I'm tempted to post this anonymously to avoid the inevitable Trolls and Flamebaits this will earn me... but I think I'll put my high karma to good use and stand publicly behind my opinion.
Simple fact: The Gimp, like many other Open Source programs, has a poor user interface. Unlike Photoshop, which, despite its massive feature-set, is easy for an average user to pick up, the Gimp's functions are all buried in multiple levels of right-click menus. It also uses an annoying multi-window interface that clutters your taskbar horribly. The simple fact is that Photoshop is just a lot more pleasant and easy to use.
Likewise, MS Office is a much smoother experience than StarOffice (which, admittedly, has improved by leaps and bounds since its thrice-damned 5.0 incarnation).
Now, I'm behind Open Source 100%, but I don't get so caught up in my zealotry that I lose sight of ease of use issues. If an everyday user can't sit down and use an Open Source program just as easily as they could use a proprietary one, then they're not going to want to switch. It's as simple as that.
Microsoft bullying OEMs isn't news. What's news is that someone actually has the guts to testify about it. Microsoft is quite capable of making Gateway suffer for this.
Next time you buy some mcnuggets, take a good look at them. You might notice that they only come in three different shapes. Chicken McNuggets are actually made out of smaller chunks of meat, which are then "glued" together using a special enzyme. (You may have noticed that the grain of the meat inside a mcnugget goes in all weird directions).
At any rate, the point of all this is that they're not likely to start making them cube-shaped. They could do it now--they just don't, because it betrays the fact that their meat isn't entirely natural. Go fig.:)
Sadly, green and blue lasers require more power, are more expensive, and have a shorter lifetime. I'm not saying that it won't happen eventually--it's just that with that level of miniaturization, it's best to start easy and work up.
...that the material presented in the article suggests the exact opposite of its hypothesis. As was stated, the astronauts began to adapt after a little while days. (The article also suggests that new models can be learned--but isn't that the opposite of hard-wiring?)
Think of it this way: A little kid can't just start catching a ball naturally. It takes a while for it to click. It just so happens that, by the time someone is a teen-ager, they've had to catch things so often that they do it without thinking about it. That's not hard wiring, it's conditioning. Of course, when you've been conditioned to do something over a long period of time, it takes a little while to unlearn it.
Anyway, I just don't see any solid evidence from the material presented that predicting gravitational acceleration is hard-wired into the brain. Take some kids who haven't yet learned to catch into a zero-G environment (Vomit Comet, anyone?) and do the experiment with them. That way, conditioning won't contaminate the results.
Because so many people seem to be having trouble with this...
One would assume that they said "anime-based" because these sorts of battle suits crop up a lot in anime (although generally without invisibility) -- take Bubblegum Crisis, for example. The suit pictured in the article--along with the drawing style and the fact that the wearer is apprently female--looks suspiciously anime-like.
Also, a little note to the humor impaired: The phrase "anime-based" in the title of the story isn't there to imply that the Pentagon is actually trying to be anime-like. It's a joke.
Opensource should not automatically be excused of all liability. If a bug exits and a sizeable amount of time passes with no fix, as new users are downloading and using the product *without being warned* then the maintainers of the source should be held liable. Opensource vendors should be required to post an updated list of bugs as they appear and fix them before releasing the next version of the software.
I'd have to disagree with this. The above represents the biggest problem with any liability to Open Source programmers. If you develop an Open Source project, you're doing so entirely on your own time. You may not have a chance to go back and update the bug list--or you may not feel like it. As long as no one is paying you to maintain your software, you should have absolutely no obligation to change it or update it for anyone.
On the other hand, if someone purchases software that doesn't work as advertised, the vendor that originally sold the software should be responsible.
"Will we have two parallel tracks in the market at once? Not desirable. There are a lot of reasons why that was really a pain in the neck for everybody, and I hope we can avoid that here," Ballmer said. "But it's conceivable that we will wind up with something that will be put on a dual track."
Translation: No, but yes.
Way to go, Steve! Incomprehensible drivel is at the core of Microsoft's strategy, and it looks like you've got it down pat.
On my system (Win 98 SE), IE 5 crashes several times a week. The Mozilla nightly I use crashes maybe once a week, and Moz 0.9.8 is almost perfectly stable.
Maybe I have a corrupt file somewhere, I dunno. Also, there might be a bug fixed in IE6, which I don't want to download because I don't want it taking over my computer like every previous version of IE has done.
It might be version 20 or so. The menu I'm talking about is Help->Options. If they've moved that to a more intuitive place (just an Options menu) and called it Syntax Highlighting, then they're on the right track. I might just upgrade Emacs.:)
Note: This isn't intended as either a troll or flaimbait. I'm just trying to make a point.
Emacs: at a _minimum_, Emacs can be considered to be an IDE of a very superior nature, with elisp programming primitives for editor macros of arbitrary complexity/sophistication/power. Emacss' ability to create and use "major modes" for editing of arbitrarily many different languages in a language-specific, nice way, with color syntax highlighting, etc, are not matched by any PC-based IDE I have ever seen, nor expect to.
