I'd say the reason that this is an issue is because every project wants to be a brand to itself. Projects don't feel it is enough to be 'the conferencing bit for Gnome' they want to make a name in their own right - and in order to do that they need to have a name that does all the things you list.
Now in one way this is more than fair enough! They put the work in (usually unpaid), they are justifiably proud of the work that they have done and they would like some recognition for what they have done.
But does it help the 'community'? I'd say not really - it dilutes the 'brand recognition' of the open source movement, linux and Gnome by increasing the number of different brands that people have to recognise.
What was wrong with trying to increase the brand awareness of 'Gnome'?
Macromedia, Microsoft, IBM, even RedHat all produce a number of different products but they don't seem to feel the need to give a special name to every product - instead each product reinforces the brand awareness of the company or range as a whole.
Re:Ekiga? What the hell is an Ekiga?
on
Ekiga 2.0 Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
No skype isn't immediatelyobvious - and perhaps on that basis skype was a poor choice of name.
But in addition to this there is one other major difference - the advertising budget.
Skype has thrown a huge amount of money and resources into turning itself into a 'name' brand and as such it makes sense that they should go with something original and snappy.
Unless we want to put together a community project to fund an advert in New York Times for every open source project it probably makes more sense to pick obvious names.
Telling everyone that they are going to wait till Tuesday to patch the problem, then releasing a patch 5 days earlier might actually be quite a neat trick.
I'm sure a lot of people out there who were planning to taking advantage of this problem have been thinking that they have till Tuesday to write a really good exploit, and therefore not hurrying too much.
Now Microsoft come along and patch it early.
I don't know about anyone else but I was expecting Monday do be a day from hell...
From first looks it is just a directory service. Certainly nothing indicates that they will be pushing it to other sites using their redirection URL.
On the other hand it is fairly obviously just a miss-understanding - they removed it as soon as he asked. If they had just been a little more reasonable about putting it back when he found out that it was in common use we would never have to have heard anything about this.
Tin foil hat VERY required if you go anywhere near their toolbar. The terms and conditions should turn any reasonble persons brain to jelly:
http://toolbar.a9.com/-/company/toolbar-tou.jsp
In summary:
1> They will collect the URL of any/all pages you visit.
2> They 'may report any activity it suspects violates any law or regulation to appropriate law enforcement officials, regulators, or other third parties'
Since anything you do uses the toolbar (because it reports the URL) and they don't even have to be right (just suspect) a violation that pretty much covers everything. Then they can report it to any third party they like.
Guess what - read the terms and conditions and then hit 'cancel' (quite hard)
Change is not necessarily bad - ergonomics and design for human use have definitely made some things a lot better - but this does seem like a particularly poor change. In particular the right hand side of the keypad looks horrible to use.
If you hold your currenly phone in you hand anything like me you dial with your thumb most of the time with the rest of your hand holding the phone. Now try pressing the '3' key on your current phone - by far the hardest key to hit on the whole keypad because of how you have to bend your thumb.
Now look at the new design - a tiny, tiny 3 key right on the edge of the keypad.
I tried this when I was contracting at one point. I lasted about 2/3 months before I started loosing sleep and having problems relaxing in my own house.
The problem I found was that it was fine when the project was going fine but as soon as it started going wrong there was no way to escape it.
My solutions was to find a small development company in the area with too much space and negotiate desk space with them. I also agreed that I would help out occasionally on their projects (if I had experience they needed) in exchange for being able to talk over problems with their staff when I got stuck. In the end I got the space free in exchange for the help - except for the phone bill:-)
On top of this there is also the advantage that if they are in a similar line they will have equipment and facilities you need (for instance a graphical designer, fax, photocopier). It worked out very well until they got a bit larger and needed the space back...
Do you remember the number of comments when these first appeared? They were referred to as 'silly' and 'childish' which certainly seems to me to be unprofessional!
Since then people have got used to them - and they were certainly very suitable to the consumer market - but that doesn't mean they were not a significant marketing mistake. Half the people I know renamed them on sight when they first got a copy, but after the 10th reinstall can you really be bothered to any more?
