Perhaps part of the issue here is that OS X is capable of doing some quite advanced color, level, and white balance calibration on the display. (System Prefs, Display, Color, Calibrate.) I find that color calibration *really* tunes up things for a given monitor (including the built in one), and even for different ambient lighting conditions in which I work.
Maybe with all the advanced processing they're doing to manage all of this amazing color calibration, they use some dithering. Perhaps the defaults aren't as good as windows. (Hmmm, and who made the windows display driver for the MacBooks? Me thinks that would be Apple.) I bet if color calibration were done, the "OS X" display would be on par or surpass the equivalent windows display. Just a hunch.
It's the completely wrong answer to the problem though, as it still promotes the idea of using SQL built by string concatenation. The result being that SQL injection is only one forgotten function call away.
I agree. I actually find it easier to use the call with parameters, rather than trying patch together a string. Putting in the "?" parameters in the string, and listing them afterwards, pretty damn simple. I'm amazed SQL injection is an issue at all. I guess there's a lot scarier programming out there on major sites than I can possible imagine.
Wholy crap, the price is just numbing. And probably actually justified by the tech that had to go into it.
Why couldn't they do something simpler? Like an LCD panel under the keyboard, and each key just spies down on a portion of the panel, maybe with some optics to make it look nice and focused, etc.. (I call patents!) Seems a lot more sense than having a separate OLED on every single key, which is probably what led to the outrageous price of this beast.
Given the beating most keyboards take, I'm assured this company will tank. For $1500, you want to be assured your asset will last, and I can't see this one living up to the promise.
Another option is rethinking the UI in general to start with. I think the article details a good option for exising UI's, backwards compatible and all. But designing for a touch screen really takes a bit of refactoring, in general. For example, most programs on my Pocket PC phone are unusable with fingers on the touch screen; but Tom Tom Navigator isn't; it is a dream to use with just a meat stylus, in almost all the modes/screens it has.
It always amazes me how the simplest of things is not done by most coders. For example, if I introduce a branch of logic (if...then or otherwise), I will at the very least do a quick test on each of the branches, to make sure it exhibits both behaviours as appropriate. It's been my experience that most coders do not even do that, much less creating formal test suites (something of which I'm guilty). But if you make a change, goddammit, *test* the changes and any "logic branches" you might have added. It's not exactly rocket science. I think a lot of the training that true engineers receive, should be applied to "software engineer" training. It really is scary what people are creating out there.
While I agree overuse of LED's is a bit annoying, it's the sound factor of current PC's that sticks out like a sore thumb to me. More and more, I'm using PC's for more than just work; entertainment system, PVR, and so forth. Having to find some uber-elite and expensive fans and hard drives to quiet the noise, is frustrating.
After a particularly stressful day, I turned off the four or five PC's in my house (well, small cottage) that were normally going 24/7. The silence was striking; I think we're conditioned to accept a lot more background noise than we should. (Now I'm definitely an "auditory" type, and more sensitive to sound, whereas a greater percentage of people are visually oriented.)
On a side note, I notice that the hard disk in my MacBook (Toshiba MK8034GSX) is incredibly quiet. It's doubt specifically chosen by Apple, in their typical attention to detail. It is nice not hearing the clickity click all the time (on the other hand, there are times when things might be getting slow, and you don't know if your disk is churning or not; but the Activity Monitor helps with that). Unfortunately, when the MacBook is busy, the fan is far from silent. Sigh.
The one thing SUV's tend to have that most other classes of vehicles don't (other than trucks) is four wheel drive. I wish more consumer vehicles (cars, vans) had four wheel drive as a more standard feature. (It's an expensive option on a lot of vans, and seems hard to find on most cars.) Also, I wish 4wd didn't have the gas mileage performance penalty; surely some research and technology could bring down the price and help the gas mileage problem with 4wd.
Your point is certainly well taken, though. One solution I had for cargo carrying, was to slap a trailer hitch on my car ($200) and pick up a 4x8 utility trailer ($900). It's truly life changing, being able to move and haul stuff so easily, and still have room for passengers. Now I have a minivan that I tow with, so I have quite a bit of capacity overall, and great mileage the rest of the time when I'm not towing. It's the best of both worlds.
This is on par with the banks changing their ATM "Service Fees", to "Convenience Fees", and doubling them in the process. Yes, it's quite convenient to charge us more.
