The US generally lags many parts of the world in any technology. Look at Cell phones, wireless, HDTV, personal electronics, game systems, etc etc etc where the US is routinely years behind Japan and much of Western Europe.
The US leads in developing commercial softwareand entertainment. That's it.
I've voted for Nader in every election since 1992, precisely because I believed in his policies. I knew he wouldn't get elected, but I wanted to support him anyway because I believed in him. I still do.
Not entirely accurate. Almost every "alternative" band in the past 5 years has made heavy use of alternative tunings. Korn, Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, Barenaked Ladies, Goo Goo Dolls, and the Wallflowers, just to name a few off the top of my head.
Seriously, the dual lines is extremely nice to have, particularly when the wife and I both aggressively stack up things to record and there's a lot of overlap. Dual lines means that we can both be recording something time and watch something already recorded together all at once. I just wish I'd gone for the larger HD;)
I've run linux on the desktop for years now on all manner of hardware, and I tend to swap hardware like madman. Oddly enough, at least since RH 8.0 I haven't had to recompile a kernel EVER or manually edit anything to add USB devices. Hell, since Jan 1st I've upgraded to Fedora, put in a new motherboard/CPU (different chipsets for absolutely everything), added a USB CD burner, new network card, and swapped the ancient CD drive for a shiny new DVD drive. I didn't configure anything for any of it. It all just worked. Yes, Apple does it all very wonderfully. That's why I have a Mac also.
OK, I did have to actually install software to play a DVD, but big freaking deal, that's sort of expected.
I disagree with that. I have worked on plenty of production systems using CMF.
I'm not saying the plone isn't good (it is, it's an incredible product really) just that it isn't strictly necessary. CMF is lighter weight and easier to manage. And I've had plenty of trouble getting anything written for CMF to work in plone. Plone takes over form processing and there is no clearly documented way around this that works. To reiterate, there are several documented ways to get around the form mangling, none of which actually work except in one very specific version of plone which is over a year old.
I just love the "free market" ideologues who suddenly want government intervention when someone manages to effectively compete with them. They have no problem shipping jobs to India to get the best prices, but dammit consumers shouldn't be allowed to SHOP in India to get the best prices! They should be forced to pay our prices and conform to our marketing plans so we can make more money!
I've been using Zope for 4 years now, and I still don't get this view that Zope is inscrutable. I have been trying to work with Plone for over a year now and it's damn near impossible to create your own product for it.
While Zope documentation can be kindly described as minimalist, Plone documentation simply doesn't exist and what little there is is 100% wrong. Hell, I've had some of the plone developers send me solutions to problems and their solutions don't work (usually because they've skipped 2-3 major steps in their directions, assuming that I know as much about their undocumented product as they do).
I think Plone is a great project, and it will likely become an integral part of Zope, if you want to do anything other than slap a different skin on it you are SOL. I'm particularly bothered by the fact that they override many of the default behaviors of Zope/CMF and there is NO way around it so it is not possible to port a Zope/CMF product to Plone without completely rewriting from scratch.
Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that as technology changes, and the ways technology is used changes, the original design fails to efficiently and effectively meet the needs of the users. New features and functionality that weren't considered in the original architecture add stability and security issues. You reach a point where it makes more sense to take all of that knowledge gained from the current codebase and build a brand new one that takes into account all of the tacked on features and enhancements. And you will have to do it again once the "new and improved" version has been revised a few dozen times.
Photoshop, along with Illustrator, are products for professional graphic artists. They do make a consumer grade version called Photoshop Elements that has everything any home user could want for a whopping $99. Same price as Paint Shop Pro, which most people compare Photoshop to when complaining about paying professional prices for a professional product.
I've been hearing the "PCs are cheaper" argument since the early 90's at least. One problem: It's never been true. Sure, you can buy a PC for less than you can buy a Mac. But you cannot buy a PC of *comparable quality* for significantly less.
After college I sold computers for a few months at Good Guys. The was when the pentium processor was first introduced. A decent IBM (actual IBM, not a cheap crappy clone) was about $1400. A comparable Performa was about $1600. But the Performa came with a nice monitor, which was worth about $200. Gee, same price after all. You could pick up a Packard Bell for 1100, but they were pure garbage and got returned as defective more often than not.
These days you can buy a low-end computer for as little as $200 from Wal-Mart. By this logic, no one should ever buy a Dell or Gateway, because they cost more than the Wal-Mart PC. It's cheaper for a reason. Try it yourself. Look at the specs for an iMac or eMac and then spec out a Dell or Gateway of comparable power and quality parts. I doubt you'll find a difference of more than a few tens of dollars.