Now if they had called Windows 3.0 'myWindows' the history of computing might have been very different...
I can help feeling that it doesn't actually matter what's causing the changes from a practical point of view (of course it would be nice to know, but I'd like to know how the human genome works, but it doesn't stop me getting on with my life)
Humans, and most of the current species on the planet, like stability in their environment and that means that the important thing is to maintain a balance between the various factors (even if some of the factors are natural).
So do the sums, work out in which direction the net imbalance is and then make the changes required to do the opposite. Of course if it requires we burn a load of trees people just aren't going to be happy...
I've always wanted a keyboard that I could change myself, move the keys round and swap them. Also there are certain keys that I use a lot when developing and it would be nice to have them available and not 2 key presses away being able to eliminate a key and replace it with a more useful one would be lovely. Come to that I'd love to retrain to dvorak, maybe with this I could do it one key at a time and not lose too much productivity?
Now this could be done in software but then the keys would be labelled wrong and, although I'm technically a touch typist, I look down at the keyboard from time to time and it really throws my off when the key says the wrong thing (I recently had to work on a German keyboard, mapped it to UK but still found it confusing). So I'm looking for a keyboard where I can either replace one key with another (lego style?) or with a built in display.
Of course at this point you start needing to be able to take your keyboard layout with you and standardisation goes out the window but you can't have everything.
I found this in my contract when I started at Sheffield University and because I was already writting software (shareware rather than open source but in this case it is the same issue) the clause scared me a lot.
I phoned up the university to querry what it meant and as a result of a long discussion with various members of staff I ended up with a different version of the contract. Universities will be flexible, but as with any other legeal contract they are out for whatever they can get away with. From the speed with which the new contract turned up and the failure to argue I assume this is not a unique situation!
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say the reason that this is an issue is because every project wants to be a brand to itself. Projects don't feel it is enough to be 'the conferencing bit for Gnome' they want to make a name in their own right - and in order to do that they need to have a name that does all the things you list.
Now in one way this is more than fair enough! They put the work in (usually unpaid), they are justifiably proud of the work that they have done and they would like some recognition for what they have done.
But does it help the 'community'? I'd say not really - it dilutes the 'brand recognition' of the open source movement, linux and Gnome by increasing the number of different brands that people have to recognise.
What was wrong with trying to increase the brand awareness of 'Gnome'?
Macromedia, Microsoft, IBM, even RedHat all produce a number of different products but they don't seem to feel the need to give a special name to every product - instead each product reinforces the brand awareness of the company or range as a whole.
No skype isn't immediatelyobvious - and perhaps on that basis skype was a poor choice of name.
But in addition to this there is one other major difference - the advertising budget.
Skype has thrown a huge amount of money and resources into turning itself into a 'name' brand and as such it makes sense that they should go with something original and snappy.
Unless we want to put together a community project to fund an advert in New York Times for every open source project it probably makes more sense to pick obvious names.
Telling everyone that they are going to wait till Tuesday to patch the problem, then releasing a patch 5 days earlier might actually be quite a neat trick.
I'm sure a lot of people out there who were planning to taking advantage of this problem have been thinking that they have till Tuesday to write a really good exploit, and therefore not hurrying too much.
Now Microsoft come along and patch it early.
I don't know about anyone else but I was expecting Monday do be a day from hell...
If you look at what the site used to look like BEFORE they moved everything round it's fairly obvious how he got confused:
k eyword.com/blog/k eyword.com/add_keyword.php
http://web.archive.org/web/20041022104134/www.pod
http://web.archive.org/web/20041022224801/www.pod
From first looks it is just a directory service. Certainly nothing indicates that they will be pushing it to other sites using their redirection URL.
On the other hand it is fairly obviously just a miss-understanding - they removed it as soon as he asked. If they had just been a little more reasonable about putting it back when he found out that it was in common use we would never have to have heard anything about this.
Will I be able to get old Dr Who episodes?
