It needs to be said though that the WebKit builds that score 100/100 are publicly available.
To techies and tinkerers, yes. The average person is doing good to install a web browser at all, much less run webkit on top of it. So until Safari 3.2 or Opera 9.5 comes out and passes Acid3 100/100, I'd say the race is pretty wide open.
If I did not listen to This Week In Tech, I would have never heard of Twitter until this article came out. I haven't tried it but I, too don't see what the big deal is. But consider this.
TWiT is made by Leo Laporte, in Petaluma, California, a San Francisco suburb. Twitter is in San Francisco. Pownce is in San Francisco. Digg is in San Francisco. Facebook is in Palo Alto, California near San Francisco.
The reason TWiT thinks that Twitter and Pownce are such big deals is because they're all from the same area. I love TWiT but with the exception of John C. Dvorak, everyone on that show seems to forget that Silicon Valley != The Rest Of The World. That show has people every week who go on and on about how Twitter and Facebook will change the universe, but they seem to not realize what a bubble they're living in.
So for the same reason everyone in Texas wants to know what kind of truck you drive (I live in Texas so I get to make that generalization) everyone in Silicon Valley wants to be your Twitter buddy. Twitter will go the way of MySpace and soon be that technology no one talks about anymore.
instead of reporting it directly, made an exploit and waited for a hacking contest to get a monetary benefit out of it
Are there a lot of these contests? I suspect not, so the idea of him withholding an exploit to make money at a contest would seem pretty far fetched. Also, why wouldn't he have done it on the first day?
Yes, because letting car companies make third-party parts has sure hurt the auto industry... Ditto phones, computers, etc.
You're confusing domains here. There are many different car and cell phone manufacturers. There's only one maker of Blizzard games, Blizzard. You're not "helping" the Blizzard industry by making a 3rd party server. And your insinuation that someone will eventually make a commercial 3rd party WoW server just confirms the fact that you either have never spent a day in the real world or are actively in denial as much as you can.
hmm? I always thought that the censoring by the network was PART of the joke...
Sort of. Basically, the SP guys wanted to make an episode about the Muhammad illustration controversy and when Comedy Central caught wind of it, they said they wouldn't allow the image Muhammad to be displayed in the show. So, Matt & Trey expanded the notion to basically be a story-within-a-story where in the show the characters were blasting the Fox network for refusing to show the image in an episode of Family Guy whereas in reality, Comedy Central was refusing to show the image in an episode of South Park. The producers hoped that the weeklong stint between the episodes would coerce Comedy Central into changing its mind, and they fought with the network right up until the night the second part was aired, but ultimately Comedy Central chose note to display the image.
The whole incident is similar to how the outcry over the content of the 1999 South Park movie paralleled the outcry over the contents of the Terrence and Phillip movie within the South Park movie.
Well, if anything, Acrobat Reader is more precise of a name. It reads Acrobat files. Seems pretty clear to me.
Yeah but I think the problem Adobe was having is that no one got that Adobe Acrobat != Adobe Acrobat Reader. They probably couldn't sell Acrobat at all since people saw they were charging $200 or whatever for Acrobat and said "Why would I pay for that? I can get 'Acrobat' for free online!" while at the same time wondering how one would make PDF files (this is before PrimoPDF and another hundred good ways to make simple PDF files became available). Worse than that, people would go to the Adobe site and look for "Acrobat", find the not-free Acrobat product instead of the free Acrobat Reader, think that suddenly they needed to pay money to view a PDF file, and leave in disgust. Renaming the product Adobe Reader, in theory, avoids this confusion and also makes it out like Reader is a generic viewing app that reads PDF's.
