They're the GNOME UI team. GNOME lost me years ago, when they decided to shove that stupid "spatial file browsing" thing down everyone's throats. I still don't see how it was any different from the default settings in Windows 95, which I would immediately change every time I used a new windows box. Some people think of their files in terms of a position on their desktop. Some people have a lot of files and don't want to put everything eight folders deep, so they put them in one directory and then have the file manager alphabetize them. Sometimes people even want to see advanced details, like how big their files are and when they were last modified. Around that time, they were also having discussions about doing away with tabs in applications.
Essentially, if GNOME says something in the UI is "too complicated", then there's a very good chance that it's something I use and like. So I just use KDE.:)
I'm a web developer. When I put up audio and video files, I'd like to be able to put up one single format and have every browser be able to play it, and do so without bringing netbooks to their knees with flash.
First off, HTML 4 has plenty of browser interoperability issues. Just try to develop something that works on IE and any other browser.
Secondly, for the love of God and all that is holy, HTML is primarily a visual medium that people look at on a computer screen! Separating content (html) from presentation (CSS) was an excellent idea. Failing to allow vertical centering without dumbass CSS and javascript hacks is not. Seriously, what the hell?
Third, why can't CSS styles inherit other styles or use constants? You were *finally* going to add that into CSS, and then some jackass decided not to include it because it would make it more *complicated*. Do you know what's complicated? Having to change 40 instances of a color in a CSS file because I can't define a damn constant. This is exactly the kind of shit CSS was supposed to *solve*. Safari implemented this briefly and removed it because *they were afraid people would like it too much and usage would become widespread before there was a standard*. Add it to the standard! Right now, we have to use ridiculous workarounds like CSS compilers, which don't fit very well into a lot of modern CMSs.
Fourth, stop deliberating and start releasing official standards, otherwise Microsoft will just run off and do its own thing and we'll all be boned *again*. You're doing way more damage than you're preventing.
Finally, your failure to support as standards things (like the aforementioned CSS vertical centering) that people need to do in the real world on a regular basis just leads web developers to use non-standard code and bullshit like Flash, which circumvents your standard altogether.
Those of you who are making this argument, please think about whether you support the idea of corporate personhood and whether you believe that there is a corporate right to free speech and to decide which customers they want to service and which ones they don't.
Unfortunately, this isn't a black and white issue. The founders were all about free speech in the federal government, but the original intent of the constitution was to allow the states to make their own laws that might place additional restrictions on peoples' rights. This turned out to be a very bad idea (slavery, segregation, etc), and the constitution was eventually amended to allow the Federal government to step in and enforce the bill of rights in a way that would *supercede* state laws. But to say the the founders would have necessarily supported forcing a private company, Rackspace, to broadcast someone else's speech is just wrong. They weren't even in favor of forcing the *states* to allow free speech.
All that being said, it's a very legitimate idea that the right to express oneself supersedes property rights, *particularly in cases where there are few options for expressing yourself*. This is the whole idea behind Net Neutrality. Since the Internet is controlled by a few large companies, at some point it becomes necessary to step in with legislation and preserve the *de facto* right to free speech, since if these few private companies decided to arbitrarily restrict political speech (or any other kind of expression) it would put a serious dent in our ability to express ourselves.
All told, Rackspace's obligations to respect the free speech of other groups ought to be tied directly to how many other real, useful alternatives exist to their service. If it would be relatively easy for this site to pick up and move to another server farm, then I think Rackspace's policy ought to stand. On the other hand, if all hosting providers have this policy, or Rackspace is the only one big enough to handle hosting their website, then it becomes a Net Neutrality issue.
Founder of http://opengameart.org/ here. I noticed the bandwidth spike, so I thought I'd take a look at the referrer link, and I'm glad to see someone finally mention us on Slashdot. Honestly, I'd love to have a *real* slashdotting. The server's hefty enough to handle it, and the publicity would be immensely helpful.:)
At any rate, one of our underlying missions is to help FOSS games move beyond "programmer art", and we do that by taking donations and then using those to commission artists to do art. I run the site mostly out of pocket, and with all the commissions, it costs me a good $500 monthly, in addition to the roughly $100/month in donations that we bring in (mostly community members with recurring subscriptions). Shameless plug: If you subscribe, even for $3/month, that's money we can use to buy art for everyone that will never go away.:)
It's a lot of work, and it's not cheap, but there's a lot of FOSS game code out there with a lot of potential, and I think it's worth it. Plus, all of the assets we commission are CC-licensed, so they're reusable as part of the commons.