The concept of your "state" affecting your effectiveness, is not news (although this is an interesting detail on the same).
I remember playing pool with some sailing friends one night, playing an average game. They asked me about my business, which happened to be (at the time, at least) going extremely well. I was enthusiastic, confident, and excited telling them about the business. And suddenly I was kicking ass at pool; nobody could touch me. Similarly, there have been times when things weren't going well, in a negative state, and pool and other attempts at things, were quite poor.
(Another example, on the positive side, was when my home office overlooked the ocean; I was inspired and confident and produced some great stuff.)
Being in an environment with lofty, spacious ceilings, is inspiring. It's symbolic of success and riches (high ceilings in expensive houses, etc.) So it's not surprising there are measurable differences in results. Lock someone in a 4x4 box, and see what kind of results they get:)
(I've read a bit of NLP and Tony Robbins stuff, which focuses upon this concept a lot; almost to an extreme. Yes, it's new-age-ish and pop-psychology-ish, but it is effective and based in a lot of good behavioural psychology. And it does work, surprisingly well. Get yourself in a peak state, even through somewhat artificial means, and you'll achieve more. It's a powerful self-fulfilling prophecy.)
(/me looks at my 7 foot ceilings, and contemplates a renovation...)
Even with relatively few users, there's far too many voices for suggestions to listen to. Users ask how to submit wishes, but it's really not worth it for us to make it easy. There's already far too many wishes just from our beta testers, not to mention that many requests are either contradictory, would break the database model we've developed, or are in fact already in the program and they just haven't realized it. And that's not counting the fact that my fellow developers, marketers, and I have our own "brilliant" ideas on how to best improve the program.
Your posting struck a nerve with you. You *don't* need to respond to, and implement every user wish. But it doesn't take a genius to at least simply categorize and stash away user requests, and spot trends. If hundreds of people are asking for a given feature, well, that might not be a bad feature to implement. No knee jerk reactions, just spotting of trends in user wishes, and adapting to that. I founded a.COM company that grew to a top 100 web site (according to Mediametrix) during the.COM boom, using largely that approach. We watched for trends in what the users wanted, and adapted. Everyone was happy.
(Now, unfortunately that was on the pure product side; there was no magic bullet for.COM politics, VC investors, shady partners, misguided marketing efforts, and other silliness. Oh well, live and learn.)
I decided to check out OpenBSD anyway, despite lack of an ISO. I used a Parallel's virtual machine to try an install.
The baseline netbook fired up, prompted me with a lot of text prompts and manual disk editing (wow, they still do that?), detected the network fine, prompted me for packages, and started downloading them. Great.
After getting base41.tgz (I think it was), it just sat there. For an hour. Doing nothing.
So I restarted the install. It hung at the same place.
No diagnostics. No indication of what might be wrong. A network issue? Possibly. If so, an ISO would have avoided that glitch.
As it stands, I'll never bother spending the time to figure it out, and will never end up using/recommending/buying OpenBSD at this time. For now, when I need a lean, mean, gateway machine, NetBSD seems small, ISO-available, stable, and secure, so I'll use/recommend that.
(One other thing that "bothered" me about the non-ISO thing, was that the "CD layouts" were "Copyright by Theo." Having a layout of all things, copyrighted by one person, again, seems a bit small-time and unprofessional. And the/. crowd is the type that would be up in arms about a layout being copyrightable, since arguably there's no creative design involved, just some drudgery of getting a bootloader and the packages on a disc.)
Anyhow, I do have a lot of respect for what the OpenBSD folks have done over the years. I just think that the ISO thing is hurting them more than it's helping them. Let people see what you have, as easily as possible. If they like it, and they are the type of person/corporation/role that would pay for things, they will. If they're not the type that would pay, they won't. But you're only excluding potential customers in the former category, by not making it as easy as possible for them.
(/me goes off to download the latest NetBSD to play and see what they've been up to...)
I've been looking into web frameworks lately, a lot of different ones (Java, Perl, Python, Ruby based ones). I finally decided upon going the Ruby-on-Rails, and probably the Ruby ActiveScaffold plugin.
