The ability to close and continue sessions later removes a major reason why many people kept their browsers open for long periods of time.
Uh, I keep my browser open because I think the odds are pretty good that at some point in the future I'm going to want to view a web page.
Why would one ever choose to quit a browser, or for that matter any application? At least for anything other than upgrades to the kernel, fundamental libraries, or hardware?
Memory leak: I often run Firefoxes for a whole week long. Yes, you read that correctly. I often just leave important links open when I leave work, then I login back from home and continue useing it, then again tomorrow from work, and so on. After a week it often eats up around half a gigs of memory, true. But really, how many of you do such things?
The only thing impressive about this statement is exactly how far your standards have been lowered. You actually feel that it is incredible or unusual to be able to leave an application running for a week?
When I've been using javascript-heavy sites (eg, google stuff), safari gets a little slow after it's been running for about a month. And I consider that a failing on its part, not something to brag about. The fact that firefox runs for a whole shiny week for you should be a point of shame, not pride.
Unfortunately, not a one of those (so far as I know) has brought with them the single greatest trait Blizzard has as a game developer: making full-quality, interoperable mac versions that are always released at the exact same time (and indeed on the same discs) as the Windows versions.
So while I've heard good things about Guild Wars or Hellgate London, I'll never play them. I and a few million other mac users will be using Blizzard's product, because they actually offer us one.
Actually, the one solid predictor of reproductive tendency (in all cultures, so far as I know) is education. More educated people are less likely to have children, less educated more likely. Of course education and affluence have a strong correlation. But when they diverge, reproductive tendency follows the schooling, not the money.
Education is not a genetically-passed trait. So while this has interesting implications for societies, it will have little or no effect on species.
The whole point of the post to which you're replying is that, as evaluated by the market, non-incandescent bulbs are _not_ better. They are longer-lasting, which is one of many attributes that go into the overall decision of "better".
The idea that the light-bulb industry has intentionally designed incandescent bulbs to fail is silly. First of all, I don't really think that there _is_ a hugely powerful lightbulb industry; given the almost nonexistant margins and barrier to entry, they can't be making money hand over fist.
Secondly, incandescent lighting is just crap technology, and bulbs fail. They're not "by design... planned to die so you have to buy a replacement", they die because that's an inevitable result of the technology on which they're based.
But it's cheap, so people keep choosing it anyway. That's not the result of shady deals between lightbulb barons in smoky back rooms, it's just consumers making rational decisions about the products available to them.
How do you know? You seem to be under the impression that you have total control over what you store in Gmail.
Well, among other things, I work at Google. And everything about Google's culture of data-handling is that privacy is taken very seriously, even internally. Even as an employee here, I couldn't just go and read your gmail (or search logs, or writely docs, or anything else) myself; I don't have access to it, and would need to make a very strong case for a legitimate need in order to get access to it. Selling it to an outside party would be completely antithetical to the entire way I've seen the company behave.
But let's focus on the "among other things", so you don't have to take my word for it. I think that even if you assume Google to be evil, the logistics of them being malicious here wouldn't really work out.
It's pretty hard to both 1) try to sell a product to outside entities and 2) keep the availability of that product secret. How exactly would Google go about offering your data up for sale without disclosing that it's doing so? And if such deals were somehow arranged, for how long exactly do you think that every advertiser would keep it secret? As with most conspiracy theories, I think this just involves too many moving parts to really be stable.
And even if we assume that Google has both the willingness and the means to make such sales in secret, I don't really see the motive for doing so. Why would advertisers want your email? To extract relevant information to run ads against it... the way that Google already does for them, to the best of their considerable ability, without any human eyes being involved? And why would Google risk the damage to their reputation associated with doing this? They're not exactly hurting for above-board income, you know.
I'm fairly paranoid about the privacy of my own data, so I can see why you'd have hesitation about handing yours over to anyone else. But I don't think that the particular threat being described is especially realistic.
(If it wasn't obvious, I'm not speaking for Google in any official capacity, I'm just talking about how their culture looks from the inside. The "do no evil" thing is not just marketing schtick, it really is something that people talk about and take seriously all the time.)
