I'd bet money that many kids getting a Zune for Christmas will think "well damn, why couldn't it have been an iPod?". Happens all the time...kids want one thing, parents buy what they can actually afford that comes close.
Although holiday sales give you a sign of how much revenue a company is pulling in, this is the *least* representative time in terms of what product is actually *desired*. Who's doing the buying? Not the people using the stuff!
Come back in January, see how many Zunes are returned. Or hell, look at sales in the middle of March or some other random time. Either of those would be more accurate indicators of whether or not the Zune is really hurting the iPod market.
You can certainly accuse them of misusing information that has been made available to them. But let's not pretend they stole it. Have they entered houses and raided computers? Have they forced people at gunpoint to tell them how to decrypt files? No, they simply made a deal with networks that were handed information freely by thousands of people.
We have a right to be angry at the misuse. But there are ways to avoid it, including not putting stuff on the Internet in the first place, encrypting it strongly, and snail-mailing decryption information to trusted eyes.
You can't hand your phone number to a business and then be annoyed because a telemarketer calls.
If you want middle-click-paste behavior on a Mac, it is pretty easy with most 3rd party mice I've seen.
For example, using the Logitech control panel, I can map the middle button to any keystroke...such as, command-V (which every application uses for Paste). Boom - middle-click-paste.
Sign up? Doesn't that deliberately exclude the tens of millions of Anonymous Cowards who have spurred riveting discussion over these 10 years? They have their place!
Post a big sign, name the time and place and let the Anonymous Cowards in!
What's that? No, not the same time and place as the rest of us...
But, this program is surely targeted toward the average person's boring blog, not something that would generate significant traffic. So, is the feature just broken for them now?
It's good to see Microsoft focusing on solving the world's most pressing computing problems, diverting their innovation and patenting dollars toward what is matters most.
Did we need a patent to tell us that Microsoft excels at innovations whose purpose is primarily to annoy users?
I think that until Microsoft's default format for Save is ODF, there will still be a proliferation of Word documents that require post-translation. Anyone have experiences convincing PC users at work to save as PDF for the benefit of Linux and other platforms? I thought so.
I don't know how Word is configured, but I hope you can tell it what the default format for Save should be. At least then, an organization can pre-configure PCs for its employees to save in ODF, and start a reasonable migration to ODF. Telling users "by the way, every time you save you have to select ODF, company policy" will NOT work.
The web, and for that matter an application, is not designed to be input-device-specific. If a site actually cares that I'm using a mouse, then it already has some pretty fundamental problems that the iPhone did not introduce, that you would in fact see on any phone. (Not long ago, I could browse any site I wanted to from a terminal with Lynx. In fact, I still use this as a basic compatibility metric.)
Applications should respond to requests for action. How that action is performed, on some level, should be of no interest to the application code. This is one of many reasons why abstracts in code are important.
Of course, the spammers have already found something new.
Yesterday, I logged in and in the middle of a major WoW city, there were 3 or 4 "jumble-name" accounts similar to the ones who had previously sent whispers. Only this time, they were standing there preaching spam messages over and over, where a lot of people would surely be gathered and overhear them.
While we're all grateful the whispers have gone away, these people are far from done.
20 years have proven that simply having better products is not enough.
Remember: the idiots are still in charge of I.T.
I've seen this time and again. I.T. groups in many, many, many companies are filled with Microsoft apologists who simply don't go to the effort to even find better solutions, much less adopt them. They just buy Microsoft, keep their jobs (even getting bonuses), and continue to siphon far too much money for computer products.
You need two things to dethrone Microsoft. First, open-minded people in charge of I.T. who genuinely work at finding better solutions for the price. Second, you must have management willing to accept risk and not fire the open-minded people if their first transition away from Microsoft doesn't go as planned.
If a kid doesn't want to be tracked, he won't be. Star Trek has only covered this about 12 times by now...if Security can simply ask the Computer where you are, take off your communicator and leave it wherever you're "supposed" to be (like confined to quarters). A kid may do one better by removing the battery.