One of the things that turns me off about frameworks in general, is the almost maniacal focusing upon AJAX. AJAX can do a lot of things nicely (Google Earth as the classic example), but for most web sites, all it does is add a slight bit more interactivity to forms. And many of the frameworks I looked at, handled forms nicely, but if JavaScript was turned off or unavaialble (like on some PDA's, Phones, and other environments), they were unusable.
I became very intruiged by Hobo as a Ruby on Rails plugin. Unfortunately, all the (scant) examples are so AJAX-centric, and do not degrade gracefully at all without JavaScript, I have no idea if it can be used effectively in a non AJAX environment. (I could spend a week exploring this, but I'm just going to move on with a framework I know will work.) A damn shame, because Hobo has a lot to offer.
I believe I am finally settling on ActiveScaffold, because it seems to degrade very nicely in the absence of JavaScript, and doesn't seem so heavily dependant upon it. Seems to have a good community around it, and isn't too heavyweight.
(BTW: Many of the Ruby plugins actually use prototype [and scriptalicious, I believe]; in fact, Prototype libraries come as part of Ruby on Rails.)
Wow, so you're telling me that Vista not only has UAP (finally, an OS with fancy user permissions!), but also has a programmable shell!?!?!? WOW, I had no idea OS's had progressed so far. Wholy crap, sign me up!!!
One can't help but wonder how this relates to the recent discussion about how chest compression is more important than ventilation while performing CPR (to the point where you should probably just focus solely upon the compression). If the cells have started to become vulnerable, and sudden resumption of oxygen might be damaging, then perhaps these findings are indeed related. (Compressions alone probably jiggle some air into the lungs, and a more gradual resumption of oxygen might be better.)
Or are we talking totally different timeframes of oxygen starvation here?
When you don't pay your drug dealer, him coming and killing you doesn't increase the odds of *you* paying (at all); but it reinforces his reputation, so others will be sure not to fail in their payments. I don't see how this is any different. Yes, if you make a threat, and have to follow through, there is no direct benefit from the effort required in following through; however, there is "P.R." value for your next threat.
While I hear great things about OpenBSD, and realize it is for a niche market where stability and security are the number one concern, it seems to me that more people would check it out and use it, if not for this policy:
"The OpenBSD project does not make the ISO images used to master the official CDs available for download. The reason is simply that we would like you to buy the CD sets to help fund ongoing OpenBSD development. The official OpenBSD CD-ROM layout is copyright Theo de Raadt. Theo does not permit people to redistribute images of the official OpenBSD CDs. As an incentive for people to buy the CD set, some extras are included in the package as well (artwork, stickers etc).
Note that only the CD layout is copyrighted, OpenBSD itself is free. Nothing precludes someone else from downloading OpenBSD and making their own CD. If for some reason you want to download a CD image, try searching the mailing list archives for possible sources. Of course, any OpenBSD ISO images available on the Internet either violate Theo de Raadt's copyright or are not official images. The source of an unofficial image may or may not be trustworthy; it is up to you to determine this for yourself."
Now, FTP installs are pretty slick in these days of prevalent high speed; still, it seems a bit silly and arbitrary to intentionally restrict ISO distribution, to try and sell a few discs. The people who are willing to pay, would buy regardless of a free ISO being available (corporations and IT departments like having the official discs, and such).
I guess more than anything, this policy stikes me as a bit of "attitude", which turns me off the distribution, more than the mild inconvenience of not having ISO's readily available.
Jumping the Shark implies a decline in quality, and milking things far beyond their useful life.
Open Source is more powerful and of higher quality than it's ever been. I can fire up a server with a Debian CD or a Desktop with an Ubuntu CD, more easily and more smoothly than ever before, and have a world of software, both server and desktop just an "apt-get" away.
Things are better than they've ever been. Just become it's been getting some legitimacy, and therefore sloganeering, by some big companies, doesn't invalidate anything.
Lately, after a long examination of web technologies, I've settled on, and have been heavily getting into Ruby on Rails. Getting a full production server environment up and running on Debian was trivial, with MySQL and Apache helping out. Similarly, on OS X, my main development environment now, getting Ruby rolling was similarly easy (both fink and MacPorts did a smashing job of it). Apparently Apple is embracing RoR, and including it in the next OS X release (whenever that may be). Does that mean RoR's jumped the shark? Anything but, it's more powerful and prevalent than ever.
You mean there are some games that are *only* supposed to run on Vista? My experience has been completely the opposite; I thought it was designed *not* to run any games...
