The iPhone arrived in 2007. Before that, anything even called a smartphone was so unadvanced it was a different market. This means that for all practical purposes, the entire market that this article is referring to has only EXISTED for under 4 years, and they feel capable of telling us where it will be 4 years from now?
Microsoft is essentially a NON player so far, so the only prediction I feel comfortable making is that Microsoft cash somehow funded these "predictions".
What the hell...45 days to "review" a "procedure"? Pure bureaucracy. We need just one reasonable person to spend 10 seconds using a Sharpie to cross out this step in the "procedure" so life can go on.
This isn't just a Facebook story...it's a problem that someone thought it was OK to share ANY user name and password to ANY service. This is something you just don't do, and people who fail to realize that need to be educated! In addition to all the other things that could be hosed, your password and E-mail address could be changed by the person logging in, to the point where you're unlikely to regain access to your account no matter how much you beg the administrators.
It sure seems that modern "crime" investigations need to start with these words: "alright, first: everyone kindly calm the fuck down".
I'm tired of hearing about cases where there is OBVIOUSLY no real victim, yet the "trial" marches on. And it appears that we have a hard time presuming innocence when there's insufficient evidence to convict.
I hope that this isn't an upward trend...maybe this has always happened to some degree, and we only hear about it more now because of the Internet. Either way, it scares the hell out of me and makes me feel like we should be putting the prosecutors on trial instead of the "criminals".
Kids won't be stopped by that. Maybe each day they'll nominate one friend to carry all the stupid devices to school and log in while the others goof off. Or worse, they'll probably threaten some small kid to do it for them.
Hmm, okay: if it's important to security, don't put it on the damned Internet, and rip the network and wireless cards out of any device that has the data. Station armed guards around the building. Better yet, scribble the information on a napkin in an ancient native language and make it look as unimportant as possible.
You're welcome...please send my 500 million dollar check. Hey you know what, I'll even make it half price and charge you 250 million.
The thing that continues to infuriate me about tabs, is that we're expecting applications to provide them. This is a waste of time for application developers! The lack of tab support is a deficiency in the majority of window managers, that should be addressed (only) at the window manager level.
The proof is in how poorly tabs continue to integrate with OSes. Suddenly you need 5 or 6 commands to deal specifically with tabs, e.g. it seems there has to be a "Close Tab", "Open in New Tab", etc. in addition to "Close Window", all because there is no easy way for the application to distinguish one from the other. Minimization doesn't seem to do exactly what you want. And sheets on Mac OS X, originally awesome for their ability to not block access to more than one window, now end up blocking 20 tabs at once.
But even if this wasn't the case, who is to say that all my tabs should be web browsers? It is completely reasonable to want one of those tabs to be my mail client, a couple to be terminals, etc. with web browsers mixed in. The only sane way to achieve that is with window manager support.
Yes, some window managers have this, but only obscure ones. Until you have Windows and Mac doing this, Firefox won't stop doing it.
Why yes, because when I think of what it would take to quickly open and view PDFs, I immediately conclude that the only solution is a program big enough and complex enough to require a sandbox, to make sure that it can't be exploited.
For years, Adobe has been creating extremely bloated software. And it has been years, not coincidentally, since I've wanted to install any of their stuff.
Why did PDF have to have all this crap added to it? The answer is, it didn't; Adobe just wanted to keep extending their reach, for as long as they could convince people to keep installing "free" readers that just happen to contain your kitchen sink. Enough.
Recommending that people "new to computers" use Windows is the worst advice imaginable. We've given Microsoft over 20 horrible years, and they have managed to make computing almost boring in that time. It is well past time to hand the torch somewhere else...ANYWHERE else. The last thing we need is another generation who thinks Windows is what it means to "use a computer".
Even in 1990, the power and potential of machines was staggering. And I'm sorry, but Microsoft has done NOTHING with that potential. Software is still overly-expensive, locked-in, ugly, and crashing, and impressively it seems that basic tasks are even slower today than on machines of the 80s. It really wouldn't have taken much effort to bring the world way forward, to make PCs absolutely marvelous devices. Instead of realizing the potential, these incredibly sophisticated machines still have pretty basic uses, and I find that sad.