Still, this is a disturbing trend. What good can come from it? Paranoid parents are paying extra for this technology to avoid potential troubles that are, let's face it, unlikely. Meanwhile, the kid gets so sick and tired of being interrogated about his every move that he decides to ditch his phone: thus robbing him of a real asset when a typical problem does occur (like car trouble in the middle of nowhere).
It's silly that they've already rolled out as many as 3 million. It would make sense, when using a brand new thing, to be a little more cautious (e.g. 98% of the applicants receive old passports for now, 2% get the nifty new technology). Only after a transition period, when the new technology is proven, would they ramp up adoption. Now that a flaw has been found, the government is responsible for millions of problems instead of, say, a few hundred.
Testing is a part of the software process that almost no one seems to teach (and thus almost no applicants seem to know). I really want to see universities make this a strong focus, even a primary focus, prior to implementation.
I see too much software that is not only untested, but designed in a way that makes testing harder than it should be. This is irresponsible and makes it difficult not only to understand software, but to maintain it (or even replace it, since a test suite tells you what important things the software was supposed to do).
A professor doesn't have to immediately delve into the nuances of some complex C++ commercial testing tool, or the process of setting up a test framework. For instance, a class could start with a programming language that has testing built in really well, like Python. Then, the concepts of testing (like what makes a good testcase) can be taught easily and independent of other complexities of programming.
...then there's the fact that a Mac is itself "a good Windows box", by many accounts. So if you can get a good Windows box either way, you really are only looking at the price of the OS.
Not everyone listens to Jobs for the same reason. Of course there will be Mac zealots, but I'd wager a huge chunk of your fabled 98% are watching Apple purely because of its success in the entertainment business.
PC users don't necessarily care about Leopard going in. But they care about new video iPods, or hookups to their televisions, or brain implants, or whatever Apple's dreaming up next. And Leopard will be in the same presentation. Jobs is a master of presentation. Slap up an obviously-cooler OS, with half the price tag, with oh-by-the-way-you-can-run-Windows-if-you-want-to, and people *will* buy.
Somehow, I see this going a little like Apple's surprise price reduction for the iPod just before the Zune came along: Microsoft employees scrambling to hack some last-minute changes into their strategy after hearing what Apple is doing.
So imagine MacWorld just before this January 30 Vista release. Jobs has already shown he's not too afraid to take a stab at Redmond. We all expect some surprise Leopard features that speak for themselves, but expect some intentional jabs as well. Maybe even a TV commercial campaign to steal thunder from the TV campaign Microsoft is sure to launch (because they always do).
Personally, I predict the real show-stopper will be a surprise price reduction from Apple. Seriously, if they knocked Leopard *down* to $99 or something, Microsoft would be looking really bad.
While indeed Perl operators are becoming more "consistent" among themselves, I think Perl's decision to undefine decades-old comforts like the ternary operator (?:) and bit shifting () is a huge mistake. If a language wants to change these things, the results should be clearly *more* intuitive, not just different. Take Python, which recently added the following style of ternary operator: "x = 1 if cond else 2". Yes, it's not "?:", but to me it's a lot easier to understand than the equivalent Perl operator. The fact that Python was able to add a feature by reusing keywords is even better.
Some Perl 6 additions will prove quite useful, like the zip() function (which Python has had for some time, incidentally). Some changes are moderately useful, but it is difficult to see how they are superior to Perl 5 (like getting rid of the "_" short-cut for stat calls in favor of sequencing calls). But a lot of the stuff just doesn't seem to warrant all the effort to change scripts: programmer time is expensive, and is wasted twiddling ASCII characters just because the language wants to use new characters to express *exactly the same concept*.
In my case, I will probably look at my array of Perl scripts, and I will probably decide it is easier to finally switch them over to Python or another superior language. At least then, I will gain something for my trouble.
Is WGA applied universally to downloads, even ones meant to fix serious problems? Or, for instance, can you always download security patches without the rubber gloves?