(Just got my son a new laptop, and we're thinking we'll have to "upgrade" it to XP, so we can play half the games he likes.)
(And the cancel/allow thing is beyond silly; having to do that more than once for a single install, is just crazy.)
Can someone explain to us layman, how being within 1% of a prediction is impressive for this particular area? (For example, if newtonian physics only provided 99% accuracy for localalized physics on earth, it would be a joke.) I'm sure this "within 1%" is impressive, if the experts in the field are saying so; but explain to us layman, why?
One tidbit not mentioned in the summary, was that Shockley was one of the co-inventors of the transistor. Despite a lot of controversy around the guy, that is quite worthy of mention. It has turned out to be a somewhat useful component of electronic goods.:)
I started a.COM company during the.COM boom, and our investors wanted us to have a Silicon Valley presence, so we set up a "head office" there. (A mistake, for several reasons, but that's beside the point.) Anyhow, during my trips down to the area (and some previous trips, visiting Netscape headquaters during its heyday), I was always surprised at the area. It wasn't a Garden of Eden, but a sprawling semi-commercial area, with some major historical tech landmarks, but also some areas where I made sure my doors were locked. A lot of them, actually. So the fact that one building happened to have some exciting stuff happen, then turn into a fruit stand, then close down in a shambles, isn't shocking, interesting, nor particularly newsworthy to me.
Living elsewhere, one pictures Silicon Valley as having a certain glamour to it; a bit of an "Hollywood/L.A. Syndrome." They sound glamourous to outsiders, but it's not as pretty and glamourous as it might seem, once you're checking it out in more detail. (I found the same of New York; exciting to finally see it, but even in front of a site such as the famed Ritz Carleton, I was surprised that the streets are still as filthy as elsewhere, with scary neighborhoods around every turn.)
Things such as the HP garage have a lot more local character than this, and are more notable, IMO.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps part of the issue here is that OS X is capable of doing some quite advanced color, level, and white balance calibration on the display. (System Prefs, Display, Color, Calibrate.) I find that color calibration *really* tunes up things for a given monitor (including the built in one), and even for different ambient lighting conditions in which I work.
Maybe with all the advanced processing they're doing to manage all of this amazing color calibration, they use some dithering. Perhaps the defaults aren't as good as windows. (Hmmm, and who made the windows display driver for the MacBooks? Me thinks that would be Apple.) I bet if color calibration were done, the "OS X" display would be on par or surpass the equivalent windows display. Just a hunch.
It's the completely wrong answer to the problem though, as it still promotes the idea of using SQL built by string concatenation.
The result being that SQL injection is only one forgotten function call away.
I agree. I actually find it easier to use the call with parameters, rather than trying patch together a string. Putting in the "?" parameters in the string, and listing them afterwards, pretty damn simple. I'm amazed SQL injection is an issue at all. I guess there's a lot scarier programming out there on major sites than I can possible imagine.
Wholy crap, the price is just numbing. And probably actually justified by the tech that had to go into it.
Why couldn't they do something simpler? Like an LCD panel under the keyboard, and each key just spies down on a portion of the panel, maybe with some optics to make it look nice and focused, etc.. (I call patents!) Seems a lot more sense than having a separate OLED on every single key, which is probably what led to the outrageous price of this beast.
Given the beating most keyboards take, I'm assured this company will tank. For $1500, you want to be assured your asset will last, and I can't see this one living up to the promise.
Another option is rethinking the UI in general to start with. I think the article details a good option for exising UI's, backwards compatible and all. But designing for a touch screen really takes a bit of refactoring, in general. For example, most programs on my Pocket PC phone are unusable with fingers on the touch screen; but Tom Tom Navigator isn't; it is a dream to use with just a meat stylus, in almost all the modes/screens it has.
Great post, with some good tips and practices.
It always amazes me how the simplest of things is not done by most coders. For example, if I introduce a branch of logic (if...then or otherwise), I will at the very least do a quick test on each of the branches, to make sure it exhibits both behaviours as appropriate. It's been my experience that most coders do not even do that, much less creating formal test suites (something of which I'm guilty). But if you make a change, goddammit, *test* the changes and any "logic branches" you might have added. It's not exactly rocket science. I think a lot of the training that true engineers receive, should be applied to "software engineer" training. It really is scary what people are creating out there.