Feel free to hit me up if you have any questions or ideas. If you have thoughts about the site interface (we're still working on it), there's a forum thread discussing planned changes for OGA 2.0. I'd love to hear what you think!
While it's true that politicians do tend to pander to their base in the primaries, this one did it to a much more alarming extent. Obama pandered to the left and went center right after he was elected. McCain pandered to the right and probably would have gone center right also.
Saying "I can't help but think how your response may differ if the political parties were flipped" is a broad and utterly baseless assumption about that particular person making the post. Yes, there are some people for whom it would be true, but may of us on both sides of the political spectrum at least make an effort to hold our candidates to the same standards as we hold the other party's.
Politicians of all affiliations need to be prepared, particularly in the information age, to answer what they said during the primaries. Shoving it under a rug by misusing copyright law is just cowardly.
The treaty passes, and suddenly we're in violation of said treaty because unlicensed copyrighted content is moving over our network. O NOES! ITS AN EMERGENCEY!!! WE MUST LOCKS DOWN TEH NETWERKS!!
I'm sure the Obama administration will be in favor of this bill, since they're basically in bed with the content distribution industry already.
Full disclosure: I'm a liberal, and this pisses me the fuck off. I favor government involvement, but only when it's done well and to the benefit of the people of the United States.
I edited articles until the 'personalities' discovered them. I also removed from vandalism from a page once and was *accused* of posting that particular vandalism. I'm done there.
Have you *used* anti-virus software lately? It takes over your computer and bogs everything down by scanning at irritating times, like every file access.
I don't use anti-virus software, except for the occasional one-off malware scan. I don't get viruses because I don't do stupid shit.
* I don't trust free downloads unless they're open source, or a google on "$SOFTWARE spyware" comes up clean. * I don't browse porn (or anything else) on internet explorer. * I don't browse porn with adblock turned off. * I don't download stupid free desktop frills, like smileys and crap. * I don't open obvious spam, even if it appears to be from my friends. * When a webpage informs me that it has SCANNED MY COMPUTER and VIRUS DETECTED, I remember that I did not, in fact, install a virus scanner, and that the message is fake, and I do not have to install their special software to fix it. Instead, I close the web page. * When doing p2p file-sharing, I use clients that are well known and spyware free. * I don't put audio CDs into my machine when I'm running Windows, because they might install rootkits. * I always click the "advanced" button when I install software, because that's where they hide the fact that they're installing a bunch of extra shit I don't want. * Under no circumstances do I *ever* install Norton, which in my experience is far worse for performance than any virus.
So at the office where I work, we used to have these meetings with my whole department (mostly a bunch of programmers and such). I noticed that pretty much everyone in the meeting except me had a mac laptop (I have a dell running Fedora). Anyway, one day I grabbed a sticky note and drew an apple logo on it with a marker, and underneath it wrote "Think different.", then put the sticky note over the Dell logo on my laptop. Anyway, about half way through the meeting, someone finally noticed, and asked me why I had the apple logo stickied to my laptop, and I replied:
"Because I wanted to think different, like everyone else."
5) Fake search traffic by loading sites with referrer spam.
I'm serious. Do a google search for "Bing referrer spam" and see how many results you come up with. My semi-popular website was getting Bing hits for really generic terms like "art" and "audio". The number of these fake hits eclipsed the number of legitimate Bing searches, by a factor of at least a hundred to one. Every single one of these hits came from a Microsoft IP address, and even more maddeningly, every single one of them sent a browser ID string of IE6, thus inflating my IE6 numbers (I've since stopped officially supporting IE6 on my site, although it's possible that it still works. I just don't care enough to check, as *real* IE6 usage is less than 2%).
tl;dr: in one fell swoop, Microsoft is spamming websites and making it look like both Bing and IE6 are being used far more than they actually are. Any numbers about Bing usage are suspect.
Unfortunately, this treaty isn't a left/right thing (ACTA originated under the Bush administration, and the Obama administration is carrying on with it). Almost universally, the public hates it and the government loves it (save for a few principled politicians on both sides).
I'm unabashedly liberal, and I believe that there are places where the government can do a lot of good. This is definitely not one of those times. Rather than pointing fingers at other voters, what we need to do as the American public is band together and fight this thing.
My statement doesn't prove his point at all. I was stating that there are plenty of demanding fields where women do just fine, which don't have the ridiculous gender gap that the FOSS community does. While I would agree with you that whiny people tend not to get very far, I would disagree with the assertion that this is a predominantly female trait. Things wouldn't magically improve if women in FOSS "just stopped whining," because that's not the problem. The *problem* is that they don't receive the same treatment.
