Is there something in social bookmarking that requires things to have periods in the middle of everything? Or is delirious just copying delicious?
The guy that runs del.icio.us just has a thing for domains like that. He also owns burri.to, and a few others along such lines.
Since del.icio.us got popular, people have been in a kind of mad dash to make clever riffs on the name.
I haven't RTFA because letting the entire world know what my bookmarks are, without an option to let the world know what SOME of my bookmarks are doesn't appeal to me.
I know this is a very common feeling, but I have a hard time understanding why. Could someone give some examples of bookmarks you would want to be private?
I think you're looking too much at what other people are doing rather than what you might do with it.
I use the living fuck out of del.icio.us, and I very, very, rarely do anything "social" with it. It just happens to be a fantastic way to manage bookmarks. It makes no difference to me that they're public.
Likewise, if you think of blogging as "keeping a record of your life", and you feel like you have a boring life, then yeah, don't bother (too many people do). Some people have exciting lives, or boring lives they write about well, write about something other than their own life, or write well about something incredibly intreresting but then occasionally post pictures of their cat.
The reason these things get so much attention is that people are doing many different things with them.
These guys ( and gal ) are all security engineers with CISSP/etc certs whose job is to protect the company's assets ( which are 90% digital, billions a year ), so I would say they're pretty l337, too.
I would say that these would be *too* 1337. People with a significant investment in a particular platform are probably better off sticking to it. The best OS/environment is the one that you feel best using. I'd guess that these people all have fairly customized environments, and fairly strong opinions about things like text editors, and work better for it.
The Windows->Linux->Mac switching pattern is extremely common because people find themselves to be too 1337 for Windows and not 1337 enough for Linux.
To each his own. It's still notable is that a lot of people are finding that Mac OS X is right for them, dispite all of the traditional Mac-hate that we've all been exposed to over the years.
So honestly, I can't see the vast majority of "ordinary people" wanting to learn any of the things that people like/.ers would enjoy, like programming for instance.
Ten years ago, walking around any good university, you would have seen a lot of people using this cool new thing called the World Wide Web.
Maybe "ordinary people" don't know how or why the web works, but they sure as hell use it.
What he's saying isn't about what they teach, it's about what the people are doing. CS people tend to be geeks, early adopters, and increasingly, entrepreneurs. Insofar as technology factors into cultural change, they are the future.
Your average Joe is *not* going to be a stylin' C++ wizard in 10 years.
Of course, you won't see anyone using C++ if you walk around at a good university.::ducks::
I want to install a new program on my work computer (running WinXP Pro) that will track every program I run for two weeks or so. At the end of that period it should report to me how much of what I ran is available under Mac OS X
This is roughly...impossible. Rarely, if ever, will there be a perfect 1-to-1 relation, nor will there be any way of understanding how important a particular application is to you, nor can they know of every available product, nor can they provide such a service without there being some sort of implied endorsement of one or another product.
A more realistic proposal might be a kind of community site (moderated or wiki-style) and allow people to enter in their own findings and ratings of alternatives. Such things already exist, in very scattered and unhelpful fashon, but there is no single reliable site for such things.
Surely you wouldn't be opposed to researching compatability if there were a single authoritative site for such information.
wtf would I really want OSX for when I've got all of Linux to play with...
The word "play" generally implies something "fun". In my experience most one's time using Linux is spent doing very unfun things, like trying to get the GUI to work.
It all depends very much on one's own particular tastes and tolerances. Some people enjoy Linux just the way it is, while some find that it impedes what they're trying to do. What seems to be noteworthy is that the latter group appears to be much larger than previously thought.
They will continue to take away rights. iTunes version 4.7.1 only allows streaming to 5 unique users per day, it used to support any 5 simultaniuse users.
You know that license agreement that pops up when you install or upgrade iTunes? If you don't "Agree" with it, then don't click "Agree".
Pretend that I have developed the world's most functional word processing program. However, you may only use it under a licence that grants me censorship rights to anything you write.