While I agree overuse of LED's is a bit annoying, it's the sound factor of current PC's that sticks out like a sore thumb to me. More and more, I'm using PC's for more than just work; entertainment system, PVR, and so forth. Having to find some uber-elite and expensive fans and hard drives to quiet the noise, is frustrating.
After a particularly stressful day, I turned off the four or five PC's in my house (well, small cottage) that were normally going 24/7. The silence was striking; I think we're conditioned to accept a lot more background noise than we should. (Now I'm definitely an "auditory" type, and more sensitive to sound, whereas a greater percentage of people are visually oriented.)
On a side note, I notice that the hard disk in my MacBook (Toshiba MK8034GSX) is incredibly quiet. It's doubt specifically chosen by Apple, in their typical attention to detail. It is nice not hearing the clickity click all the time (on the other hand, there are times when things might be getting slow, and you don't know if your disk is churning or not; but the Activity Monitor helps with that). Unfortunately, when the MacBook is busy, the fan is far from silent. Sigh.
The one thing SUV's tend to have that most other classes of vehicles don't (other than trucks) is four wheel drive. I wish more consumer vehicles (cars, vans) had four wheel drive as a more standard feature. (It's an expensive option on a lot of vans, and seems hard to find on most cars.) Also, I wish 4wd didn't have the gas mileage performance penalty; surely some research and technology could bring down the price and help the gas mileage problem with 4wd.
Your point is certainly well taken, though. One solution I had for cargo carrying, was to slap a trailer hitch on my car ($200) and pick up a 4x8 utility trailer ($900). It's truly life changing, being able to move and haul stuff so easily, and still have room for passengers. Now I have a minivan that I tow with, so I have quite a bit of capacity overall, and great mileage the rest of the time when I'm not towing. It's the best of both worlds.
This is on par with the banks changing their ATM "Service Fees", to "Convenience Fees", and doubling them in the process. Yes, it's quite convenient to charge us more.
One time, I went to press the eject button on my CD tray, and, get this, I pressed the reset button by mistake!
Man, was my face red. It took about two minutes to complete the reboot.
True story.
I wrote: and based in a lot of good behavioural psychology
I should have said "cognitive psychology." Minor nit, but thought I'd correct it.
The concept of your "state" affecting your effectiveness, is not news (although this is an interesting detail on the same).
:)
I remember playing pool with some sailing friends one night, playing an average game. They asked me about my business, which happened to be (at the time, at least) going extremely well. I was enthusiastic, confident, and excited telling them about the business. And suddenly I was kicking ass at pool; nobody could touch me. Similarly, there have been times when things weren't going well, in a negative state, and pool and other attempts at things, were quite poor.
(Another example, on the positive side, was when my home office overlooked the ocean; I was inspired and confident and produced some great stuff.)
Being in an environment with lofty, spacious ceilings, is inspiring. It's symbolic of success and riches (high ceilings in expensive houses, etc.) So it's not surprising there are measurable differences in results. Lock someone in a 4x4 box, and see what kind of results they get
(I've read a bit of NLP and Tony Robbins stuff, which focuses upon this concept a lot; almost to an extreme. Yes, it's new-age-ish and pop-psychology-ish, but it is effective and based in a lot of good behavioural psychology. And it does work, surprisingly well. Get yourself in a peak state, even through somewhat artificial means, and you'll achieve more. It's a powerful self-fulfilling prophecy.)
(/me looks at my 7 foot ceilings, and contemplates a renovation...)
Even with relatively few users, there's far too many voices for suggestions to listen to. Users ask how to submit wishes, but it's really not worth it for us to make it easy. There's already far too many wishes just from our beta testers, not to mention that many requests are either contradictory, would break the database model we've developed, or are in fact already in the program and they just haven't realized it. And that's not counting the fact that my fellow developers, marketers, and I have our own "brilliant" ideas on how to best improve the program.
.COM company that grew to a top 100 web site (according to Mediametrix) during the .COM boom, using largely that approach. We watched for trends in what the users wanted, and adapted. Everyone was happy.
.COM politics, VC investors, shady partners, misguided marketing efforts, and other silliness. Oh well, live and learn.)
