The one site in particular that sticks out in my mind has having particularly bad design is MySpace. Total information overload, poor organization of content, and horrible horrible backend code (servers are slow as molasses, and my sessions are frequently expired inexplicably).
I understand that it's a 'community' site, but I honestly don't feel a part of that at all. It's difficult to build a huge online community unless users can selectively segregate themselves into groups. This is part of the reason why Facebook and Flickr are both extremely successful.
Granted, there are ugly sites with truly great content that balances out the fact that the site's rather ugly. Likewise, there are a host of very pretty sites that are lacking in the content department.
Although I used to consider myself more of an content guy and the type of guy who uses the command line for most tasks, I find myself gravitating toward sites that although they may not offer as many features, are easier to use, and are visually appealing. Flickr is probably the best example of this. With CSS, there is no excuse to have a poorly designed site. CSS makes it ridiculously easy to propogate an attractive design across your entire site. If you already know basic HTML, you can pick up all the CSS you need to know in a few days. Likewise, CSS also means people can finally stop using Photoshop as a design tool.
With CSS, formerly ugly sites can make themselves pretty with very little effort. Slashdot went to great lengths with their stylesheet to make sure they preserved the old ugly layout.
Re:Now it's time to kill The Simpsons
on
Futurama Returns
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· Score: 1
Agreed, but remember that Family Guy has gotten progressively worse as the seasaon's gone on, and it's pretty clear that American Dad is a show without any identity whatsoever.
American Dad was more or less McFarlane's response to the cancellation of Family guy, so he basically made something that was very very similar. Once Fox ordered another season of Family Guy, the producers of AD didn't know what to do, and the show subsequently sucked.
I can say with a good degree of certainty that Family Guy appeals to a much wider audience than American Dad....
Startup load isn't an issue with SCSI hard drives. Any half-decent SCSI controller can be programmed to spin drives up one at a time. From what I understand, this is the default behavior for most RAID controllers.
Parallel ATA does not have this capability (drives spin up the instant the power is turned on). I don't know how SATA handles this....
(For the uninformed, hard drives require a significantly higer amount of power to initially turn on than they need to operate once the platters are spinning. A hard drive that takes 30W to spin up should only take about 15W to operate)
Okay. This is the first public school in Indiana to require a laptop. Lots of schools have required students to own a laptop for a long time. I know that undergrad business programs have required it for 4 or 5 years now.
The public university I attend will begin to require incoming freshmen to own a laptop starting next fall. Their primary reason for this is that according to a survey, over 99% of students at the school own a computer of some sort, over 90% of which used laptops. The remaining 1 percent presumably could not afford a computer.
Because virtually all administrative tasks (registration, housing selection, turning in papers, etc.) occur via an online system, and that many reserarch assignments are much easeier via th einternet, students who do not own a computer are placed at a significant disadvantage. If students are not required to own a laptop, the school is not legally allowed to provide them with financial assistance to purchase one. I'm not sure how this works for private schools, but that's the way it goes for public schools. If your family is making just under $40,000 per year, purchasing a $2000 computer is simply not an option, even if you're being granted reduced tuition.
And of course, IT's job gets much easier, as everyone's on a standardized platform, and support costs are usually subsidized by the hardware vendor.
The Sega Saturn had the same problem, except that it never achieved the critical mass necessary to produce games taking full advantage of the hardware, and Sega pulled the plug.
In a lot of ways, the PS3 is looking VERY similar to the Saturn. Complex hardware with several individual processing units. Lots of potential, but also very risky.
Of course, with the momentum from the success of the PS2, and the backing of Sony, I think that the PS3 will perform better than Xbox360. As I've been predicting all along, however, I still think that Nintendo's going to dominate this round, and we're going to see a lot of incredible and unique games that will appeal to a huge range of audiences.
Even better, you can pay to have your servers replicated automatically to provide better service where your clients are. Server gets replicated x1 to China and x6 to west coast.
