It seems the problem is much older than that. When VB became popular, everyone who could make a dialog box pop up figured he or she could slap together some (usually) crappy piece of semi-functional-ware, charge $29.99 and become rich. It didn't help that shareware had been successful for a lot of products (mostly because the successful products were _good_). Shareware _is_ a great idea, but there is so much stuff out there which is complete crap, and you'll see 10 wastes of disk space for every app that is actually worth the 30 seconds to download.
My frustration is not so much finding free tools but finding _any_ tools that don't suck for small simple needs like the one described. I'll gladly pay a small fee for a small utility that does something really well, but the freeware actually tends to be better than the shareware in so many cases, probably because the creator is motivated to make a useful app rather than just become the next WinZip (which I happily paid for years ago, but now I use WinRAR, also paid for). Big commercial apps have their place, but most of the time, what I'm looking for is a simple tool to fill a simple need, not something that tries to be everything to everyone.
Between sourceforge.net and freshmeat.org and maybe a little learning curve with cygwin, there is plenty of good Windows open source software out there to be had, but it should be a lot better.
Recently I wanted a good font manager for Windows, something that would let me browse through hundreds of fonts and install or uninstall them quickly and easily. I found the same thing... a bunch of crappy shareware (or at best, decent shareware that lacked features I required), so in frustration I started writing my own using old Ziff-Davis free utility source code as a starting point. I haven't gotten far because of work demands, but if I ever get something good, I will release it Open Source.
And please, Windows programmers, if you are going to release freeware, give us the source. Many marginal piece of software could be very valuable if the source were available.
I have nothing against shareware or commercial software, but if you are going to go that route, your app better be worth the download, and from what I've seen, most aren't. At the end of the day, any good software is hard to find.
You're referring to Lotus 1-2-3, not Notes. No one in their right mind would ever consider stealing that East German war surplus 16-color user interface from Notes. I had the unfortunate necessity to use Notes for about 5 months last year and it vividly reminded me what software was like in the 1980's. The scariest thing about Notes was that I'd used it briefly in '96 and '97 and in 6 years it hadn't improved one bit.
All I have to say is that if the Soviet government had lasted long enough to use Windows software it would have been Notes.
Not that I should feed the troll, but on September 11, Bush would have been a number one target, while Giuliani was just another person. No one knew what else was coming... Ground Zero after the towers fell would have been the least likely place in the entire country to get attacked.
I don't know about you but I spent 9/11 waiting for nukes to go off in U.S. cities. Thank God, I was wrong.
Bush's actions were the only sensible thing for him to do.
The key values of the Green party are: grassroots democracy, social justice and equal opportunity, ecological wisdom, non-violence, decentralization, community-based economics and economic justice, feminism and gender equity, respect for diversity, personal and global responsibility, and future focus and sustainability.
Yes, and each and every one of those terms is so broad and vague that they could apply to almost every political party on the planet.
Who would argue with "social justice" or "equal opportunity"? I bet the Green Party is also for Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness too. Hooray.
>I'm not a Green but I do object to being poisoned for some companies bottom line.
Err, I think you summarized the entire Green platform with that last bit.
Hardly. There's nothing inherently Green about wanting a clean environment. I know I do. Now if he had insisted that be go back to an agrarian society, or more accurately, a Stone-age society, then he would be a Green.
...it works great in the gyroscopic mode, but I never use it that way. However, it is also about the best optical mouse I've ever used too. It works well on almost any surface, like a good optical should, and feels really comfortable in my hand.
A financial penalty alone isn't much of a penalty if he made all his money from the crime.
Then why does that keep happening for corporations convicted of monopoly or other crimes? It reminds me of the Simpsons episode where the nuclear plant is fined $3 million and Burns pays out of his wallet.
In the case of Microsoft you'd have to fine them tens of billions of dollars before it would have any real effect. That's why it's so important, in my mind anyway, that Ken Lay and all his cronies do real time, because otherwise they just write a check and go back to their mansions.
Of course, none of this will do any good for the thousands of people they destroyed financially.
I'll take mediocrity and the Costner-level of emoting (i.e., he'd have to get worked up to look bored) over the thick, slimy, festering mess that is Jim Carrey. Just reading a review of "The Cable Guy" scarred me for life. Reeves may be a lame actor, but at least he's been in movies I would actually want to watch.
And let's not even get into how they're completely raping the works of our poor, beloved, late Dr. Seuss. I don't know what's worse, the reptilian smarminess of Jim Carrey or the crushing, leaden unfunniness of Mike Myers, who makes Walter Cronkite look like Robin Williams.
If not, you would especially appreciate what he has to say about Jim Carrey.
Jim Carrey wouldn't be a good Vogon, IMO. He's too thin and ropy and goofy. You need someone really huge, with a deep booming voice and terminal constipation. Not someone who causes terminal constipation.