Probably not. I can imagine hundreds of illegal copies of Windows already taken over and turned into spam bots, etc. and thanks to WGA, there is no way to fix them. Can WGA keep these machines off the Internet, keep them from harming others? No.
In time, networking protocols evolve, systems change, etc. so these wide-open networked machines will eventually lose some of their teeth. But not before another decade or so of anguish, thanks to Microsoft's unbelievable failure to accept responsibility.
The unfortunate truth is that many people don't have the guts to try a Mac. Yes, that's really where it comes from.
Microsoft should be punished for its shoddy products and its business practices. But suppose you believe that, what is the price of your moral fiber? Well, you sure can't play a lot of PC games. And hell, you can't even view certain web sites! Chances are there are clueless I.T. staff at your workplace who have either managed to standardize on software that runs only on Windows, or they only "officially support" the PC and give you a download link to the crappiest Mac software you've ever seen. The list goes on.
It's tough to change. Just as most people won't stand up for their beliefs when it can get them fired, or choose more convenient products instead of being steadfast environmentalists, etc., the average shmuck will not throw Windows away.
I am a Mac user. I'm not an environmentalist.:) But I've never been in a position where I was using Windows regularly, so a "PC user" should tell us what this switch is really like. But I think it takes guts.
In my experience, it is often necessary to recompile from source simply to have more than one version of the same package available at once! Too many pre-built binaries assume they are the only version in the universe you could want in/usr/local/bin.
For some packages a recompile is merely annoying, having to download and reconfigure with a new prefix and rebuild; but for others, it can be a horrible web of configuration options to find numerous dependencies in special locations. This complexity can be really frustrating if all you want to do is relocate the tool so two different versions can be installed.
Pre-built binaries should assume by default that they'll go into a version-specific directory (say/opt/pkgname/1.0), and at the same time they should assume their dependencies can also be found there. The/usr/local hierarchy would remain, but as a hierarchy of references to specific versions of things. The/usr/local hierarchy would contain selected default versions, it would be used for efficient runtime linking (have "ld" search one "lib", not 20 different packages), and it would be targeted for dependencies that truly don't care about the version that is used.
There are other details, of course...for example, it may matter what compiler you use, you may want 32-bit and 64-bit, etc. But the basic principle is still simple: have a standard package version tree on all Unix-like systems so you can "just download" binaries without conflicts, once and for all.
This will serve to proliferate the obsession with the marketing value of domain names, when their very exposure to the average user is really an Internet usability problem that should be fixed.
Already, there are plenty of companies that can't have simply "yourcompanyname.com", and the only reason this "matters" is because users are apparently unable to find a company's web site otherwise.
Similarly, because people screw up the name anyway, there's a whole group of web scum that register "slightly mispelled" domain names. I would predict that someone will buy "b.com" and convince the owner of "d.com" that they must have both for the sake of the dyslexic (I mean no disrespect to those with dyslexia, but this is exactly the kind of crap that will happen).
The domain name simply shouldn't matter. We are now at a point in web history where we should do better. Google is about the best for a more generic kind of "look up by name and not by domain", but I'm thinking of something that probably extends into the smarts of the web browser itself.
Will the game be enhanced to allow enforcement of more rules among group members - for instance, if everyone in a group agrees "let's roll for that chest", have the game guarantee that only the winner can open it?
I would envision a kind of majority voting system, where if at least 3 of 5 players feel a rule is appropriate, it can be "voted in" to the rules that the game enforces on the group's activities.
One of the most frustrating aspects of the game is the chance that a player might "ninja", stealing items that are not his or hers according to those sensible-but-easily-ignored "group rules".
Slashdot Mirror
I'd bet money that many kids getting a Zune for Christmas will think "well damn, why couldn't it have been an iPod?". Happens all the time...kids want one thing, parents buy what they can actually afford that comes close.
Although holiday sales give you a sign of how much revenue a company is pulling in, this is the *least* representative time in terms of what product is actually *desired*. Who's doing the buying? Not the people using the stuff!
