I think this phenomenon will be helped considerably by the switch to higher level languages. There are a lot of people out there who could help us with the spit and polish if they didn't have to work with pointers. I think as more and more open source projects pick up technologies like mono, svg and hopefully one day a clean and flexible UI framework, we will see more advantages of skill set diversity.
I guess my smart-assed post was only going to get a smart-assed reply. Lets try something more constructive:
Here's Wikipedia's description of a sweatshop In it, it describes workers who:
are paid close to nothing - not true in India. Salaries are lower than in the US ($11k/yr), but are more than 20 times the average Indian salary (Wired)
abused physically, mentally, or sexually - I haven't head anything about this in India's call centers or programming shops
I know a lot of spoiled Americans who consider anything repetitive or menial to be sweatshop work. They're wrong. The Indians are doing the same job that was being done in California five years ago. If it's a sweat shop there, then it was a sweatshop here.
I'm so sick of hearing about 'Buying American', Unions and tariffs. Too many people here think they deserve a job and deserve high pay simply because they were born in the richest country on the planet. In the 80s, the Japanese were taking our jobs. In the 90s, the Mexican immigrants were taking them. Today it's the Indians. No one is taking our jobs. We give them away. We had no competitive advantage over the Japanese in the electronics or auto industries. We had no advantage in the labor pool over Mexican immigrants and we have no advantage over Indians when it comes to programming or answering phones. Creating artificial advantages like unions, boycotts and tariffs just make us look like the spoiled kid on the playground: "I'm taking my ball and going home!"
Here's a better solution: keep yourself educated. Encourage your children to learn and innovate. Take some risks. Let them answer the phones in India. If we can keep the interesting opportunities here (and we learn to play nice with other races), the best of India's best will migrate here and work with us.
I can't remember the last time I used mine. Is this a solution in search of a problem or do people actually use their histories?
I think you just hit on the problem. I don't use my history either. Most of the time its easier to find a page you've been to by typing in what you remember into google. If our browsers were a better tool, maybe we wouldn't have to rely on google to find things that are already on our hard drive.
Most usability problems aren't obvious until they're fixed. Hopefully, trailblazer has found one.
the customer is actually supposed to be an end user... so no, not "usually management". XP also requires management buy in. If your manager is fighting your move to XP, don't even bother trying.
That's like saying cars existed 200 years ago simply because all the basic technologies in a car existed. Just because you worked side by side with someone on a program doesn't mean you were doing XP.
I have a 20-year old RCA 19-inch console TV that is still working fine. I don't want to buy another just because of some damn 'broadcast flag' not letting watch my shows.
This isn't true. A broadcast flag is a bit (or bytes) added to a digital signal. Your 20-year old RCA doesn't recieve a digital signal, so it will never see the broadcast flag. One day, when analog signals are turned off, you will loose the use of your set (unless you buy a converter). This has nothing to do with the broadcast flag.
Of course, you just did exactly what I'm talking about, flow the dialog into the same old anti-RIAA thing.
Look, I agree that P2P tech itself should not be held accountable. And I agreed with the EFF when that was their position. And note also that the EFF used to suggest that the RIAA should be suing infringers.
But the EFF has come to adapt a pro file-sharing-even-when-it's-copyrighted schtick, and that's when they got off track.
You need to read the EFF site a little. The EFF isn't trying to get rid of copyright, or make file sharing (in its current form) legal. Their trying to get the law to catch up to the technology in a way that benefits both consumers and artists (but not necessarily the RIAA/MPAA). The reason the RIAA/MPAA are portrayed as 'evil' is that they fight these efforts at every step (as they probably should, for the sake of their business).
The EFF has not adopted a anti-copyright view (as you suggest). If you would read their website, you would see that the "EFF advocates offering fans a legal way to use P2P programs while ensuring that artists get paid."
Rather than assuming you understand the position of the EFF based on conversations on/. (including this one), you should read their site. They spell it all out in plain English.
Every country sets its own agenda. The US wants to be the untouchable goliath of military power. If the US wanted to be the world leader in non-military research and development, they could be.
The US IS the world leader in non-military research and development (among other things). Yes, the US spent more on its military than most continents, but it also spends plenty more on AIDS & Cancer research, space exploration and technology.
These things were really cool from the perspective of an 11 year old boy. I didn't think they would be comming back so soon, though. I remember thinking that next time the Cicadas came out, I would be old. I wonder if I did the math wrong, or if I just thought 28 was damn old?
Yeah, let me just pack up my family, sell my house and all of my belongings, kiss off my friends, and break every tie that I have by deserting my country so I can go work for $12 an hour.