Your posting struck a nerve with you. You *don't* need to respond to, and implement every user wish. But it doesn't take a genius to at least simply categorize and stash away user requests, and spot trends. If hundreds of people are asking for a given feature, well, that might not be a bad feature to implement. No knee jerk reactions, just spotting of trends in user wishes, and adapting to that. I founded a
(Now, unfortunately that was on the pure product side; there was no magic bullet for
"Security isn't just avoiding Microsoft..."
Sometimes a double negative can sum it up best: "but it isn't *not* avoiding Microsoft..."
A followup on my own posting:
/. crowd is the type that would be up in arms about a layout being copyrightable, since arguably there's no creative design involved, just some drudgery of getting a bootloader and the packages on a disc.)
I decided to check out OpenBSD anyway, despite lack of an ISO. I used a Parallel's virtual machine to try an install.
The baseline netbook fired up, prompted me with a lot of text prompts and manual disk editing (wow, they still do that?), detected the network fine, prompted me for packages, and started downloading them. Great.
After getting base41.tgz (I think it was), it just sat there. For an hour. Doing nothing.
So I restarted the install. It hung at the same place.
No diagnostics. No indication of what might be wrong. A network issue? Possibly. If so, an ISO would have avoided that glitch.
As it stands, I'll never bother spending the time to figure it out, and will never end up using/recommending/buying OpenBSD at this time. For now, when I need a lean, mean, gateway machine, NetBSD seems small, ISO-available, stable, and secure, so I'll use/recommend that.
(One other thing that "bothered" me about the non-ISO thing, was that the "CD layouts" were "Copyright by Theo." Having a layout of all things, copyrighted by one person, again, seems a bit small-time and unprofessional. And the
Anyhow, I do have a lot of respect for what the OpenBSD folks have done over the years. I just think that the ISO thing is hurting them more than it's helping them. Let people see what you have, as easily as possible. If they like it, and they are the type of person/corporation/role that would pay for things, they will. If they're not the type that would pay, they won't. But you're only excluding potential customers in the former category, by not making it as easy as possible for them.
(/me goes off to download the latest NetBSD to play and see what they've been up to...)
I've been looking into web frameworks lately, a lot of different ones (Java, Perl, Python, Ruby based ones). I finally decided upon going the Ruby-on-Rails, and probably the Ruby ActiveScaffold plugin.
One of the things that turns me off about frameworks in general, is the almost maniacal focusing upon AJAX. AJAX can do a lot of things nicely (Google Earth as the classic example), but for most web sites, all it does is add a slight bit more interactivity to forms. And many of the frameworks I looked at, handled forms nicely, but if JavaScript was turned off or unavaialble (like on some PDA's, Phones, and other environments), they were unusable.
I became very intruiged by Hobo as a Ruby on Rails plugin. Unfortunately, all the (scant) examples are so AJAX-centric, and do not degrade gracefully at all without JavaScript, I have no idea if it can be used effectively in a non AJAX environment. (I could spend a week exploring this, but I'm just going to move on with a framework I know will work.) A damn shame, because Hobo has a lot to offer.
I believe I am finally settling on ActiveScaffold, because it seems to degrade very nicely in the absence of JavaScript, and doesn't seem so heavily dependant upon it. Seems to have a good community around it, and isn't too heavyweight.
(BTW: Many of the Ruby plugins actually use prototype [and scriptalicious, I believe]; in fact, Prototype libraries come as part of Ruby on Rails.)
Wow, so you're telling me that Vista not only has UAP (finally, an OS with fancy user permissions!), but also has a programmable shell!?!?!? WOW, I had no idea OS's had progressed so far. Wholy crap, sign me up!!!
One can't help but wonder how this relates to the recent discussion about how chest compression is more important than ventilation while performing CPR (to the point where you should probably just focus solely upon the compression). If the cells have started to become vulnerable, and sudden resumption of oxygen might be damaging, then perhaps these findings are indeed related. (Compressions alone probably jiggle some air into the lungs, and a more gradual resumption of oxygen might be better.)
Or are we talking totally different timeframes of oxygen starvation here?
When you don't pay your drug dealer, him coming and killing you doesn't increase the odds of *you* paying (at all); but it reinforces his reputation, so others will be sure not to fail in their payments. I don't see how this is any different. Yes, if you make a threat, and have to follow through, there is no direct benefit from the effort required in following through; however, there is "P.R." value for your next threat.