Come back in January, see how many Zunes are returned. Or hell, look at sales in the middle of March or some other random time. Either of those would be more accurate indicators of whether or not the Zune is really hurting the iPod market.
Not sure where the Windows/etc. requirements came from, but I'm viewing it perfectly right now on my Mac.
Using Leopard (10.5) and OmniWeb (based on the Safari engine), in case that's significant.
You can certainly accuse them of misusing information that has been made available to them. But let's not pretend they stole it. Have they entered houses and raided computers? Have they forced people at gunpoint to tell them how to decrypt files? No, they simply made a deal with networks that were handed information freely by thousands of people.
We have a right to be angry at the misuse. But there are ways to avoid it, including not putting stuff on the Internet in the first place, encrypting it strongly, and snail-mailing decryption information to trusted eyes.
You can't hand your phone number to a business and then be annoyed because a telemarketer calls.
If you want middle-click-paste behavior on a Mac, it is pretty easy with most 3rd party mice I've seen.
For example, using the Logitech control panel, I can map the middle button to any keystroke...such as,
command-V (which every application uses for Paste). Boom - middle-click-paste.
Sign up? Doesn't that deliberately exclude the tens of millions of Anonymous Cowards who have spurred riveting discussion over these 10 years? They have their place!
Post a big sign, name the time and place and let the Anonymous Cowards in!
What's that? No, not the same time and place as the rest of us...
SeaShore might be what you want: http://seashore.sourceforge.net/screenshot.php
It apparently is based on GIMP but has an OS X interface.
One of the features of Apple's new iWeb release is AdSense: http://www.apple.com/ilife/iweb/#google
But, this program is surely targeted toward the average person's boring blog, not something that would generate significant traffic. So, is the feature just broken for them now?
It's good to see Microsoft focusing on solving the world's most pressing computing problems, diverting their innovation and patenting dollars toward what is matters most.
Did we need a patent to tell us that Microsoft excels at innovations whose purpose is primarily to annoy users?
Here are some of the more basic formulas:
;'
Hours spent solving user problems per week:
% lookupd -q user | egrep '^name:' | awk '{print $2}' | wc -l | perl -e 'print 1.5 *
Hours spent putting up with useless management requests:
% find ~ -name '*.doc' -o -name '*.ppt' -o -name '*.xls' | wc -l
Hours spent reading news while at work:
% grep -i "href=" ~/.mozilla/firefox/default.isu/bookmarks.html | wc -l
I think that until Microsoft's default format for Save is ODF, there will still be a proliferation of Word documents that require post-translation. Anyone have experiences convincing PC users at work to save as PDF for the benefit of Linux and other platforms? I thought so.
I don't know how Word is configured, but I hope you can tell it what the default format for Save should be. At least then, an organization can pre-configure PCs for its employees to save in ODF, and start a reasonable migration to ODF. Telling users "by the way, every time you save you have to select ODF, company policy" will NOT work.
The web, and for that matter an application, is not designed to be input-device-specific. If a site actually cares that I'm using a mouse, then it already has some pretty fundamental problems that the iPhone did not introduce, that you would in fact see on any phone. (Not long ago, I could browse any site I wanted to from a terminal with Lynx. In fact, I still use this as a basic compatibility metric.)
Applications should respond to requests for action. How that action is performed, on some level, should be of no interest to the application code. This is one of many reasons why abstracts in code are important.
Of course, the spammers have already found something new.
Yesterday, I logged in and in the middle of a major WoW city, there were 3 or 4 "jumble-name" accounts similar to the ones who had previously sent whispers. Only this time, they were standing there preaching spam messages over and over, where a lot of people would surely be gathered and overhear them.
While we're all grateful the whispers have gone away, these people are far from done.
20 years have proven that simply having better products is not enough.
Remember: the idiots are still in charge of I.T.
I've seen this time and again. I.T. groups in many, many, many companies are filled with Microsoft apologists who simply don't go to the effort to even find better solutions, much less adopt them. They just buy Microsoft, keep their jobs (even getting bonuses), and continue to siphon far too much money for computer products.
