I ran into this policy early on in Flickr's career when I posted scans of a bunch of my cartoons. Flickr blank-screened them, arguing that they were a 'photo' site. I finally convinced them to turn my scans back on, but only after a dozen emails back and forth. I think the only reason they caved is because I was one of their very first paying customers when they went live.
This is another case of a company not being responsive to its customers' needs. Sure, their original vision was the sharing of photos. But if their paying customers want to share all kinds of images, why not expand their business model to embrace that? They'll have more happy customers in the long run.
If Flickr wants to emplasize the 'photo' aspect, then set up 'types' to let users and viewers filter their views and searches. If someone wants to view only photos, they could. If somebody else wanted screenshots only, so be it. It seems easy to me.
I've thought for a long, long time that someone needs to develop a free and open competitor for the proprietary PDF format. As long as Adobe owns it, it's not as useful as it could be. It has become ubiquitous because it's so darned handy. But why can't the open source community come up with something new that's competitive?
We need to find out what sites they're monitoring, and develop scripts that will continually access those sites all day long, from millions of computers.
If the system is swamped, there is no way this data can be useful to them.
I hate to even suggest this, but a virus that does this from every infected machine would also be useful in this endeavor. Or maybe a 'false virus' you could place on your own machine that would do nothing, but which could be pointed to as a defense tactic if you were ever arrested under these pretenses.
Harrison Ford has said publicly that he thought the idea of a voiceover - which came in post-production from the studio executives after they had kicked out Ridley Scott and taken over editing the final cut - was a phenomenally bad idea, and he purposely did such a bad job on it that he thought it would be totally unusable. Unfortunately, they couldn't recognize massive suckitude if their lives depended on it, so it was put in anyway. He remains, to this day, totally embarrassed that such a terribly bad example of his work remains in circulation in such a high-profile work.
The reason non-union automakers pay so well is because theirs is a traditionally unionized industry, and they know if they're not competitive, the workers will likely vote in a union. So it's thanks to the unions that they have decent jobs.
Almost 200 comments and nobody's said it yet?
on
An Alternate Human
·
· Score: 2, Funny
"I, for one, welcome our new genetically engineered alternate human overlords." I can't believe I had to be the one to say this. WTF is happening to/.?
The purpose of patents is to foster innovation - that is, to ensure that an investment in research and development will be paid off before an invention becomes available for all to create and sell. Seen in this light, wouldn't it make sense to allow patents only on those ideas that cost a bunch of money to develop? You could set a lower limit of, say, $1 million on development costs (with periodic adjustments for inflation), and make a company or inventor prove they had spent at least that much in developing an idea. Anything that doesn't meet this financial criteria is going to make it into the marketplace anyway, as it's probably an obvious offshoot of existing technology. Just my two cents.
In light of this experiment, I'd like to see a study of how prevalent prostate cancer is among Hispanic and/or Asian men whose diet regularly includes a lot of spicy foods. If it's lower, then they may be onto something. Either way, I'll keep eating spicy stuff. I'm already convinced it's good for keeping away colds and flu. Besides, it's tasty.:P
As time passes, products have a tendency to become commodities. The important thing is standards. As long as a CD, or broadcast, or music file format is an established standard, just about anyone can manufacture a product that's competitive. But big manufacturers will always try to convince the public that there is some additional value to a product having a big-name brand associated with it. And people being the sheep that they are, they'll succeed.
