It's amazing to think that Amazon wouldn't have a non-compete clause in the guy's contract to prevent this from happening. It's not unusual for one to be barred from working in the same field or for a competitor within a particular time frame (e.g., one year).
that's one of the most misleading subjects i've ever seen. a lot of people have office installed, like, say, the majority of corporate users out there and those who use the millions of computers sold with explorer bundled in.
More likely that anyone who tries to implement this will be the upset one. Adopting a tool like this will require constantly updating Libgmailer, because it will constantly break as Google works on GMail. Until Google offers an API for services like this to access it (which I doubt they ever will), any system based on GMail will be quite unstable. So, for any serious blog, this wouldn't be an option.
As a novelty item, this system is interesting; however, one should note that its novelty value many not justify the repercussions of violating GMail's Terms of Service.
Seriously, someone should create a template for Slashdot to use:
There's an interesting article over at (site) that speculates on the possibility of an (common service) offered by Google that would be based on (corresponding protocol). If (protocol) was supported by a major company like Google, it could dominate over proprietary services such as (main commercial product) or (Microsoft app for said service).
I mean, it's interesting, but these posts draws most of the same conclusions that those discussions about GMail, etc.
The cited article itself says that it's based on speculation. Channel 9 attracts developers, not "consumers"; so, the "consumers" the article mentions who "are demanding that IE be fitted with tabbed browsing", etc., are actually just developers. Indeed, the majority of IE's consumers couldn't give a damn about tabbed browsing, or CSS, or PNG.
Sadly, this whole article (i.e., Slashdot's article) has become a collection of threads promoting FireFox, Opera, etc., and generally IE-bashing instead of actually discussing the issue at hand. Sure, perhaps the majority of geeks don't use IE, but we're also the people who would use OpenOffice instead of MS Office, Linux instead of Windows, etc. I.e., we're not Microsoft's intended audience.
So, take a moment and think about the article's premise. Will there be a new version of IE before Longhorn? I'd venture to say no. Why? Mainly, a better IE would be a major selling point for Windows (as Safari has become for Mac OS X, e.g., Tiger's Safari RSS). Also, it's probably moved all new development of IE to Longhorn APIs, and doing double-development of new features is a nuisance (as it was for Apple).
In general, developing new features for IE 6 just doesn't make sense from a business, marketing, or technical perspective. Saying a new release of IE "may be imminent" just adds more vapor to the breeze, seemingly endorsing speculation, and creates even more opportunities for MS-bashing. Whereas MS-bashing can be justified, ripping apart products that exist only in your mind is ludicrous.
This is one of the few perks of working for higher ed: good benefits. The pay sucks, but benefits like health care, retirement funds, dental care -- hell, even tuition remission -- are standard fare.
On the other hand, we don't get anything extravagant. (Thus, us tech folk look lovingly at benefits like the Omni Group, who get free lunch and dinner, and can bring their pets to work.)
Re:Why not spill the beans on the new model now?
on
Apple Delays New iMac
·
· Score: 1
Nah... attendees of the WWDC would tend to use PowerMacs and PowerBooks instead of iMacs -- mostly because they're into things like external displays (for greater screen space, i.e., one screen for code, another for the app) and fast CPUs (i.e., to compile, and/or play games while compiling).
A far better reason not to release any information about a product release until the actual release is that you're not bound to deliver anything in particular. That allows for wiggle room, which allows for further innovation before product launch, as well as some protection against Murphy's Law.
A notable difference is that most shows from archive.org's Live Music Archive (LMA) are generally recorded by audience members, whereas sites like primuslive provide soundboard or matrix (soundboard + audience) copies. There's some great recordings on the LMA, but the old adage of "you get what you pay for" still applies: there's no guarantee that a source will be very good.
By law, all government sites must comply with the guidelines described by Section 508, which are actually a subset of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. It is yet to be determined if organizations that receive federal monies must comply with Section 508; if so, that would affect a lot of pages.
Just to make sure you know: the author of the second article, Blake Ross, is one of the drivers for the Firebird (formerly Phoenix) project; the entire work was intended as satire.
Organizations like the Unitarian Universalist Association -- known for its politically correct constituency -- were quick to rename "webmasters" to "web weavers" for this exact reason. All said, perhaps a good thing; however, it does require a shift of convention and a grain of salt. The shift of convention is necessary for those terms which explicitly conjure bad feelings; the grain of salt for those which are simply ridiculous.