Hello, and welcome to Nu-Perfect America. Where the Corporate boosters are sane, rational, and only want what is in your own best interest and anyone who disagrees with what corporations want to do is a radical who is trying to destroy the world.
This is what the media (corporations) promote, this is what our politicians (owned by corporations) want us to believe, and what our schools (bribed by corporations and forced by politicians) teach.
I'm still not sure what's so terrible about targeted advertising. I'll only see ads for things I might be interested in. That's awful! No more ads for Viagra? No more ads for Depends Adult Diapers? What ever will I do?!?!?!
They aren't forcing me to buy anything, they're simply tailoring their ads to things I might want. Good. That's sort of the point of technology, to improve people's lives. And I consider NOT seeing ads for luxury cruises, mutual funds, and pay-per-view sporting events to be an improvement in my life.
That's actually not the difference. I'm not in the habit of defending MSFT, but you have to differentiate between the corporation and the people that work there. The technical people at MSFT got into technology because they love it. MSFT really does tend to hire some of the best and the brightest. Many of the problems with their software have to do with overall architecture and decisions forced on the developers by marketing. That doesn't mean the developers suck or that they don't love what they do.
Blockbuster is big enough that back in the mid 90's studios would preview movies for Blockbuster before releasing them in theatres to ensure that Blockbuster would be willing to carry the movie when it went to video. I don't know if they still do that, but they did for several years.
Stores that carry music as a side business carry an extremely narrow and shallow catalog. I've looked at the music section at Wal-Mart. The dozen CDs they carry that I'd actually want I already own. So sticking with your approach I'd just never buy anymore music at all. With iTMS I have access to hundreds of thousands of songs I'd never get in the same store I get my groceries, as well as exclusive tracks I don't get anywhere else. The "music stores" in malls aren't much better. You won't find any jazz at all, and the classical music selection is a joke. You want an older Joe Jackson album? Tough, they don't carry him. The new Ben Folds EP? "Who? If he doesn't have a video on TRL, then we don't carry him."
What about going to an actual music store, you ask? Most of them are gone. I live in a top 20 radio market, over a million people in the metro area. There are about a dozen actual music stores. Some of them are damn good, but they aren't anyplace that I get to regularly and I rarely have time to make a special trip.
I save time and money and have less irritation and more convenience all in one with iTMS.
Zope is extremely powerful and flexible. Zope is an application server, it is not the complete solution on it's own. Your best bet for what you want to do is to use zope hosting someplace (I've used hurrah in the past and currently use Zettai, both are great) and get them to install (or do it yourself if you are comfortable with that) either Content Management Framework or plone and add the photo album tool and a blog tool (there are at least three). CMF/Plone provide a very user friendly interface for managing documents, photos, files, etc etc. Plone is built on CMF and basically adds more complex functionality to CMF. You can probably do just fine with the core CMF.
Rolling your own blog tool with BlogFace is pretty straightforward, or you can use one of the custom blog tools (CoreBlog, PABlog*, or CMF WebLog). For a very simplistic blog, you can just use the built in "news" tool.
*I wrote and maintain PABlog, I like it obviously. It doesn't currently work with Plone, CMF WebLog only works with Plone. CoreBlog is the most flexible of the three, as it runs on pure Zope, CMF, or Plone.
I applaud you. I have (mostly) managed to convince my wife and her mom that gifts are not necessary to demonstrate our affection for one another.
I'm working on my family, slowly. I don't exchange gifts with any friends. I was under the impression that the point of Christmas was to celebrate the birth of Christ. How that translates into hordes of people spending money they don't have on things nobody wants is beyond me.
Most of Microsofts business lines are money losers. They lose money on hardware, developer tools, graphics and internet software, server software, their only cash positive lines are Office and the Windows OS.
Here's a benefit of doing contract work for the government (at least in some agencies): No overtime. It's not allowed unless approved ahead of time and they have to be REALLY convinced that it's necessary. I haven't worked more than 40 hours in a week in two years. And oddly enough I still get all my work done in a timely manner.
This is, in theory, the strongest point in favor of capitalism. A company starts doing something that pisses of their customers, their customers can start buying from a competitor instead.
I recently (yesterday) helped my mother in law buy a new printer. The store had a very basic Lexmark for under $35 that would perfectly suit her needs. Next up was an HP that was about 7 dollars more. This is a for woman who gets extremely upset because her gas bill is two dollars more than she thinks it should be. On my advice (because of their shady actions), she went with the HP (who are no paragons of virtue, but in the printer biz are far superior in both quality and business practices to Lexmark).