Sorry if my reply up there was rude, but yeah - you've run up against Microsoft's OEM policy. I don't recall if it was in effect from day one with XP or if it just took a while before people ran up against it or if it took Microsoft a while to start enforcing it or what but yeah, if you activate an OEM copy of XP with a particular motherboard, you don't get to re-activate it with a different motherboard. The theory is if you bought, say, a Dell PC with an OEM copy installed (it works a little differently with Dell in particular but go with me here) you could potentially swap out many parts in the Dell machine, but once you swap out the motherboard they consider it a new machine. Your OEM copy is tied to that machine and the motherboard is where they draw the line. You and the OEM both paid less for this copy in order to have this proviso.
Now it's possible you were shystered in which case I'd call up Microsoft and say you were sold an OEM copy as a retail copy. It's a stretch but it might work.
Lost my motherboard shortly after a fresh install of a store-bought copy of XP. On reinstall, alarm bells went off during the online validation, and Micro$oft refused to validate it over the phone (multiple attempts at calling them)
the automated system would take my key and then forward me to a live person instead of simply giving back the validation code
I'm pretty sure you're either leaving out some details or just plain lying. I've done this exact thing about four times with the same purchased-from-the-store copy of XP Pro, and never had a problem, ever. I think you either bought an OEM copy (which is indeed tied to a particular motherboard, that's why it's cheaper) or you used a pirated copy.
This is analogous to an airline promising everyone a seat on a plane in exchange for X dollars, but then when everyone who was promised a seat actually shows up for the flight (*gasp*), the airline kicks off the fat people, and tells everyone else to share seats.
Actually, Southwest and a number of "budget" airline carriers do something very similar. They don't kick off fat people or make people share seats but they do essentially oversell flights whenever they can. The only way their business model of charging less works is if they fly out as many full planes as possible. They oversell every flight they can (by like 3-5 people) in the bet that some number of people don't make the flight, either due to being late, changing plans, etc. When everyone does show up, they go on the plane and offer someone something (a discount on their next flight, or first class on the next flight leaving or something) in order to accomodate the overage person who has just shown up (which, it never fails, is trying to get to his next location for something he can't be late for). If they can't accomodate them then they try for the next flight. It really really sucks when you're the one who gets screwed by overbooking but Southwest doesn't care, they just have a business to run.
Go into one of these centers and have them hook you up. Lick your other palm and every so often jam a 9v battery against it.
A funny idea, but I'm afraid you use both hands on the cans of the e-meter, and the auditor is watching you the entire time. As John Travolta demonstrates.
Why is this modded down to -1? I'm running IE8b1 right now and yes, it runs Acid2 completely. In fact, it does it better than the currently released 2.x version of Firefox. Perhaps the moderators are still on the outdated information that IE8 requires the meta tag for Standards Mode? Microsoft changed their tune on this so now IE8b1 is in standards mode by default. If you still don't think IE8 passes Acid2 then explain why.
No, client-side web developers hate having to test in multiple browsers. The answer is to make all of the web browsers render things identically but this will probably never happen - Opera and Mozilla don't even agree most of the time, to say nothing of Safari. True, if the browsers all agree on how to present things this problem would go away but in the meantime it's easier to curse the mere existence of the other 20% of browser usage (or ignore them) than it is to realize it's Microsoft's browser which is deficient. So, client-side web developers hate everything which is not IE.
he (or the **AA) can't go after you if you share the album online
I would hope the RIAA wouldn't go after you, since this is not being put out on one of their record labels. But is it really 100% free to distribute? I figure it's safe to say Trent won't be going after the torrents of the whole thing but does CC really mean that the album can completely be distributed for free anywhere?
When Excel started importing 1-2-3 documents, the right way to do that would be to create an importer to your own native format. Not to munge a new slightly different format into your existing structures.
Well, ignoring the fact that the article elaborates on why they made some of the technical decisions early on, Joel, who was at one point a program manager for Microsoft Excel, actually has an article on this very thing. Basically, this is exactly what they did - Excel initially opened 1-2-3 documents, but it could not write to them. You could open up your Lotus 1-2-3 document but you'd have to save it in Excel format. Excel 4.0 introduced the ability to write to Lotus 1-2-3 documents, and Excel 4.0 was the version that served as the "tipping point" - it was the version that businesses started buying in mass numbers and it was the version that signaled the end for Lotus 1-2-3.