We need another generation, the people "new to computers", to use something new. Let them tinker without the chains of some stupid monopoly, and build a better machine.
Employees that are very happy with a language, and productive in it, might keep their jobs for years; you may never even know that their companies were using that language. One productive employee might do the job of 10 people in some other language, and maybe that's why they aren't hiring.
Some job postings only made me cringe when I saw them, and many make me think to myself: "all-Microsoft shop, never heard of what X, Y or Z can do". Just because there's a job available, doesn't mean the language is popular; it might even mean the opposite, i.e. all the sane people jumped ship months ago, instead of trying to maintain a steaming pile of code, that a company is now desperately trying to hire people to support.
Don't ever learn one of the stupid programming languages just to get a job. Do something you enjoy...make money without programming if you have to, for awhile, until you find a job that requires languages and platforms that you actually like and can be productive in. Nothing else is worthwhile.
I believe that people need to see the effects of accidents in order for it to truly register. (Heck, do this for other serious stuff, too, like the casualties of wars.) Making it cost "more money" to drive dangerously is basically sugar-coating, hiding the very real risks.
There should be ads in prime time that show accident victims whose lives have been turned upside down. Show people who can no longer walk, or who lost limbs, or who lost family members. Make it clear that it was drunk driving, or cell phones, or whatever, that led to their demise.
Too many ignorant people seem to think that the world is a heck of a lot nicer than it really is. That ignorance continues when they get behind the wheel.
You speak of how you want to explore the menu. On OS X that's absolutely wrong. If you have to explore the menu to find something, then someone screwed up.
Few users seem to realize that the Help menu (as of Leopard at least) has full search of all menu items. You can literally type command-? to open the text field, and start typing to have it find matching items. It is actually incredibly easy to "explore" menus on the Mac now.
On windows, you do alt, F, S and get to the save menu item in the file menu. On OS X you do contol-F2, F, S, and get to the save menu.
Well actually, on the Mac it's control-F2, F, down-arrow, S, then return. As much as I hate Windows, the Mac's method is more awkward. (Save is a bad example because it has a direct short-cut, but imagine accessing any item in a similar way.)
Every time something new is created, the squatters make millions, and everyone else has headaches. Does that not sum up ICANN's contributions in the last decade?
The way to stop spam is to eliminate its value, not its source. Spammers send this crap to make money. So who pays them?
If it's a business, then that business is doing a pretty poor job of analyzing its marketing success rates. Just because you can "reach" the whole world, doesn't mean it's worth the money: everyone will delete your "flyer" and make a mental note to hate your brand for eternity (and tell their friends). So, one step is to convince businesses that spam not only won't win any customers, but it will most definitely lose some.
The other likely payer is the receiver, when receiving scam spam. Scammers aren't paying anyone to send spam, they're expecting a payoff when some idiot gives them what they "legitimately" asked for. Again, the solution is education, but a different kind: people need to be informed about how to recognize E-mail scams (apparently some people really can't). Even if one guy in a million sends his life savings, it justifies the effort of spammers.
Maybe novice computer users need a license to drive their mail client, as if it were a car, and I'm only half kidding. They can harm at least themselves if they don't know what they're doing. This education would solve other problems as well.
I've seen this kind of attitude more and more: organizations terrified to change anything, where even the tiniest tweak starts to require a bureaucracy of change control. Years can go by without significant improvement, until eventually a change seems unavoidable and turns into a complicated, expensive and near-catastrophic upgrade. Ridiculously, in these same organizations, "improvements" as silly as discovering some feature in Outlook are heralded as being amazing productivity boosts.
As time goes by, the I.T. people necessary to successfully pull off transitions from A to B grow frustrated and leave, which only makes organizations less likely to ever successfully make that jump.
Is this fear of change because managers are coming from industries that have moved more slowly than technology? I'm not sure.