Such a program could not be "the world's most functional" in any meaningful sense.
Therefore the previous dictionary-attack system can safely become public knowledge.
Dictionary attacks were already public knowledge. Distributed computing was already public knowledge. The fact that using bad passwords leads to bad security was already public knowledge. The fact that law enforcement agencies want to get at encrypted data was public knowledge.
The new part of this is that they're using a distributed network to build a dictionary from unencrypted evidence from the same source.
The first lesson here is that leaving your password lying around is dumber than ever. The second is that to be secure, you can't even trust yourself to come up with an unguessable password.
In which respect, they're not all that different from MacOS, KDE, or GNOME. All UI designers are in love with useless eye candy.
All bad UI designers. It seems that at Microsoft, the bad designers are given the most authority. At Apple, they're given the least. GNOME and KDE lack designers altogether, and it shows.
Even Apple, which literally wrote the book on the subject of usability, seems to consider prettiness a higher priority.
I have no idea WHAT they look like versus, say, Times New Roman, or Arial, which, by the way, are the ONLY TWO FONTS anybody cares about.
You hear that low rumbling sound? That's 500 years worth of dead typographers spinning in their graves.
You're right to not care -- in fact, it's a failure on the part of the type selector if you do notice the type instead of the text itself -- but that doesn't mean that some type is not better than other type.
When "graphics people" bitch or praise type it's because they've learned that in 500 years of evolved aesthetic tradition, a lot of people have thought very hard about very small details of very specific problems and somewhere along the way someone figured out the best solution, and it's a royal pain in the skull to see people that don't know about any of this and go and do obscene things with (say) Comic Sans MS.
i run and listen to mp3s, then at some point i get bored with my choices, and yearn for something random and fresh: voila, radio, different channels, different tastes
You obviously live in a place where the the FM stations are not unholy portals of heart-wrenchingly bad music. This is a fairly rare and precious thing. In my town the only stations worth listening to are low-power (including the pirate station I used to DJ for), and the reception in my neighborhood is too crapy for a portable player. I listen in the car, but then of course I don't need a portable player at all.
All but one of the other stations are owned by Clear Channel and suck in a utterly uniform manner.
isn't that incredibly asocial and self-important and stuffy?: "i know all there is to know about my musical tastes and my tastes will never change on a moments notice and yearn to hear something new and fresh"
This statement makes the assumption that people that don't listen to the radio don't have other means of hearing new music.
Radio is *not* the only way to hear no things, and is my experience, the *worst* way to hear anything new and fresh.
I fully support the notion of not immediately going to college after high school. Few people are able to do so and prosper into truly happy human beings. Most will resign themselves to a stressful and boring life well below their potential.
This period in your life is best time to learn about *yourself* -- and that's not a subject you can study in college.
However...
I promise you that no matter how much thinking you plan to do in your year (or more) off, you will not somehow magically gain "direction and focus" -- if anything you'll find a dozen other subjects you're interested in. Don't be fooled into thinking this is a bad thing.
My advice is to embrace every thought, every feeling, every idea, every question that bubbles up from your mind and run with it. Do the things that you can't *not* do, say the things you can't *not* say, feel the things you can't *not* feel, study the things you can't *not* study. It doesn't really matter *what* you do so much as *why* you're doing it.
Learn who you are by tuning out fears (of failure, of your parents, of peers, of death, of change, of loss) and desires (for money, for success, for sex, for entertainment, for posessions), and seeing what remains.
This is basically a life-long task, but I think that there is no better time than the transition to adulthood to get a running start on it. I think it's harder to do so when simply going straight from the pressures of high school to the pressures of college.
A designer that was with Apple during it's greatest period of decline and hasn't been with the company in nearly a decade is getting press for his bewilderingly lame knock-offs of the iPod -- a product that he (thankfully) didn't have anything to do with the design of.
Shame on Pentagram. They're better than this. This stuff is crap.
Linux is doing just fine on the back end, but on the desktop right now the only real "alternative" is Apple - we need a good Linux-based Third Option to really start nibbling away at Windows.