You need two things to dethrone Microsoft. First, open-minded people in charge of I.T. who genuinely work at finding better solutions for the price. Second, you must have management willing to accept risk and not fire the open-minded people if their first transition away from Microsoft doesn't go as planned.
If a kid doesn't want to be tracked, he won't be. Star Trek has only covered this about 12 times by now...if Security can simply ask the Computer where you are, take off your communicator and leave it wherever you're "supposed" to be (like confined to quarters). A kid may do one better by removing the battery.
Still, this is a disturbing trend. What good can come from it? Paranoid parents are paying extra for this technology to avoid potential troubles that are, let's face it, unlikely. Meanwhile, the kid gets so sick and tired of being interrogated about his every move that he decides to ditch his phone: thus robbing him of a real asset when a typical problem does occur (like car trouble in the middle of nowhere).
It's silly that they've already rolled out as many as 3 million. It would make sense, when using a brand new thing, to be a little more cautious (e.g. 98% of the applicants receive old passports for now, 2% get the nifty new technology). Only after a transition period, when the new technology is proven, would they ramp up adoption. Now that a flaw has been found, the government is responsible for millions of problems instead of, say, a few hundred.
Testing is a part of the software process that almost no one seems to teach (and thus almost no applicants seem to know). I really want to see universities make this a strong focus, even a primary focus, prior to implementation.
I see too much software that is not only untested, but designed in a way that makes testing harder than it should be. This is irresponsible and makes it difficult not only to understand software, but to maintain it (or even replace it, since a test suite tells you what important things the software was supposed to do).
A professor doesn't have to immediately delve into the nuances of some complex C++ commercial testing tool, or the process of setting up a test framework. For instance, a class could start with a programming language that has testing built in really well, like Python. Then, the concepts of testing (like what makes a good testcase) can be taught easily and independent of other complexities of programming.
...then there's the fact that a Mac is itself "a good Windows box", by many accounts. So if you can get a good Windows box either way, you really are only looking at the price of the OS.
Not everyone listens to Jobs for the same reason. Of course there will be Mac zealots, but I'd wager a huge chunk of your fabled 98% are watching Apple purely because of its success in the entertainment business.
PC users don't necessarily care about Leopard going in. But they care about new video iPods, or hookups to their televisions, or brain implants, or whatever Apple's dreaming up next. And Leopard will be in the same presentation. Jobs is a master of presentation. Slap up an obviously-cooler OS, with half the price tag, with oh-by-the-way-you-can-run-Windows-if-you-want-to, and people *will* buy.
Somehow, I see this going a little like Apple's surprise price reduction for the iPod just before the Zune came along: Microsoft employees scrambling to hack some last-minute changes into their strategy after hearing what Apple is doing.
So imagine MacWorld just before this January 30 Vista release. Jobs has already shown he's not too afraid to take a stab at Redmond. We all expect some surprise Leopard features that speak for themselves, but expect some intentional jabs as well. Maybe even a TV commercial campaign to steal thunder from the TV campaign Microsoft is sure to launch (because they always do).
Personally, I predict the real show-stopper will be a surprise price reduction from Apple. Seriously, if they knocked Leopard *down* to $99 or something, Microsoft would be looking really bad.
While indeed Perl operators are becoming more "consistent" among themselves, I think Perl's decision to undefine decades-old comforts like the ternary operator (?:) and bit shifting () is a huge mistake. If a language wants to change these things, the results should be clearly *more* intuitive, not just different. Take Python, which recently added the following style of ternary operator: "x = 1 if cond else 2". Yes, it's not "?:", but to me it's a lot easier to understand than the equivalent Perl operator. The fact that Python was able to add a feature by reusing keywords is even better.
Some Perl 6 additions will prove quite useful, like the zip() function (which Python has had for some time, incidentally). Some changes are moderately useful, but it is difficult to see how they are superior to Perl 5 (like getting rid of the "_" short-cut for stat calls in favor of sequencing calls). But a lot of the stuff just doesn't seem to warrant all the effort to change scripts: programmer time is expensive, and is wasted twiddling ASCII characters just because the language wants to use new characters to express *exactly the same concept*.