But this is one of the reasons I hate Microsoft...their software has set the entire industry -- and maybe several industries -- back by at least a decade. Microsoft delivers junk, and in turn Windows software companies seem to just copy Microsoft's bad examples. Entire groups are essentially now trained to believe that computers must be ugly, awkward, and unstable pieces of junk that require entire legions of I.T. people to keep running properly. They see no problem going for coffee while their machine churns away doing what should be trivial tasks. They are trained to believe that software must be really expensive, and that if it isn't hundreds of dollars and supported by an army, it is somehow a "risk" to use and isn't as "good" as what they've been using. It is truly sad that so many groups around the world will probably be completely screwed into using older versions of Windows for years.
This problem occurred only for people who updated their system's Perl distro via CPAN.
A vendor is free to do what it wants in the part of the system it supports. This isn't new, it's been done for decades on Unix with the distinction between the/usr/local hierarchy (a.k.a. "your crap, not ours") and the rest of/usr (i.e. "our crap, not yours").
People need to know that it's better to install customizations in/usr/local/lib/perl5, or even their home directory, than to fiddle with the vendor setup. This not only avoids vendor clobbering, but the separation is cleaner: mistakes are easier to contain and undo, you can easily test whether a problem is with your customizations or the vendor defaults, you don't necessarily need admin privileges, etc.
I prefer free software most of the time anyway, but it is astounding how bad Adobe's Acrobat Reader has become.
On Linux, I now use/usr/bin/xpdf on all PDFs by default: it's ugly, but it is incredibly fast to open, and has worked for every document so far.
On Mac OS X, I continue to be impressed with how good the built-in Preview app really is. I've never had a reason to use anything else.
Acrobat Reader 7 on Solaris was so bulky, slow, and full of Annoying Flashy Ads (TM), that I actually kept around an older version (5.0.9) of acroread in order to have better performance and a less irritating GUI.
In quotes from interviews in the article, and comments here on Slashdot, there seems to be this misguided assumption that "taxpayer" equals "American". That is wrong!!!
Immigrants who work here, even on a visa, pay taxes on their income. They shop at the same stores, forking over sales tax. Many foreign workers own property that is taxed, they buy stocks that are taxed, etc. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find any difference between an immigrant and a U.S. citizen from a "paying taxes" point of view, over the same period of residency.
So, stop acting as if foreign workers contribute no money to the government, as if somehow every use of tax dollars will only impact U.S. citizens.
You can't switch between individual windows in Mac, which is something that pisses me off being an employee of a TV station who uses Macs with Final Cut Studio.
There are several ways to switch between windows on a Mac: - Open the menu of a Dock icon for a running app; all windows are listed. - Open the Window menu from the menu bar while the app is in front. - Use the keyboard (command-tilde or shift-command-tilde for open windows; control-F3 to focus the Dock and tab between icons). - Use Exposé. - Click on the window.
"In most cases, applications that are not document-based should quit when the main window is closed. For Example, System Preferences quits if the user closes the window. If an application continues to perform some function when the main window is closed, however, it may be appropriate to leave it running when the main window is closed. For example, iTunes continues to play when the user closes the main window."
Also, Mac applications do allow access to background controls, but it depends on the application. Some of this is historical, as it is much easier to enable the "background click" behavior in Cocoa apps than Carbon ones. Also, again with the Human Interface Guidelines, Apple prescribes that destructive actions (e.g. Delete) should remain unavailable even if they may otherwise be enabled, for background windows.
I hate laws that essentially force others to pick up the bill for a special interest group's policing.
If the RIAA wants universities patrolled, let the RIAA pony up the money. For example, the RIAA could create some kind of contract with universities to have this done, if they really care that much. (Of course, I'd rather the RIAA just go away.)
The role of a university is education, and their budgets are limited enough. The idea that future tuition will probably be hiked to offset this kind of unnecessary expense, is even more disgusting than the idea of monitoring infringement in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
The iPhone arrived in 2007. Before that, anything even called a smartphone was so unadvanced it was a different market. This means that for all practical purposes, the entire market that this article is referring to has only EXISTED for under 4 years, and they feel capable of telling us where it will be 4 years from now?