Why? Because, as the article states, Excel 4.0 was the first version that would let you go back. You could just try out Excel and if it didn't work no big deal, just go back to Lotus 1-2-3. It seems completely counter-intuitive to do so, and it apparently wasn't the easiest thing to convince Microsoft management to do so, but it worked and now everyone uses Excel and Lotus 1-2-3 is ancient history.
The programmers did both the right thing and the thing which would be successful. With all due respect to the OpenOffice folks, they're not in the business of selling software. If people don't move to OpenOffice in mass numbers it doesn't spell doom for the company, because there is no company. Doing what you suggest might be the right thing in a programmer's perspective (and I agree), it's not compatible with a company that is trying to make a product to take over the market with. This is why Microsoft is so successful - they're staffed by a large number of people (like Joel) who get this.
I haven't read the article or the Wiki (I'm not new to Slashdot, after all) but I figured this is as good a place as any to post this insane dribbel from my head.
Back when I was a kid, I grew up in a modest town of about 50,000 people. Too big to be a small town, not big enough to get on most maps. Our phone book was about one inch thick. Small towns had phone books that were essentially glorified pamphlets, about 1/4" thick, and even then they shared it with all the neighboring towns. I knew people from small towns who thought phone numbers were four digits long, since the first three digits were always the same (and the then-optional area code was the same for probably a hundred miles).
When my family would go on trips we would visit "big cities" like Dallas, Houston, Orlando, Memphis, etc. (yes, I'm from the South) and in the hotel rooms I would notice that the phone books were always really thick. Like 4-5" thick. And sometimes, that was just the yellow pages, the white pages were an entirely different book, itself 3" at least. And they always had these awesome pictures on the front of the local skyline instead of the giant public domain "fingers do the walking" logo that would grace the phone book back home.
So consequently I made the connection early on in my mind that living in a huge city meant you were a success. And living in a huge city meant a huge phone book. Therefore, having a huge phone book in your home meant you were a success. A tenuous connection, but even then I had big dreams of moving to a "big city" later in life and one of these days I would have a big phone book in my house because hey, that's what big successful people living in big successful cities do.
Years and years pass. I grow up, go through High School, go to College, graduate, get married, and eventually my Wife and I move to the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. We get good paying jobs and rent then eventually buy a house. Initially the phone books that would appear on our porch would be the same standard one-inch affairs I grew up with because we live in the suburbs and they only cover the suburbs, but then one day a bag with two phone books, a 3-inch white pages and a 5-inch yellow pages, shows up on our front porch. These phone books cover the entire Metroplex. They have amazing photos of the Dallas skyline, with Reunion Tower (the one with the ball on the end) on them (under a stuck-on ad for some ambulance chaser, but that peels off easily enough).
I'm elated. After all these years, I've finally made it! I'm finally in a good job making good money and living in a big city and hey, like all big successful people living in big cities, I have a pair of bigass phone books. I've arrived! Every time I look at these phone books I'll remember how I'm in a big city.
So I put these phone books next to the phone and the first thing my Wife says was "Just throw those things away. We have the Internet now."
I ignore the order and I keep the phone books under the phone cradle for a few years, exchanging them out when a new one comes in. I never tell my Wife the insanely silly "but I've always wanted a big phone book" fantasy because I'm not in the mood to get laughed at (though, apparently, I don't mind that people on Slashdot will laugh at me). I get to keep them in place with the razor thin "well what if we want to look up a phone number when the power's off or our Internet is down?" excuse.