Um. No. That's a terrible idea. You'd have to make sure that your content is legal and kosher in every country your data could possibly be stored in. I'd daresay that that's a frighteningly daunting task. (Especially for china who will censor just about anything). Besides, how much benefit do you really expect to gain by hosting an english language site in china?
As for automatic domestic colocation, Akamai's been doing that for YEARS, and they're quite good at it. Google's never been one to purposely invade a crowded industry that is already adequately serving its market. I highly doubt that there's much google can bring to the table that Akamai and co. cannot.
Well, Christianity is by nature a very peaceful religion.
It doesn't get much simpler than "Love thy Neighbor" and "Thou Shalt Not Kill"
That doesn't mean that all Christians follow these two, founding principles of their faith, but it means that most do.
I'm unfortunately not well-versed in Islamic scrpiture, but from what I understand, there are certain interpretations that make it okay to kill in the name of God. Fortunately, from what I hear, those who believe in this are a very small minority.
Yes. I can agree with you on a lot of points here. I never worked in a HS (Split Districts... it's complicated), but have spent a good amount of time working in a number of Elementary/Middle schools. A few reflections:
1) The custodial staff cannot be relied on to move/clean anything that's vaguely technology related. It's not in their contract, so they don't do it! Expect lots of manual labor.
2) A good security policy shouldn't allow spyware or any other programs to be installed for that matter. Images of all machines should be made and maintained, and DeepFreeze is a must. Teaching faculty and students to save to a network drive is a worthwhile investment.
3) Middle-schoolers do think they know everything. Don't necessarily discourage this by locking down your systems, but using deepfreeze lets them play around all they want, and once something goes wrong, reboot, and everything's golden again!
4) Elementary school teachers love you. They love everyone as a matter of fact. However, you've got to be cautious, be slow, and be extremely nice to any teachers when teaching them anything. Never be condescending, and never act like you know more than they do. Teaching teachers is one of the hardest things you can do. Go ask an Education Professor. With enough patience, you shouldn't have any problems.
5) Budget constraints blow. You'll always be understaffed and inadqeuately equipped. Deal with it. To help deal with understaffing during busy times, hire a few of those know-it-all 14-year-olds (they have to be working age to legally hire them), and pay them $6/hour to unpack boxes and move equipment. They'll be thrilled to have the money and experience, and you'll be thrilled to not have to unpack an ungodly amount of equipment.
I think Nintendo's already won this round before they're even out the door.
Combine the 360's supply problems with the Price/delays of the PS3, as long as nintendo plays its cards right, the revolution will be a winner fairly easily.
Most of the hype the revolution's been recieving has been a result of the sheer mediocrity of the other offerings at this point. Additionally, it's the only console that's made any sort of substantial innovation other than "marginally better graphics" this time around.
As long as they can keep the details of the launch private until they're absolutely certain they're ready, and then launch it with a modest amount of publicity (and adequate supply), they've already won. Microsoft wasted millions generating hype around the 360's launch, and then botched it completely. The PS3 lacks focus, and is going to either be expensive, or have its specs cut right before launch. The expectations were initally low for the revolution after the commercial failure of the gamecube (which it wasn't -- it was just percieved that way by many), and Nintendo's got a cool new controller design that's doing a pretty good job of creating hype on its own. All in all, I'd say that by innovating and maintaining a profile of modesty, they've saved millions on advertising, and have managed to generate even more hype. I'd say it's a pretty good parallel to the initial success of the iPod.
Every industrialized nation at some point or another went through a period of dirty industry.
Also think of it this way.... London today has the highest air quality it's ever had. Think about it.... first you had cooking/heating fires, then you had dirty industry, and now you've got a clean economy. I don't doubt that the rest of the world will eventually go through the same process.
Facebook isn't anywhere nearly as hazardous as myspace.
For starters, the only people who can view your profile are those who go to your school or you have explicitly listed as a friend. You can also choose to restrict access to your profile even further to people at your school you have listed as friends, etc.... Facebook takes it a step further by customizing who can see what. Rigt now, anybody can see my picture, musical tastes, and other generic information -- only friends can see anything personal beyond that (phone numbers, screen names, email addresses, etc.)