I'm a techie from way back, I hate Microsoft, I dual-boot Linux with Windows now, and I use OpenOffice.org, Thunderbird, and Firefox even on Windows. But I still find it next to impossible to set up Linux the way I want it. Here are the major problems with 'Desktop Linux' as I see them: (1) Lack of drivers. True, this is generally because the manufacturers don't support Linux. So what? Sorry, but it's still a valid argument against Linux. My Canon scanner doesn't work, and there's no driver for my particular model of Canon printer, unless I want to spend $40 for a printer driver. Likewise, my USB thumb drive isn't recognized until I execute a command in a shell. While Windows doesn't autodetect and install drivers for absolutely everything, it does a helluva lot better job than Linux. (2) Obscure stuff. My drives aren't automatically mounted, and I had to manually edit a well-hidden file and reboot to get them to do so. To run some programs I have to compile them, or apt-get then convert from rpm to deb with alien. Huh? I can do it, but can grandma? (3) Hidden features. Where is the 'search' feature in my file browser? Nowhere. I have to use a separate program for searching my files. (4) Zillions of distros. Don't get me wrong, I think this is gererally a good thing. You don't always want 'Desktop Linux'. But there are dozens of 'Desktop Linuxes', and none of them 'just work'. I would love to see a unified effort to come up with a single version that does. (5) Redundant applications. Even your best 'desktop' Linuxes ship with 2 or 3 different wordprocessors, several shell programs, a half dozen text editors... for God's sake, people, pick ONE! (6) Non-standard interfaces. Your average Linux distro has dozens of differents looks for the apps it includes. If something works in Gnome or KDE (whichever), there's a standard look. But there are always many more programs with their own look and feel. (7) Incompatibility with the real world. I love Google Earth, and Google Desktop. I love Paint Shop Pro. I have to use Visio for work. No Linux compatiblity with these. Sorry, but Dia is no Visio, and the GIMP is IMHO user-hostile. And tons of other small irritations too numerous to mention. Sorry, but if I can't replace my real-world computing needs with Linux, what chance does a 'normal' non-geek have?
I prefer to go a few miles up the road to the local Native American casino. I figure it's the least I can do since my ancestors killed off most of their ancestors.
Not a word about Visio. If I could find a viable alternative to Visio, I'd drop Windows tomorrow. I already use Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice and a dozen other open-source programs on Windows, as well as on my Linux partition. If I had a good Visio clone on Linux, I could dump Windows and never look back. And yes, I've tried Dia and all the other Linux diagramming tools. Not even close. BTW, I like Visio better when it was an independent product. Now that Microsoft owns it, it's becoming bloatware like all the rest of their products. And, of course, they killed file compatibility with earlier versions, as is their style.
This may be weird now, but get used to it. The future is the virtual overlaid on the real, and vice-versa. The lines are blurring. In twenty years, maybe even ten, it will be considered quaint and old-fashioned to make a distinction between the two.
No matter what Google says their current retention policy is, I expect that the U.S. government will eventually require sites like Google to maintain all data on their users for a specified period, probably years. The government wants to know all about you, and under the guise of 'hunting terrorists', they'll get it.
Isn't Britain's House of Commons somewhat akin to the U.S. House of Representatives, in that they are always passing lots of ill-thought-out, brain-dead legislation that their wiser, older brothers in the other house (Lords for them, the Senate for us) has to vote down?
Mine was a kit called the ELF II, based on the RCA COSMAC processor. That was a sweet little 8-bit CPU that had 16 16-bit registers. Each could be designeated as the accumulator, X register, Y register, or program counter, which made for some wicked cool programs. Mine had 256 bytes (yes, bytes!) of RAM. I eventually built an additional 1K memory board, and hacked together a seven-digit 7-segment display for side-scrolling Hunt the Wumpus action, just like my buddy Dave's KIM-II. The ELF project was originally published in Popular Electronics. I still have the issues it appeared in.
This is really just natural evolution. As online games become more popular and realistic, they become more like the real world, where all content is developed by the 'players' every day.
Slashdot Mirror
I ran into this policy early on in Flickr's career when I posted scans of a bunch of my cartoons. Flickr blank-screened them, arguing that they were a 'photo' site. I finally convinced them to turn my scans back on, but only after a dozen emails back and forth. I think the only reason they caved is because I was one of their very first paying customers when they went live.
