That's a flamebait. While it would seem that religion and science have been knuckleheads, religion is not the main reason, it is merely one of the tools.
While I'm an agnost myself, it is ridiculous when people blame things on religion - removing religion has nothing to do with making people interested in anything.
You either are interested or you are not, with or without religion. If you had said social constructs or culture, I would have agreed, but blaming religion squarely is crazy.
It's not as simple as remove "foo" and people will do "bar". Or something.
One solution would be to provide a single point of web-based RSS feed reader of sorts, where people could not only add their bookmarks, but also just log in and read their favorite feeds.
Imagine this - if Google could provide a good UI and simple but feature rich interface, I could log onto the equivalent of Google FeedReader and add my feeds there.
A sort of Google-news for RSS feeds, of sorts.
I mean, they could move people from other webmails to Gmail, this shouldn't be too hard, either. Build a nice system where people can add in their feeds and read them on the web in a non-cluttered, nice, manner and people _will_ use your system.
That would give them more power to search and catalogue user preferences - although from a Big Brother perspective, that isn't necessarily a good thing.
No, I've noticed stories that occasionally show up, only to disappear a while later either because they were dupes or for some other reasons.
But that's always been before there were any handful of useful comments (i.e. if the story had 3 dumb GNAA and Frost Pists, and was a dupe, they do take it offline).
Usually, if there was anything vaguely sensible (even if it's a post crying dupe), they don't. Just something I've observed in all these years I've hung out here! =)
Not all news media across the world are like that - I've noticed that media in certain Asian countries and Europe have a much wider coverage of world events, unlike the American media which is pro-American-infotainment centric.
No "professionaly type" investor worth his salt would get his financial advice from the likes of CNN money. Moms thinking they are going to make millions off the stock market watching CNBC maybe, not not the serious kinds.
Products (Fedora, RH etc) and services (training, support etc).
If you are a corporation looking for a Linux solution, you would prefer a vendor who is large enough to provide you with good support and infrastructure, RH provides that in terms of both products and services.
Comparing RH to Google is madness, RH definitely has a more tangible source of revenue.
Yeah, I noticed the same problem sometime back. Updates were not showing up on RSS, and even on the main page, newer stories were just shown as "Read more..." with no number of comments or the like.
I thought my RSS feed was broken or something was wrong, but now it seems to be working, the comments have been updated and the RSS feed is back up.
You're missing a very vital point - television industry charges money for cable subscription.
If you want Foo Bar channel, you subscribe to that channel. On top of that, they advertise and make additional revenue.
On the Internet, you are not paying for the service by the website. The only thing that you ever pay for is your connection, which is quite different from a TV subscription.
If Google were to be a paid subscription plus had ads, it would be different. It only has ads, and there is only so much revenue that you can make out of it.
Not to mention Google's IPO today, which has been valued quite highly.
Google is a great company with some really good services, but where does their core revenue come from, other than ads and maybe sales of their few SE boxes?
Makes you wonder, once again. Remember - it does not matter if you have the greatest idea on Earth, if your revenue is not from tangible assets (for relative measures of tangible ofcourse), the market will put you down eventually.
This is what I'm scared of - if things like that do happen, we'll once again go into an IT industry crash.:-/
Wow, a quick search on Google about Starbucks' dress code brought up some pretty interesting titbits.
Contrary to popular belief, coffee is not the only beverage that Starbucks.the internationally renowned coffee chain.brews. As Aisha Syed, an ex-employee of the firm would tell you, it also brews a nasty concoction of discrimination, intolerance and racism.
Syed, an Indo-Canadian woman in her 20s, had a taste of this nasty brew in 2002. After having worked at the Starbucks outlet in Richmond, British Coloumbia (Canada), since 1999, Syed was arbitrarily removed in 2002 for wearing her nose stud to work.
