That's more or less how I used to feel about my Jabber account. But since Google Talk has come along, I've been finding it easier to convince my friends to make the switch.
To begin with, I had been urging my AIM-using friends to switch to the GAIM/Adium clients for a couple of years now, which was easy because the official AIM client is such a kludge. Since many of my friends use GMail anyway, once they were using a multi-protocol IM client it was easy to get them to take the extra step of signing onto their Google Talk accounts. Some of them even started using Google Talk of their own accord.
In the last few months, I've actually spent more time talking with my friends over Jabber than using AIM or any other protocol. The use of Jabber (especially Google Talk) within my circle of friends seems to have reached a critical mass now - even my non-technical friends are starting to use it. I can only imagine that this trend will continue.
You're right, though: The really big news would be if AIM and MSN were to interoperate.
Now that P2P is officially not a problem for the RIAA, I'm sure we'll see the RIAA members' profits soar by those quintillions of dollars they claimed to have been losing yearly to P2P "theft" all along, right?
The RIAA is made up of for-profit corporations, and those companies' PR departments will naturally try to frame reality into the light most beneficial to their shareholders. I get that. But when the RIAA tries to use boldfaced lies to shape public policy, that's a problem.
I disagree... the GameCube is considerably more powerful than the PS2, and pretty much on par with the original Xbox. Have you ever played Resident Evil 4 or Beyond Good and Evil on the Cube? Nintendo's outgoing console is capable of some beautiful graphics.
The Wii is, of course, equipped with much more powerful graphics hardware than the GameCube; I'm confident that its games will look more or less as pretty as those on the 360 or the PS3. However, with its inventive controller and internet-based game distribution system, the Wii is the only one of these new consoles that brings something entirely new to the equation. In that sense, I would argue that it is the only one of the three that is truly "next generation."
If you want to see some serious application breakage, just refer to the OS X 10.3 -> 10.4 upgrade cycle (I still can't get my copy of MATLAB 6.5 to run in GUI mode on Tiger). For all its faults, Microsoft has generally done an excellent job maintaining backward-compatibility between operating system releases. But when something interfaces with the system at such a low level as the authentication framework, then of course any significant upgrade to that framework is going to require some application code rewriting.
The problem is that the people held at Guantanamo Bay weren't simply captured on "the field of battle". According to information released under court order last month, fewer than half of the detainees were actually captured in battle against US forces. The majority were turned over by Pakistan, often for a cash bounty.
Few of these "combatants" are even accused of having fought; most simply lived in a house or worked for a charity associated with the Taliban or Al-Qaeda. And you would propose that we have the right to indefinitely detain these people, held only on the grounds of a suspicion, without a fair trial? What, again, are these freedoms and principles that we are fighting so hard to defend in this "war on terror"?
Actually, check out the YouTube video linked at the bottom of the article. In one of the segments, you can see the robot traverse a slalom of obsticles on its way up a wall. It actually seems to backtrack a little down the wall at each turn...
Actually (on 10.4, anyway) one has to be in the admin group to have write privileges to the/Applications directory. But good point - even so, I would rather have to perform some kind of sudo to write to that directory at all, even if I am an admin user.
You're not trolling, but I have to disagree with you on your statements about the iPod's reliability. I have a third-gen, which is about three years old now. For the past three years, I have used it for at least an hour (usually between classes) most days that I go to campus. I have also used it when I go running (at least I did, until I got my shuffle). I also use it when I'm studying at the library or when I want to listen to my music in the living room without bothering my roommates. In short, this thing literally leaves its dock at least once a day.
Yet the hard drive is still fine. And the battery, while no longer up to its original capacity, is still worth about six hours of continuous play.
Many of my friends have third or second-gen iPods, and they have mostly had similar experiences. In fact, the only person I know whose iPod actually died is my roommate - his Mini's hard drive kicked the bucket on him while he was out for a run.
In my opinion, the iPod is a superior MP3 player. It doesn't do Vorbis or FLAC and it has no FM tuner, but these things are a lot less important to me than the overall elegance of the solution of iPod + iTunes. For example, if I'm on campus and decide that I really like the song I'm listening to, I can use the scroll wheel to give it a five-star rating. Then, when I plug the iPod back into its dock, this rating is uploaded to iTunes, along with the number of times that song has been played and the last time at which I listened to it. Next, I can use a smart playlist to fill my shuffle with songs sorted by highest rating or how frequently I listen to them on any of my devices. If there are other systems with similar functionality out there, I am not aware of them.
I would attribute the success of the iPod, then, to a variety of factors: Ease of use; superior design, in my opinion; reputation for reliability, at least where I am from; and good looks, which, while I couldn't care less about, are important to many people in their personal devices (and this is something Apple is frankly wise to take advantage of).