_ the_creative_archive/project_faqs/index.html#drwho
http://creativearchive.bbc.co.uk/archives/what_is
Tin foil hat VERY required if you go anywhere near their toolbar. The terms and conditions should turn any reasonble persons brain to jelly:
http://toolbar.a9.com/-/company/toolbar-tou.jsp
In summary:
1> They will collect the URL of any/all pages you visit.
2> They 'may report any activity it suspects violates any law or regulation to appropriate law enforcement officials, regulators, or other third parties'
Since anything you do uses the toolbar (because it reports the URL) and they don't even have to be right (just suspect) a violation that pretty much covers everything. Then they can report it to any third party they like.
Guess what - read the terms and conditions and then hit 'cancel' (quite hard)
Change is not necessarily bad - ergonomics and design for human use have definitely made some things a lot better - but this does seem like a particularly poor change. In particular the right hand side of the keypad looks horrible to use.
If you hold your currenly phone in you hand anything like me you dial with your thumb most of the time with the rest of your hand holding the phone. Now try pressing the '3' key on your current phone - by far the hardest key to hit on the whole keypad because of how you have to bend your thumb.
Now look at the new design - a tiny, tiny 3 key right on the edge of the keypad.
Ug.
Do these people even use the phones they produce?
I tried this when I was contracting at one point. I lasted about 2/3 months before I started loosing sleep and having problems relaxing in my own house.
:-)
The problem I found was that it was fine when the project was going fine but as soon as it started going wrong there was no way to escape it.
My solutions was to find a small development company in the area with too much space and negotiate desk space with them. I also agreed that I would help out occasionally on their projects (if I had experience they needed) in exchange for being able to talk over problems with their staff when I got stuck. In the end I got the space free in exchange for the help - except for the phone bill
On top of this there is also the advantage that if they are in a similar line they will have equipment and facilities you need (for instance a graphical designer, fax, photocopier). It worked out very well until they got a bit larger and needed the space back...
Do you remember the number of comments when these first appeared? They were referred to as 'silly' and 'childish' which certainly seems to me to be unprofessional!
Since then people have got used to them - and they were certainly very suitable to the consumer market - but that doesn't mean they were not a significant marketing mistake. Half the people I know renamed them on sight when they first got a copy, but after the 10th reinstall can you really be bothered to any more?
Now if they had called Windows 3.0 'myWindows' the history of computing might have been very different...
Developers: New Whitespace-Only Programming Language
There are times you just wish you could mod a post up past 5...
I can help feeling that it doesn't actually matter what's causing the changes from a practical point of view (of course it would be nice to know, but I'd like to know how the human genome works, but it doesn't stop me getting on with my life)
Humans, and most of the current species on the planet, like stability in their environment and that means that the important thing is to maintain a balance between the various factors (even if some of the factors are natural).
So do the sums, work out in which direction the net imbalance is and then make the changes required to do the opposite. Of course if it requires we burn a load of trees people just aren't going to be happy...
I've always wanted a keyboard that I could change myself, move the keys round and swap them. Also there are certain keys that I use a lot when developing and it would be nice to have them available and not 2 key presses away being able to eliminate a key and replace it with a more useful one would be lovely. Come to that I'd love to retrain to dvorak, maybe with this I could do it one key at a time and not lose too much productivity?
Now this could be done in software but then the keys would be labelled wrong and, although I'm technically a touch typist, I look down at the keyboard from time to time and it really throws my off when the key says the wrong thing (I recently had to work on a German keyboard, mapped it to UK but still found it confusing). So I'm looking for a keyboard where I can either replace one key with another (lego style?) or with a built in display.
Of course at this point you start needing to be able to take your keyboard layout with you and standardisation goes out the window but you can't have everything.
I found this in my contract when I started at Sheffield University and because I was already writting software (shareware rather than open source but in this case it is the same issue) the clause scared me a lot.
I phoned up the university to querry what it meant and as a result of a long discussion with various members of staff I ended up with a different version of the contract. Universities will be flexible, but as with any other legeal contract they are out for whatever they can get away with. From the speed with which the new contract turned up and the failure to argue I assume this is not a unique situation!