Microsoft is essentially a NON player so far, so the only prediction I feel comfortable making is that Microsoft cash somehow funded these "predictions".
What the hell...45 days to "review" a "procedure"? Pure bureaucracy. We need just one reasonable person to spend 10 seconds using a Sharpie to cross out this step in the "procedure" so life can go on.
This isn't just a Facebook story...it's a problem that someone thought it was OK to share ANY user name and password to ANY service. This is something you just don't do, and people who fail to realize that need to be educated! In addition to all the other things that could be hosed, your password and E-mail address could be changed by the person logging in, to the point where you're unlikely to regain access to your account no matter how much you beg the administrators.
It sure seems that modern "crime" investigations need to start with these words: "alright, first: everyone kindly calm the fuck down".
I'm tired of hearing about cases where there is OBVIOUSLY no real victim, yet the "trial" marches on. And it appears that we have a hard time presuming innocence when there's insufficient evidence to convict.
I hope that this isn't an upward trend...maybe this has always happened to some degree, and we only hear about it more now because of the Internet. Either way, it scares the hell out of me and makes me feel like we should be putting the prosecutors on trial instead of the "criminals".
Kids won't be stopped by that. Maybe each day they'll nominate one friend to carry all the stupid devices to school and log in while the others goof off. Or worse, they'll probably threaten some small kid to do it for them.
Hmm, okay: if it's important to security, don't put it on the damned Internet, and rip the network and wireless cards out of any device that has the data. Station armed guards around the building. Better yet, scribble the information on a napkin in an ancient native language and make it look as unimportant as possible.
You're welcome...please send my 500 million dollar check. Hey you know what, I'll even make it half price and charge you 250 million.
Reminds me of a UserFriendly.org comic from a few years ago...went something like this:
"Someone is force-feeding you 5 bricks while kneeing you in the crotch. Suddenly, they decide to feed you only FOUR bricks. Do you THANK them?!?"
The thing that continues to infuriate me about tabs, is that we're expecting applications to provide them. This is a waste of time for application developers! The lack of tab support is a deficiency in the majority of window managers, that should be addressed (only) at the window manager level.
The proof is in how poorly tabs continue to integrate with OSes. Suddenly you need 5 or 6 commands to deal specifically with tabs, e.g. it seems there has to be a "Close Tab", "Open in New Tab", etc. in addition to "Close Window", all because there is no easy way for the application to distinguish one from the other. Minimization doesn't seem to do exactly what you want. And sheets on Mac OS X, originally awesome for their ability to not block access to more than one window, now end up blocking 20 tabs at once.
But even if this wasn't the case, who is to say that all my tabs should be web browsers? It is completely reasonable to want one of those tabs to be my mail client, a couple to be terminals, etc. with web browsers mixed in. The only sane way to achieve that is with window manager support.
Yes, some window managers have this, but only obscure ones. Until you have Windows and Mac doing this, Firefox won't stop doing it.
Why yes, because when I think of what it would take to quickly open and view PDFs, I immediately conclude that the only solution is a program big enough and complex enough to require a sandbox, to make sure that it can't be exploited.
For years, Adobe has been creating extremely bloated software. And it has been years, not coincidentally, since I've wanted to install any of their stuff.
Why did PDF have to have all this crap added to it? The answer is, it didn't; Adobe just wanted to keep extending their reach, for as long as they could convince people to keep installing "free" readers that just happen to contain your kitchen sink. Enough.
Recommending that people "new to computers" use Windows is the worst advice imaginable. We've given Microsoft over 20 horrible years, and they have managed to make computing almost boring in that time. It is well past time to hand the torch somewhere else...ANYWHERE else. The last thing we need is another generation who thinks Windows is what it means to "use a computer".