On November 19, 2002, a manager at Starbucks (an American company) told Syed to remove her nose stud as it was against the official 'dress code'. Syed found this discriminatory and refused to comply. Her manager next told her, "We can't control the colour of the skin we're born with but we can control what we put in our noses." On December 2, Syed was fired as she refused to obey the manager's orders.
"Why was I fired? Because Starbucks' dress code does not allow any 'facial jewe The Starbucks officials even told Syed that nose studs were "offensive to customers". "What kind of customers would be offended by my nose stud? I told them that such customers would be equally offended if a man wearing a turban or a woman wearing a scarf served them," she says.
It is not being a prude, it is just a matter of perception - of you, of the society you belong to.
Don't believe me? Try dressing up all in leather and going to a bank and try dressing up in full formal suit and going to the same bank - notice the way they treat you.
The way you dress is a sign of your social stature and how people perceive you. And this is not even local to any one place. On international flights where I've been dressed in full formals, I've noticed a visible difference in the way I'm treated. People pay more attention, consider you a lot highly than if you were dressed in shorts and a tee.
And if I saw a person wearing shorts, sandals and an attitude tee with piercings and tats, I form a certain image of them in my mind, I have a certain perception of who they are. If the same person came dressed in a suit, I'd most certainly think of them differently. I mean, if I were to hire a lawyer, I'd most certainly not hire someone who dressed like that - I'd like to hire someone who at the very least gives an impression of professionalism, that they are a lot more serious about their job than sporting their latest hairstyle.
These are social constructs and social structures, you cannot disavow them just like that. Hell, they even serve a purpose - to enforce the fact that the person is professional in his/her tasks. Hey, you're spending half your day at the work-place and they are paying you - you'd better adhere to their sense of what is professional and what is not. Personally, if it came to everything being equal, I'd choose the person who's more willing to act professionally, no matter what. If they are not willing to change a superficial external appearance for their job, I'm not sure how I'd consider anything else about them.
The speed and performance comment was in response to that statement, I assumed that you meant speed as a factor in that statement (perhaps it was my bad in assuming so, but your comment was so badly written that I could not make sense out of it). Acrylic does suck now due to several reasons, one of which is that it is in beta. And another is that it is the first iteration. That was my point.
And you do not read my comments, either - I have mentioned very clearly, "Thirdly, Acrylic is not competing against Photoshop - it's a vector and pixel editing/rendering tool - do you know what that means?" Acrylic is vector and pixel based, but that does not mean you compare the beta of the first edition with the highend version of the best pixel editing program out there and put it down. He (and you) seem to assume that MS is trying to compete with Photoshop because it can do pixel editing, which need not be the case - it is too early to make a statement of any kind. Photoshop is a pixel editing software with some basic vector functionality, it would be ridiculous to compare it with the best vector editing program out there.
Finally, by low end users, I meant in terms of cost, not in terms of performance or use.
I believe we are making the same point - I should have been clearer, when I meant the masses, I meant purely from a financial/cost perspective. If you notice, I have mentioned the SME market there - for example, there are several companies and users out there who cannot afford to have Adobe's or Macromedia's products, and would love a cheaper alternative (I've a small startup of my own, I know how hard it is to pay an arm and a leg for good software). MS could easily target (and win) from such a market, and the familiar UI eases achieving that goal. Not everybody needs all the quintillion features of Photoshop or Illustrator, you know?
My point was that MS would be targetting this market, not the high-end image editing market.
Yes, I agree about the performance, but the doc explicitly mentions that. Besides, it's betas do contains such things as debug information and the like, so I can understand where MS is coming from.
I'm not a fan of MS either, but when idiots start bashing and spew nonsense, it gets on my nerves!:)
First of all, Acrylic is beta - do you know the meaning of beta? Beta means that the program contains debug information and it _will_ be slow, inherently - the idea is to analyze the faults and give the developers information on its functionality. Beta means that it is not perfect, and it is stupid to assume otherwise.
Secondly, it is commonsense that tells you - if you compared Linux 1.0 with OS/2, you'd realize how much Linux sucked. The point is, both are made for different things and both are in different stages of maturity.