This is another case of a company not being responsive to its customers' needs. Sure, their original vision was the sharing of photos. But if their paying customers want to share all kinds of images, why not expand their business model to embrace that? They'll have more happy customers in the long run.
If Flickr wants to emplasize the 'photo' aspect, then set up 'types' to let users and viewers filter their views and searches. If someone wants to view only photos, they could. If somebody else wanted screenshots only, so be it. It seems easy to me.
the Boston Molassacre?
I've thought for a long, long time that someone needs to develop a free and open competitor for the proprietary PDF format. As long as Adobe owns it, it's not as useful as it could be. It has become ubiquitous because it's so darned handy. But why can't the open source community come up with something new that's competitive?
We need to find out what sites they're monitoring, and develop scripts that will continually access those sites all day long, from millions of computers.
If the system is swamped, there is no way this data can be useful to them.
I hate to even suggest this, but a virus that does this from every infected machine would also be useful in this endeavor. Or maybe a 'false virus' you could place on your own machine that would do nothing, but which could be pointed to as a defense tactic if you were ever arrested under these pretenses.
Harrison Ford has said publicly that he thought the idea of a voiceover - which came in post-production from the studio executives after they had kicked out Ridley Scott and taken over editing the final cut - was a phenomenally bad idea, and he purposely did such a bad job on it that he thought it would be totally unusable. Unfortunately, they couldn't recognize massive suckitude if their lives depended on it, so it was put in anyway. He remains, to this day, totally embarrassed that such a terribly bad example of his work remains in circulation in such a high-profile work.
The reason non-union automakers pay so well is because theirs is a traditionally unionized industry, and they know if they're not competitive, the workers will likely vote in a union. So it's thanks to the unions that they have decent jobs.
"I, for one, welcome our new genetically engineered alternate human overlords." /.?
I can't believe I had to be the one to say this. WTF is happening to
The purpose of patents is to foster innovation - that is, to ensure that an investment in research and development will be paid off before an invention becomes available for all to create and sell. Seen in this light, wouldn't it make sense to allow patents only on those ideas that cost a bunch of money to develop? You could set a lower limit of, say, $1 million on development costs (with periodic adjustments for inflation), and make a company or inventor prove they had spent at least that much in developing an idea.
Anything that doesn't meet this financial criteria is going to make it into the marketplace anyway, as it's probably an obvious offshoot of existing technology.
Just my two cents.
In light of this experiment, I'd like to see a study of how prevalent prostate cancer is among Hispanic and/or Asian men whose diet regularly includes a lot of spicy foods. If it's lower, then they may be onto something. :P
Either way, I'll keep eating spicy stuff. I'm already convinced it's good for keeping away colds and flu.
Besides, it's tasty.
Your problem is that you read the manual.
Nobody ever reads the manual.
(And I'm a tech writer... *sigh!*)
Thursday Next has been called and is on her way!
Though the Irish did not invent redheads, they sure perfected them!
I vote with this guy.
How many Libraries of Congress will it hold? :)
How many football fields does it cover?
I need some stats I can relate to!
As time passes, products have a tendency to become commodities. The important thing is standards. As long as a CD, or broadcast, or music file format is an established standard, just about anyone can manufacture a product that's competitive. But big manufacturers will always try to convince the public that there is some additional value to a product having a big-name brand associated with it. And people being the sheep that they are, they'll succeed.
I'm a techie from way back, I hate Microsoft, I dual-boot Linux with Windows now, and I use OpenOffice.org, Thunderbird, and Firefox even on Windows. But I still find it next to impossible to set up Linux the way I want it. Here are the major problems with 'Desktop Linux' as I see them:
(1) Lack of drivers. True, this is generally because the manufacturers don't support Linux. So what? Sorry, but it's still a valid argument against Linux. My Canon scanner doesn't work, and there's no driver for my particular model of Canon printer, unless I want to spend $40 for a printer driver. Likewise, my USB thumb drive isn't recognized until I execute a command in a shell. While Windows doesn't autodetect and install drivers for absolutely everything, it does a helluva lot better job than Linux.