Furthermore, if you treat women the same as you treat men, then you're not part of the problem; in this case, I would suggest that you become part of the solution by standing up to this sort of crap when you see it, rather than denying that it happens.
Your generalization utterly fails to take into account the fact that there are plenty of whiny douchebag men out there who want nothing but recognition and approval. You also fail to take into account the fact that there are many women out there who are quite capable of standing on their own in the face of adversity. Take medicine, for example. Medical residents are probably one of the most mentally abused groups of people out there. They are frequently disapproved of (and called incompetent, among other things) by their superiors, and somehow a lot of women still make it through and become doctors. In that case, though, the abuse is doled out pretty much equally between the sexes.
I don't find the mere mention of pornography to be sexist -- however, if female developers can't work with a group without being constantly hit on, asked on dates, flirted with, or otherwise weirded out, you can't really expect them to stick around. They're liable to go somewhere where they're treated with equal respect, and I can't blame them.
Get a screenshot of this comment -- I'm about to side with a libertarian.
I'm a liberal. I agree that Net Neutrality is something that ought to be codified in law. However, I don't believe that this law does it as written. This whole "reasonable" thing smacks of "let's throttle bittorrent because it *might* be used for piracy".
How about mandating absolute network neutrality (no throttling, shaping, blocking, etc) and then enforcing the laws we already have? The days where the Supreme Court keeps VCRs legal because of substantial non-infringing use are long gone. We can't trust the court to protect us from this.
Anybody reading this law and not getting a little nervous ought to get their head checked.
Slashdot Mirror
They're the GNOME UI team. GNOME lost me years ago, when they decided to shove that stupid "spatial file browsing" thing down everyone's throats. I still don't see how it was any different from the default settings in Windows 95, which I would immediately change every time I used a new windows box. Some people think of their files in terms of a position on their desktop. Some people have a lot of files and don't want to put everything eight folders deep, so they put them in one directory and then have the file manager alphabetize them. Sometimes people even want to see advanced details, like how big their files are and when they were last modified. Around that time, they were also having discussions about doing away with tabs in applications.
Essentially, if GNOME says something in the UI is "too complicated", then there's a very good chance that it's something I use and like. So I just use KDE. :)
I'm a web developer. When I put up audio and video files, I'd like to be able to put up one single format and have every browser be able to play it, and do so without bringing netbooks to their knees with flash.
...OGG and VP8 out of the box now?
Web developer here.
First off, HTML 4 has plenty of browser interoperability issues. Just try to develop something that works on IE and any other browser.
Secondly, for the love of God and all that is holy, HTML is primarily a visual medium that people look at on a computer screen! Separating content (html) from presentation (CSS) was an excellent idea. Failing to allow vertical centering without dumbass CSS and javascript hacks is not. Seriously, what the hell?
Third, why can't CSS styles inherit other styles or use constants? You were *finally* going to add that into CSS, and then some jackass decided not to include it because it would make it more *complicated*. Do you know what's complicated? Having to change 40 instances of a color in a CSS file because I can't define a damn constant. This is exactly the kind of shit CSS was supposed to *solve*. Safari implemented this briefly and removed it because *they were afraid people would like it too much and usage would become widespread before there was a standard*. Add it to the standard! Right now, we have to use ridiculous workarounds like CSS compilers, which don't fit very well into a lot of modern CMSs.
Fourth, stop deliberating and start releasing official standards, otherwise Microsoft will just run off and do its own thing and we'll all be boned *again*. You're doing way more damage than you're preventing.
Finally, your failure to support as standards things (like the aforementioned CSS vertical centering) that people need to do in the real world on a regular basis just leads web developers to use non-standard code and bullshit like Flash, which circumvents your standard altogether.
End rant.
Those of you who are making this argument, please think about whether you support the idea of corporate personhood and whether you believe that there is a corporate right to free speech and to decide which customers they want to service and which ones they don't.
Unfortunately, this isn't a black and white issue. The founders were all about free speech in the federal government, but the original intent of the constitution was to allow the states to make their own laws that might place additional restrictions on peoples' rights. This turned out to be a very bad idea (slavery, segregation, etc), and the constitution was eventually amended to allow the Federal government to step in and enforce the bill of rights in a way that would *supercede* state laws. But to say the the founders would have necessarily supported forcing a private company, Rackspace, to broadcast someone else's speech is just wrong. They weren't even in favor of forcing the *states* to allow free speech.