I'll give you good syntax highlighting over a wide variety of languages, but that's about all. Emacs's interface is awful. The design feels like it's been thrown together haphazardly over a long time--and quite frankly, it's in need of a major rewrite. For instance, whose idea was it to put color syntax highlighting in the help menu, and who decided to call it Global Font Lock?
A good IDE needs to be intuitive and easy to use. Programmers can't afford to spend a long time learning how to use their IDE--that defeats an IDE's purpose. Quite frankly, IDEs like Netbeans, KDevelop, and (god forbid) Visual Developer Studio beat the tar out of Emacs in terms of intuitiveness and general useability.
That said, I use Emacs for my coding at work. If you know how to use it, and you're writing programs that don't require a lot of seperate files to compile, it can be quite helpful. I just wouldn't want to trust it to manage a large project... and before you mention GNU make, I just want to point out that a lot of programmers are different from us, in that they don't really like configuring things with a text editor and a command line interface.
what other decent sized software vendor actually has a valid business model and is profitable???
Sun and Oracle spring immediately to mind.
Of course nobody else can afford contributions like this!
That is absolutely false. If a software company is big enough that you've heard of them--Red Hat included, then they can afford to cough up a million dollars to butter up some politicians. It just so happens that Mircosoft wanted something really bad, which made it worth it.
Don't pretend that means you anti-microsoft people are some how less corrupt
I'm pretending nothing of the sort. But out of all these software companies, Microsoft is the only one with a monopoly. They're the ones on trial here.
Actually, Attourney General John Ashcroft was appointed by George Bush, and is part of the executive branch, as is (unless I'm mistaken) the Department of Justice. All these people are partisan, and accept campaign money.
Campaign contributions from Microsoft to the republican party this last election cycle have amounted to over $680,000. (They've been generous with the democrats as well, totalling at over $450,000). Their total contributions, just over 1.1 million dollars, are ten times bigger than those from any other software vendor, and nearly half of all the contributions from software vendors combined.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm tempted to post this anonymously to avoid the inevitable Trolls and Flamebaits this will earn me... but I think I'll put my high karma to good use and stand publicly behind my opinion.
Simple fact: The Gimp, like many other Open Source programs, has a poor user interface. Unlike Photoshop, which, despite its massive feature-set, is easy for an average user to pick up, the Gimp's functions are all buried in multiple levels of right-click menus. It also uses an annoying multi-window interface that clutters your taskbar horribly. The simple fact is that Photoshop is just a lot more pleasant and easy to use.
Likewise, MS Office is a much smoother experience than StarOffice (which, admittedly, has improved by leaps and bounds since its thrice-damned 5.0 incarnation).
Now, I'm behind Open Source 100%, but I don't get so caught up in my zealotry that I lose sight of ease of use issues. If an everyday user can't sit down and use an Open Source program just as easily as they could use a proprietary one, then they're not going to want to switch. It's as simple as that.
Microsoft bullying OEMs isn't news. What's news is that someone actually has the guts to testify about it. Microsoft is quite capable of making Gateway suffer for this.
Next time you buy some mcnuggets, take a good look at them. You might notice that they only come in three different shapes. Chicken McNuggets are actually made out of smaller chunks of meat, which are then "glued" together using a special enzyme. (You may have noticed that the grain of the meat inside a mcnugget goes in all weird directions).
:)
At any rate, the point of all this is that they're not likely to start making them cube-shaped. They could do it now--they just don't, because it betrays the fact that their meat isn't entirely natural. Go fig.
Sadly, green and blue lasers require more power, are more expensive, and have a shorter lifetime. I'm not saying that it won't happen eventually--it's just that with that level of miniaturization, it's best to start easy and work up.
Bart
...that the material presented in the article suggests the exact opposite of its hypothesis. As was stated, the astronauts began to adapt after a little while days. (The article also suggests that new models can be learned--but isn't that the opposite of hard-wiring?)
Think of it this way: A little kid can't just start catching a ball naturally. It takes a while for it to click. It just so happens that, by the time someone is a teen-ager, they've had to catch things so often that they do it without thinking about it. That's not hard wiring, it's conditioning. Of course, when you've been conditioned to do something over a long period of time, it takes a little while to unlearn it.
Anyway, I just don't see any solid evidence from the material presented that predicting gravitational acceleration is hard-wired into the brain. Take some kids who haven't yet learned to catch into a zero-G environment (Vomit Comet, anyone?) and do the experiment with them. That way, conditioning won't contaminate the results.
One where democracy rules, where the law is applied equally to both big companies and the little guy.
...but if you move the root dns servers to another universe, we won't be able to access them from here, so it'll be moot.
The parent post really deserves to be modded up a bit.
This might mean those companies are bound to remove you from their mailing lists if they offer to do so at the end of their messages--which most do.
But then, I'm not a lawyer... Anybody with some legal background have thoughts on this?
Because so many people seem to be having trouble with this...
One would assume that they said "anime-based" because these sorts of battle suits crop up a lot in anime (although generally without invisibility) -- take Bubblegum Crisis, for example. The suit pictured in the article--along with the drawing style and the fact that the wearer is apprently female--looks suspiciously anime-like.