... BSG's creator (Ronald Moore) LOVED Firefly and much of the directing in BSG is based off of Firefly's style.
Just to drive your point home: If you look carefully enough during the doctor's office scene in the first episode of the Battlestar Galactica miniseries, you will find a small tribute to Whedon's Firefly.
The RSS specifications are specific subsets of XML, and RSS readers have to know how to interpret that XML. When Microsoft starts to change the RSS spec, and if others decide to use Microsoft's features, then there's a good chance that users of non-Microsoft RSS client software will be effectively locked out of these feeds. It really doesn't matter whether it's XML or not (or more generally, human-readable or not), because by trying to shove new features into the RSS specification outside of the official channels for doing so, Microsoft is trying to tell the independent developers "now you need to conform to OUR standard, or our large user base will ensure that your software becomes incompatible with all that content your users want to access."
Fortunately, I think there's a pretty good chance it won't work this time. A great deal of news feeds are generated by open source software such as LiveJournal's engine and Wordpress, and I think the authors of such software would be less likely than most to cave in to a new "standard" just because Microsoft says so. There's already a huge amount of RSS content out there, even if Microsoft users have been missing out on it so far. Hopefully, when all is said and done, it will be Microsoft following the standard, and not the other way around.
That's a cool prototype, but I don't think could ever be marketed; the whole formula depends on the car's remarkable small size and low drag coefficient. I love small cars (I drive an integra), but there's just a certain size below which a car isn't useful for a trip to the grocery store, let alone a trip home for the holidays. So while a vehicle in this fashion may be the ultimate "economy car" for getting to the office and back, its economy is stymied by the fact that it would be of limited utility to anyone who can't also afford a second, larger car with a trunk.
The Washington Post has a bias toward the right? I'm not sure I can agree with that. I consider myself pretty allergic to any strong conservative bias; few things pain me more than sitting through the O'Reilly Factor. I've never considered the Washington Post to have any such bias. If they do, it's either too clever or too weak for me to pick up on.
I would also argue that simply tallying up "left versus right" bias is useless with regards to determining the state of our mass media. By its very nature, political bias is anything but a black-and-white issue.
I don't live in Massachusetts, but I'd guess the lack of press has a lot to do with the general public's tenuous grasp on the concept of file formats, let alone the idea of why any one format should be considered 'better' than another. Until the people's knowledge of such technical issues improves (I have faith that it must, eventually), I'm afraid that issues like this, however important they really are, will never achieve much attention in the mainstream press.
I'm not sure that comparison is completely accurate... for a worm to spread using a Windows service, it must first find another computer on the network or Internet that has the necessary security vulnerability. Then it must be able to make a connection to that host's open port(s) through whatever NATs and firewalls may lie between the two computers.
NATs and firewalls, a road block for most computer worms, are also a problem for IM systems. Centralized systems like AOL's AIM get around the issue of computers not necessarily being able to receive inbound connections directly from one another by routing IMs through AOLs servers. So a "real" IM worm has a much greater potential for reproduction than a typical OS vulnerability-based worm, because:
The worm can find potential hosts with greater ease using the victim's buddy list, and
Such a worm could propagate through firewalls and NATs by crafting attacks as instant messages
As a sidenote, it's funny to see this story pop up now; just last night my roommate's computer was infected by an AIM virus (not a self-propagating worm; she clicked on a link and much fun ensued).
Actually, it's a common misconception that John C. Dvorak was the creator of the Dvorak keyboard. The Dvorak keyboard layout was actually invented in the 1930s by August Dvorak, an educational psychologist and distant relation to the composer Antonin Dvorak.
and personally, I think mainstream artists are mainstream for a reason
That reason is often simply that someone in an RIAA member's marketing department decided to promote that particular band, seeing a potential new revenue stream but not necessarily talent. It's not that everything produced by RIAA member labels is bad. However, consider that the RIAA member companies are, naturally, focused on marketing and business margins; on the other hand, indie bands and indie labels are typically in business becuase, to at least some degree, they love music.
It should be clear which of these scenes would tend to produce the more innovative and interesting music.
I use the Finder's color labels and they're great for simple things, but they aren't quite the same thing as GMail's label system. For one thing, in OS X one is limited to choosing from seven labels. Now I have way more than seven labels in my GMail account; if someone were to incorporate this functionality into a file system, I would need the ability to allocate way more labels than that for the system to be useful.
Also, in the Finder one cannot assign multiple labels to the same object. This is a defining feature of GMail's labels.
Slashdot Mirror
That's more or less how I used to feel about my Jabber account. But since Google Talk has come along, I've been finding it easier to convince my friends to make the switch.