All that being said, it's a very legitimate idea that the right to express oneself supersedes property rights, *particularly in cases where there are few options for expressing yourself*. This is the whole idea behind Net Neutrality. Since the Internet is controlled by a few large companies, at some point it becomes necessary to step in with legislation and preserve the *de facto* right to free speech, since if these few private companies decided to arbitrarily restrict political speech (or any other kind of expression) it would put a serious dent in our ability to express ourselves.
All told, Rackspace's obligations to respect the free speech of other groups ought to be tied directly to how many other real, useful alternatives exist to their service. If it would be relatively easy for this site to pick up and move to another server farm, then I think Rackspace's policy ought to stand. On the other hand, if all hosting providers have this policy, or Rackspace is the only one big enough to handle hosting their website, then it becomes a Net Neutrality issue.
Just a quick addendum: You can catch us on IRC, too. We're #opengameart on irc.freenode.net. Here's a web link:
http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=opengameart
I'm in and out of the channel during the work day, but it's a pretty active place, so there's always someone around.
Hey folks!
Founder of http://opengameart.org/ here. I noticed the bandwidth spike, so I thought I'd take a look at the referrer link, and I'm glad to see someone finally mention us on Slashdot. Honestly, I'd love to have a *real* slashdotting. The server's hefty enough to handle it, and the publicity would be immensely helpful. :)
At any rate, one of our underlying missions is to help FOSS games move beyond "programmer art", and we do that by taking donations and then using those to commission artists to do art. I run the site mostly out of pocket, and with all the commissions, it costs me a good $500 monthly, in addition to the roughly $100/month in donations that we bring in (mostly community members with recurring subscriptions). Shameless plug: If you subscribe, even for $3/month, that's money we can use to buy art for everyone that will never go away. :)
One of our current projects is an art revamp for a Smash Bros. clone called Ultimate Smash Friends. ( http://usf.tuxfamily.org/wiki/Main_Page )
Here's are the first two characters we've commissioned:
Xeon: http://opengameart.org/content/xeon-ultimate-smash-friends
Awesome Possum: http://opengameart.org/content/the-awesome-possum-ultimate-smash-friends
It's a lot of work, and it's not cheap, but there's a lot of FOSS game code out there with a lot of potential, and I think it's worth it. Plus, all of the assets we commission are CC-licensed, so they're reusable as part of the commons.
Feel free to hit me up if you have any questions or ideas. If you have thoughts about the site interface (we're still working on it), there's a forum thread discussing planned changes for OGA 2.0. I'd love to hear what you think!
Peace,
Bart K.
http://opengameart.org/
While it's true that politicians do tend to pander to their base in the primaries, this one did it to a much more alarming extent. Obama pandered to the left and went center right after he was elected. McCain pandered to the right and probably would have gone center right also.
Saying "I can't help but think how your response may differ if the political parties were flipped" is a broad and utterly baseless assumption about that particular person making the post. Yes, there are some people for whom it would be true, but may of us on both sides of the political spectrum at least make an effort to hold our candidates to the same standards as we hold the other party's.
Politicians of all affiliations need to be prepared, particularly in the information age, to answer what they said during the primaries. Shoving it under a rug by misusing copyright law is just cowardly.
Percentages may not add up to 100 due to rounding.
Although really, they'd rather release shitty new games and duplicates of their old games on different systems.
Gotta keep killing those fan games. You can't really ruin a good video game franchise with fans jumping in there and making better stuff.
The treaty passes, and suddenly we're in violation of said treaty because unlicensed copyrighted content is moving over our network. O NOES! ITS AN EMERGENCEY!!! WE MUST LOCKS DOWN TEH NETWERKS!!
I'm sure the Obama administration will be in favor of this bill, since they're basically in bed with the content distribution industry already.
Full disclosure: I'm a liberal, and this pisses me the fuck off. I favor government involvement, but only when it's done well and to the benefit of the people of the United States.
...and I'm here to deliberately sabotage the government's work and claim it can't do anything right.
I edited articles until the 'personalities' discovered them. I also removed from vandalism from a page once and was *accused* of posting that particular vandalism. I'm done there.
Commendable troll. Condescending and pedantic, and convincing enough that most people are taking it at face value. I salute you!
...until morale improves.
Can't be bothered?
Have you *used* anti-virus software lately? It takes over your computer and bogs everything down by scanning at irritating times, like every file access.
I don't use anti-virus software, except for the occasional one-off malware scan. I don't get viruses because I don't do stupid shit.
* I don't trust free downloads unless they're open source, or a google on "$SOFTWARE spyware" comes up clean.