No no no! Surveys target power users. Think about it: surveys about mozilla would probably show up at mozillazine, or maybe even mozilla.org; an average users' home page could be Google News or Mozilla's default home page, not a site which surveys everyday end users. You hire experts who know what to test, and how to use documented methods to achieve empirically sounds results.
From a developer's perspective, this makes open source software great: there are great products made by developers, for developers -- products like Mozilla's DOM inspector or Venkman (its javascript debugger) come to mind. It's also why open source software either dominates a niche market (e.g., Apache, Linux, MySQL, PHP, and perl come to mind) or has a small, devoted user base (e.g., Mozilla, OpenOfffice, etc.).
It's really hard to get both without a significant investment in both human factors work and marketing.
This is why applications like Mozilla have things like about:config (as implied, only works for mozilla users); similarly, Eudora has a text file of settings to edit. If you're enough of a power user to tweak such advanced options, editing a configuration file or pulling up a "hidden" config menu shouldn't be a big deal.
In order to achieve widespread adoption in non-niche markets, a vendor needs to target the lowest common denominator (i.e., a beginning or average user), and add options on top of that foundation.
This is a problem across most open source projects. Indeed, most programmers know very little about HCI concerns, and it shows. Take, for example, Mozilla's UI blunders -- its numerous "managers" and the famed cipher editor (see also: commentary by Ben Goodger and comments by Blake Ross).
What's needed is not just the involvement of HCI people, but a commitment to accept the methods they bring to the table, and the results they produce. For example, if it's proven that a system like Mozilla's "Edit Ciphers" confuses more than helps, the project's drivers must be willing to listen, and get its code out of the main builds. If not, the HCI people can put as much time as they want into a product, only to burn out.
the trouble with hotsauce was that it was an hci disaster. it didn't scale well. for extremely deep & narrow sites, the user's experience quickly degraded into a forward-back mess. deep & narrow sites are hard to pull off (i'm ignoring the utility of search intentionally) with decent navigation, but hotsauce made that worse than it was previously.
given that and apple's characteristicly poor marketing, the product died.
it is, however, good to see r&d like newton's hand writing recognition be improved and brought back into the light (it's now in jaguar, called "inkwell").
i would agree. even though i own the book, i find that i consult the online manual before i do the book. the user comments and more timely updates there make it more worthwhile. if you develop remotely (without 'net access) or if you strongly prefer a book to a site, i recommend this book above any other book on php. however, with a manual as concise, coherent, comprehensive, clear, and consistent as php's, there is little a book can offer without doing your job for you.
[ yoinked from cnn.com around 11:00 AM GMT -05:00 ]
NEW YORK (CNN) -- Terrorists struck the United States Tuesday morning in harrowing, widespread attacks that included at least three commercial jet crashes into significant buildings.
In the first attack, a plane smashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in Manhattan shortly before 9 a.m., followed by another plane into the second tower about 20 minutes later. Both towers later collapsed. Sources told CNN that one of the planes was an American Airlines Boeing 767 that had been hijacked after take-off from Boston.
About an hour later, a plane crashed into the Pentagon in Washington, part of which later collapsed.
Sources say a second plane was heading toward the Pentagon; F-16 jets were in the air monitoring it.
The Pentagon, the White House, the State Department, the Justice Department, the Capitol and all other government buildings in Washington evacuated.
The FAA shut down all airports in the country, and all international flights heading into D.C. and New York airports were diverted to Canada.
President Bush cancelled an appearance in Florida to return to Washington, calling the crashes "apparent terrorist attacks" and "a national tragedy."
In Chicago, the Sears Tower was evacuated; United Nations in New York evacuated.
The New York Port Authority said it had closed all bridges and tunnels into the city.
New York's Bellevue Hospital was designated command central for handling the catastrophe. Several hospitals have already reported receiving victims with burns and head injuries.
Large plane crashed 80 miles south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but it was unknown if this crash was connected to terrorist attacks.
wow. somebody busts up his screen and instead of pulling strings and screaming at people that the product broke, he writes a hack to "fix" / get around the problem by disabling the broken part of the screen. does that make him "'l33t", or does it just make him an idiot?
i just finished reading Crypto myself, and must say that i rather enjoyed it. the book makes for a good book to read on your commute, as it is a pretty straightforward read, but does include the requisite level of technicality to explain some underlying concepts. Steven Levy is very good at doing this, as he did in Hackers & Insanely Great. The book, over all, is worth reading if you don't know whether or not to learn more about cryptography or if you simply want to brush up on your history of the American cryptographic revolution.