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The US generally lags many parts of the world in any technology. Look at Cell phones, wireless, HDTV, personal electronics, game systems, etc etc etc where the US is routinely years behind Japan and much of Western Europe.
The US leads in developing commercial softwareand entertainment. That's it.
I've voted for Nader in every election since 1992, precisely because I believed in his policies. I knew he wouldn't get elected, but I wanted to support him anyway because I believed in him. I still do.
Not entirely accurate. Almost every "alternative" band in the past 5 years has made heavy use of alternative tunings. Korn, Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, Barenaked Ladies, Goo Goo Dolls, and the Wallflowers, just to name a few off the top of my head.
And here RG highlights the difference between a true capitalist and a monopolist. Capitalism isn't evil, some of the people who practice it are.
I'd mod parent up, but it's already maxed.
me too!
;)
Seriously, the dual lines is extremely nice to have, particularly when the wife and I both aggressively stack up things to record and there's a lot of overlap. Dual lines means that we can both be recording something time and watch something already recorded together all at once. I just wish I'd gone for the larger HD
It's called a loss leader. Sell the basic item at or below cost and make your money on accessories. See also: printers and ink cartridges.
I've run linux on the desktop for years now on all manner of hardware, and I tend to swap hardware like madman. Oddly enough, at least since RH 8.0 I haven't had to recompile a kernel EVER or manually edit anything to add USB devices. Hell, since Jan 1st I've upgraded to Fedora, put in a new motherboard/CPU (different chipsets for absolutely everything), added a USB CD burner, new network card, and swapped the ancient CD drive for a shiny new DVD drive. I didn't configure anything for any of it. It all just worked. Yes, Apple does it all very wonderfully. That's why I have a Mac also.
OK, I did have to actually install software to play a DVD, but big freaking deal, that's sort of expected.
I disagree with that. I have worked on plenty of production systems using CMF.
I'm not saying the plone isn't good (it is, it's an incredible product really) just that it isn't strictly necessary. CMF is lighter weight and easier to manage. And I've had plenty of trouble getting anything written for CMF to work in plone. Plone takes over form processing and there is no clearly documented way around this that works. To reiterate, there are several documented ways to get around the form mangling, none of which actually work except in one very specific version of plone which is over a year old.
I just love the "free market" ideologues who suddenly want government intervention when someone manages to effectively compete with them. They have no problem shipping jobs to India to get the best prices, but dammit consumers shouldn't be allowed to SHOP in India to get the best prices! They should be forced to pay our prices and conform to our marketing plans so we can make more money!
I've been using Zope for 4 years now, and I still don't get this view that Zope is inscrutable. I have been trying to work with Plone for over a year now and it's damn near impossible to create your own product for it.
While Zope documentation can be kindly described as minimalist, Plone documentation simply doesn't exist and what little there is is 100% wrong. Hell, I've had some of the plone developers send me solutions to problems and their solutions don't work (usually because they've skipped 2-3 major steps in their directions, assuming that I know as much about their undocumented product as they do).
I think Plone is a great project, and it will likely become an integral part of Zope, if you want to do anything other than slap a different skin on it you are SOL. I'm particularly bothered by the fact that they override many of the default behaviors of Zope/CMF and there is NO way around it so it is not possible to port a Zope/CMF product to Plone without completely rewriting from scratch.
Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that as technology changes, and the ways technology is used changes, the original design fails to efficiently and effectively meet the needs of the users. New features and functionality that weren't considered in the original architecture add stability and security issues. You reach a point where it makes more sense to take all of that knowledge gained from the current codebase and build a brand new one that takes into account all of the tacked on features and enhancements. And you will have to do it again once the "new and improved" version has been revised a few dozen times.
Photoshop, along with Illustrator, are products for professional graphic artists. They do make a consumer grade version called Photoshop Elements that has everything any home user could want for a whopping $99. Same price as Paint Shop Pro, which most people compare Photoshop to when complaining about paying professional prices for a professional product.
I've been hearing the "PCs are cheaper" argument since the early 90's at least. One problem: It's never been true. Sure, you can buy a PC for less than you can buy a Mac. But you cannot buy a PC of *comparable quality* for significantly less.
After college I sold computers for a few months at Good Guys. The was when the pentium processor was first introduced. A decent IBM (actual IBM, not a cheap crappy clone) was about $1400. A comparable Performa was about $1600. But the Performa came with a nice monitor, which was worth about $200. Gee, same price after all. You could pick up a Packard Bell for 1100, but they were pure garbage and got returned as defective more often than not.