Likewise, facebook has a basic user-authentication scheme that prevents you from registering unless you have a university email account. It's not completely foolproof, but works well enough to block out virtually all online predators.
In the case of the student you mention, this means that the girl was either 'friends' with the assailant, or he went to the same school. In either case, that leaves him with plenty of other information sources to find her personal information.
I go to a tiny liberal arts college. Everybody knows everybody as it is. Anything on my facebook could easily be figured out from other public information sources (Campus Phonebook, etc...). In a large (20,000+) university, I could see that privacy might be an issue, but here, it simply isn't.
Likewise, facebook is a tad 'cleaner' than myspace by preventing users from using any sort of markup (HTML,CSS,Javascript, etc.) in their profiles.
Comparing facebook to myspace is like comparing apples to oranges. Anyone trying to stalk on facebook is wasting their time. Facebook is for networking with people you know (innocuous). Myspace is for meeting new people you've never met (sketch)
Had this guy called himself an engineer or a physicist, I might believe his claims.
Calling yourself an inventor is more or less calling yourself a hackjob. And a lot of people do it. An engineer is well-educated, and is also well aware of what is and isn't possible, and work well within those bounds to create these designs. Physics can work outside these boundaries, albeit cautiously.
An "inventor" has a brilliant idea, grabs a first-year physics textbook, and grabs the first thing he sees as evidence to back it up.
The worst thing is that I'm actually going to college with people that have that very same dinosaur mentality that I just spoofed. Then again, a little fancy ASM code in all of the C++ flying around really could speed things up, but I just have more of a preference towards ASM over higher level stuff.
And sadly, those people you're going to college with are the ones who are preventing Open Source Software from being successful. RMS anybody?
I think that we will be able to finally produce an open source desktop once we build one that refuses to run Vi or Emacs
Although I lean towards being economically conservative, from what I gather, most Britons have been in favor of the TV Tax over the past few years, stating that the value of the programming on the BBC that they get in return exceeds the cost of the tax to them.
Do they plan on doing the same for the internet? Personally, because I think it's very difficult to define what a 'PC' is, people should be taxed based upon connections to the internet if anything. Likewise, I think it just makes more sense for people to be able to opt-out. If I had the chance to opt out of the British TV tax, I wouldn't do so because I enjoy the programming on the BBC. However, I could easily understand being irritated by the tax if I didn't care to utilize the Tax-subsidized programming.
they'll run screaming to the other side of the store and buy a notepad, ledger, calculator, typewriter, DVD player, WebTV console, CD player, and game console. These computer things will never catch on.
Your point? I own a computer in additionto all those things(Except for WebTV). My uses for my legal pads, CD player, etc. tend to be things that would otherwise be impractical. I'd imagine that most computer users own these things as well.
PCs didn't begin to be considered as 'Media Centers' by the general public until apple started bundling iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes, etc. with everything they sold. The PC tends to be a shitty platform for doing these things otherwise. Doing these things on a standard WinXP installation is a daunting task for most people, myself included.
the problem is that the things you mention are premium goods. There will always be BMWs and Kias.
Blu-ray represents an advance in technology designed to replace the current technology. Although we can always expect higher early adopter prices, it seems like there's a huge price premium going on here.
If there's some sort of technical hurdle keeping these discs expensive, it's going to be the death of the format. I don't like the direction the industry's taking one bit..... this is going to be betamax all over again
Either way, these demonstrations are ridiculous. The fact that individuals are actively protesting freedom of speech in this day and age completely boggles my mind.
Maybe 5 years ago when it was in vogue, it was a tad complex, but today, winamp is by all means a very slick piece of software. It's one of the few applications I've seen that's successfully implemented an entirely plugin-based architecture. Because of it, you get support for virtually every file format as well as support for some esoteric output devices.