* I don't browse porn (or anything else) on internet explorer.
* I don't browse porn with adblock turned off.
* I don't download stupid free desktop frills, like smileys and crap.
* I don't open obvious spam, even if it appears to be from my friends.
* When a webpage informs me that it has SCANNED MY COMPUTER and VIRUS DETECTED, I remember that I did not, in fact, install a virus scanner, and that the message is fake, and I do not have to install their special software to fix it. Instead, I close the web page.
* When doing p2p file-sharing, I use clients that are well known and spyware free.
* I don't put audio CDs into my machine when I'm running Windows, because they might install rootkits.
* I always click the "advanced" button when I install software, because that's where they hide the fact that they're installing a bunch of extra shit I don't want.
* Under no circumstances do I *ever* install Norton, which in my experience is far worse for performance than any virus.
This explains the corpse in the back of that lecture hall in the math building.
So at the office where I work, we used to have these meetings with my whole department (mostly a bunch of programmers and such). I noticed that pretty much everyone in the meeting except me had a mac laptop (I have a dell running Fedora). Anyway, one day I grabbed a sticky note and drew an apple logo on it with a marker, and underneath it wrote "Think different.", then put the sticky note over the Dell logo on my laptop. Anyway, about half way through the meeting, someone finally noticed, and asked me why I had the apple logo stickied to my laptop, and I replied:
"Because I wanted to think different, like everyone else."
5) Fake search traffic by loading sites with referrer spam.
I'm serious. Do a google search for "Bing referrer spam" and see how many results you come up with. My semi-popular website was getting Bing hits for really generic terms like "art" and "audio". The number of these fake hits eclipsed the number of legitimate Bing searches, by a factor of at least a hundred to one. Every single one of these hits came from a Microsoft IP address, and even more maddeningly, every single one of them sent a browser ID string of IE6, thus inflating my IE6 numbers (I've since stopped officially supporting IE6 on my site, although it's possible that it still works. I just don't care enough to check, as *real* IE6 usage is less than 2%).
tl;dr: in one fell swoop, Microsoft is spamming websites and making it look like both Bing and IE6 are being used far more than they actually are. Any numbers about Bing usage are suspect.
Evidence containers full of corn. :p
Unfortunately, this treaty isn't a left/right thing (ACTA originated under the Bush administration, and the Obama administration is carrying on with it). Almost universally, the public hates it and the government loves it (save for a few principled politicians on both sides).
I'm unabashedly liberal, and I believe that there are places where the government can do a lot of good. This is definitely not one of those times. Rather than pointing fingers at other voters, what we need to do as the American public is band together and fight this thing.
My statement doesn't prove his point at all. I was stating that there are plenty of demanding fields where women do just fine, which don't have the ridiculous gender gap that the FOSS community does. While I would agree with you that whiny people tend not to get very far, I would disagree with the assertion that this is a predominantly female trait. Things wouldn't magically improve if women in FOSS "just stopped whining," because that's not the problem. The *problem* is that they don't receive the same treatment.
Furthermore, if you treat women the same as you treat men, then you're not part of the problem; in this case, I would suggest that you become part of the solution by standing up to this sort of crap when you see it, rather than denying that it happens.
Your generalization utterly fails to take into account the fact that there are plenty of whiny douchebag men out there who want nothing but recognition and approval. You also fail to take into account the fact that there are many women out there who are quite capable of standing on their own in the face of adversity. Take medicine, for example. Medical residents are probably one of the most mentally abused groups of people out there. They are frequently disapproved of (and called incompetent, among other things) by their superiors, and somehow a lot of women still make it through and become doctors. In that case, though, the abuse is doled out pretty much equally between the sexes.
I don't find the mere mention of pornography to be sexist -- however, if female developers can't work with a group without being constantly hit on, asked on dates, flirted with, or otherwise weirded out, you can't really expect them to stick around. They're liable to go somewhere where they're treated with equal respect, and I can't blame them.
Get a screenshot of this comment -- I'm about to side with a libertarian.
I'm a liberal. I agree that Net Neutrality is something that ought to be codified in law. However, I don't believe that this law does it as written. This whole "reasonable" thing smacks of "let's throttle bittorrent because it *might* be used for piracy".
How about mandating absolute network neutrality (no throttling, shaping, blocking, etc) and then enforcing the laws we already have? The days where the Supreme Court keeps VCRs legal because of substantial non-infringing use are long gone. We can't trust the court to protect us from this.
Anybody reading this law and not getting a little nervous ought to get their head checked.
Firefox does.