Why doesn't the RIAA do advertisements about how used sales take food out of the mouths of artists (which is MORE true than for P2P file sharing).
Don't give them any ideas. They might buy a Congress and revoke the right of first sale. After seeing what Sonny Bono did, I wouldn't put it past the U.S. legislature.
Your comments are right on. It's how the insurance companies work: They deliberately make things purposelessly complicated because that way more people will give up trying to pursue what is owed them. Therefore they make more money and still, in theory, provide the same service. Because when it comes to companies and goernments alike, your time and effort and mine are completely valueless.
Of course, from the point of view of trying maintain an orderly society, the U.S. laws can be summed up in one sentence: Don't screw over people.
But the fact of the matter is, since people will do anything that's not explicitly illegal, the legislators need to plug every hole in an infinite wall.
The sad part is that each law becomes increasingly irrelevant when it is drowning in a sea of other regulation, just like code, anyone can write something complicated, only the most brilliant can write something useful that's simple.
The distribution method is that a factory creates the media, and ships them out to various retail outlets where the customer picks up a physical copy and pays for it.
This is increasingly outdated and will soon be almost completely irrelevant, yet this is still the primary distribution method favored by these companies. And don't tell me for a minute that these on-line music services are ready for primetime. They may be for the Britney-drunk millions, but I for one couldn't find most of what I was searching for iTunes... and these are things you can find in almost any CD store... even Best Buy.
So, the media conglomerates managed to wedge a pinky into the dike. It's kind of like the cop pulling over one person for a ticket when everyone on the road is doing 85, it only pisses off the one person and has no effect on the other 999.
The media companies will not relinquish their monopoly on 19th-century distribution methods, despite the fact that you can download practically any music CD, software, movie or TV show with a little effort.
As long as they keep treating their customers as criminal while gouging them mercilessly for the products they sell, this will continue. This problem won't go away until buyers and sellers undergo a radical paradigm shift on the idea of intellectual property. I have no idea what this shift will be, but once it starts, everyone who ignores it will be put out of business.
I think the parent post was saying "That's just wrong." as in "That's just wrong for the U.S. to do that." and then cites examples in other countries where the penalties are more in line with reality.
If you ask me, the fact that the legislators are considering the Orwellian and moronic concept of a car breathalyzer shows that there is no deterrent against drunk driving, but of course, why bother to enforce existing law when you can simply pass new ones?
If the U.S. Constitution were written today, it would be 12000 pages long and be understandable by only three people in the world, two of whom would be driven insane and the other would kill himself out of frustration. It's wonderful that the law of the U.S. could be spelled out simply enough to fit on the back of a cereal box. It's a travesty that U.S. law has become so complex no person could ever understand it all, leave alone be able to obey it all. We are all criminals, and when someone in the government wants to get you, they simply need to figure out what obscure, byzantine law you are ignornantly breaking and proceed to enforce it.
Let's equip every legislator in the country with an electric collar that delivers a moderate shock every time the legistalor has an idea that doesn't pass the laughability test. In other words, if they so much as propose a law as ludicrous as this, they get 200 volts to the brain stem. If such a law gets passed raise the voltage to 1000. Perhaps we need monitoring equipment to detect the rate of rotation of our Founding Fathers spinning in their graves. Right now I'm expecting to see some of them burrowing through the ground like a Horta. At this rate, in another few years, we will see violent eruptions of 18th century corpses spinning themselves out of the ground and spraying the surrounding area with friction-scorched earth.
The nanny state is alive and well in the U.S. It's only a matter of time before we're reduced to the level of toddlers, stuck in our playpens with woolen mittens tied to our hands for our own safety.
Fortunately, you New Mexicans have a couple years to straighten out this travesty. Voting out everyone who voted for this absurdity is a good start. I'm sick and tired of being jerked around by people on the miniscule chance (really, zero chance from my point of view) that I might be a criminal. Insurance companies do it in spades, the RIAA, MPAA and software industies are perfecting the art and government is the heavyweight champ in hassling the innocent. Fight for your right not to be treated as an idiot.
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It seems the problem is much older than that. When VB became popular, everyone who could make a dialog box pop up figured he or she could slap together some (usually) crappy piece of semi-functional-ware, charge $29.99 and become rich. It didn't help that shareware had been successful for a lot of products (mostly because the successful products were _good_). Shareware _is_ a great idea, but there is so much stuff out there which is complete crap, and you'll see 10 wastes of disk space for every app that is actually worth the 30 seconds to download.