The trouble is that few distributions have the balls to claim that that they are that good third option. "Linux" is too broad a thing, distributions need to define and differentiate themselves -- I'm glad to see Novell taking that step, and I hope more distributions will try to do the same.
Caveat emptor. You know what the limitations are when you buy. And you'd certainly better know the limitations before you invest $1000 in music. Every DRMed music store has the same platform limitation. If you buy $1000 worth of stuff from Napster, and want to use iTunes, you're in the same boat. For what it's worth, most people would just burn and re-rip CDs, instead of crying about it.
The problem you have is with DRM in general, not with Apple in particular.
Everything Apple needs to port iTunes (or at the very least, a stripped-down version) to Linux already exists.
Except for that pesky "economic incentive" thing.
You're suggesting that Apple port iTunes to appease... 1) Linux desktop users, who... 2) aren't buying Apple hardware or Mac OS X or iPods, and... 3) are willing to accept 128kbps AAC files with DRM, and... 4) are already openly and actively circumventing said DRM,and... 5) are already using pymusique to buy from them.
In other words, an absolutely tiny market that is basically opposed to everything else they do, that is already buying.
There's just no reason for Apple to care, no matter how "easy" you seem to think it would be.
The DRM is not about placating the music companies, and it never was.
This statement is completely at odds with reality. Said music companies would not be on board if not for the "protection" of DRM. There are no online music stores that sell major label music without DRM. [ALLOFMP3 being an exception, but they don't actually have the explicit permission of those labels.]
For Apple, it is about platform lock-in. The DMCA gives Apple the ability to lock out competition by a means that, although technically trivial to circumvent, is now illegal to hack in any way.
How on Earth do you figure they are locking out competition? There is plenty of competition -- mostly with DRM -- it just happens to all suck. DRM and the DMCA don't even factor into it.
You cannot be a customer of the iTunes Music Store without accepting the DRM arrangement. There is no forcing involved. If you don't like it, you don't have to buy it.
Re:I wish I could make that much moola....
on
Yahoo buys Flickr
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· Score: 1
So basically, their achievement was a combination of having an excellent development team, being users (domain knowledge), and being able to utilize the latest and greatest technology to create a truly innovative product.
Most importantly, they were more interested in creating something that they wanted to create than they were in making money off of it:
"The game and styles of playing the game are what matter because they produce identities people care about. Likewise, a business develops an identity by providing a product or a service to people. To do that it needs capital, and it needs to make a profit, but no more than it needs to have competent employees or customers or any other thing that enables production to take place. None of this is the goal of the activity." -- from Ludicorp's "Corporate Philosophy"
What do I use? A trashcan.
on
CD Storage Advice?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
My advice is basically to not have so many freakin' CDs.
Seriously, unless you're starting some kind of kitchy museum, you really don't need to keep all of that stuff.
Drivers? Get on the web, download the latest versions of everything, put them all on one CD. I guarantee that there is nothing else on those driver disks that's worth keeping.
Games/Movies? Trust me, you do not need too keep every single one you ever purchased. I know it's tempting to keep them "just in case", but that case will never come. Sell them used or give them away. If it's in your closet now it can't be that worth keeping.
Backups? Who are you kidding? I can't think of many scenarios where an individuals vital data would take up more than a handful of CDs or one DVD. There is some stuff that just isn't worth the hassle of backing up like that. If you've got a bunch of ripped music or something just mirror it onto an external hard disk.
Slashdot Mirror
Is there something in social bookmarking that requires things to have periods in the middle of everything? Or is delirious just copying delicious?
The guy that runs del.icio.us just has a thing for domains like that. He also owns burri.to, and a few others along such lines.
Since del.icio.us got popular, people have been in a kind of mad dash to make clever riffs on the name.
I haven't RTFA because letting the entire world know what my bookmarks are, without an option to let the world know what SOME of my bookmarks are doesn't appeal to me.