Your phrasing suggests that Google does currently sell advertisers access to gmail content. That's not the case; you may wish to be more clear about your accusations.
either way, this is exactly the reason why i had replied to your troll comment in the first place. because it was troll, and 1) didn't warrant saying on your part,
It was not, in fact, intended as a troll. I found it kind of amazing that you felt blatant racism was an acceptable things to espouse, and it seemed worth chastising such antisocial behaviour.
and 2) had absolutely nothing to do with what i was saying. avoiding the argument in favor of attacking my character as "horrifically ignorant and offensive" (i.e. racist), as it were, even though there wasn't much of a thesis in the contents of my original post, save for (paraphrasing) "there are a shitload of hispanics where i live."
If you'll forgive me for putting it indelicately: bullshit. You're suggesting that even though you mentioned exactly two things in your post (that there are many hispanics in that area and that you're eager to move away), these were completely unrelated to one another?
No, I'm afraid that the causality seemed pretty clear. You were indicating that the presence of hispanic people is something bad, and that you were moving away to escape it. The phrase "more than I care to count" has pretty clear connotations of distaste.
i'm tolerant of others, and so should you. that's pretty much the only requirement we have as americans these days. i don't mind that the kkk exists. i don't mind that there's a group called the north american man-boy love association (nambla). as long as you don't come knockin on my door, we're cool. so if i choose to be generally racist (which could be implied from my original post), it ain't got a thing to do with you, so why comment? is there something about me you wish to change because you're concerned about my well-being?
It's tough for you to take the position of extreme tolerance when the entire point of your first comment was to convey your intolerance for latino people.
I'm a big fan of being tolerant of most things other than intolerance. So I don't have a problem with nambla, but I do have a problem with the kkk.
"Horrifically ignorant and offensive" is not the same thing as illegal. So if you meant "allowed" in the legal sense, I don't see much what that had to do with my statement.
Are you suggesting that racism is not, or should not be, offensive? That racism should be considered socially or morally acceptable?
Which was the part of your brain that made this statement seem like anything other than horrifically ignorant and offensive racism? Cause you might want to have that bit checked out.
It also appears to require Windows. Sorry, it's just not possible for any game in the world to be good enough to make me want to involve Windows in my life.
Good of you to decide for us whether we're "real" players, though. I'm sure we're all very grateful for your clarification.
Fascinating. Isn't the most common accusation leveled at Microsoft that they always prioritize new features and bloat over making their existing stuff more stable and secure?
So, in other words, the Mozilla project has become Microsoft, but more so?
It's true, I wouldn't put it past Jobs to be very aware of the value of starting off with extra-restrictive measures, and then generating goodwill by loosening them.
But I'm probably willing to be a little more forgiving of Jobs in light of the fact that consumers are second on his list of people he's cajoling into accepting lax drm; first on the list is the music publishing industry. I think that he probably started off with the loosest controls that would get them to play ball at all, and he'll probably continue to loosen things up slowly as they see the sky continuing to not fall.
Of course it's tempting to say that the RIAA is so evil that anyone who's willing to compromise with them is tainted. But I think that Jobs really is leading them in the right direction... just from a long way away.
No version of any Apple software has ever required registration or
license confirmation.
I've not seen forced registration, but when you first turn on an Apple
machine you're asked to agree to the EULA, and for the first run of iTunes
and for subsequent updates. I may be a bit wrong, but I'm pretty sure of
this as I do the updates and stuff on my Mum's Mac Mini, so I think I've
been offered a licence to agree to with iTunes updates.
Sorry, my phrasing was vague; I meant "license" in a different sense. Yes, Apple does force you to agree to their license before using their software. What I meant is that they do not confirm your license to use the software before they'll let you use it.
eg, none of their tools phone home to prove that you're a blessed user, check whether this cd key has been used before, or indeed have anything like a cd key at all. They work on the premise that if you have the software, you're probably licensed to use it. I'm sure they know that sometimes this is not true, but they've always decided that it's a better choice to lose some sales to piracy in exchange for not treating their honest customers like thieves. I like that, and I think it's material evidence in predicting how they'll deal with drm issues in the future.
Except in this case everybody works to make Google richer than they already
are and we do not get to use the data as we see fit. It's the Web 2.0 way!
Um, how is either one of those true? Sketchup is free, and Earth is free, so how exactly does my use of them give Google any money?