My frustration is not so much finding free tools but finding _any_ tools that don't suck for small simple needs like the one described. I'll gladly pay a small fee for a small utility that does something really well, but the freeware actually tends to be better than the shareware in so many cases, probably because the creator is motivated to make a useful app rather than just become the next WinZip (which I happily paid for years ago, but now I use WinRAR, also paid for). Big commercial apps have their place, but most of the time, what I'm looking for is a simple tool to fill a simple need, not something that tries to be everything to everyone.
Between sourceforge.net and freshmeat.org and maybe a little learning curve with cygwin, there is plenty of good Windows open source software out there to be had, but it should be a lot better.
Recently I wanted a good font manager for Windows, something that would let me browse through hundreds of fonts and install or uninstall them quickly and easily. I found the same thing... a bunch of crappy shareware (or at best, decent shareware that lacked features I required), so in frustration I started writing my own using old Ziff-Davis free utility source code as a starting point. I haven't gotten far because of work demands, but if I ever get something good, I will release it Open Source.
And please, Windows programmers, if you are going to release freeware, give us the source. Many marginal piece of software could be very valuable if the source were available.
I have nothing against shareware or commercial software, but if you are going to go that route, your app better be worth the download, and from what I've seen, most aren't.
At the end of the day, any good software is hard to find.
I only understand bandwidth in terms of LoC's.
Now, if I only had one to test it with.
You're referring to Lotus 1-2-3, not Notes. No one in their right mind would ever consider stealing that East German war surplus 16-color user interface from Notes. I had the unfortunate necessity to use Notes for about 5 months last year and it vividly reminded me what software was like in the 1980's. The scariest thing about Notes was that I'd used it briefly in '96 and '97 and in 6 years it hadn't improved one bit.
All I have to say is that if the Soviet government had lasted long enough to use Windows software it would have been Notes.
I know that. I was just explaining where the numbers apparently came from.
Retail price.
Not that I should feed the troll, but on September 11, Bush would have been a number one target, while Giuliani was just another person. No one knew what else was coming... Ground Zero after the towers fell would have been the least likely place in the entire country to get attacked.
I don't know about you but I spent 9/11 waiting for nukes to go off in U.S. cities. Thank God, I was wrong.
Bush's actions were the only sensible thing for him to do.
The key values of the Green party are: grassroots democracy, social justice and equal opportunity, ecological wisdom, non-violence, decentralization, community-based economics and economic justice, feminism and gender equity, respect for diversity, personal and global responsibility, and future focus and sustainability.
Yes, and each and every one of those terms is so broad and vague that they could apply to almost every political party on the planet.
Who would argue with "social justice" or "equal opportunity"? I bet the Green Party is also for Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness too. Hooray.
>I'm not a Green but I do object to being poisoned for some companies bottom line.
Err, I think you summarized the entire Green platform with that last bit.
Hardly. There's nothing inherently Green about wanting a clean environment. I know I do. Now if he had insisted that be go back to an agrarian society, or more accurately, a Stone-age society, then he would be a Green.
Like... "Amphiberus".
On second thought, maybe not.
...it works great in the gyroscopic mode, but I never use it that way. However, it is also about the best optical mouse I've ever used too. It works well on almost any surface, like a good optical should, and feels really comfortable in my hand.
My wife liked it so much I got one for her, too.
I hope they don't take a tip from the RIAA. They could end up suing a 78-year-old grandmother who owns a Mac.
The old joke is attributed to Gallagher:
I wish there was a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence. There's a knob called `brightness', but it doesn't work.
A financial penalty alone isn't much of a penalty if he made all his money from the crime.
Then why does that keep happening for corporations convicted of monopoly or other crimes? It reminds me of the Simpsons episode where the nuclear plant is fined $3 million and Burns pays out of his wallet.
In the case of Microsoft you'd have to fine them tens of billions of dollars before it would have any real effect. That's why it's so important, in my mind anyway, that Ken Lay and all his cronies do real time, because otherwise they just write a check and go back to their mansions.
Of course, none of this will do any good for the thousands of people they destroyed financially.
Yeah, me and my .22 say the Catholic Church is the One True Church, cha cha. ;-)
It's my understanding that the "Close Door" buttons on elevators only exist for the same reason, and they don't do anything.
Kinda like the "brightness" button on the TV set. (To paraphrase the old joke).
I'll take mediocrity and the Costner-level of emoting (i.e., he'd have to get worked up to look bored) over the thick, slimy, festering mess that is Jim Carrey. Just reading a review of "The Cable Guy" scarred me for life. Reeves may be a lame actor, but at least he's been in movies I would actually want to watch.
And let's not even get into how they're completely raping the works of our poor, beloved, late Dr. Seuss. I don't know what's worse, the reptilian smarminess of Jim Carrey or the crushing, leaden unfunniness of Mike Myers, who makes Walter Cronkite look like Robin Williams.
If not, you would especially appreciate what he has to say about Jim Carrey.
