of town.
The people that work in the offices might care. If you expect people to commute to Cracksburg every morning because physical location doesn't matter in online business, you're probably not going to attract the highest caliber of employee.
(One solution to the problem is to let online employees work from their homes, avoiding the cost of renting office space altogether. And a rack of servers doesn't care if it's located in Nicedale or Cracksburg, so long as the backbone is nearby and there's enough security to keep hobos from making wee-wee on them.)
Perfect example of why the dot bomb era sucked.Several hundred k website in '99?
To be fair, it loaded nice and quickly in Boo.com's offices in a designer TriBeCa loft. They should have just invited potential shoppers to come in and look at the site from there.
Not getting hired for the Desktop Support position I interviewed for there in 1999 was a blessing in disguise...
If you take a job with a contract involving completing a project in 18 months for $40k/yr then you are going to finish the project for $60k regardless of how many hours you work in those 18 months.
The lesson here is not to take any such contracts that lack provisions for any kind of project overrun.
If the requirements change halfway through the project, and it throws schedules off to the point where it's going to take 24 months to finish it instead of 18, or will require me to work 70-hour weeks instead of 40-50 hour weeks, I will require additional compensation, and my employer is going to be aware of that from the outset.
More people who get burned out ought to get guns- then maybe the corporations would begin to take a different attitude towards "deadweight". I wonder how many C-level executives would have to die to make the change?
Here's an idea -- once you get burned out at a stressful job, try quitting instead of murdering some middle managers (who probably hates their jobs as much as you hate yours).
You'd have a really tough time finding equipment that isn't broken by design.
Or, you find yourself with a glut of equipment produced in Hong Kong by men who don't give a damn what the United States Congress says the FCC can do, and allow all the misfeatures to be disabled by pressing the secret key sequence "1-2-3-4-5" on the remote control.
Actually, the article is about exhaggeration of the number of visitors.
I thought it was well known to everybody in the web business already that IP addresses and unique visitors do not have a strong direct correlation. If the point of the article wasn't to support in particular the 10-to-1 ratio, then I'm not sure what the point was.
How about a little less effort tracking your visitors and a little more generating something interesting for them to see when they do visit?
How are we supposed to know what our visitors find interesting? Hmm, maybe we could take a look at what current content they favor and use those statistics to guide the creation of new content...
"Am I supposed to be happy about having to go down to the DMV and tell them my name is Ernest'? For God's sake, where were my parents? I can't believe they would have let this get by"
seeing how Nintendogs and Animal Crossing etc. did, it seems that the're hitting that market almost perfectly.
Those are examples of GOOD names, though.
"Nintendogs" is a portmanteau of "Nintendo" and "Dogs". Bingo, you know what to expect. "Animal Crossing" evokes community, interaction between various types of animals. You understand the basic premise immediately.
"Nintendo Wii" requires someone to explain to you that it's pronounced "whee", and the two i's represent players, and it also stands for "we", and even after that I still don't know anything about the Remote or the online service or any of the other new features that are supposed to make this console a Revolution. It's not a descriptive or evocative name. It's arbitrary. It's poor branding.
The only two responses I read that defended the name were weak.
Well, there you go. Sounds like the name Nintendo chose isn't very defendable.
I use a piece of software called "The Gimp 2.0" but I have never once heard anyone make fun of it.
Do you browse Slashdot at +5 or something? I don't think I've ever seen a discussion of The Gimp where it was not mentioned what a terrible name that is, and usually cited as a major reason why the product is far from being the Photoshop-Killer that it could be.
Names matter. Refraining from saying that a name is stupid doesn't make it any less stupid.
For crying out loud, "wii," "wee," or "we" all sound the same and the latter is good pun.
And the middle one is a BAD pun. So that cancels out the good pun, leaving us with only a non-word that not only has no connotations in English, but doesn't even have intuitive pronounciation.
That's like saying George Mason had a successful run in this year's NCAA basketball tournament. Yes, they posted a lot of wins that no one expected them to, but they still ended up with fewer points than Florida in their Final Four game. They failed to win the tournament.
Like Mason, Microsoft's Xbox division may be a success by some measures, but if they're in the red on the accounting ledgers, they're still a failure in some way.
Rarely do the most vocal critics of "open sourcing" something actually understand the rationale behind free software, which is NOT to have the best code, NOT to have the most secure code, NOT to ship a product the fastest [...]
If I'm understanding you correctly, what you're saying is that those who insist on having the best code, or the most secure code, or shipping a product the fastest--all of which are completely valid and reasonable business and ideological goals--should not look to Open Source software as a solution.
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("foo.in"));
If it really hurts your eyes that much to see this line of code every time an input stream is opened, you could always just create a convenience class whose constructor does the above for you...
developers who are working on Safari, Konqueror, Mozilla Firefox and Seamonkey, IE, Opera, Camino, and so on, all need to take a step back from their computers and say,
"Hey, how come we're adding new features to a program that isn't even standards-compliant?"
The continual lack of support for even the full subset of CSS 1 and 2.1 makes designing pages based on XHTML and CSS a frickin' pain in the arse.