Exactly... If we were all willing to take $12 an hour, they wouldn't need to ship jobs elsewhere.
For a less drastic solution, try moving to the midwest. Although we have seen the effects of the recession, there isn't the same level of competition here as on the coast. The pay is a little lower on average, but you can buy a 4 bedroom house an hour away from any midwestern city for $150k. It has the same effect as moving to India (lower pay, lower cost of living), just to a lesser extent.
Feel free to compare Missouri to third world countries below:
The analog shoulder buttons on the Gamecube are trigger-like. Your finger naturally rests in them while holding the controller.
The left and right triggers are natural and trigger-like (like the xbox), but the Z button is a digital third trigger (much like the playstation triggers). If they really needed it, I would have rather they put it on top of the controller with the other four.
Something else that hasn't been addressed here: How would open sourcing Java benefit Sun? It would obviously benefit IBM (hence the letter). It would obviously benefit the open source community (otherwise we wouldn't be talking about this on slashdot). But why would Sun give away the only thing it has going for it for the greater good of everyone else? Sun is a public company, not a charity.
I see this in many of the comments attached to this story and I don't understand it. In Linux at least, you can dock every pallet into a single window that has a single task bar button. Add the image window, and that's two. Is the problem having a separate task bar button for each image?
No, the problem isn't having a separate task bar button for each image... Photoshop on the Mac works this way (although on the mac, you have to click on the running Photoshop icon in the dock to see the open documents). The issue is with the tool pallets. Joining them all together minimizes the problem and is a decent work around. The ultimate issue is that (in Windows and Mac OSX, at least) tool pallets are not tasks. They aren't managed as task, and should not take up ANY space on the user's task bar. The gimp treats each toolbar as though it were just as important as an independent application (at least from the UI standpoint).
I don't mean to make it sound like the end of the world. It's just one of many small UI annoyances that doesn't get the attention I believe it deserves.
I fought this argument for quite a while at my last employer. I agree with everything you say - except the Microsoft bashing. MS was completely wrong with their MDI implementations of 1987. MDI implementations in Program Manager, Word (until Office 2000), Excel, VB (until v6?), and other programs all sucked bad. But Microsoft did sort things out. They now recommend against MDI in traditional terms (they don't seem to agree with your definition of MDI).
Meanwhile, they started transitioning office to SDI (which is appropriate for most Office apps). They also use both MDI and SDI in Outlook (you can switch views with the navigation on the left, or open an entirely new window).
But the topic that started this all: Photoshop. The Windows version of Photoshop uses the traditional MDI windows for the images (which is a pain in the ass for multiple monitors), but separate panels for the tools (which are NOT constrained to the MDI interface). The Photoshop tool panels are even an improvement over the Gimp, as they don't show up as separate tasks in the task bar. Photoshop for the Mac beats them both however. EVERYTHING is treated as it's own window, but the pallets can still be hidden quickly, accessed on demand as a pull down or arranged on a another monitor.
I don't know if they have this yet, but it should have a shortcut key (Caps lock in Photoshop). I switch back and forth between the more precise cursor and the brush sized one constantly.
The Windows version of Photoshop has floating tool pallets too. It works fine with multiple monitors (unless you want to display two images on separate monitors). The Mac version, of course has separate windows for everything (and they don't all show up as separate tasks as they do in the gimp).
Taskbar buttons and MDI have nothing to do with each other. Gimp has all those task bar buttons for a single app because they choose to (or choose not to change it). In Photoshop (at least version 7), the tool pallets are not part of the MDI interface (they are not constrained to the parent window). No one really wants a MDI. We just want a clean interface -- including the removal of all those tool pallet task bar buttons!
BTW, Photoshop on the PC would be a lot better (IMHO) if they rid themselves of the MDI. Photoshop feels a lot less constrained on the Mac - especially on multiple monitors.
I think the 50% market share you refer to is the market of legal music downloads. These files have DRM that would need to be licensed from Apple (an that won't be happening for quite a while).
But that still leaves your original question: Why not support (non-DRM) AAC?
I don't think anyone is surprised by this -- Intel would be nuts to mention AMD in any press release about anything unless it's incredibly negative toward AMD (which this definitely is not), and even then it would be ill-advised from a amrketing perspective.
AMD could send out the press release:
AMD Develops Intel Instruction Set Sunnyvale, CA -- February 24, 2004 --Intel Corperation announce last week it would be using an instruction set pioneered by long time rival AMD (NYSE:AMD) in it's new 64-bit processor....
Slashdot Mirror
I think this phenomenon will be helped considerably by the switch to higher level languages. There are a lot of people out there who could help us with the spit and polish if they didn't have to work with pointers. I think as more and more open source projects pick up technologies like mono, svg and hopefully one day a clean and flexible UI framework, we will see more advantages of skill set diversity.