Slashdot Mirror
It's amazing to think that Amazon wouldn't have a non-compete clause in the guy's contract to prevent this from happening. It's not unusual for one to be barred from working in the same field or for a competitor within a particular time frame (e.g., one year).
that's one of the most misleading subjects i've ever seen. a lot of people have office installed, like, say, the majority of corporate users out there and those who use the millions of computers sold with explorer bundled in.
More likely that anyone who tries to implement this will be the upset one. Adopting a tool like this will require constantly updating Libgmailer, because it will constantly break as Google works on GMail. Until Google offers an API for services like this to access it (which I doubt they ever will), any system based on GMail will be quite unstable. So, for any serious blog, this wouldn't be an option.
As a novelty item, this system is interesting; however, one should note that its novelty value many not justify the repercussions of violating GMail's Terms of Service.
I mean, it's interesting, but these posts draws most of the same conclusions that those discussions about GMail, etc.
The cited article itself says that it's based on speculation. Channel 9 attracts developers, not "consumers"; so, the "consumers" the article mentions who "are demanding that IE be fitted with tabbed browsing", etc., are actually just developers. Indeed, the majority of IE's consumers couldn't give a damn about tabbed browsing, or CSS, or PNG.
Sadly, this whole article (i.e., Slashdot's article) has become a collection of threads promoting FireFox, Opera, etc., and generally IE-bashing instead of actually discussing the issue at hand. Sure, perhaps the majority of geeks don't use IE, but we're also the people who would use OpenOffice instead of MS Office, Linux instead of Windows, etc. I.e., we're not Microsoft's intended audience.
So, take a moment and think about the article's premise. Will there be a new version of IE before Longhorn? I'd venture to say no. Why? Mainly, a better IE would be a major selling point for Windows (as Safari has become for Mac OS X, e.g., Tiger's Safari RSS). Also, it's probably moved all new development of IE to Longhorn APIs, and doing double-development of new features is a nuisance (as it was for Apple).
In general, developing new features for IE 6 just doesn't make sense from a business, marketing, or technical perspective. Saying a new release of IE "may be imminent" just adds more vapor to the breeze, seemingly endorsing speculation, and creates even more opportunities for MS-bashing. Whereas MS-bashing can be justified, ripping apart products that exist only in your mind is ludicrous.
You're buying the proof-of-concept? You must be a programmer.
This is one of the few perks of working for higher ed: good benefits. The pay sucks, but benefits like health care, retirement funds, dental care -- hell, even tuition remission -- are standard fare.
On the other hand, we don't get anything extravagant. (Thus, us tech folk look lovingly at benefits like the Omni Group, who get free lunch and dinner, and can bring their pets to work.)
Nah... attendees of the WWDC would tend to use PowerMacs and PowerBooks instead of iMacs -- mostly because they're into things like external displays (for greater screen space, i.e., one screen for code, another for the app) and fast CPUs (i.e., to compile, and/or play games while compiling).
A far better reason not to release any information about a product release until the actual release is that you're not bound to deliver anything in particular. That allows for wiggle room, which allows for further innovation before product launch, as well as some protection against Murphy's Law.
MozillaZine's discussion notes several problems this will create. Notably, extensions and themes that are compatible with 0.9 won't appear properly.
In general, it seems that 0.9.1 was released too hastily.
there will soon be 10, per recent revisions ("clarifications") to RSS.
A notable difference is that most shows from archive.org's Live Music Archive (LMA) are generally recorded by audience members, whereas sites like primuslive provide soundboard or matrix (soundboard + audience) copies. There's some great recordings on the LMA, but the old adage of "you get what you pay for" still applies: there's no guarantee that a source will be very good.
Actually, there are some rules to which many U.S. sites must comply, specified in Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act Amendments of 1998 (summary).
By law, all government sites must comply with the guidelines described by Section 508, which are actually a subset of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. It is yet to be determined if organizations that receive federal monies must comply with Section 508; if so, that would affect a lot of pages.
Just to make sure you know: the author of the second article, Blake Ross, is one of the drivers for the Firebird (formerly Phoenix) project; the entire work was intended as satire.
This approach is quite practical, really. Sadly, you don't often see it in an open source product, though.
Organizations like the Unitarian Universalist Association -- known for its politically correct constituency -- were quick to rename "webmasters" to "web weavers" for this exact reason. All said, perhaps a good thing; however, it does require a shift of convention and a grain of salt. The shift of convention is necessary for those terms which explicitly conjure bad feelings; the grain of salt for those which are simply ridiculous.