Even in 1990, the power and potential of machines was staggering. And I'm sorry, but Microsoft has done NOTHING with that potential. Software is still overly-expensive, locked-in, ugly, and crashing, and impressively it seems that basic tasks are even slower today than on machines of the 80s. It really wouldn't have taken much effort to bring the world way forward, to make PCs absolutely marvelous devices. Instead of realizing the potential, these incredibly sophisticated machines still have pretty basic uses, and I find that sad.
We need another generation, the people "new to computers", to use something new. Let them tinker without the chains of some stupid monopoly, and build a better machine.
Job listings don't mean very much.
Employees that are very happy with a language, and productive in it, might keep their jobs for years; you may never even know that their companies were using that language. One productive employee might do the job of 10 people in some other language, and maybe that's why they aren't hiring.
Some job postings only made me cringe when I saw them, and many make me think to myself: "all-Microsoft shop, never heard of what X, Y or Z can do". Just because there's a job available, doesn't mean the language is popular; it might even mean the opposite, i.e. all the sane people jumped ship months ago, instead of trying to maintain a steaming pile of code, that a company is now desperately trying to hire people to support.
Don't ever learn one of the stupid programming languages just to get a job. Do something you enjoy...make money without programming if you have to, for awhile, until you find a job that requires languages and platforms that you actually like and can be productive in. Nothing else is worthwhile.
I believe that people need to see the effects of accidents in order for it to truly register. (Heck, do this for other serious stuff, too, like the casualties of wars.) Making it cost "more money" to drive dangerously is basically sugar-coating, hiding the very real risks.
There should be ads in prime time that show accident victims whose lives have been turned upside down. Show people who can no longer walk, or who lost limbs, or who lost family members. Make it clear that it was drunk driving, or cell phones, or whatever, that led to their demise.
Too many ignorant people seem to think that the world is a heck of a lot nicer than it really is. That ignorance continues when they get behind the wheel.
Few users seem to realize that the Help menu (as of Leopard at least) has full search of all menu items. You can literally type command-? to open the text field, and start typing to have it find matching items. It is actually incredibly easy to "explore" menus on the Mac now.
Well actually, on the Mac it's control-F2, F, down-arrow, S, then return. As much as I hate Windows, the Mac's method is more awkward. (Save is a bad example because it has a direct short-cut, but imagine accessing any item in a similar way.)
Every time something new is created, the squatters make millions, and everyone else has headaches. Does that not sum up ICANN's contributions in the last decade?
As expected, spammers keep becoming smarter.
The way to stop spam is to eliminate its value, not its source. Spammers send this crap to make money. So who pays them?
If it's a business, then that business is doing a pretty poor job of analyzing its marketing success rates. Just because you can "reach" the whole world, doesn't mean it's worth the money: everyone will delete your "flyer" and make a mental note to hate your brand for eternity (and tell their friends). So, one step is to convince businesses that spam not only won't win any customers, but it will most definitely lose some.
The other likely payer is the receiver, when receiving scam spam. Scammers aren't paying anyone to send spam, they're expecting a payoff when some idiot gives them what they "legitimately" asked for. Again, the solution is education, but a different kind: people need to be informed about how to recognize E-mail scams (apparently some people really can't). Even if one guy in a million sends his life savings, it justifies the effort of spammers.
Maybe novice computer users need a license to drive their mail client, as if it were a car, and I'm only half kidding. They can harm at least themselves if they don't know what they're doing. This education would solve other problems as well.
For more on this story, please watch the following interview video...oh crap.
I've seen this kind of attitude more and more: organizations terrified to change anything, where even the tiniest tweak starts to require a bureaucracy of change control. Years can go by without significant improvement, until eventually a change seems unavoidable and turns into a complicated, expensive and near-catastrophic upgrade. Ridiculously, in these same organizations, "improvements" as silly as discovering some feature in Outlook are heralded as being amazing productivity boosts.
As time goes by, the I.T. people necessary to successfully pull off transitions from A to B grow frustrated and leave, which only makes organizations less likely to ever successfully make that jump.
Is this fear of change because managers are coming from industries that have moved more slowly than technology? I'm not sure.