Thirdly, Acrylic is not competing against Photoshop - it's a vector and pixel editing/rendering tool - do you know what that means? It is more along the lines of MM Fireworks or Illustrator. It is targeted at a very different audience.
And lastly, low end users does not mean dumb users - low end could be companies that cannot afford to have a copy of Adobe's or Macromedia's products, a sort of cheaper version. He assumes low-end == dumb, which need not be the case. Low end from a financial/cost perspective makes more sense.
Combine this with his (and your) ignorance on product development, we have a classic winner on our hands.
Yeah, I've read several blog reviews, and some of them are genuinely good. In fact, if he had known what exactly it does, maybe the review might actually have been half decent.
Instead, this just sounds like a fanboy who tried something he did not know what it was for and wrote a review.
And ofcourse it's not even going to come close to Photoshop, what was s/he thinking? Like another poster remarked, this is probably nothing more than a publicity stunt by MS. Or maybe it's their attempt at bringing a simple vector + pixel editing program to the masses, the folks who cannot afford MM Fireworks or Photoshop. That might make a lot of sense, too -- since MS is quite well known to start by capturing the SME market and move upwards.
But from what I've seen, while the program isn't particularly impressive, MS could work on making it quite nice, if they wanted to. Just my two cents, ofcourse! =)
Well, it's primarily a vector editing program, you ought to be comparing it against such tools as Macromedia's Fireworks and the like. It has both pixel and vector editing features, but the guy does not explore that aspect at all.
He keeps comparing the pixel editing aspects with photoshop, completely ignoring the other side. And half his/her rant is spent on crazy stuff pertaining to how s/he could not download it?
If you notice, the reviewer has failed to mention vector editing in any form or comparison - makes you wonder if they are even aware of that.
And yes, I agree with you - it's probably nothing more than a stunt by MS, but if you are reviewing a product, at the very least be aware of _what_ you're reviewing it against. If I took up a street Miata prototype and started comparing it against the virtues of Ferrari, folks are gonna laugh at me. Both are entirely different, and made for quite different purposes.
What utter crap, that guy has no clue about what Acrylic is meant for, and keeps comparing it with Photoshop (it's like comparing apples and oranges). And ofcourse, his utter prejudice against MS doesn't help, either.
I'm not a particularly big fan of MS, but having seen Acrylic, I can assure you that that guy has no clue about what he's talking about.
It is unfortunate that we have gotten to the point where we have to talk about defeating censorship - it has permeated our society so much that we've grown to accept it. How did this even happen, how did we let it come so far? Several generations are to blame, but more importantly, those that were blind to the fact that this was happening in the first place.
Even today, look around you - most people simply do not care about what is happening, or how their rights are being trampled on, or even that they have any rights at all. The republic is not of the people anymore, it belongs to our corrupt politicians trying to remake things in the way that benefits them.
Really, really unfortunate.:-/ Leave the great wall of China, in the great US of A, we've the classic, "Ihr Papieren, bitte!" scenario.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a flamebait. While it would seem that religion and science have been knuckleheads, religion is not the main reason, it is merely one of the tools.
While I'm an agnost myself, it is ridiculous when people blame things on religion - removing religion has nothing to do with making people interested in anything.
You either are interested or you are not, with or without religion. If you had said social constructs or culture, I would have agreed, but blaming religion squarely is crazy.
It's not as simple as remove "foo" and people will do "bar". Or something.
Thank you.
Well, it's just different, not apocalyptic nor utopian - it's just different.
Besides, at the end of Snow Crash, he saves the world and gets the girl, what more do you really want?!
One solution would be to provide a single point of web-based RSS feed reader of sorts, where people could not only add their bookmarks, but also just log in and read their favorite feeds.
Imagine this - if Google could provide a good UI and simple but feature rich interface, I could log onto the equivalent of Google FeedReader and add my feeds there.
A sort of Google-news for RSS feeds, of sorts.