I know this is a very common feeling, but I have a hard time understanding why. Could someone give some examples of bookmarks you would want to be private?
I think you're looking too much at what other people are doing rather than what you might do with it.
I use the living fuck out of del.icio.us, and I very, very, rarely do anything "social" with it. It just happens to be a fantastic way to manage bookmarks. It makes no difference to me that they're public.
Likewise, if you think of blogging as "keeping a record of your life", and you feel like you have a boring life, then yeah, don't bother (too many people do). Some people have exciting lives, or boring lives they write about well, write about something other than their own life, or write well about something incredibly intreresting but then occasionally post pictures of their cat.
The reason these things get so much attention is that people are doing many different things with them.
These guys ( and gal ) are all security engineers with CISSP/etc certs whose job is to protect the company's assets ( which are 90% digital, billions a year ), so I would say they're pretty l337, too.
I would say that these would be *too* 1337. People with a significant investment in a particular platform are probably better off sticking to it. The best OS/environment is the one that you feel best using. I'd guess that these people all have fairly customized environments, and fairly strong opinions about things like text editors, and work better for it.
The Windows->Linux->Mac switching pattern is extremely common because people find themselves to be too 1337 for Windows and not 1337 enough for Linux.
To each his own. It's still notable is that a lot of people are finding that Mac OS X is right for them, dispite all of the traditional Mac-hate that we've all been exposed to over the years.
So honestly, I can't see the vast majority of "ordinary people" wanting to learn any of the things that people like /.ers would enjoy, like programming for instance.
::ducks::
Ten years ago, walking around any good university, you would have seen a lot of people using this cool new thing called the World Wide Web.
Maybe "ordinary people" don't know how or why the web works, but they sure as hell use it.
What he's saying isn't about what they teach, it's about what the people are doing. CS people tend to be geeks, early adopters, and increasingly, entrepreneurs. Insofar as technology factors into cultural change, they are the future.
Your average Joe is *not* going to be a stylin' C++ wizard in 10 years.
Of course, you won't see anyone using C++ if you walk around at a good university.
I want to install a new program on my work computer (running WinXP Pro) that will track every program I run for two weeks or so. At the end of that period it should report to me how much of what I ran is available under Mac OS X
This is roughly...impossible. Rarely, if ever, will there be a perfect 1-to-1 relation, nor will there be any way of understanding how important a particular application is to you, nor can they know of every available product, nor can they provide such a service without there being some sort of implied endorsement of one or another product.
A more realistic proposal might be a kind of community site (moderated or wiki-style) and allow people to enter in their own findings and ratings of alternatives. Such things already exist, in very scattered and unhelpful fashon, but there is no single reliable site for such things.
Surely you wouldn't be opposed to researching compatability if there were a single authoritative site for such information.
wtf would I really want OSX for when I've got all of Linux to play with...
The word "play" generally implies something "fun". In my experience most one's time using Linux is spent doing very unfun things, like trying to get the GUI to work.
It all depends very much on one's own particular tastes and tolerances. Some people enjoy Linux just the way it is, while some find that it impedes what they're trying to do. What seems to be noteworthy is that the latter group appears to be much larger than previously thought.
I don't know of anyone offering a USB gigabit adapter...
That's probably because USB2 spec is only 480 megabit.
They will continue to take away rights. iTunes version 4.7.1 only allows streaming to 5 unique users per day, it used to support any 5 simultaniuse users.
You know that license agreement that pops up when you install or upgrade iTunes? If you don't "Agree" with it, then don't click "Agree".
Less to do with it being Apple, more to do with being better than Dell and HP and the rest of the crap out there.
In other words, Apple makes the best stuff.
I seem to recall hearing that a few times in the past, oh, 25 years.
The question is why doesn't anyone else make nice stuff? Or if they do, why don't they do it as consistently as Apple?
Ok, so you want to define "functional" to include issues of licencing freedom?
Not quite. I meant that a license can impair (or enhance) the percieved functionality of a program. A better term might be "usefullness" or "utility".