But then one day I'm cleaning the house and I'm trying to reduce some clutter and it occurs to me that in two years I've never opened these things, ever, and they're just collecting dust and the odds of the power going out or the Internet going down at the same time as my cell phone battery dying and me having to have some obscure phone number are vanishingly small. Oh, and in the years since we moved out here we've switched to Vonage so we couldn't even use the phone in a power outage anyway. And I now have Internet access on my phone (hell my wife has a Treo) so if we needed to
I'll add one more user type to the mix - the Technically Declined. Some people are "not technically inclined" which is a nice way of saying they don't know how to operate a computer. However, the Technically Declined are literally completely incapable of learning how to operate a computer on a basic level. I'm not talking about people who are resistant to change or technology. I'm not talking about people who just haven't been trained. I'm talking about people who are literally completely unable to figure out basic technology no matter how hard they try. They're missing the gears in their brain that can comprehend these things.
Currently I'm working with a project manager that couldn't understand "multi-select" in a form. I explained the whole "click and drag to select multiple items" bit two him. Three times. In a row. The last time I drew it on paper. This was in a meeting with the two of us while waiting on a third person. Who he also asked again. This person literally drew it out the same way I had just done. Even pointed out how the PM could "go practice in Excel". I'm pretty sure this guy's getting shitcanned next year when we have the budget to hire someone new to replace him.
Another guy I worked with was a "programmer" who couldn't set up a DSN entry in Windows. So I showed him. About ten times over the course of several months. Every single time he "wrote it down". The last few times I had him do it. Not that it mattered. This was one of those deals where because he was there when they started the company and "worked hard" (i.e., because he's so slow and hasn't been able to learn much he works late nights) they kept him around.
This is more than just forgetfulness or technology phobia - this is a simple inability to learn. We never want to admit this. We don't want to admit that some people don't have the capacity to figure out technological tasks. We want to say things like "oh, well they haven't had the training" or something like that, which is true sometimes. But sometimes, people just simply cannot learn. They're not cut out for this kind of work.
One more quick type: the one-trick pony. Like the woman I know who takes dozens of hours entering data into Excel from other sources, when a quick automation of some sort (or even just some practice) would cut that time down to 10%. But she can pivot table like a motherfucker. Pivot tables are her hammer and every single problem is a nail.
And will this spell more success for Windows-media based music subscription services like Napster?
No. Because Napster relies on PlaysForSure, and the Zune does not support PlaysForSure, both because some of the Zune's features are incompatible with PlaysForSure licensing and also because Microsoft wants to have its own iTunes Music Store (the Zune Marketplace). They saw that Apple's model of owning-all-the-pieces worked well for them and so Microsoft is now emulating that. This is why the Zune will probably never work with any other services.
No, I won't. I built a new PC this weekend and it runs Ubuntu 7.10.
You didn't buy a new PC. You bought a bunch of parts and assembled them into a PC, then installed Ubuntu on it. You are not the average person. The average person doesn't know what all parts to buy. The average person has no idea how to assemble them. The average person just buys the latest from Dell and eventually, the average person will just buy a new PC with "Windows" on it and that will be Vista.
I have no comment other than to say that it's funny how the linked photo is of Japanese people holding Xbox 360 controllers in Tokyo and the story is about American senators complaining a PS2/PSP/Wii game in Washington D.C.
In my haste I used the wrong link. here is one that gives hard numbers. The Killer NIC does make frame rates go up, but not by much. Whether or not it makes them go up enough to justify the pricetag is arguable (I don't think it does, others may disagree) but it does help.
Slashdot Mirror
If I did not listen to This Week In Tech, I would have never heard of Twitter until this article came out. I haven't tried it but I, too don't see what the big deal is. But consider this.
TWiT is made by Leo Laporte, in Petaluma, California, a San Francisco suburb.
Twitter is in San Francisco.
Pownce is in San Francisco.
Digg is in San Francisco.
Facebook is in Palo Alto, California near San Francisco.
The reason TWiT thinks that Twitter and Pownce are such big deals is because they're all from the same area. I love TWiT but with the exception of John C. Dvorak, everyone on that show seems to forget that Silicon Valley != The Rest Of The World. That show has people every week who go on and on about how Twitter and Facebook will change the universe, but they seem to not realize what a bubble they're living in.