I guess my smart-assed post was only going to get a smart-assed reply. Lets try something more constructive:
Here's Wikipedia's description of a sweatshop
In it, it describes workers who:
are paid close to nothing - not true in India. Salaries are lower than in the US ($11k/yr), but are more than 20 times the average Indian salary (Wired)
abused physically, mentally, or sexually - I haven't head anything about this in India's call centers or programming shops
I know a lot of spoiled Americans who consider anything repetitive or menial to be sweatshop work. They're wrong. The Indians are doing the same job that was being done in California five years ago. If it's a sweat shop there, then it was a sweatshop here.
Great post!
I'm so sick of hearing about 'Buying American', Unions and tariffs. Too many people here think they deserve a job and deserve high pay simply because they were born in the richest country on the planet. In the 80s, the Japanese were taking our jobs. In the 90s, the Mexican immigrants were taking them. Today it's the Indians. No one is taking our jobs. We give them away. We had no competitive advantage over the Japanese in the electronics or auto industries. We had no advantage in the labor pool over Mexican immigrants and we have no advantage over Indians when it comes to programming or answering phones. Creating artificial advantages like unions, boycotts and tariffs just make us look like the spoiled kid on the playground: "I'm taking my ball and going home!"
Here's a better solution: keep yourself educated. Encourage your children to learn and innovate. Take some risks. Let them answer the phones in India. If we can keep the interesting opportunities here (and we learn to play nice with other races), the best of India's best will migrate here and work with us.
If you think there are Indian programming sweatshops over there, you really need an education.
It would be nice if the results of Google could be filtered using your browser history.
How is that different than what Trailblazer is doing? It allows a full text search of your history using lucene.
I can't remember the last time I used mine. Is this a solution in search of a problem or do people actually use their histories?
I think you just hit on the problem. I don't use my history either. Most of the time its easier to find a page you've been to by typing in what you remember into google. If our browsers were a better tool, maybe we wouldn't have to rely on google to find things that are already on our hard drive.
Most usability problems aren't obvious until they're fixed. Hopefully, trailblazer has found one.
XP is not just a term for efficently programming. Its a process with very well defined steps. Skip one and your no longer doing XP.
the customer is actually supposed to be an end user... so no, not "usually management". XP also requires management buy in. If your manager is fighting your move to XP, don't even bother trying.
That's like saying cars existed 200 years ago simply because all the basic technologies in a car existed. Just because you worked side by side with someone on a program doesn't mean you were doing XP.
What makes you think Walmart is making a profit off this?
I have a 20-year old RCA 19-inch console TV that is still working fine. I don't want to buy another just because of some damn 'broadcast flag' not letting watch my shows.
This isn't true. A broadcast flag is a bit (or bytes) added to a digital signal. Your 20-year old RCA doesn't recieve a digital signal, so it will never see the broadcast flag. One day, when analog signals are turned off, you will loose the use of your set (unless you buy a converter). This has nothing to do with the broadcast flag.
Of course, you just did exactly what I'm talking about, flow the dialog into the same old anti-RIAA thing.
Look, I agree that P2P tech itself should not be held accountable. And I agreed with the EFF when that was their position. And note also that the EFF used to suggest that the RIAA should be suing infringers.
But the EFF has come to adapt a pro file-sharing-even-when-it's-copyrighted schtick, and that's when they got off track.
You need to read the EFF site a little. The EFF isn't trying to get rid of copyright, or make file sharing (in its current form) legal. Their trying to get the law to catch up to the technology in a way that benefits both consumers and artists (but not necessarily the RIAA/MPAA). The reason the RIAA/MPAA are portrayed as 'evil' is that they fight these efforts at every step (as they probably should, for the sake of their business).
The EFF has not adopted a anti-copyright view (as you suggest). If you would read their website, you would see that the "EFF advocates offering fans a legal way to use P2P programs while ensuring that artists get paid."
Rather than assuming you understand the position of the EFF based on conversations on
Every country sets its own agenda. The US wants to be the untouchable goliath of military power. If the US wanted to be the world leader in non-military research and development, they could be.
The US IS the world leader in non-military research and development (among other things). Yes, the US spent more on its military than most continents, but it also spends plenty more on AIDS & Cancer research, space exploration and technology.
These things were really cool from the perspective of an 11 year old boy. I didn't think they would be comming back so soon, though. I remember thinking that next time the Cicadas came out, I would be old. I wonder if I did the math wrong, or if I just thought 28 was damn old?
Yeah, let me just pack up my family, sell my house and all of my belongings, kiss off my friends, and break every tie that I have by deserting my country so I can go work for $12 an hour.