In other words:
The function of a word processor is to enable communication.
A program with a license that grants another the right to censor my work would be no more functional(useful) than one that randomly drops letters.
It is, I realize, a somewhat different meaning, but one that I think more accurately describes the reality of how most people choose software.
Pretend that I have developed the world's most functional word processing program. However, you may only use it under a licence that grants me censorship rights to anything you write.
Such a program could not be "the world's most functional" in any meaningful sense.
Therefore the previous dictionary-attack system can safely become public knowledge.
Dictionary attacks were already public knowledge.
Distributed computing was already public knowledge.
The fact that using bad passwords leads to bad security was already public knowledge.
The fact that law enforcement agencies want to get at encrypted data was public knowledge.
The new part of this is that they're using a distributed network to build a dictionary from unencrypted evidence from the same source.
The first lesson here is that leaving your password lying around is dumber than ever. The second is that to be secure, you can't even trust yourself to come up with an unguessable password.
In which respect, they're not all that different from MacOS, KDE, or GNOME. All UI designers are in love with useless eye candy.
All bad UI designers. It seems that at Microsoft, the bad designers are given the most authority. At Apple, they're given the least. GNOME and KDE lack designers altogether, and it shows.
Even Apple, which literally wrote the book on the subject of usability, seems to consider prettiness a higher priority.
Have you ever actually used Mac OS X?
I have no idea WHAT they look like versus, say, Times New Roman, or Arial, which, by the way, are the ONLY TWO FONTS anybody cares about.
You hear that low rumbling sound? That's 500 years worth of dead typographers spinning in their graves.
You're right to not care -- in fact, it's a failure on the part of the type selector if you do notice the type instead of the text itself -- but that doesn't mean that some type is not better than other type.
When "graphics people" bitch or praise type it's because they've learned that in 500 years of evolved aesthetic tradition, a lot of people have thought very hard about very small details of very specific problems and somewhere along the way someone figured out the best solution, and it's a royal pain in the skull to see people that don't know about any of this and go and do obscene things with (say) Comic Sans MS.
i run and listen to mp3s, then at some point i get bored with my choices, and yearn for something random and fresh: voila, radio, different channels, different tastes
You obviously live in a place where the the FM stations are not unholy portals of heart-wrenchingly bad music. This is a fairly rare and precious thing. In my town the only stations worth listening to are low-power (including the pirate station I used to DJ for), and the reception in my neighborhood is too crapy for a portable player. I listen in the car, but then of course I don't need a portable player at all.
All but one of the other stations are owned by Clear Channel and suck in a utterly uniform manner.
isn't that incredibly asocial and self-important and stuffy?: "i know all there is to know about my musical tastes and my tastes will never change on a moments notice and yearn to hear something new and fresh"
This statement makes the assumption that people that don't listen to the radio don't have other means of hearing new music.
Radio is *not* the only way to hear no things, and is my experience, the *worst* way to hear anything new and fresh.
I fully support the notion of not immediately going to college after high school. Few people are able to do so and prosper into truly happy human beings. Most will resign themselves to a stressful and boring life well below their potential.
This period in your life is best time to learn about *yourself* -- and that's not a subject you can study in college.
However...
I promise you that no matter how much thinking you plan to do in your year (or more) off, you will not somehow magically gain "direction and focus" -- if anything you'll find a dozen other subjects you're interested in. Don't be fooled into thinking this is a bad thing.
My advice is to embrace every thought, every feeling, every idea, every question that bubbles up from your mind and run with it. Do the things that you can't *not* do, say the things you can't *not* say, feel the things you can't *not* feel, study the things you can't *not* study. It doesn't really matter *what* you do so much as *why* you're doing it.
Learn who you are by tuning out fears (of failure, of your parents, of peers, of death, of change, of loss) and desires (for money, for success, for sex, for entertainment, for posessions), and seeing what remains.
This is basically a life-long task, but I think that there is no better time than the transition to adulthood to get a running start on it. I think it's harder to do so when simply going straight from the pressures of high school to the pressures of college.