To begin with, I had been urging my AIM-using friends to switch to the GAIM/Adium clients for a couple of years now, which was easy because the official AIM client is such a kludge. Since many of my friends use GMail anyway, once they were using a multi-protocol IM client it was easy to get them to take the extra step of signing onto their Google Talk accounts. Some of them even started using Google Talk of their own accord.
In the last few months, I've actually spent more time talking with my friends over Jabber than using AIM or any other protocol. The use of Jabber (especially Google Talk) within my circle of friends seems to have reached a critical mass now - even my non-technical friends are starting to use it. I can only imagine that this trend will continue.
You're right, though: The really big news would be if AIM and MSN were to interoperate.
I'm not sure about 811, but in my area 311 will connect you to a non-emergency dispatcher.
This kind of thing could make Lucas Brunelle's job easier, for better or for worse...
Now that P2P is officially not a problem for the RIAA, I'm sure we'll see the RIAA members' profits soar by those quintillions of dollars they claimed to have been losing yearly to P2P "theft" all along, right?
The RIAA is made up of for-profit corporations, and those companies' PR departments will naturally try to frame reality into the light most beneficial to their shareholders. I get that. But when the RIAA tries to use boldfaced lies to shape public policy, that's a problem.
I disagree... the GameCube is considerably more powerful than the PS2, and pretty much on par with the original Xbox. Have you ever played Resident Evil 4 or Beyond Good and Evil on the Cube? Nintendo's outgoing console is capable of some beautiful graphics.
The Wii is, of course, equipped with much more powerful graphics hardware than the GameCube; I'm confident that its games will look more or less as pretty as those on the 360 or the PS3. However, with its inventive controller and internet-based game distribution system, the Wii is the only one of these new consoles that brings something entirely new to the equation. In that sense, I would argue that it is the only one of the three that is truly "next generation."
If you want to see some serious application breakage, just refer to the OS X 10.3 -> 10.4 upgrade cycle (I still can't get my copy of MATLAB 6.5 to run in GUI mode on Tiger). For all its faults, Microsoft has generally done an excellent job maintaining backward-compatibility between operating system releases. But when something interfaces with the system at such a low level as the authentication framework, then of course any significant upgrade to that framework is going to require some application code rewriting.
The problem is that the people held at Guantanamo Bay weren't simply captured on "the field of battle". According to information released under court order last month, fewer than half of the detainees were actually captured in battle against US forces. The majority were turned over by Pakistan, often for a cash bounty.
Few of these "combatants" are even accused of having fought; most simply lived in a house or worked for a charity associated with the Taliban or Al-Qaeda. And you would propose that we have the right to indefinitely detain these people, held only on the grounds of a suspicion, without a fair trial? What, again, are these freedoms and principles that we are fighting so hard to defend in this "war on terror"?
Actually, check out the YouTube video linked at the bottom of the article. In one of the segments, you can see the robot traverse a slalom of obsticles on its way up a wall. It actually seems to backtrack a little down the wall at each turn...
Actually (on 10.4, anyway) one has to be in the admin group to have write privileges to the /Applications directory. But good point - even so, I would rather have to perform some kind of sudo to write to that directory at all, even if I am an admin user.
You're not trolling, but I have to disagree with you on your statements about the iPod's reliability. I have a third-gen, which is about three years old now. For the past three years, I have used it for at least an hour (usually between classes) most days that I go to campus. I have also used it when I go running (at least I did, until I got my shuffle). I also use it when I'm studying at the library or when I want to listen to my music in the living room without bothering my roommates. In short, this thing literally leaves its dock at least once a day.
Yet the hard drive is still fine. And the battery, while no longer up to its original capacity, is still worth about six hours of continuous play.
Many of my friends have third or second-gen iPods, and they have mostly had similar experiences. In fact, the only person I know whose iPod actually died is my roommate - his Mini's hard drive kicked the bucket on him while he was out for a run.
In my opinion, the iPod is a superior MP3 player. It doesn't do Vorbis or FLAC and it has no FM tuner, but these things are a lot less important to me than the overall elegance of the solution of iPod + iTunes. For example, if I'm on campus and decide that I really like the song I'm listening to, I can use the scroll wheel to give it a five-star rating. Then, when I plug the iPod back into its dock, this rating is uploaded to iTunes, along with the number of times that song has been played and the last time at which I listened to it. Next, I can use a smart playlist to fill my shuffle with songs sorted by highest rating or how frequently I listen to them on any of my devices. If there are other systems with similar functionality out there, I am not aware of them.