Personally, I'd just like to see VLC tied to some sort of music managment interface. I know that's the goal of songbird, and I hope that they can speed it up. Why they ever chose XULRunner is completely beyond me. It would seem that in my experience, XULRunner takes a great deal of time and work to optimize properly.
I have faith in Rob Lord. Muse.Net was an amazing service while it lasted, and winamp will remain installed on my computer for many years to come. It might take some time, but I think songbird holds great promise. Remember guys, this is a 0.1 release! Go ahead and install one of the old Mozilla Milestone releases and see how it runs if you want to compare the two.
That's excellent advice. I did exactly that and become convinced that, once again, RMS is campaigning for your freedom to use your computer as you see fit. You're right: he is a hero.
The roads to hell are paved with good intentions. RMS might have the right goals in mind, but the GPL just doesn't cut it for mainstream usage in a predominately capitalist society.
The GPL is far too restrictive for most people and businesses. The Mozilla/BSD license has fared a lot better than the GPL has, especially over the past 5 years. Nobody's afraid to run Firefox or Darwin due to licensing constraints, and I don't hear anyone complaining about how they're not open enough. The only recent successful project I can recall that's used GPL is VLC, I'd imagine that we'd be seeing a lot more of it in mainstream usage if it had a less restrictive license -- it's mature, stable, and runs on every platform imaginable. Why don't developers embed it into their apps that need multimedia support?
There is no logical reason in my mind why apple would want palm. Apple has a very competent R&D team that could easily start from scratch and create a superior product.
The only possible reason I could see for this would be if somebody discovered huge chunks of BeOS code in OS X, and apple is purchasing palm to curtail a lawsuit
Slashdot Mirror
The one site in particular that sticks out in my mind has having particularly bad design is MySpace. Total information overload, poor organization of content, and horrible horrible backend code (servers are slow as molasses, and my sessions are frequently expired inexplicably).
I understand that it's a 'community' site, but I honestly don't feel a part of that at all. It's difficult to build a huge online community unless users can selectively segregate themselves into groups. This is part of the reason why Facebook and Flickr are both extremely successful.
Granted, there are ugly sites with truly great content that balances out the fact that the site's rather ugly. Likewise, there are a host of very pretty sites that are lacking in the content department.
Although I used to consider myself more of an content guy and the type of guy who uses the command line for most tasks, I find myself gravitating toward sites that although they may not offer as many features, are easier to use, and are visually appealing. Flickr is probably the best example of this. With CSS, there is no excuse to have a poorly designed site. CSS makes it ridiculously easy to propogate an attractive design across your entire site. If you already know basic HTML, you can pick up all the CSS you need to know in a few days. Likewise, CSS also means people can finally stop using Photoshop as a design tool.
With CSS, formerly ugly sites can make themselves pretty with very little effort. Slashdot went to great lengths with their stylesheet to make sure they preserved the old ugly layout.
Agreed, but remember that Family Guy has gotten progressively worse as the seasaon's gone on, and it's pretty clear that American Dad is a show without any identity whatsoever.
American Dad was more or less McFarlane's response to the cancellation of Family guy, so he basically made something that was very very similar. Once Fox ordered another season of Family Guy, the producers of AD didn't know what to do, and the show subsequently sucked.
I can say with a good degree of certainty that Family Guy appeals to a much wider audience than American Dad....
Startup load isn't an issue with SCSI hard drives. Any half-decent SCSI controller can be programmed to spin drives up one at a time. From what I understand, this is the default behavior for most RAID controllers.
Parallel ATA does not have this capability (drives spin up the instant the power is turned on). I don't know how SATA handles this....
(For the uninformed, hard drives require a significantly higer amount of power to initially turn on than they need to operate once the platters are spinning. A hard drive that takes 30W to spin up should only take about 15W to operate)
But this all goes away if phone companies are allowed to "share towers"
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't Cingular and Verizon already lease tower space from each other to cut down on costs?
In this case, density economics don't play anywhere nearly as big of a factor.