I mean, they could move people from other webmails to Gmail, this shouldn't be too hard, either. Build a nice system where people can add in their feeds and read them on the web in a non-cluttered, nice, manner and people _will_ use your system.
That would give them more power to search and catalogue user preferences - although from a Big Brother perspective, that isn't necessarily a good thing.
I sense a good opening for a web-application!
No, I've noticed stories that occasionally show up, only to disappear a while later either because they were dupes or for some other reasons.
But that's always been before there were any handful of useful comments (i.e. if the story had 3 dumb GNAA and Frost Pists, and was a dupe, they do take it offline).
Usually, if there was anything vaguely sensible (even if it's a post crying dupe), they don't. Just something I've observed in all these years I've hung out here! =)
Not all news media across the world are like that - I've noticed that media in certain Asian countries and Europe have a much wider coverage of world events, unlike the American media which is pro-American-infotainment centric.
Originally, that was not part of the story (I'm a subscriber, so I had a preview).
I'm guessing that someone probably mailed Taco and told him this was a dupe, at which point, he decided to add the extra line.
Why did he do that rather than remove the story altogether? Who knows.
No "professionaly type" investor worth his salt would get his financial advice from the likes of CNN money. Moms thinking they are going to make millions off the stock market watching CNBC maybe, not not the serious kinds.
They would much rather look at something like Bloomberg, or approach their bank for financial consultancy services.
(How do I know this? My company has a product that caters to this market segment.)
> Where does Red Hat's income come from?
Products (Fedora, RH etc) and services (training, support etc).
If you are a corporation looking for a Linux solution, you would prefer a vendor who is large enough to provide you with good support and infrastructure, RH provides that in terms of both products and services.
Comparing RH to Google is madness, RH definitely has a more tangible source of revenue.
Yeah, I noticed the same problem sometime back. Updates were not showing up on RSS, and even on the main page, newer stories were just shown as "Read more..." with no number of comments or the like.
I thought my RSS feed was broken or something was wrong, but now it seems to be working, the comments have been updated and the RSS feed is back up.
Weird.
You're missing a very vital point - television industry charges money for cable subscription.
If you want Foo Bar channel, you subscribe to that channel. On top of that, they advertise and make additional revenue.
On the Internet, you are not paying for the service by the website. The only thing that you ever pay for is your connection, which is quite different from a TV subscription.
If Google were to be a paid subscription plus had ads, it would be different. It only has ads, and there is only so much revenue that you can make out of it.
Not to mention Google's IPO today, which has been valued quite highly.
Google is a great company with some really good services, but where does their core revenue come from, other than ads and maybe sales of their few SE boxes?
Makes you wonder, once again. Remember - it does not matter if you have the greatest idea on Earth, if your revenue is not from tangible assets (for relative measures of tangible ofcourse), the market will put you down eventually.
This is what I'm scared of - if things like that do happen, we'll once again go into an IT industry crash.
Here is the link to the Berkeley press release and information on Berkeley astronomer Geoff Marcy.
And oh, looks like Slashdot is continuing to mirror Boing Boing.
Reminds me of a similar joke on paratroopers who do reconnaissance missions.
Cadet: Sir, what do we do in these four weeks of training?
Sgt: Well, son. In the first week, we separate the men from the boys.
Cadet: Wow, that sounds hard.
Sgt: Yes, it is. And in the second week, we separate the real men from the fake ones.
Cadet: This should be exciting!
Sgt: And in the third week, we separate the real men from the fools.
Cadet: Wow, and what's the final week for?
Sgt: Well son, in the fourth week the fools jump.
=)
Wow, a quick search on Google about Starbucks' dress code brought up some pretty interesting titbits.
Contrary to popular belief, coffee is not the only beverage that Starbucks.the internationally renowned coffee chain.brews. As Aisha Syed, an ex-employee of the firm would tell you, it also brews a nasty concoction of discrimination, intolerance and racism.