I would attribute the success of the iPod, then, to a variety of factors: Ease of use; superior design, in my opinion; reputation for reliability, at least where I am from; and good looks, which, while I couldn't care less about, are important to many people in their personal devices (and this is something Apple is frankly wise to take advantage of).
Now that's a thought.
As a side note, did this comment send anyone else images of Evangelion?
Just to drive your point home: If you look carefully enough during the doctor's office scene in the first episode of the Battlestar Galactica miniseries, you will find a small tribute to Whedon's Firefly.
Someone give this man some Karma.
The RSS specifications are specific subsets of XML, and RSS readers have to know how to interpret that XML. When Microsoft starts to change the RSS spec, and if others decide to use Microsoft's features, then there's a good chance that users of non-Microsoft RSS client software will be effectively locked out of these feeds. It really doesn't matter whether it's XML or not (or more generally, human-readable or not), because by trying to shove new features into the RSS specification outside of the official channels for doing so, Microsoft is trying to tell the independent developers "now you need to conform to OUR standard, or our large user base will ensure that your software becomes incompatible with all that content your users want to access."
Fortunately, I think there's a pretty good chance it won't work this time. A great deal of news feeds are generated by open source software such as LiveJournal's engine and Wordpress, and I think the authors of such software would be less likely than most to cave in to a new "standard" just because Microsoft says so. There's already a huge amount of RSS content out there, even if Microsoft users have been missing out on it so far. Hopefully, when all is said and done, it will be Microsoft following the standard, and not the other way around.
No mod points, but I'll second that...
That's a cool prototype, but I don't think could ever be marketed; the whole formula depends on the car's remarkable small size and low drag coefficient. I love small cars (I drive an integra), but there's just a certain size below which a car isn't useful for a trip to the grocery store, let alone a trip home for the holidays. So while a vehicle in this fashion may be the ultimate "economy car" for getting to the office and back, its economy is stymied by the fact that it would be of limited utility to anyone who can't also afford a second, larger car with a trunk.
This illustrates the danger of the DMCA's vaguely-defined broadness, even if only satirically.
The Washington Post has a bias toward the right? I'm not sure I can agree with that. I consider myself pretty allergic to any strong conservative bias; few things pain me more than sitting through the O'Reilly Factor. I've never considered the Washington Post to have any such bias. If they do, it's either too clever or too weak for me to pick up on.
I would also argue that simply tallying up "left versus right" bias is useless with regards to determining the state of our mass media. By its very nature, political bias is anything but a black-and-white issue.
I don't live in Massachusetts, but I'd guess the lack of press has a lot to do with the general public's tenuous grasp on the concept of file formats, let alone the idea of why any one format should be considered 'better' than another. Until the people's knowledge of such technical issues improves (I have faith that it must, eventually), I'm afraid that issues like this, however important they really are, will never achieve much attention in the mainstream press.
I'm not sure that comparison is completely accurate... for a worm to spread using a Windows service, it must first find another computer on the network or Internet that has the necessary security vulnerability. Then it must be able to make a connection to that host's open port(s) through whatever NATs and firewalls may lie between the two computers.
NATs and firewalls, a road block for most computer worms, are also a problem for IM systems. Centralized systems like AOL's AIM get around the issue of computers not necessarily being able to receive inbound connections directly from one another by routing IMs through AOLs servers. So a "real" IM worm has a much greater potential for reproduction than a typical OS vulnerability-based worm, because:
As a sidenote, it's funny to see this story pop up now; just last night my roommate's computer was infected by an AIM virus (not a self-propagating worm; she clicked on a link and much fun ensued).
Actually, it's a common misconception that John C. Dvorak was the creator of the Dvorak keyboard. The Dvorak keyboard layout was actually invented in the 1930s by August Dvorak, an educational psychologist and distant relation to the composer Antonin Dvorak.
It's ok, we can just abbreviate it 'PDFDF'.
That reason is often simply that someone in an RIAA member's marketing department decided to promote that particular band, seeing a potential new revenue stream but not necessarily talent. It's not that everything produced by RIAA member labels is bad. However, consider that the RIAA member companies are, naturally, focused on marketing and business margins; on the other hand, indie bands and indie labels are typically in business becuase, to at least some degree, they love music.
It should be clear which of these scenes would tend to produce the more innovative and interesting music.
I use the Finder's color labels and they're great for simple things, but they aren't quite the same thing as GMail's label system. For one thing, in OS X one is limited to choosing from seven labels. Now I have way more than seven labels in my GMail account; if someone were to incorporate this functionality into a file system, I would need the ability to allocate way more labels than that for the system to be useful.
Also, in the Finder one cannot assign multiple labels to the same object. This is a defining feature of GMail's labels.
And A Prairie Home Companion!