And all the models I've created or downloaded are sitting right here on my hard drive, not locked into any kind of wacky drm or server-side-only architecture. While Sketchup defaults to using its own file format, it's happy to export to any of about half a dozen other very common formats, so nothing is stopping me from downloading a bunch of models and using them with some other tool. So how exactly am I being stopped from using my data as I see fit?
I started using sketchup a while back for the geekiest of all possible reasons: creating and displaying models of places for a roleplaying game I was running.
(This is actually a surprisingly hard problem, which no other tools solve well. You need do deal with there being a complex model that already exists, but of which only a dynamic section is actually visible to players. Navigating an actual 3d model gives you the ability to convey great detail quickly, without ever having to worry about giving away too much. The players see exactly what they characters see, and you can get on with the actual game.)
So I started to place the locations that I'd modeled into Seattle (yes, Shadowrun), and was pleased to find that a lot of Seattle was already modeled in Earth, with yet more available in the google "3D Warehouse". It's basically the classic free software development model: everyone in the community works on something they find interesting, and we all benefit from one another's products.
So, aside from the standard/. bias that Apple==Good and Microsoft==Evil,
ranting against WMP and people who use it is, as far as I'm concerned, a
case of "the pot calling the kettle black."
Well, I would say that in this case the pot does have a substantially different albedo than the kettle.
So far, Apple's drm policies have gotten slowly looser and more permissive. They raised the number of machines that can be simultaneously authorized to play drm'd files from three to five; they raised the cap on the number of times that the same playlist of drm'd file can be burned from I think five to seven; they added a feature to automatically offer to copy drm'd files from an ipod to a machine as long as that machine is also authorized to play them.
Whereas, as this and other stories document, Microsoft's drm policies have been getting more restrictive, even before compatibility issues like Zune and PlayForSure.
And this is consistent with the beliefs of each company and its leader on the matter of copyright. Jobs has always maintained that copyright infringement is a social problem, not a technical problem. Which is why, before the music indistry had to buy in on the deal, the drm protection on the original ipod was small text on the packaging that read, "Don't steal music." No version of any Apple software has ever required registration or license confirmation. Apple seems to have always believed that if you make doing the right thing easy, people will generally do it, without you forcing them.
By contrast, Bill Gates's first famed publication was a rant to the software developer community that they should stop stealing his BASIC, damnit.
I don't dispute that drm is icky. But saying that these two offerings are exactly the same simply because they're both drm is oversimplifying things.
Besides it is just one example. What about the Home and End keys? Why does mac even ship with those?
Uh, to be able to quickly jump to the beginning or end of the window or document?
One would think that pressing Home key would take you to the beginning on the line in a textbox (like the Address Bar).
Huh. Maybe "one who has only used Windows" would think that, but it would never have crossed my mind that they would do so. I'm much more inclined to use ^a and ^e for that, or just the up and down arrows for a single-line text field like an address bar. Both of which are extremely well-established standards that I suspect of predating the entire existence of Windows.
As far as Spotlight (Google Desktop) Dashboard (Confabulator, aka Yahoo Widgets), been there, done that. Nice repackaging on existing technology.
Uh, dashboard considerably predates google desktop, knows more about and does more with metadata, and uses some very low-level hooks to get responsiveness without periodic indexing. Konfabulator I'll totally give you.
Spring loaded folders? You are kidding, right? Wasn't it in Mac OS 8?
Yep, and it's still good ui, and still, so far as I know, not duplicated elsewhere. These probably wouldn't have been my top three picks for great macosx features, but they're pretty good.
Can you cite documentation of this? The current imac cases make everything astoundingly accessible, and I'm pretty sure that nearly everything in there is considered user-serviceable. Even the display panel itself just slides right out once you've removed the three easy screws that reveal everything.
There's this persistent belief that touching anything inside a mac will cause Apple to disown you, but it's just not true, and hasn't been since around 1986.
Given that Bush and Ahmadinejhad are basically the same person, I'd imagine that listening to either one is pretty much interchangeable.
The truly unfortunate thing is that having such narrow-minded, reactionary, militaristic leaders in power is contagious. Bush's invasion of Iraq lead to Ahmadinejhad's election; one of the bigger ways in which Bush has accomplished nothing in the region other than pushing it back toward the violent theocracy from which it had steadily been extracting itself.