These days you can buy a low-end computer for as little as $200 from Wal-Mart. By this logic, no one should ever buy a Dell or Gateway, because they cost more than the Wal-Mart PC. It's cheaper for a reason. Try it yourself. Look at the specs for an iMac or eMac and then spec out a Dell or Gateway of comparable power and quality parts. I doubt you'll find a difference of more than a few tens of dollars.
Hello, and welcome to Nu-Perfect America. Where the Corporate boosters are sane, rational, and only want what is in your own best interest and anyone who disagrees with what corporations want to do is a radical who is trying to destroy the world.
This is what the media (corporations) promote, this is what our politicians (owned by corporations) want us to believe, and what our schools (bribed by corporations and forced by politicians) teach.
I'm still not sure what's so terrible about targeted advertising. I'll only see ads for things I might be interested in. That's awful! No more ads for Viagra? No more ads for Depends Adult Diapers? What ever will I do?!?!?!
;)
They aren't forcing me to buy anything, they're simply tailoring their ads to things I might want. Good. That's sort of the point of technology, to improve people's lives. And I consider NOT seeing ads for luxury cruises, mutual funds, and pay-per-view sporting events to be an improvement in my life.
That's why I have TiVo
That's actually not the difference. I'm not in the habit of defending MSFT, but you have to differentiate between the corporation and the people that work there. The technical people at MSFT got into technology because they love it. MSFT really does tend to hire some of the best and the brightest. Many of the problems with their software have to do with overall architecture and decisions forced on the developers by marketing. That doesn't mean the developers suck or that they don't love what they do.
Blockbuster is big enough that back in the mid 90's studios would preview movies for Blockbuster before releasing them in theatres to ensure that Blockbuster would be willing to carry the movie when it went to video. I don't know if they still do that, but they did for several years.
Stores that carry music as a side business carry an extremely narrow and shallow catalog. I've looked at the music section at Wal-Mart. The dozen CDs they carry that I'd actually want I already own. So sticking with your approach I'd just never buy anymore music at all. With iTMS I have access to hundreds of thousands of songs I'd never get in the same store I get my groceries, as well as exclusive tracks I don't get anywhere else. The "music stores" in malls aren't much better. You won't find any jazz at all, and the classical music selection is a joke. You want an older Joe Jackson album? Tough, they don't carry him. The new Ben Folds EP? "Who? If he doesn't have a video on TRL, then we don't carry him."
What about going to an actual music store, you ask? Most of them are gone. I live in a top 20 radio market, over a million people in the metro area. There are about a dozen actual music stores. Some of them are damn good, but they aren't anyplace that I get to regularly and I rarely have time to make a special trip.
I save time and money and have less irritation and more convenience all in one with iTMS.
Rolling your own blog tool with BlogFace is pretty straightforward, or you can use one of the custom blog tools (CoreBlog, PABlog*, or CMF WebLog). For a very simplistic blog, you can just use the built in "news" tool.
*I wrote and maintain PABlog, I like it obviously. It doesn't currently work with Plone, CMF WebLog only works with Plone. CoreBlog is the most flexible of the three, as it runs on pure Zope, CMF, or Plone.
I applaud you. I have (mostly) managed to convince my wife and her mom that gifts are not necessary to demonstrate our affection for one another.
I'm working on my family, slowly. I don't exchange gifts with any friends. I was under the impression that the point of Christmas was to celebrate the birth of Christ. How that translates into hordes of people spending money they don't have on things nobody wants is beyond me.
Most of Microsofts business lines are money losers. They lose money on hardware, developer tools, graphics and internet software, server software, their only cash positive lines are Office and the Windows OS.
You must be new to the internet. Such calm, rational, and reasonable views are not welcome here.
Fantacism, lies, vicious attacks, and more lies are all people seem to care about.
What's to prevent them from violating the GPL without moving to Linux?
Here's a benefit of doing contract work for the government (at least in some agencies): No overtime. It's not allowed unless approved ahead of time and they have to be REALLY convinced that it's necessary. I haven't worked more than 40 hours in a week in two years. And oddly enough I still get all my work done in a timely manner.
I recently (yesterday) helped my mother in law buy a new printer. The store had a very basic Lexmark for under $35 that would perfectly suit her needs. Next up was an HP that was about 7 dollars more. This is a for woman who gets extremely upset because her gas bill is two dollars more than she thinks it should be. On my advice (because of their shady actions), she went with the HP (who are no paragons of virtue, but in the printer biz are far superior in both quality and business practices to Lexmark).