So for the same reason everyone in Texas wants to know what kind of truck you drive (I live in Texas so I get to make that generalization) everyone in Silicon Valley wants to be your Twitter buddy. Twitter will go the way of MySpace and soon be that technology no one talks about anymore.
A phrase that gets passed around: Calling Scientology a 'religion' really is an awful lot like calling Dunkin' Donuts a 'restaurant'
The whole incident is similar to how the outcry over the content of the 1999 South Park movie paralleled the outcry over the contents of the Terrence and Phillip movie within the South Park movie.
Blocked By Websense
Reason: The Web category "Tasteless" is filtered.
Wow, I wonder how something gets listed as tasteless?
Customer: I should have known something was up when they only wanted $50 for the car. I should have just bought last year's model instead...
Sorry if my reply up there was rude, but yeah - you've run up against Microsoft's OEM policy. I don't recall if it was in effect from day one with XP or if it just took a while before people ran up against it or if it took Microsoft a while to start enforcing it or what but yeah, if you activate an OEM copy of XP with a particular motherboard, you don't get to re-activate it with a different motherboard. The theory is if you bought, say, a Dell PC with an OEM copy installed (it works a little differently with Dell in particular but go with me here) you could potentially swap out many parts in the Dell machine, but once you swap out the motherboard they consider it a new machine. Your OEM copy is tied to that machine and the motherboard is where they draw the line. You and the OEM both paid less for this copy in order to have this proviso.
Now it's possible you were shystered in which case I'd call up Microsoft and say you were sold an OEM copy as a retail copy. It's a stretch but it might work.
Why? Because, as the article states, Excel 4.0 was the first version that would let you go back. You could just try out Excel and if it didn't work no big deal, just go back to Lotus 1-2-3. It seems completely counter-intuitive to do so, and it apparently wasn't the easiest thing to convince Microsoft management to do so, but it worked and now everyone uses Excel and Lotus 1-2-3 is ancient history.
The programmers did both the right thing and the thing which would be successful. With all due respect to the OpenOffice folks, they're not in the business of selling software. If people don't move to OpenOffice in mass numbers it doesn't spell doom for the company, because there is no company. Doing what you suggest might be the right thing in a programmer's perspective (and I agree), it's not compatible with a company that is trying to make a product to take over the market with. This is why Microsoft is so successful - they're staffed by a large number of people (like Joel) who get this.
I haven't read the article or the Wiki (I'm not new to Slashdot, after all) but I figured this is as good a place as any to post this insane dribbel from my head.
Back when I was a kid, I grew up in a modest town of about 50,000 people. Too big to be a small town, not big enough to get on most maps. Our phone book was about one inch thick. Small towns had phone books that were essentially glorified pamphlets, about 1/4" thick, and even then they shared it with all the neighboring towns. I knew people from small towns who thought phone numbers were four digits long, since the first three digits were always the same (and the then-optional area code was the same for probably a hundred miles).
When my family would go on trips we would visit "big cities" like Dallas, Houston, Orlando, Memphis, etc. (yes, I'm from the South) and in the hotel rooms I would notice that the phone books were always really thick. Like 4-5" thick. And sometimes, that was just the yellow pages, the white pages were an entirely different book, itself 3" at least. And they always had these awesome pictures on the front of the local skyline instead of the giant public domain "fingers do the walking" logo that would grace the phone book back home.
So consequently I made the connection early on in my mind that living in a huge city meant you were a success. And living in a huge city meant a huge phone book. Therefore, having a huge phone book in your home meant you were a success. A tenuous connection, but even then I had big dreams of moving to a "big city" later in life and one of these days I would have a big phone book in my house because hey, that's what big successful people living in big successful cities do.