I agree with you, but I also recognize that browser developers are not guided by what would make us web designers the happiest. They ultimately report to USERS, not to us.
Why should a user care that CSS-alpha-channel-transparency-with-a-twist-of-lem on isn't properly implemented in their browser? They don't know there's a problem with it, and even if they knew they wouldn't care. But new toolbar icons? Holy crap, the users eat it up! What an improvement!
Slashdot Mirror
What are they personally giving up (in more specific terms than just "privacy")?
The right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures? The right to freely associate with whomever they want without a governmental chaperone?
What are they personally gaining?
A mildly warm fuzzy feeling and not much else. There's no way for the public to know whether the tactics the NSA are using will ever be effective in preventing a terrorist attack. There's no way for the public to even know whether the tactics the NSA are using are the tactics they SAY they're using.
you *have* to be interoperable with the market leader's file formats and software.
That's true of the majority player in the market, too.
How do you think Microsoft's sales would do if they announced that the next version of Office would not be able to read or write any existing Word or Excel files, not even via converters?
vi is a text editor, emacs is an operating system.
Can't be. Last I hurd, RMS has never released an operating system.
America isn't known for its outstanding education system.
Not as far as its public education system goes, and especially not in science and mathematics. But as far as post-secondary universities go, the United States is better represented than any other country in the top n rankings. That would seem to indicate that a contest targeted at university-level computer science students would similarly have a large US representation.
Anyway, I don't know if it even makes sense to try to draw any broad conclusions from the one data point we have, namely, the results of this single competition. There's a lot of factors beyond country of origin that may have affected the rankings of this, or any, contest.
This software, although it contains tons of closed source code, is based on open source code and contains literally hundreds and hundreds of free software packages. Apple would never have succeeded in creating such a feature-rich operating system in the time it took to make it without the availability and use of such open source code.
I agree, the status of OS X as a mixture of open and closed source code, depending on which allows for more expedient development, has been a boon to Apple. Linspire should consider adopting a similar philosophy... oh. Right.
At the end of a slippery slope, we find a situation where:
Linux will be locked into outdated but unchangable kernel schemes, for fear of breaking it's hordes of proprietary device drivers.
And this would be worse than a situation where the kernel is free to evolve however it needs, but the system can only run in VGA mode because no better device drivers--proprietary or not--were ever released?
the brain damage sustained from the buildup of toxins accumulated from repeated ingestion of Play Doh
Sorry, no. "Non-Toxic" has been a primary marketing point of Play-Doh for years. That means it's safe to eat as much of it as you want!
Liberal arts majors must have gotten their brain damage from eating something else.
It's not like 99% of keyed systems were very secure. Except for the newer laser/dimple keys, thieves are going to easily get into your car.
A rock through the window defeats even the newer laser/dimple key systems.
The benefit of using a laptop, though, is that the thief doesn't have to engage in suspicious-looking activities like reaching through shattered safety glass on a car with a shrieking alarm, or fidgeting over the door lock with a bobby pin. Now they can just park a cargo van next to the target car, and sit in the back packet-sniffing to their heart's content without a passerby raising an eyebrow.
For the developers and consumers, the coolest features [of Vista] are Aero Glass, Indigo, Avalon, Net 2.0 and the rest of the WinFX framework.
I know "Aero Glass" is the name of the latest flavor of UI eye candy. I guess that's pretty cool, maybe. The rest of that stuff, I have no idea what it is or why I would need it as a consumer.
The initial shortage of [Xbox 360] units happened because of simultaneous world wide release.
Which still demonstrates "an exhibition of poor planning and bad business intelligence gathering" on MS's part. Perhaps Dvorak is actually right, just for the wrong reasons.
Microsoft has indeed shown lack of vision by concentrating not on where its strength laid, the operating system, but instead parleying with the competitors in 'side ventures' it had expanded to.
Just like Google is showing lack of vision by developing products that aren't search engines.
Just like IBM showed lack of vision by selling a "personal" computer that competed with Commodore and Osbourne rather than concentrating on their mainframe support and services business.
Just like IBM showed lack of vision by developing mainframe computers rather than selling typewriters and adding machines!
Indeed it is often when a company moves BEYOND where its strength lays that it demonstrates true vision.
They might pay 1/10 the rent of a B&M business, because they don't care if they're in the crappy part of town.
The people that work in the offices might care. If you expect people to commute to Cracksburg every morning because physical location doesn't matter in online business, you're probably not going to attract the highest caliber of employee.
(One solution to the problem is to let online employees work from their homes, avoiding the cost of renting office space altogether. And a rack of servers doesn't care if it's located in Nicedale or Cracksburg, so long as the backbone is nearby and there's enough security to keep hobos from making wee-wee on them.)
Perfect example of why the dot bomb era sucked.Several hundred k website in '99?
To be fair, it loaded nice and quickly in Boo.com's offices in a designer TriBeCa loft. They should have just invited potential shoppers to come in and look at the site from there.
Not getting hired for the Desktop Support position I interviewed for there in 1999 was a blessing in disguise...