Exactly... If we were all willing to take $12 an hour, they wouldn't need to ship jobs elsewhere.
For a less drastic solution, try moving to the midwest. Although we have seen the effects of the recession, there isn't the same level of competition here as on the coast. The pay is a little lower on average, but you can buy a 4 bedroom house an hour away from any midwestern city for $150k. It has the same effect as moving to India (lower pay, lower cost of living), just to a lesser extent.
Feel free to compare Missouri to third world countries below:
The analog shoulder buttons on the Gamecube are trigger-like. Your finger naturally rests in them while holding the controller.
The left and right triggers are natural and trigger-like (like the xbox), but the Z button is a digital third trigger (much like the playstation triggers). If they really needed it, I would have rather they put it on top of the controller with the other four.
Something else that hasn't been addressed here: How would open sourcing Java benefit Sun? It would obviously benefit IBM (hence the letter). It would obviously benefit the open source community (otherwise we wouldn't be talking about this on slashdot). But why would Sun give away the only thing it has going for it for the greater good of everyone else? Sun is a public company, not a charity.
I see this in many of the comments attached to this story and I don't understand it. In Linux at least, you can dock every pallet into a single window that has a single task bar button. Add the image window, and that's two. Is the problem having a separate task bar button for each image?
No, the problem isn't having a separate task bar button for each image... Photoshop on the Mac works this way (although on the mac, you have to click on the running Photoshop icon in the dock to see the open documents). The issue is with the tool pallets. Joining them all together minimizes the problem and is a decent work around. The ultimate issue is that (in Windows and Mac OSX, at least) tool pallets are not tasks. They aren't managed as task, and should not take up ANY space on the user's task bar. The gimp treats each toolbar as though it were just as important as an independent application (at least from the UI standpoint).
I don't mean to make it sound like the end of the world. It's just one of many small UI annoyances that doesn't get the attention I believe it deserves.
I fought this argument for quite a while at my last employer. I agree with everything you say - except the Microsoft bashing. MS was completely wrong with their MDI implementations of 1987. MDI implementations in Program Manager, Word (until Office 2000), Excel, VB (until v6?), and other programs all sucked bad. But Microsoft did sort things out. They now recommend against MDI in traditional terms (they don't seem to agree with your definition of MDI).
Meanwhile, they started transitioning office to SDI (which is appropriate for most Office apps). They also use both MDI and SDI in Outlook (you can switch views with the navigation on the left, or open an entirely new window).
But the topic that started this all: Photoshop. The Windows version of Photoshop uses the traditional MDI windows for the images (which is a pain in the ass for multiple monitors), but separate panels for the tools (which are NOT constrained to the MDI interface). The Photoshop tool panels are even an improvement over the Gimp, as they don't show up as separate tasks in the task bar. Photoshop for the Mac beats them both however. EVERYTHING is treated as it's own window, but the pallets can still be hidden quickly, accessed on demand as a pull down or arranged on a another monitor.
I don't know if they have this yet, but it should have a shortcut key (Caps lock in Photoshop). I switch back and forth between the more precise cursor and the brush sized one constantly.
The Windows version of Photoshop has floating tool pallets too. It works fine with multiple monitors (unless you want to display two images on separate monitors). The Mac version, of course has separate windows for everything (and they don't all show up as separate tasks as they do in the gimp).
Taskbar buttons and MDI have nothing to do with each other. Gimp has all those task bar buttons for a single app because they choose to (or choose not to change it). In Photoshop (at least version 7), the tool pallets are not part of the MDI interface (they are not constrained to the parent window). No one really wants a MDI. We just want a clean interface -- including the removal of all those tool pallet task bar buttons!
BTW, Photoshop on the PC would be a lot better (IMHO) if they rid themselves of the MDI. Photoshop feels a lot less constrained on the Mac - especially on multiple monitors.
Wow! (Score: 5, Funny)
Cow bells must be the new Beowulf cluster.
I think the 50% market share you refer to is the market of legal music downloads. These files have DRM that would need to be licensed from Apple (an that won't be happening for quite a while).
But that still leaves your original question: Why not support (non-DRM) AAC?
I don't think anyone is surprised by this -- Intel would be nuts to mention AMD in any press release about anything unless it's incredibly negative toward AMD (which this definitely is not), and even then it would be ill-advised from a amrketing perspective.
AMD could send out the press release:
AMD Develops Intel Instruction Set
Sunnyvale, CA -- February 24, 2004 --Intel Corperation announce last week it would be using an instruction set pioneered by long time rival AMD (NYSE:AMD) in it's new 64-bit processor....