Iran declined Russia's offer because Iran sees Russia as laughably unreliable.
Within the past fifteen years Russia has gone from being the head of the communist soviet union, to being a separate capitalist nation, to being a near-anarchy drowning in its own corruption, to now heading back toward centralized authoritarianism.
The last thing in the world that Iran wants to do is to hang their fate as a nation on the long-term reliability of any group so schizophrenic as Russia.
The viability of powerleveling/goldselling/etc as a business is directly proportional to how much of the game is simply not fun for players.
The real solution is not to try and enact policies and game systems to make powerleveling difficult, but instead to design the game to make it undesired. If a leveling/farming market springs up, that's your cue that this is an area of the game which needs reinventing as something that players actually _enjoy_ doing.
Of course distribution is the issue. But distributing tons of food to dozens of countries when the general tendency will be to accept and share it is a heck of a lot cheaper a problem than distributing tons of munitions and hundreds of thousands of troops to dozens of countries who will not appreciate this and have a problematic tendency to shoot back.
Combined with the fact that the former would actually work and the latter manifestly does not, the grandparent is spot-on. The only point on which I might disagree with him is that I think plumbing might be a better investment in world peace than food distribution. But either one is about two orders of magnitude cheaper and more effective than bullets.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, I keep my browser open because I think the odds are pretty good that at some point in the future I'm going to want to view a web page.
Why would one ever choose to quit a browser, or for that matter any application? At least for anything other than upgrades to the kernel, fundamental libraries, or hardware?
The only thing impressive about this statement is exactly how far your standards have been lowered. You actually feel that it is incredible or unusual to be able to leave an application running for a week?
When I've been using javascript-heavy sites (eg, google stuff), safari gets a little slow after it's been running for about a month. And I consider that a failing on its part, not something to brag about. The fact that firefox runs for a whole shiny week for you should be a point of shame, not pride.
Unfortunately, not a one of those (so far as I know) has brought with them the single greatest trait Blizzard has as a game developer: making full-quality, interoperable mac versions that are always released at the exact same time (and indeed on the same discs) as the Windows versions.
So while I've heard good things about Guild Wars or Hellgate London, I'll never play them. I and a few million other mac users will be using Blizzard's product, because they actually offer us one.
Actually, the one solid predictor of reproductive tendency (in all cultures, so far as I know) is education. More educated people are less likely to have children, less educated more likely. Of course education and affluence have a strong correlation. But when they diverge, reproductive tendency follows the schooling, not the money.
Education is not a genetically-passed trait. So while this has interesting implications for societies, it will have little or no effect on species.
I must be missing the "fun" part about harassing other people.
Nor am I seeing the unfairness of the justice you describe. Since your entire stated point it to annoy people, banning sounds exactly appropriate.
Nonsense.
... planned to die so you have to buy a replacement", they die because that's an inevitable result of the technology on which they're based.
The whole point of the post to which you're replying is that, as evaluated by the market, non-incandescent bulbs are _not_ better. They are longer-lasting, which is one of many attributes that go into the overall decision of "better".
The idea that the light-bulb industry has intentionally designed incandescent bulbs to fail is silly. First of all, I don't really think that there _is_ a hugely powerful lightbulb industry; given the almost nonexistant margins and barrier to entry, they can't be making money hand over fist.
Secondly, incandescent lighting is just crap technology, and bulbs fail. They're not "by design
But it's cheap, so people keep choosing it anyway. That's not the result of shady deals between lightbulb barons in smoky back rooms, it's just consumers making rational decisions about the products available to them.
Well, among other things, I work at Google. And everything about Google's culture of data-handling is that privacy is taken very seriously, even internally. Even as an employee here, I couldn't just go and read your gmail (or search logs, or writely docs, or anything else) myself; I don't have access to it, and would need to make a very strong case for a legitimate need in order to get access to it. Selling it to an outside party would be completely antithetical to the entire way I've seen the company behave.
But let's focus on the "among other things", so you don't have to take my word for it. I think that even if you assume Google to be evil, the logistics of them being malicious here wouldn't really work out.
It's pretty hard to both 1) try to sell a product to outside entities and 2) keep the availability of that product secret. How exactly would Google go about offering your data up for sale without disclosing that it's doing so? And if such deals were somehow arranged, for how long exactly do you think that every advertiser would keep it secret? As with most conspiracy theories, I think this just involves too many moving parts to really be stable.