But this is one of the reasons I hate Microsoft...their software has set the entire industry -- and maybe several industries -- back by at least a decade. Microsoft delivers junk, and in turn Windows software companies seem to just copy Microsoft's bad examples. Entire groups are essentially now trained to believe that computers must be ugly, awkward, and unstable pieces of junk that require entire legions of I.T. people to keep running properly. They see no problem going for coffee while their machine churns away doing what should be trivial tasks. They are trained to believe that software must be really expensive, and that if it isn't hundreds of dollars and supported by an army, it is somehow a "risk" to use and isn't as "good" as what they've been using. It is truly sad that so many groups around the world will probably be completely screwed into using older versions of Windows for years.
This problem occurred only for people who updated their system's Perl distro via CPAN.
A vendor is free to do what it wants in the part of the system it supports. This isn't new, it's been done for decades on Unix with the distinction between the /usr/local hierarchy (a.k.a. "your crap, not ours") and the rest of /usr (i.e. "our crap, not yours").
People need to know that it's better to install customizations in /usr/local/lib/perl5, or even their home directory, than to fiddle with the vendor setup. This not only avoids vendor clobbering, but the separation is cleaner: mistakes are easier to contain and undo, you can easily test whether a problem is with your customizations or the vendor defaults, you don't necessarily need admin privileges, etc.
I prefer free software most of the time anyway, but it is astounding how bad Adobe's Acrobat Reader has become.
On Linux, I now use /usr/bin/xpdf on all PDFs by default: it's ugly, but it is incredibly fast to open, and has worked for every document so far.
On Mac OS X, I continue to be impressed with how good the built-in Preview app really is. I've never had a reason to use anything else.
Acrobat Reader 7 on Solaris was so bulky, slow, and full of Annoying Flashy Ads (TM), that I actually kept around an older version (5.0.9) of acroread in order to have better performance and a less irritating GUI.
In quotes from interviews in the article, and comments here on Slashdot, there seems to be this misguided assumption that "taxpayer" equals "American". That is wrong!!!
Immigrants who work here, even on a visa, pay taxes on their income. They shop at the same stores, forking over sales tax. Many foreign workers own property that is taxed, they buy stocks that are taxed, etc. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find any difference between an immigrant and a U.S. citizen from a "paying taxes" point of view, over the same period of residency.
So, stop acting as if foreign workers contribute no money to the government, as if somehow every use of tax dollars will only impact U.S. citizens.
You can't switch between individual windows in Mac, which is something that pisses me off being an employee of a TV station who uses Macs with Final Cut Studio.
There are several ways to switch between windows on a Mac:
- Open the menu of a Dock icon for a running app; all windows are listed.
- Open the Window menu from the menu bar while the app is in front.
- Use the keyboard (command-tilde or shift-command-tilde for open windows; control-F3 to focus the Dock and tab between icons).
- Use Exposé.
- Click on the window.
Should be: http://forum.icann.org/lists/gtld-guide/pdf5GxptFPV1D.pdf
From the Apple Human Interface Guidelines:
"In most cases, applications that are not document-based should quit when the main window is closed. For Example, System Preferences quits if the user closes the window. If an application continues to perform some function when the main window is closed, however, it may be appropriate to leave it running when the main window is closed. For example, iTunes continues to play when the user closes the main window."
Also, Mac applications do allow access to background controls, but it depends on the application. Some of this is historical, as it is much easier to enable the "background click" behavior in Cocoa apps than Carbon ones. Also, again with the Human Interface Guidelines, Apple prescribes that destructive actions (e.g. Delete) should remain unavailable even if they may otherwise be enabled, for background windows.
I hate laws that essentially force others to pick up the bill for a special interest group's policing.
If the RIAA wants universities patrolled, let the RIAA pony up the money. For example, the RIAA could create some kind of contract with universities to have this done, if they really care that much. (Of course, I'd rather the RIAA just go away.)
The role of a university is education, and their budgets are limited enough. The idea that future tuition will probably be hiked to offset this kind of unnecessary expense, is even more disgusting than the idea of monitoring infringement in the first place.