In my case, I will probably look at my array of Perl scripts, and I will probably decide it is easier to finally switch them over to Python or another superior language. At least then, I will gain something for my trouble.
Is WGA applied universally to downloads, even ones meant to fix serious problems? Or, for instance, can you always download security patches without the rubber gloves?
Probably not. I can imagine hundreds of illegal copies of Windows already taken over and turned into spam bots, etc. and thanks to WGA, there is no way to fix them. Can WGA keep these machines off the Internet, keep them from harming others? No.
In time, networking protocols evolve, systems change, etc. so these wide-open networked machines will eventually lose some of their teeth. But not before another decade or so of anguish, thanks to Microsoft's unbelievable failure to accept responsibility.
The unfortunate truth is that many people don't have the guts to try a Mac. Yes, that's really where it comes from.
:) But I've never been in a position where I was using Windows regularly, so a "PC user" should tell us what this switch is really like. But I think it takes guts.
Microsoft should be punished for its shoddy products and its business practices. But suppose you believe that, what is the price of your moral fiber? Well, you sure can't play a lot of PC games. And hell, you can't even view certain web sites! Chances are there are clueless I.T. staff at your workplace who have either managed to standardize on software that runs only on Windows, or they only "officially support" the PC and give you a download link to the crappiest Mac software you've ever seen. The list goes on.
It's tough to change. Just as most people won't stand up for their beliefs when it can get them fired, or choose more convenient products instead of being steadfast environmentalists, etc., the average shmuck will not throw Windows away.
I am a Mac user. I'm not an environmentalist.
In my experience, it is often necessary to recompile from source simply to have more than one version of the same package available at once! Too many pre-built binaries assume they are the only version in the universe you could want in /usr/local/bin.
/opt/pkgname/1.0), and at the same time they should assume their dependencies can also be found there. The /usr/local hierarchy would remain, but as a hierarchy of references to specific versions of things. The /usr/local hierarchy would contain selected default versions, it would be used for efficient runtime linking (have "ld" search one "lib", not 20 different packages), and it would be targeted for dependencies that truly don't care about the version that is used.
For some packages a recompile is merely annoying, having to download and reconfigure with a new prefix and rebuild; but for others, it can be a horrible web of configuration options to find numerous dependencies in special locations. This complexity can be really frustrating if all you want to do is relocate the tool so two different versions can be installed.
Pre-built binaries should assume by default that they'll go into a version-specific directory (say
There are other details, of course...for example, it may matter what compiler you use, you may want 32-bit and 64-bit, etc. But the basic principle is still simple: have a standard package version tree on all Unix-like systems so you can "just download" binaries without conflicts, once and for all.
This will serve to proliferate the obsession with the marketing value of domain names, when their very exposure to the average user is really an Internet usability problem that should be fixed.
Already, there are plenty of companies that can't have simply "yourcompanyname.com", and the only reason this "matters" is because users are apparently unable to find a company's web site otherwise.
Similarly, because people screw up the name anyway, there's a whole group of web scum that register "slightly mispelled" domain names. I would predict that someone will buy "b.com" and convince the owner of "d.com" that they must have both for the sake of the dyslexic (I mean no disrespect to those with dyslexia, but this is exactly the kind of crap that will happen).
The domain name simply shouldn't matter. We are now at a point in web history where we should do better. Google is about the best for a more generic kind of "look up by name and not by domain", but I'm thinking of something that probably extends into the smarts of the web browser itself.
Will the game be enhanced to allow enforcement of more rules among group members - for instance, if everyone in a group agrees "let's roll for that chest", have the game guarantee that only the winner can open it?
I would envision a kind of majority voting system, where if at least 3 of 5 players feel a rule is appropriate, it can be "voted in" to the rules that the game enforces on the group's activities.
One of the most frustrating aspects of the game is the chance that a player might "ninja", stealing items that are not his or hers according to those sensible-but-easily-ignored "group rules".