And even if we assume that Google has both the willingness and the means to make such sales in secret, I don't really see the motive for doing so. Why would advertisers want your email? To extract relevant information to run ads against it... the way that Google already does for them, to the best of their considerable ability, without any human eyes being involved? And why would Google risk the damage to their reputation associated with doing this? They're not exactly hurting for above-board income, you know.
I'm fairly paranoid about the privacy of my own data, so I can see why you'd have hesitation about handing yours over to anyone else. But I don't think that the particular threat being described is especially realistic.
(If it wasn't obvious, I'm not speaking for Google in any official capacity, I'm just talking about how their culture looks from the inside. The "do no evil" thing is not just marketing schtick, it really is something that people talk about and take seriously all the time.)
Your phrasing suggests that Google does currently sell advertisers access to gmail content. That's not the case; you may wish to be more clear about your accusations.
It was not, in fact, intended as a troll. I found it kind of amazing that you felt blatant racism was an acceptable things to espouse, and it seemed worth chastising such antisocial behaviour.
If you'll forgive me for putting it indelicately: bullshit. You're suggesting that even though you mentioned exactly two things in your post (that there are many hispanics in that area and that you're eager to move away), these were completely unrelated to one another?
No, I'm afraid that the causality seemed pretty clear. You were indicating that the presence of hispanic people is something bad, and that you were moving away to escape it. The phrase "more than I care to count" has pretty clear connotations of distaste.
It's tough for you to take the position of extreme tolerance when the entire point of your first comment was to convey your intolerance for latino people.
I'm a big fan of being tolerant of most things other than intolerance. So I don't have a problem with nambla, but I do have a problem with the kkk.
"Horrifically ignorant and offensive" is not the same thing as illegal. So if you meant "allowed" in the legal sense, I don't see much what that had to do with my statement.
Are you suggesting that racism is not, or should not be, offensive? That racism should be considered socially or morally acceptable?
Which was the part of your brain that made this statement seem like anything other than horrifically ignorant and offensive racism? Cause you might want to have that bit checked out.
(Replying to my own post to clarify my poor phrasing.)
What I had actually meant to point out is that Darkfall, the game the previous poster was hawking, appears to require Windows.
I meant this as opposed to WoW. Which, yes, I happily play on a mac quite often.
It also appears to require Windows. Sorry, it's just not possible for any game in the world to be good enough to make me want to involve Windows in my life.
Good of you to decide for us whether we're "real" players, though. I'm sure we're all very grateful for your clarification.
Fascinating. Isn't the most common accusation leveled at Microsoft that they always prioritize new features and bloat over making their existing stuff more stable and secure?
So, in other words, the Mozilla project has become Microsoft, but more so?
It's true, I wouldn't put it past Jobs to be very aware of the value of starting off with extra-restrictive measures, and then generating goodwill by loosening them.
But I'm probably willing to be a little more forgiving of Jobs in light of the fact that consumers are second on his list of people he's cajoling into accepting lax drm; first on the list is the music publishing industry. I think that he probably started off with the loosest controls that would get them to play ball at all, and he'll probably continue to loosen things up slowly as they see the sky continuing to not fall.
Of course it's tempting to say that the RIAA is so evil that anyone who's willing to compromise with them is tainted. But I think that Jobs really is leading them in the right direction... just from a long way away.
Sorry, my phrasing was vague; I meant "license" in a different sense. Yes, Apple does force you to agree to their license before using their software. What I meant is that they do not confirm your license to use the software before they'll let you use it.
eg, none of their tools phone home to prove that you're a blessed user, check whether this cd key has been used before, or indeed have anything like a cd key at all. They work on the premise that if you have the software, you're probably licensed to use it. I'm sure they know that sometimes this is not true, but they've always decided that it's a better choice to lose some sales to piracy in exchange for not treating their honest customers like thieves. I like that, and I think it's material evidence in predicting how they'll deal with drm issues in the future.
Um, how is either one of those true? Sketchup is free, and Earth is free, so how exactly does my use of them give Google any money?