While I hear great things about OpenBSD, and realize it is for a niche market where stability and security are the number one concern, it seems to me that more people would check it out and use it, if not for this policy:
"The OpenBSD project does not make the ISO images used to master the official CDs available for download. The reason is simply that we would like you to buy the CD sets to help fund ongoing OpenBSD development. The official OpenBSD CD-ROM layout is copyright Theo de Raadt. Theo does not permit people to redistribute images of the official OpenBSD CDs. As an incentive for people to buy the CD set, some extras are included in the package as well (artwork, stickers etc).
Note that only the CD layout is copyrighted, OpenBSD itself is free. Nothing precludes someone else from downloading OpenBSD and making their own CD. If for some reason you want to download a CD image, try searching the mailing list archives for possible sources. Of course, any OpenBSD ISO images available on the Internet either violate Theo de Raadt's copyright or are not official images. The source of an unofficial image may or may not be trustworthy; it is up to you to determine this for yourself."
Now, FTP installs are pretty slick in these days of prevalent high speed; still, it seems a bit silly and arbitrary to intentionally restrict ISO distribution, to try and sell a few discs. The people who are willing to pay, would buy regardless of a free ISO being available (corporations and IT departments like having the official discs, and such).
I guess more than anything, this policy stikes me as a bit of "attitude", which turns me off the distribution, more than the mild inconvenience of not having ISO's readily available.
And pay for my drinks!
Ummmm, how about, "no"?
Jumping the Shark implies a decline in quality, and milking things far beyond their useful life.
Open Source is more powerful and of higher quality than it's ever been. I can fire up a server with a Debian CD or a Desktop with an Ubuntu CD, more easily and more smoothly than ever before, and have a world of software, both server and desktop just an "apt-get" away.
Things are better than they've ever been. Just become it's been getting some legitimacy, and therefore sloganeering, by some big companies, doesn't invalidate anything.
Lately, after a long examination of web technologies, I've settled on, and have been heavily getting into Ruby on Rails. Getting a full production server environment up and running on Debian was trivial, with MySQL and Apache helping out. Similarly, on OS X, my main development environment now, getting Ruby rolling was similarly easy (both fink and MacPorts did a smashing job of it). Apparently Apple is embracing RoR, and including it in the next OS X release (whenever that may be). Does that mean RoR's jumped the shark? Anything but, it's more powerful and prevalent than ever.
'Nuff said. No offence, but stupid headline.
You mean there are some games that are *only* supposed to run on Vista? My experience has been completely the opposite; I thought it was designed *not* to run any games...
(Just got my son a new laptop, and we're thinking we'll have to "upgrade" it to XP, so we can play half the games he likes.)
(And the cancel/allow thing is beyond silly; having to do that more than once for a single install, is just crazy.)
Can someone explain to us layman, how being within 1% of a prediction is impressive for this particular area? (For example, if newtonian physics only provided 99% accuracy for localalized physics on earth, it would be a joke.) I'm sure this "within 1%" is impressive, if the experts in the field are saying so; but explain to us layman, why?
One tidbit not mentioned in the summary, was that Shockley was one of the co-inventors of the transistor. Despite a lot of controversy around the guy, that is quite worthy of mention. It has turned out to be a somewhat useful component of electronic goods. :)
I started a .COM company during the .COM boom, and our investors wanted us to have a Silicon Valley presence, so we set up a "head office" there. (A mistake, for several reasons, but that's beside the point.) Anyhow, during my trips down to the area (and some previous trips, visiting Netscape headquaters during its heyday), I was always surprised at the area. It wasn't a Garden of Eden, but a sprawling semi-commercial area, with some major historical tech landmarks, but also some areas where I made sure my doors were locked. A lot of them, actually. So the fact that one building happened to have some exciting stuff happen, then turn into a fruit stand, then close down in a shambles, isn't shocking, interesting, nor particularly newsworthy to me.
Living elsewhere, one pictures Silicon Valley as having a certain glamour to it; a bit of an "Hollywood/L.A. Syndrome." They sound glamourous to outsiders, but it's not as pretty and glamourous as it might seem, once you're checking it out in more detail. (I found the same of New York; exciting to finally see it, but even in front of a site such as the famed Ritz Carleton, I was surprised that the streets are still as filthy as elsewhere, with scary neighborhoods around every turn.)
Things such as the HP garage have a lot more local character than this, and are more notable, IMO.