Syed, an Indo-Canadian woman in her 20s, had a taste of this nasty brew in 2002. After having worked at the Starbucks outlet in Richmond, British Coloumbia (Canada), since 1999, Syed was arbitrarily removed in 2002 for wearing her nose stud to work.
On November 19, 2002, a manager at Starbucks (an American company) told Syed to remove her nose stud as it was against the official 'dress code'. Syed found this discriminatory and refused to comply. Her manager next told her, "We can't control the colour of the skin we're born with but we can control what we put in our noses." On December 2, Syed was fired as she refused to obey the manager's orders.
"Why was I fired? Because Starbucks' dress code does not allow any 'facial jewe
The Starbucks officials even told Syed that nose studs were "offensive to customers". "What kind of customers would be offended by my nose stud? I told them that such customers would be equally offended if a man wearing a turban or a woman wearing a scarf served them," she says.
That's something, isn't it? Pretty scary stuff.
It is not being a prude, it is just a matter of perception - of you, of the society you belong to.
Don't believe me? Try dressing up all in leather and going to a bank and try dressing up in full formal suit and going to the same bank - notice the way they treat you.
The way you dress is a sign of your social stature and how people perceive you. And this is not even local to any one place. On international flights where I've been dressed in full formals, I've noticed a visible difference in the way I'm treated. People pay more attention, consider you a lot highly than if you were dressed in shorts and a tee.
And if I saw a person wearing shorts, sandals and an attitude tee with piercings and tats, I form a certain image of them in my mind, I have a certain perception of who they are. If the same person came dressed in a suit, I'd most certainly think of them differently. I mean, if I were to hire a lawyer, I'd most certainly not hire someone who dressed like that - I'd like to hire someone who at the very least gives an impression of professionalism, that they are a lot more serious about their job than sporting their latest hairstyle.
These are social constructs and social structures, you cannot disavow them just like that. Hell, they even serve a purpose - to enforce the fact that the person is professional in his/her tasks. Hey, you're spending half your day at the work-place and they are paying you - you'd better adhere to their sense of what is professional and what is not.
Personally, if it came to everything being equal, I'd choose the person who's more willing to act professionally, no matter what. If they are not willing to change a superficial external appearance for their job, I'm not sure how I'd consider anything else about them.
> Acrylic DOES suck now
The speed and performance comment was in response to that statement, I assumed that you meant speed as a factor in that statement (perhaps it was my bad in assuming so, but your comment was so badly written that I could not make sense out of it). Acrylic does suck now due to several reasons, one of which is that it is in beta. And another is that it is the first iteration. That was my point.
And you do not read my comments, either - I have mentioned very clearly, "Thirdly, Acrylic is not competing against Photoshop - it's a vector and pixel editing/rendering tool - do you know what that means?" Acrylic is vector and pixel based, but that does not mean you compare the beta of the first edition with the highend version of the best pixel editing program out there and put it down. He (and you) seem to assume that MS is trying to compete with Photoshop because it can do pixel editing, which need not be the case - it is too early to make a statement of any kind. Photoshop is a pixel editing software with some basic vector functionality, it would be ridiculous to compare it with the best vector editing program out there.
Finally, by low end users, I meant in terms of cost, not in terms of performance or use.
I believe we are making the same point - I should have been clearer, when I meant the masses, I meant purely from a financial/cost perspective. If you notice, I have mentioned the SME market there - for example, there are several companies and users out there who cannot afford to have Adobe's or Macromedia's products, and would love a cheaper alternative (I've a small startup of my own, I know how hard it is to pay an arm and a leg for good software). MS could easily target (and win) from such a market, and the familiar UI eases achieving that goal. Not everybody needs all the quintillion features of Photoshop or Illustrator, you know?
:)
My point was that MS would be targetting this market, not the high-end image editing market.
Yes, I agree about the performance, but the doc explicitly mentions that. Besides, it's betas do contains such things as debug information and the like, so I can understand where MS is coming from.