(2) Obscure stuff. My drives aren't automatically mounted, and I had to manually edit a well-hidden file and reboot to get them to do so. To run some programs I have to compile them, or apt-get then convert from rpm to deb with alien. Huh? I can do it, but can grandma?
(3) Hidden features. Where is the 'search' feature in my file browser? Nowhere. I have to use a separate program for searching my files.
(4) Zillions of distros. Don't get me wrong, I think this is gererally a good thing. You don't always want 'Desktop Linux'. But there are dozens of 'Desktop Linuxes', and none of them 'just work'. I would love to see a unified effort to come up with a single version that does.
(5) Redundant applications. Even your best 'desktop' Linuxes ship with 2 or 3 different wordprocessors, several shell programs, a half dozen text editors... for God's sake, people, pick ONE!
(6) Non-standard interfaces. Your average Linux distro has dozens of differents looks for the apps it includes. If something works in Gnome or KDE (whichever), there's a standard look. But there are always many more programs with their own look and feel.
(7) Incompatibility with the real world. I love Google Earth, and Google Desktop. I love Paint Shop Pro. I have to use Visio for work. No Linux compatiblity with these. Sorry, but Dia is no Visio, and the GIMP is IMHO user-hostile.
And tons of other small irritations too numerous to mention.
Sorry, but if I can't replace my real-world computing needs with Linux, what chance does a 'normal' non-geek have?
I prefer to go a few miles up the road to the local Native American casino. I figure it's the least I can do since my ancestors killed off most of their ancestors.
Not a word about Visio. If I could find a viable alternative to Visio, I'd drop Windows tomorrow. I already use Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice and a dozen other open-source programs on Windows, as well as on my Linux partition. If I had a good Visio clone on Linux, I could dump Windows and never look back.
And yes, I've tried Dia and all the other Linux diagramming tools. Not even close.
BTW, I like Visio better when it was an independent product. Now that Microsoft owns it, it's becoming bloatware like all the rest of their products. And, of course, they killed file compatibility with earlier versions, as is their style.
This may be weird now, but get used to it. The future is the virtual overlaid on the real, and vice-versa. The lines are blurring. In twenty years, maybe even ten, it will be considered quaint and old-fashioned to make a distinction between the two.
No matter what Google says their current retention policy is, I expect that the U.S. government will eventually require sites like Google to maintain all data on their users for a specified period, probably years. The government wants to know all about you, and under the guise of 'hunting terrorists', they'll get it.
Isn't Britain's House of Commons somewhat akin to the U.S. House of Representatives, in that they are always passing lots of ill-thought-out, brain-dead legislation that their wiser, older brothers in the other house (Lords for them, the Senate for us) has to vote down?
But will this generate the 1.21 gigawatts required by my time flux capacitor? I really need a 'Mr. Fusion' reactor for my DeLorean.
Mine was a kit called the ELF II, based on the RCA COSMAC processor. That was a sweet little 8-bit CPU that had 16 16-bit registers. Each could be designeated as the accumulator, X register, Y register, or program counter, which made for some wicked cool programs. Mine had 256 bytes (yes, bytes!) of RAM. I eventually built an additional 1K memory board, and hacked together a seven-digit 7-segment display for side-scrolling Hunt the Wumpus action, just like my buddy Dave's KIM-II. The ELF project was originally published in Popular Electronics. I still have the issues it appeared in.
Finally, the missing piece of the long-known but much-debated 'South Park' economic model has been revealed!
(1) Create operating system with many obvious security vulnerabilities.
(2) ??? [Create for-pay security hole patching subscription service.]
(3) Profit!!!
Time to suit up in the EMF shielding clothing sold here. :)
I especially like the cap woven with silver threads.
This is really just natural evolution. As online games become more popular and realistic, they become more like the real world, where all content is developed by the 'players' every day.