Okay. This is the first public school in Indiana to require a laptop. Lots of schools have required students to own a laptop for a long time. I know that undergrad business programs have required it for 4 or 5 years now.
The public university I attend will begin to require incoming freshmen to own a laptop starting next fall. Their primary reason for this is that according to a survey, over 99% of students at the school own a computer of some sort, over 90% of which used laptops. The remaining 1 percent presumably could not afford a computer.
Because virtually all administrative tasks (registration, housing selection, turning in papers, etc.) occur via an online system, and that many reserarch assignments are much easeier via th einternet, students who do not own a computer are placed at a significant disadvantage. If students are not required to own a laptop, the school is not legally allowed to provide them with financial assistance to purchase one. I'm not sure how this works for private schools, but that's the way it goes for public schools. If your family is making just under $40,000 per year, purchasing a $2000 computer is simply not an option, even if you're being granted reduced tuition.
And of course, IT's job gets much easier, as everyone's on a standardized platform, and support costs are usually subsidized by the hardware vendor.
The Sega Saturn had the same problem, except that it never achieved the critical mass necessary to produce games taking full advantage of the hardware, and Sega pulled the plug.
In a lot of ways, the PS3 is looking VERY similar to the Saturn. Complex hardware with several individual processing units. Lots of potential, but also very risky.
Of course, with the momentum from the success of the PS2, and the backing of Sony, I think that the PS3 will perform better than Xbox360. As I've been predicting all along, however, I still think that Nintendo's going to dominate this round, and we're going to see a lot of incredible and unique games that will appeal to a huge range of audiences.
Even better, you can pay to have your servers replicated automatically to provide better service where your clients are. Server gets replicated x1 to China and x6 to west coast.
Um. No. That's a terrible idea. You'd have to make sure that your content is legal and kosher in every country your data could possibly be stored in. I'd daresay that that's a frighteningly daunting task. (Especially for china who will censor just about anything). Besides, how much benefit do you really expect to gain by hosting an english language site in china?
As for automatic domestic colocation, Akamai's been doing that for YEARS, and they're quite good at it. Google's never been one to purposely invade a crowded industry that is already adequately serving its market. I highly doubt that there's much google can bring to the table that Akamai and co. cannot.
True, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't make the best of what you have.
Well, Christianity is by nature a very peaceful religion.
It doesn't get much simpler than "Love thy Neighbor" and "Thou Shalt Not Kill"
That doesn't mean that all Christians follow these two, founding principles of their faith, but it means that most do.
I'm unfortunately not well-versed in Islamic scrpiture, but from what I understand, there are certain interpretations that make it okay to kill in the name of God. Fortunately, from what I hear, those who believe in this are a very small minority.
Yes. I can agree with you on a lot of points here. I never worked in a HS (Split Districts... it's complicated), but have spent a good amount of time working in a number of Elementary/Middle schools. A few reflections:
1) The custodial staff cannot be relied on to move/clean anything that's vaguely technology related. It's not in their contract, so they don't do it! Expect lots of manual labor.
2) A good security policy shouldn't allow spyware or any other programs to be installed for that matter. Images of all machines should be made and maintained, and DeepFreeze is a must. Teaching faculty and students to save to a network drive is a worthwhile investment.
3) Middle-schoolers do think they know everything. Don't necessarily discourage this by locking down your systems, but using deepfreeze lets them play around all they want, and once something goes wrong, reboot, and everything's golden again!
4) Elementary school teachers love you. They love everyone as a matter of fact. However, you've got to be cautious, be slow, and be extremely nice to any teachers when teaching them anything. Never be condescending, and never act like you know more than they do. Teaching teachers is one of the hardest things you can do. Go ask an Education Professor. With enough patience, you shouldn't have any problems.