And all the models I've created or downloaded are sitting right here on my hard drive, not locked into any kind of wacky drm or server-side-only architecture. While Sketchup defaults to using its own file format, it's happy to export to any of about half a dozen other very common formats, so nothing is stopping me from downloading a bunch of models and using them with some other tool. So how exactly am I being stopped from using my data as I see fit?
I started using sketchup a while back for the geekiest of all possible reasons: creating and displaying models of places for a roleplaying game I was running.
(This is actually a surprisingly hard problem, which no other tools solve well. You need do deal with there being a complex model that already exists, but of which only a dynamic section is actually visible to players. Navigating an actual 3d model gives you the ability to convey great detail quickly, without ever having to worry about giving away too much. The players see exactly what they characters see, and you can get on with the actual game.)
So I started to place the locations that I'd modeled into Seattle (yes, Shadowrun), and was pleased to find that a lot of Seattle was already modeled in Earth, with yet more available in the google "3D Warehouse". It's basically the classic free software development model: everyone in the community works on something they find interesting, and we all benefit from one another's products.
Well, I would say that in this case the pot does have a substantially different albedo than the kettle.
So far, Apple's drm policies have gotten slowly looser and more permissive. They raised the number of machines that can be simultaneously authorized to play drm'd files from three to five; they raised the cap on the number of times that the same playlist of drm'd file can be burned from I think five to seven; they added a feature to automatically offer to copy drm'd files from an ipod to a machine as long as that machine is also authorized to play them.
Whereas, as this and other stories document, Microsoft's drm policies have been getting more restrictive, even before compatibility issues like Zune and PlayForSure.
And this is consistent with the beliefs of each company and its leader on the matter of copyright. Jobs has always maintained that copyright infringement is a social problem, not a technical problem. Which is why, before the music indistry had to buy in on the deal, the drm protection on the original ipod was small text on the packaging that read, "Don't steal music." No version of any Apple software has ever required registration or license confirmation. Apple seems to have always believed that if you make doing the right thing easy, people will generally do it, without you forcing them.
By contrast, Bill Gates's first famed publication was a rant to the software developer community that they should stop stealing his BASIC, damnit.
I don't dispute that drm is icky. But saying that these two offerings are exactly the same simply because they're both drm is oversimplifying things.
Can you cite documentation of this? The current imac cases make everything astoundingly accessible, and I'm pretty sure that nearly everything in there is considered user-serviceable. Even the display panel itself just slides right out once you've removed the three easy screws that reveal everything.
There's this persistent belief that touching anything inside a mac will cause Apple to disown you, but it's just not true, and hasn't been since around 1986.
Given that Bush and Ahmadinejhad are basically the same person, I'd imagine that listening to either one is pretty much interchangeable.
The truly unfortunate thing is that having such narrow-minded, reactionary, militaristic leaders in power is contagious. Bush's invasion of Iraq lead to Ahmadinejhad's election; one of the bigger ways in which Bush has accomplished nothing in the region other than pushing it back toward the violent theocracy from which it had steadily been extracting itself.
Iran declined Russia's offer because Iran sees Russia as laughably unreliable.
Within the past fifteen years Russia has gone from being the head of the communist soviet union, to being a separate capitalist nation, to being a near-anarchy drowning in its own corruption, to now heading back toward centralized authoritarianism.
The last thing in the world that Iran wants to do is to hang their fate as a nation on the long-term reliability of any group so schizophrenic as Russia.
The viability of powerleveling/goldselling/etc as a business is directly proportional to how much of the game is simply not fun for players.
The real solution is not to try and enact policies and game systems to make powerleveling difficult, but instead to design the game to make it undesired. If a leveling/farming market springs up, that's your cue that this is an area of the game which needs reinventing as something that players actually _enjoy_ doing.
Of course distribution is the issue. But distributing tons of food to dozens of countries when the general tendency will be to accept and share it is a heck of a lot cheaper a problem than distributing tons of munitions and hundreds of thousands of troops to dozens of countries who will not appreciate this and have a problematic tendency to shoot back.
Combined with the fact that the former would actually work and the latter manifestly does not, the grandparent is spot-on. The only point on which I might disagree with him is that I think plumbing might be a better investment in world peace than food distribution. But either one is about two orders of magnitude cheaper and more effective than bullets.
To quote:
"If atheism is a religion, then not collecting stamps is a hobby."