I'm not a fan of MS either, but when idiots start bashing and spew nonsense, it gets on my nerves!
First of all, Acrylic is beta - do you know the meaning of beta? Beta means that the program contains debug information and it _will_ be slow, inherently - the idea is to analyze the faults and give the developers information on its functionality. Beta means that it is not perfect, and it is stupid to assume otherwise.
Secondly, it is commonsense that tells you - if you compared Linux 1.0 with OS/2, you'd realize how much Linux sucked. The point is, both are made for different things and both are in different stages of maturity.
Thirdly, Acrylic is not competing against Photoshop - it's a vector and pixel editing/rendering tool - do you know what that means? It is more along the lines of MM Fireworks or Illustrator. It is targeted at a very different audience.
And lastly, low end users does not mean dumb users - low end could be companies that cannot afford to have a copy of Adobe's or Macromedia's products, a sort of cheaper version. He assumes low-end == dumb, which need not be the case. Low end from a financial/cost perspective makes more sense.
Combine this with his (and your) ignorance on product development, we have a classic winner on our hands.
Yeah, I've read several blog reviews, and some of them are genuinely good. In fact, if he had known what exactly it does, maybe the review might actually have been half decent.
Instead, this just sounds like a fanboy who tried something he did not know what it was for and wrote a review.
And ofcourse it's not even going to come close to Photoshop, what was s/he thinking? Like another poster remarked, this is probably nothing more than a publicity stunt by MS. Or maybe it's their attempt at bringing a simple vector + pixel editing program to the masses, the folks who cannot afford MM Fireworks or Photoshop. That might make a lot of sense, too -- since MS is quite well known to start by capturing the SME market and move upwards.
But from what I've seen, while the program isn't particularly impressive, MS could work on making it quite nice, if they wanted to. Just my two cents, ofcourse! =)
Grandparent:
The first two versions of ANY product always suck, if you consider an alpha build a full-fledged product.
Parent:
IE is at 6+ and it still sucks.
Well, that doesn't change the fact that the first two versions of IE sucked, dude. ^_^
Well, it's primarily a vector editing program, you ought to be comparing it against such tools as Macromedia's Fireworks and the like. It has both pixel and vector editing features, but the guy does not explore that aspect at all.
He keeps comparing the pixel editing aspects with photoshop, completely ignoring the other side. And half his/her rant is spent on crazy stuff pertaining to how s/he could not download it?
If you notice, the reviewer has failed to mention vector editing in any form or comparison - makes you wonder if they are even aware of that.
And yes, I agree with you - it's probably nothing more than a stunt by MS, but if you are reviewing a product, at the very least be aware of _what_ you're reviewing it against. If I took up a street Miata prototype and started comparing it against the virtues of Ferrari, folks are gonna laugh at me. Both are entirely different, and made for quite different purposes.
What utter crap, that guy has no clue about what Acrylic is meant for, and keeps comparing it with Photoshop (it's like comparing apples and oranges). And ofcourse, his utter prejudice against MS doesn't help, either.
I'm not a particularly big fan of MS, but having seen Acrylic, I can assure you that that guy has no clue about what he's talking about.
Anyway, I wrote a detailed rant in reply to his blog entry.
Man, since when did Slashdot starting posting ridiculous reviews from Joe Schmoe off the street?
It is unfortunate that we have gotten to the point where we have to talk about defeating censorship - it has permeated our society so much that we've grown to accept it. How did this even happen, how did we let it come so far? Several generations are to blame, but more importantly, those that were blind to the fact that this was happening in the first place.
:-/ Leave the great wall of China, in the great US of A, we've the classic, "Ihr Papieren, bitte!" scenario.
Even today, look around you - most people simply do not care about what is happening, or how their rights are being trampled on, or even that they have any rights at all. The republic is not of the people anymore, it belongs to our corrupt politicians trying to remake things in the way that benefits them.
Really, really unfortunate.
Anubis is alive!!!!!!!1111!!!111oneone