5) Budget constraints blow. You'll always be understaffed and inadqeuately equipped. Deal with it. To help deal with understaffing during busy times, hire a few of those know-it-all 14-year-olds (they have to be working age to legally hire them), and pay them $6/hour to unpack boxes and move equipment. They'll be thrilled to have the money and experience, and you'll be thrilled to not have to unpack an ungodly amount of equipment.
you could easily fit 10,000 account numbers into a tab-deliminated text file, and it'd only take up a few megabytes.
a zip disk perhaps would have been more appropriate?
I think Nintendo's already won this round before they're even out the door.
Combine the 360's supply problems with the Price/delays of the PS3, as long as nintendo plays its cards right, the revolution will be a winner fairly easily.
Most of the hype the revolution's been recieving has been a result of the sheer mediocrity of the other offerings at this point. Additionally, it's the only console that's made any sort of substantial innovation other than "marginally better graphics" this time around.
As long as they can keep the details of the launch private until they're absolutely certain they're ready, and then launch it with a modest amount of publicity (and adequate supply), they've already won. Microsoft wasted millions generating hype around the 360's launch, and then botched it completely. The PS3 lacks focus, and is going to either be expensive, or have its specs cut right before launch. The expectations were initally low for the revolution after the commercial failure of the gamecube (which it wasn't -- it was just percieved that way by many), and Nintendo's got a cool new controller design that's doing a pretty good job of creating hype on its own. All in all, I'd say that by innovating and maintaining a profile of modesty, they've saved millions on advertising, and have managed to generate even more hype. I'd say it's a pretty good parallel to the initial success of the iPod.
It's part of the price to pay for development.
Every industrialized nation at some point or another went through a period of dirty industry.
Also think of it this way.... London today has the highest air quality it's ever had. Think about it.... first you had cooking/heating fires, then you had dirty industry, and now you've got a clean economy. I don't doubt that the rest of the world will eventually go through the same process.
Facebook isn't anywhere nearly as hazardous as myspace.
For starters, the only people who can view your profile are those who go to your school or you have explicitly listed as a friend. You can also choose to restrict access to your profile even further to people at your school you have listed as friends, etc.... Facebook takes it a step further by customizing who can see what. Rigt now, anybody can see my picture, musical tastes, and other generic information -- only friends can see anything personal beyond that (phone numbers, screen names, email addresses, etc.)
Likewise, facebook has a basic user-authentication scheme that prevents you from registering unless you have a university email account. It's not completely foolproof, but works well enough to block out virtually all online predators.
In the case of the student you mention, this means that the girl was either 'friends' with the assailant, or he went to the same school. In either case, that leaves him with plenty of other information sources to find her personal information.
I go to a tiny liberal arts college. Everybody knows everybody as it is. Anything on my facebook could easily be figured out from other public information sources (Campus Phonebook, etc...). In a large (20,000+) university, I could see that privacy might be an issue, but here, it simply isn't.
Likewise, facebook is a tad 'cleaner' than myspace by preventing users from using any sort of markup (HTML,CSS,Javascript, etc.) in their profiles.
Comparing facebook to myspace is like comparing apples to oranges. Anyone trying to stalk on facebook is wasting their time. Facebook is for networking with people you know (innocuous). Myspace is for meeting new people you've never met (sketch)
Had this guy called himself an engineer or a physicist, I might believe his claims.
Calling yourself an inventor is more or less calling yourself a hackjob. And a lot of people do it. An engineer is well-educated, and is also well aware of what is and isn't possible, and work well within those bounds to create these designs. Physics can work outside these boundaries, albeit cautiously.
An "inventor" has a brilliant idea, grabs a first-year physics textbook, and grabs the first thing he sees as evidence to back it up.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
The worst thing is that I'm actually going to college with people that have that very same dinosaur mentality that I just spoofed. Then again, a little fancy ASM code in all of the C++ flying around really could speed things up, but I just have more of a preference towards ASM over higher level stuff.
And sadly, those people you're going to college with are the ones who are preventing Open Source Software from being successful. RMS anybody?
I think that we will be able to finally produce an open source desktop once we build one that refuses to run Vi or Emacs
Your post makes me incredibly glad I learned physics using only metric units.