If you take a job with a contract involving completing a project in 18 months for $40k/yr then you are going to finish the project for $60k regardless of how many hours you work in those 18 months.
The lesson here is not to take any such contracts that lack provisions for any kind of project overrun.
If the requirements change halfway through the project, and it throws schedules off to the point where it's going to take 24 months to finish it instead of 18, or will require me to work 70-hour weeks instead of 40-50 hour weeks, I will require additional compensation, and my employer is going to be aware of that from the outset.
More people who get burned out ought to get guns- then maybe the corporations would begin to take a different attitude towards "deadweight". I wonder how many C-level executives would have to die to make the change?
Here's an idea -- once you get burned out at a stressful job, try quitting instead of murdering some middle managers (who probably hates their jobs as much as you hate yours).
You'd have a really tough time finding equipment that isn't broken by design.
Or, you find yourself with a glut of equipment produced in Hong Kong by men who don't give a damn what the United States Congress says the FCC can do, and allow all the misfeatures to be disabled by pressing the secret key sequence "1-2-3-4-5" on the remote control.
Reinserting the parenthesis, duh
How do you know they didn't just remove the match-less parenthesis instead?
Actually, the article is about exhaggeration of the number of visitors.
I thought it was well known to everybody in the web business already that IP addresses and unique visitors do not have a strong direct correlation. If the point of the article wasn't to support in particular the 10-to-1 ratio, then I'm not sure what the point was.
How about a little less effort tracking your visitors and a little more generating something interesting for them to see when they do visit?
How are we supposed to know what our visitors find interesting? Hmm, maybe we could take a look at what current content they favor and use those statistics to guide the creation of new content...
"Am I supposed to be happy about having to go down to the DMV and tell them my name is Ernest'? For God's sake, where were my parents? I can't believe they would have let this get by"
"KnowhutImean, Vern?"
seeing how Nintendogs and Animal Crossing etc. did, it seems that the're hitting that market almost perfectly.
Those are examples of GOOD names, though.
"Nintendogs" is a portmanteau of "Nintendo" and "Dogs". Bingo, you know what to expect. "Animal Crossing" evokes community, interaction between various types of animals. You understand the basic premise immediately.
"Nintendo Wii" requires someone to explain to you that it's pronounced "whee", and the two i's represent players, and it also stands for "we", and even after that I still don't know anything about the Remote or the online service or any of the other new features that are supposed to make this console a Revolution. It's not a descriptive or evocative name. It's arbitrary. It's poor branding.
The only two responses I read that defended the name were weak.
Well, there you go. Sounds like the name Nintendo chose isn't very defendable.
I use a piece of software called "The Gimp 2.0" but I have never once heard anyone make fun of it.
Do you browse Slashdot at +5 or something? I don't think I've ever seen a discussion of The Gimp where it was not mentioned what a terrible name that is, and usually cited as a major reason why the product is far from being the Photoshop-Killer that it could be.
Names matter. Refraining from saying that a name is stupid doesn't make it any less stupid.
For crying out loud, "wii," "wee," or "we" all sound the same and the latter is good pun.
And the middle one is a BAD pun. So that cancels out the good pun, leaving us with only a non-word that not only has no connotations in English, but doesn't even have intuitive pronounciation.
Hard to say it wasn't a success.
That's like saying George Mason had a successful run in this year's NCAA basketball tournament. Yes, they posted a lot of wins that no one expected them to, but they still ended up with fewer points than Florida in their Final Four game. They failed to win the tournament.
Like Mason, Microsoft's Xbox division may be a success by some measures, but if they're in the red on the accounting ledgers, they're still a failure in some way.
Rarely do the most vocal critics of "open sourcing" something actually understand the rationale behind free software, which is NOT to have the best code, NOT to have the most secure code, NOT to ship a product the fastest [...]
If I'm understanding you correctly, what you're saying is that those who insist on having the best code, or the most secure code, or shipping a product the fastest--all of which are completely valid and reasonable business and ideological goals--should not look to Open Source software as a solution.
Frankly, your arrogant pragmatism nauseates me.
Ditto your arrogant idealism. Jerk.
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("foo.in"));
If it really hurts your eyes that much to see this line of code every time an input stream is opened, you could always just create a convenience class whose constructor does the above for you...
developers who are working on Safari, Konqueror, Mozilla Firefox and Seamonkey, IE, Opera, Camino, and so on, all need to take a step back from their computers and say,
m on isn't properly implemented in their browser? They don't know there's a problem with it, and even if they knew they wouldn't care. But new toolbar icons? Holy crap, the users eat it up! What an improvement!
"Hey, how come we're adding new features to a program that isn't even standards-compliant?"
The continual lack of support for even the full subset of CSS 1 and 2.1 makes designing pages based on XHTML and CSS a frickin' pain in the arse.
I agree with you, but I also recognize that browser developers are not guided by what would make us web designers the happiest. They ultimately report to USERS, not to us.
Why should a user care that CSS-alpha-channel-transparency-with-a-twist-of-le