So, let me get this straight...
A designer that was with Apple during it's greatest period of decline and hasn't been with the company in nearly a decade is getting press for his bewilderingly lame knock-offs of the iPod -- a product that he (thankfully) didn't have anything to do with the design of.
Shame on Pentagram. They're better than this. This stuff is crap.
They've actually been poor at design
If you believe this, it's because you don't understand design.
Linux is doing just fine on the back end, but on the desktop right now the only real "alternative" is Apple - we need a good Linux-based Third Option to really start nibbling away at Windows.
The trouble is that few distributions have the balls to claim that that they are that good third option. "Linux" is too broad a thing, distributions need to define and differentiate themselves -- I'm glad to see Novell taking that step, and I hope more distributions will try to do the same.
I buy $1000 worth of iTMS music.
Caveat emptor. You know what the limitations are when you buy. And you'd certainly better know the limitations before you invest $1000 in music. Every DRMed music store has the same platform limitation. If you buy $1000 worth of stuff from Napster, and want to use iTunes, you're in the same boat. For what it's worth, most people would just burn and re-rip CDs, instead of crying about it.
The problem you have is with DRM in general, not with Apple in particular.
Everything Apple needs to port iTunes (or at the very least, a stripped-down version) to Linux already exists.
Except for that pesky "economic incentive" thing.
You're suggesting that Apple port iTunes to appease...
1) Linux desktop users, who...
2) aren't buying Apple hardware or Mac OS X or iPods, and...
3) are willing to accept 128kbps AAC files with DRM, and...
4) are already openly and actively circumventing said DRM,and...
5) are already using pymusique to buy from them.
In other words, an absolutely tiny market that is basically opposed to everything else they do, that is already buying.
There's just no reason for Apple to care, no matter how "easy" you seem to think it would be.
The DRM is not about placating the music companies, and it never was.
This statement is completely at odds with reality. Said music companies would not be on board if not for the "protection" of DRM. There are no online music stores that sell major label music without DRM. [ALLOFMP3 being an exception, but they don't actually have the explicit permission of those labels.]
For Apple, it is about platform lock-in. The DMCA gives Apple the ability to lock out competition by a means that, although technically trivial to circumvent, is now illegal to hack in any way.
How on Earth do you figure they are locking out competition? There is plenty of competition -- mostly with DRM -- it just happens to all suck. DRM and the DMCA don't even factor into it.
loving your customers
By forcing DRM onto them?
You cannot be a customer of the iTunes Music Store without accepting the DRM arrangement. There is no forcing involved. If you don't like it, you don't have to buy it.
So basically, their achievement was a combination of having an excellent development team, being users (domain knowledge), and being able to utilize the latest and greatest technology to create a truly innovative product.
Most importantly, they were more interested in creating something that they wanted to create than they were in making money off of it:
"The game and styles of playing the game are what matter because they produce identities people care about. Likewise, a business develops an identity by providing a product or a service to people. To do that it needs capital, and it needs to make a profit, but no more than it needs to have competent employees or customers or any other thing that enables production to take place. None of this is the goal of the activity." -- from Ludicorp's "Corporate Philosophy"
My advice is basically to not have so many freakin' CDs.
Seriously, unless you're starting some kind of kitchy museum, you really don't need to keep all of that stuff.
Drivers? Get on the web, download the latest versions of everything, put them all on one CD. I guarantee that there is nothing else on those driver disks that's worth keeping.
Games/Movies? Trust me, you do not need too keep every single one you ever purchased. I know it's tempting to keep them "just in case", but that case will never come. Sell them used or give them away. If it's in your closet now it can't be that worth keeping.
Backups? Who are you kidding? I can't think of many scenarios where an individuals vital data would take up more than a handful of CDs or one DVD. There is some stuff that just isn't worth the hassle of backing up like that. If you've got a bunch of ripped music or something just mirror it onto an external hard disk.
I say this as a reformed packrat.