Megainches??? Do real scientists seriously use such a measurment?
Not a problem. The trend will die out.
You mean sort of like the ASCII ribbon campaign did in the late 90s?
Although I lean towards being economically conservative, from what I gather, most Britons have been in favor of the TV Tax over the past few years, stating that the value of the programming on the BBC that they get in return exceeds the cost of the tax to them.
Do they plan on doing the same for the internet? Personally, because I think it's very difficult to define what a 'PC' is, people should be taxed based upon connections to the internet if anything. Likewise, I think it just makes more sense for people to be able to opt-out. If I had the chance to opt out of the British TV tax, I wouldn't do so because I enjoy the programming on the BBC. However, I could easily understand being irritated by the tax if I didn't care to utilize the Tax-subsidized programming.
they'll run screaming to the other side of the store and buy a notepad, ledger, calculator, typewriter, DVD player, WebTV console, CD player, and game console. These computer things will never catch on.
Your point? I own a computer in additionto all those things(Except for WebTV). My uses for my legal pads, CD player, etc. tend to be things that would otherwise be impractical. I'd imagine that most computer users own these things as well.
PCs didn't begin to be considered as 'Media Centers' by the general public until apple started bundling iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes, etc. with everything they sold. The PC tends to be a shitty platform for doing these things otherwise. Doing these things on a standard WinXP installation is a daunting task for most people, myself included.
the problem is that the things you mention are premium goods. There will always be BMWs and Kias.
Blu-ray represents an advance in technology designed to replace the current technology. Although we can always expect higher early adopter prices, it seems like there's a huge price premium going on here.
If there's some sort of technical hurdle keeping these discs expensive, it's going to be the death of the format. I don't like the direction the industry's taking one bit..... this is going to be betamax all over again
Maybe the pen really is mighier than the sword...
Either way, these demonstrations are ridiculous. The fact that individuals are actively protesting freedom of speech in this day and age completely boggles my mind.
Winamp.....complex?
Maybe 5 years ago when it was in vogue, it was a tad complex, but today, winamp is by all means a very slick piece of software. It's one of the few applications I've seen that's successfully implemented an entirely plugin-based architecture. Because of it, you get support for virtually every file format as well as support for some esoteric output devices.
Personally, I'd just like to see VLC tied to some sort of music managment interface. I know that's the goal of songbird, and I hope that they can speed it up. Why they ever chose XULRunner is completely beyond me. It would seem that in my experience, XULRunner takes a great deal of time and work to optimize properly.
I have faith in Rob Lord. Muse.Net was an amazing service while it lasted, and winamp will remain installed on my computer for many years to come. It might take some time, but I think songbird holds great promise. Remember guys, this is a 0.1 release! Go ahead and install one of the old Mozilla Milestone releases and see how it runs if you want to compare the two.
That's excellent advice. I did exactly that and become convinced that, once again, RMS is campaigning for your freedom to use your computer as you see fit. You're right: he is a hero.
The roads to hell are paved with good intentions. RMS might have the right goals in mind, but the GPL just doesn't cut it for mainstream usage in a predominately capitalist society.
The GPL is far too restrictive for most people and businesses. The Mozilla/BSD license has fared a lot better than the GPL has, especially over the past 5 years. Nobody's afraid to run Firefox or Darwin due to licensing constraints, and I don't hear anyone complaining about how they're not open enough. The only recent successful project I can recall that's used GPL is VLC, I'd imagine that we'd be seeing a lot more of it in mainstream usage if it had a less restrictive license -- it's mature, stable, and runs on every platform imaginable. Why don't developers embed it into their apps that need multimedia support?
Yes, but IBM gave Apple the reason to dump them.
There is no logical reason in my mind why apple would want palm. Apple has a very competent R&D team that could easily start from scratch and create a superior product.
The only possible reason I could see for this would be if somebody discovered huge chunks of BeOS code in OS X, and apple is purchasing palm to curtail a lawsuit