Compare to this.
Also, a little note to the humor impaired: The phrase "anime-based" in the title of the story isn't there to imply that the Pentagon is actually trying to be anime-like. It's a joke.
Opensource should not automatically be excused of all liability. If a bug exits and a sizeable amount of time passes with no fix, as new users are downloading and using the product *without being warned* then the maintainers of the source should be held liable. Opensource vendors should be required to post an updated list of bugs as they appear and fix them before releasing the next version of the software.
I'd have to disagree with this. The above represents the biggest problem with any liability to Open Source programmers. If you develop an Open Source project, you're doing so entirely on your own time. You may not have a chance to go back and update the bug list--or you may not feel like it. As long as no one is paying you to maintain your software, you should have absolutely no obligation to change it or update it for anyone.
On the other hand, if someone purchases software that doesn't work as advertised, the vendor that originally sold the software should be responsible.
"Will we have two parallel tracks in the market at once? Not desirable. There are a lot of reasons why that was really a pain in the neck for everybody, and I hope we can avoid that here," Ballmer said. "But it's conceivable that we will wind up with something that will be put on a dual track."
Translation: No, but yes.
Way to go, Steve! Incomprehensible drivel is at the core of Microsoft's strategy, and it looks like you've got it down pat.
This is Slashdot. Stray from the Sacred Topic even for a moment, and you get modded down. Defend yourself, and you get modded down.
On my system (Win 98 SE), IE 5 crashes several times a week. The Mozilla nightly I use crashes maybe once a week, and Moz 0.9.8 is almost perfectly stable.
Maybe I have a corrupt file somewhere, I dunno. Also, there might be a bug fixed in IE6, which I don't want to download because I don't want it taking over my computer like every previous version of IE has done.
...can anyone point to some *real* TCO numbers? As in, biased neither toward Linux or Windows?
Lendrick
It might be version 20 or so. The menu I'm talking about is Help->Options. If they've moved that to a more intuitive place (just an Options menu) and called it Syntax Highlighting, then they're on the right track. I might just upgrade Emacs. :)
Note: This isn't intended as either a troll or flaimbait. I'm just trying to make a point.
Emacs: at a _minimum_, Emacs can be considered to be an IDE of a very superior nature, with elisp programming primitives for editor macros of arbitrary complexity/sophistication/power. Emacss' ability to create and use "major modes" for editing of arbitrarily many different languages in a language-specific, nice way, with color syntax highlighting, etc, are not matched by any PC-based IDE I have ever seen, nor expect to.
I'll give you good syntax highlighting over a wide variety of languages, but that's about all. Emacs's interface is awful. The design feels like it's been thrown together haphazardly over a long time--and quite frankly, it's in need of a major rewrite. For instance, whose idea was it to put color syntax highlighting in the help menu, and who decided to call it Global Font Lock?
A good IDE needs to be intuitive and easy to use. Programmers can't afford to spend a long time learning how to use their IDE--that defeats an IDE's purpose. Quite frankly, IDEs like Netbeans, KDevelop, and (god forbid) Visual Developer Studio beat the tar out of Emacs in terms of intuitiveness and general useability.
That said, I use Emacs for my coding at work. If you know how to use it, and you're writing programs that don't require a lot of seperate files to compile, it can be quite helpful. I just wouldn't want to trust it to manage a large project... and before you mention GNU make, I just want to point out that a lot of programmers are different from us, in that they don't really like configuring things with a text editor and a command line interface.
Lendrick
what other decent sized software vendor actually has a valid business model and is profitable???
Sun and Oracle spring immediately to mind.
Of course nobody else can afford contributions like this!
That is absolutely false. If a software company is big enough that you've heard of them--Red Hat included, then they can afford to cough up a million dollars to butter up some politicians. It just so happens that Mircosoft wanted something really bad, which made it worth it.
Don't pretend that means you anti-microsoft people are some how less corrupt
I'm pretending nothing of the sort. But out of all these software companies, Microsoft is the only one with a monopoly. They're the ones on trial here.
Actually, Attourney General John Ashcroft was appointed by George Bush, and is part of the executive branch, as is (unless I'm mistaken) the Department of Justice. All these people are partisan, and accept campaign money.
Campaign contributions from Microsoft to the republican party this last election cycle have amounted to over $680,000. (They've been generous with the democrats as well, totalling at over $450,000). Their total contributions, just over 1.1 million dollars, are ten times bigger than those from any other software vendor, and nearly half of all the contributions from software vendors combined.
Check my source here.
...how this is either a troll or redundant--since it was modded as both. I've never posted that message before, and I was defending myself.
Go ahead and mod this one down too. How bout Offtopic?
Mod this bastard down, not up. You can find my original post here.
That's standard procedure, really. I don't see where it's big news. Big news would be if the dismissal was actually granted.
...to UCANT.
(Universal Controller of All Network Traffic)
Most murderers will kill again.
How exactly does someone running a standard Windows install go about faking an email bounce? Or on Linux?
Lendrick