Jim Carrey wouldn't be a good Vogon, IMO. He's too thin and ropy and goofy. You need someone really huge, with a deep booming voice and terminal constipation. Not someone who causes terminal constipation.
Again. Why isn't anybody talking about this?
Talk to R.E.M. or Garth Brooks.
Why doesn't the RIAA do advertisements about how used sales take food out of the mouths of artists (which is MORE true than for P2P file sharing).
Don't give them any ideas. They might buy a Congress and revoke the right of first sale. After seeing what Sonny Bono did, I wouldn't put it past the U.S. legislature.
Your comments are right on. It's how the insurance companies work: They deliberately make things purposelessly complicated because that way more people will give up trying to pursue what is owed them. Therefore they make more money and still, in theory, provide the same service. Because when it comes to companies and goernments alike, your time and effort and mine are completely valueless.
Of course, from the point of view of trying maintain an orderly society, the U.S. laws can be summed up in one sentence: Don't screw over people.
But the fact of the matter is, since people will do anything that's not explicitly illegal, the legislators need to plug every hole in an infinite wall.
The sad part is that each law becomes increasingly irrelevant when it is drowning in a sea of other regulation, just like code, anyone can write something complicated, only the most brilliant can write something useful that's simple.
The distribution method is that a factory creates the media, and ships them out to various retail outlets where the customer picks up a physical copy and pays for it.
This is increasingly outdated and will soon be almost completely irrelevant, yet this is still the primary distribution method favored by these companies. And don't tell me for a minute that these on-line music services are ready for primetime. They may be for the Britney-drunk millions, but I for one couldn't find most of what I was searching for iTunes... and these are things you can find in almost any CD store... even Best Buy.
THe company was called Ampex.
So, the media conglomerates managed to wedge a pinky into the dike. It's kind of like the cop pulling over one person for a ticket when everyone on the road is doing 85, it only pisses off the one person and has no effect on the other 999.
The media companies will not relinquish their monopoly on 19th-century distribution methods, despite the fact that you can download practically any music CD, software, movie or TV show with a little effort.
As long as they keep treating their customers as criminal while gouging them mercilessly for the products they sell, this will continue. This problem won't go away until buyers and sellers undergo a radical paradigm shift on the idea of intellectual property. I have no idea what this shift will be, but once it starts, everyone who ignores it will be put out of business.
So what exactly are you saying by bribing prospective employers with lubricant? ;-)
Seriously, it's a clever idea, but now about 10000 people will be trying it.
My experience: In a good job market, Monster.com was superb in getting me appropriate job leads in which I was interested
In a bad job market, I found it to be pretty much a waste of time, but I don't really feel that's their fault, the jobs aren't there.
I think the parent post was saying "That's just wrong." as in "That's just wrong for the U.S. to do that." and then cites examples in other countries where the penalties are more in line with reality.
If you ask me, the fact that the legislators are considering the Orwellian and moronic concept of a car breathalyzer shows that there is no deterrent against drunk driving, but of course, why bother to enforce existing law when you can simply pass new ones?
If the U.S. Constitution were written today, it would be 12000 pages long and be understandable by only three people in the world, two of whom would be driven insane and the other would kill himself out of frustration. It's wonderful that the law of the U.S. could be spelled out simply enough to fit on the back of a cereal box. It's a travesty that U.S. law has become so complex no person could ever understand it all, leave alone be able to obey it all. We are all criminals, and when someone in the government wants to get you, they simply need to figure out what obscure, byzantine law you are ignornantly breaking and proceed to enforce it.
Let's equip every legislator in the country with an electric collar that delivers a moderate shock every time the legistalor has an idea that doesn't pass the laughability test. In other words, if they so much as propose a law as ludicrous as this, they get 200 volts to the brain stem. If such a law gets passed raise the voltage to 1000. Perhaps we need monitoring equipment to detect the rate of rotation of our Founding Fathers spinning in their graves. Right now I'm expecting to see some of them burrowing through the ground like a Horta. At this rate, in another few years, we will see violent eruptions of 18th century corpses spinning themselves out of the ground and spraying the surrounding area with friction-scorched earth.
The nanny state is alive and well in the U.S. It's only a matter of time before we're reduced to the level of toddlers, stuck in our playpens with woolen mittens tied to our hands for our own safety.
Fortunately, you New Mexicans have a couple years to straighten out this travesty. Voting out everyone who voted for this absurdity is a good start. I'm sick and tired of being jerked around by people on the miniscule chance (really, zero chance from my point of view) that I might be a criminal. Insurance companies do it in spades, the RIAA, MPAA and software industies are perfecting the art and government is the heavyweight champ in hassling the innocent. Fight for your right not to be treated as an idiot.
My phone number at the time was an anagram of 867-5309. It was 537-0869. I only got prank calls from dyslexic people.