Years and years pass. I grow up, go through High School, go to College, graduate, get married, and eventually my Wife and I move to the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. We get good paying jobs and rent then eventually buy a house. Initially the phone books that would appear on our porch would be the same standard one-inch affairs I grew up with because we live in the suburbs and they only cover the suburbs, but then one day a bag with two phone books, a 3-inch white pages and a 5-inch yellow pages, shows up on our front porch. These phone books cover the entire Metroplex. They have amazing photos of the Dallas skyline, with Reunion Tower (the one with the ball on the end) on them (under a stuck-on ad for some ambulance chaser, but that peels off easily enough).
I'm elated. After all these years, I've finally made it! I'm finally in a good job making good money and living in a big city and hey, like all big successful people living in big cities, I have a pair of bigass phone books. I've arrived! Every time I look at these phone books I'll remember how I'm in a big city.
So I put these phone books next to the phone and the first thing my Wife says was "Just throw those things away. We have the Internet now."
I ignore the order and I keep the phone books under the phone cradle for a few years, exchanging them out when a new one comes in. I never tell my Wife the insanely silly "but I've always wanted a big phone book" fantasy because I'm not in the mood to get laughed at (though, apparently, I don't mind that people on Slashdot will laugh at me). I get to keep them in place with the razor thin "well what if we want to look up a phone number when the power's off or our Internet is down?" excuse.
But then one day I'm cleaning the house and I'm trying to reduce some clutter and it occurs to me that in two years I've never opened these things, ever, and they're just collecting dust and the odds of the power going out or the Internet going down at the same time as my cell phone battery dying and me having to have some obscure phone number are vanishingly small. Oh, and in the years since we moved out here we've switched to Vonage so we couldn't even use the phone in a power outage anyway. And I now have Internet access on my phone (hell my wife has a Treo) so if we needed to
I'll add one more user type to the mix - the Technically Declined. Some people are "not technically inclined" which is a nice way of saying they don't know how to operate a computer. However, the Technically Declined are literally completely incapable of learning how to operate a computer on a basic level. I'm not talking about people who are resistant to change or technology. I'm not talking about people who just haven't been trained. I'm talking about people who are literally completely unable to figure out basic technology no matter how hard they try. They're missing the gears in their brain that can comprehend these things.
Currently I'm working with a project manager that couldn't understand "multi-select" in a form. I explained the whole "click and drag to select multiple items" bit two him. Three times. In a row. The last time I drew it on paper. This was in a meeting with the two of us while waiting on a third person. Who he also asked again. This person literally drew it out the same way I had just done. Even pointed out how the PM could "go practice in Excel". I'm pretty sure this guy's getting shitcanned next year when we have the budget to hire someone new to replace him.
Another guy I worked with was a "programmer" who couldn't set up a DSN entry in Windows. So I showed him. About ten times over the course of several months. Every single time he "wrote it down". The last few times I had him do it. Not that it mattered. This was one of those deals where because he was there when they started the company and "worked hard" (i.e., because he's so slow and hasn't been able to learn much he works late nights) they kept him around.
This is more than just forgetfulness or technology phobia - this is a simple inability to learn. We never want to admit this. We don't want to admit that some people don't have the capacity to figure out technological tasks. We want to say things like "oh, well they haven't had the training" or something like that, which is true sometimes. But sometimes, people just simply cannot learn. They're not cut out for this kind of work.
One more quick type: the one-trick pony. Like the woman I know who takes dozens of hours entering data into Excel from other sources, when a quick automation of some sort (or even just some practice) would cut that time down to 10%. But she can pivot table like a motherfucker. Pivot tables are her hammer and every single problem is a nail.
"Dead Like Me" was on Showtime originally, which is why the show had to be somewhat censored before it was on the Sci-Fi channel.
I have no comment other than to say that it's funny how the linked photo is of Japanese people holding Xbox 360 controllers in Tokyo and the story is about American senators complaining a PS2/PSP/Wii game in Washington D.C.
In my haste I used the wrong link. here is one that gives hard numbers. The Killer NIC does make frame rates go up, but not by much. Whether or not it makes them go up enough to justify the pricetag is arguable (I don't think it does, others may disagree) but it does help.