No no no! Surveys target power users. Think about it: surveys about mozilla would probably show up at mozillazine, or maybe even mozilla.org; an average users' home page could be Google News or Mozilla's default home page, not a site which surveys everyday end users. You hire experts who know what to test, and how to use documented methods to achieve empirically sounds results.
From a developer's perspective, this makes open source software great: there are great products made by developers, for developers -- products like Mozilla's DOM inspector or Venkman (its javascript debugger) come to mind. It's also why open source software either dominates a niche market (e.g., Apache, Linux, MySQL, PHP, and perl come to mind) or has a small, devoted user base (e.g., Mozilla, OpenOfffice, etc.).
It's really hard to get both without a significant investment in both human factors work and marketing.
This is why applications like Mozilla have things like about:config (as implied, only works for mozilla users); similarly, Eudora has a text file of settings to edit. If you're enough of a power user to tweak such advanced options, editing a configuration file or pulling up a "hidden" config menu shouldn't be a big deal.
In order to achieve widespread adoption in non-niche markets, a vendor needs to target the lowest common denominator (i.e., a beginning or average user), and add options on top of that foundation.
This is a problem across most open source projects. Indeed, most programmers know very little about HCI concerns, and it shows. Take, for example, Mozilla's UI blunders -- its numerous "managers" and the famed cipher editor (see also: commentary by Ben Goodger and comments by Blake Ross).
What's needed is not just the involvement of HCI people, but a commitment to accept the methods they bring to the table, and the results they produce. For example, if it's proven that a system like Mozilla's "Edit Ciphers" confuses more than helps, the project's drivers must be willing to listen, and get its code out of the main builds. If not, the HCI people can put as much time as they want into a product, only to burn out.
hey those aren't xhtml compliant!
the trouble with hotsauce was that it was an hci disaster. it didn't scale well. for extremely deep & narrow sites, the user's experience quickly degraded into a forward-back mess. deep & narrow sites are hard to pull off (i'm ignoring the utility of search intentionally) with decent navigation, but hotsauce made that worse than it was previously.
given that and apple's characteristicly poor marketing, the product died.
it is, however, good to see r&d like newton's hand writing recognition be improved and brought back into the light (it's now in jaguar, called "inkwell").
i would agree. even though i own the book, i find that i consult the online manual before i do the book. the user comments and more timely updates there make it more worthwhile. if you develop remotely (without 'net access) or if you strongly prefer a book to a site, i recommend this book above any other book on php. however, with a manual as concise, coherent, comprehensive, clear, and consistent as php's, there is little a book can offer without doing your job for you.
[ yoinked from cnn.com around 11:00 AM GMT -05:00 ]
NEW YORK (CNN) -- Terrorists struck the United States Tuesday morning in harrowing, widespread attacks that included at least three commercial jet crashes into significant buildings.
In the first attack, a plane smashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in Manhattan shortly before 9 a.m., followed by another plane into the second tower about 20 minutes later. Both towers later collapsed. Sources told CNN that one of the planes was an American Airlines Boeing 767 that had been hijacked after take-off from Boston.
About an hour later, a plane crashed into the Pentagon in Washington, part of which later collapsed.
Sources say a second plane was heading toward the Pentagon; F-16 jets were in the air monitoring it.
The Pentagon, the White House, the State Department, the Justice Department, the Capitol and all other government buildings in Washington evacuated.
The FAA shut down all airports in the country, and all international flights heading into D.C. and New York airports were diverted to Canada.
President Bush cancelled an appearance in Florida to return to Washington, calling the crashes "apparent terrorist attacks" and "a national tragedy."
In Chicago, the Sears Tower was evacuated; United Nations in New York evacuated.
The New York Port Authority said it had closed all bridges and tunnels into the city.
New York's Bellevue Hospital was designated command central for handling the catastrophe. Several hospitals have already reported receiving victims with burns and head injuries.
Large plane crashed 80 miles south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but it was unknown if this crash was connected to terrorist attacks.
wow. somebody busts up his screen and instead of pulling strings and screaming at people that the product broke, he writes a hack to "fix" / get around the problem by disabling the broken part of the screen. does that make him "'l33t", or does it just make him an idiot?
i just finished reading Crypto myself, and must say that i rather enjoyed it. the book makes for a good book to read on your commute, as it is a pretty straightforward read, but does include the requisite level of technicality to explain some underlying concepts. Steven Levy is very good at doing this, as he did in Hackers & Insanely Great. The book, over all, is worth reading if you don't know whether or not to learn more about cryptography or if you simply want to brush up on your history of the American cryptographic revolution.
to this, MacAddicts eagerly anticipating Mac OS X, like myself, say 'word'