The original acting was pretty bad as well. Not to mention the sets, the entire premise (Really, the Captain, First Officer and Chief Doctor of a star ship beams down to $random planet in T-shirts? What Starfleet manual did that come out of?).It was the time and place that made Star Trek what is was. This was 1966. We hadn't made it to the moon but NASA was on a roll. 2001 hadn't even hit the screens.
The stories really don't age well, the characters really don't age well and we sure the hell didn't age well.
Ultimately, that's the problem. I thought the original Star Trek was great. But, it was 1966 and I was 12 years old. In reality, the "good old days" never actually existed and they weren't actually as good as we remember them.
A faithful re-creation of the original Star Trek is NOT a good idea. There simply have been too many advances in the last 40 years. The cheap sets, cheesey special effects and bad acting just aren't tolerable any more.
"Mobile" is basically a trailer for the cryptographically sealed dystopia after the demise of the general purpose computer. Your options are basically 'consume that content, just the way its creator intended you to' or 'walk away'..
Yes, that is correct. And 'walk away' is exactly what people need to do..The ADD/OCD stare-at-your-phone-every-minute-of-the-day crowd doesn't want to hear it, but if you're having problems surfing the web on your phone, it's because you're doing it wrong.
Browsing the Internet on a phone is a perfect example of the old saying: "Just because you *CAN* do something, doesn't mean you *SHOULD*." Other than the occasional "I need to look up directions to somewhere" I leave my Internet use to comfortably browsing on a real computer where I am in complete control of what software is installed and how it is configured.
If people would 'walk away', a huge drop in mobile ad revenue just might get the message across that websites need to clean up their act. Until then, you're just part of the problem.
Smartphones, Tablets and EBay had very little to do with the demise of SkyMall. Long before those things ever existed people weren't buying SkyMall's useless, overpriced crap. It's amazing they held on for this long. They must have a parent company with lots of money to waste.
That most people don't give a damn about security "because it is hard"?
Actually, security is not hard. But, security done properly requires you to commit substantial resources -- people, time, money. And that cuts into profits, so most most companies are not interested.
But why now? Even back in the 1980s they were selling random overpriced crap, and there were rarely any customers in the stores. They were openly hostile to the few that ventured in, demanding name, address, and phone number for the privilege of buying a battery. Why is it only now, three decades later, that they are finally going under?
In the 80s they at least sold stuff that people wanted. VCRs, computers and computer components, stereo systems and components (speakers, receivers, turntables, etc). And there weren't a lot of other companies selling those products (at least where I live).
But nobody buys those things any more. As the demand for those products disappeared Radio Shack removed them from their stores, leaving them with nothing to sell. And the few things they do have that someone might want can be bought elsewhere, probably cheaper and with less hassle.
But this is a weak analogy at best. I now pay for a bunch of sports channels and kids TV that I don't care about. Your example of internet access; if I'm not going to use it on the plane I don't have to pay for it. Same thing for the light snack or entertainment. I don't have to pay for it. Or I can bring my own candy bar. But with cable, if I want Channels X & Y, I have no choice but to get the package that offers Channels M through Z whether I want them or not. The idea that now you have to pay for a lot of things individually on airlines that you used to get for "free" assumes that I cared about any of those "free" things in the first place.
The problem is, getting rid of the things that you don't want and only getting the things you want, doesn't necessarily lead to lower prices.
People want unbundling of cable channels because they have done the following math:
200 channels for $100 a month = 50 cents per channel. Therefore, if I pick only the 50 channels I might ever possibly care about, my bill will be 50 x 0.50 = $25, a substantial savings.
But there's nothing forcing the cable company to charge the same price for every channel. If you have odd tastes and most of the 50 channels you like are very unpopular, you might actually get your 50 channels for around $25.. But there's nothing stopping the cable company from charging much higher prices for the channels they know are the most popular, so, you could end up choosing your 50 channels and still end up paying about the same amount of money that you pay now for 200 channels.
It's an interesting idea, but getting *TO* Mars isn't the real problem. The biggest problem, that nobody is talking about (because they have no idea how to solve it), is *LANDING* on Mars.
The real problem is the combination of Mars’ atmosphere and the size of spacecraft needed for human missions. While the Apollo lunar lander weighed approximately 10 metric tons, a human mission to Mars will require three to six times that mass, given the restraints of staying on the planet for a year. Landing a payload that heavy on Mars is currently impossible, using our existing capabilities. "It’s this ugly, grey zone. There’s too much atmosphere on Mars to land heavy vehicles like we do on the moon, using propulsive technology, and there’s too little atmosphere to land like we do on Earth. Until we come up with a whole new system, landing humans on Mars will be an ugly and scary proposition."
Worldwide Pants is the production company owned by David Letterman. Looks like he won't be getting a cut of the new Colbert Show. But that's OK. Worldwide Pants owns Everybody Loves Raymond, which is still in syndication and has made a few gazillion dollars.. When Letterman retires next year I'm pretty sure he won't have to get a job as a Wal-Mart greeter to make ends meet.
Content owners want you to watch on cable TV, not YouTube.
Why? They still get paid regardless.
Viacom and the other "content owners" collect billions of dollars a year from all the cable/satellite companies, just for the right to carry their programming. If I never watch a single minute of TV, Viacom and all the others still get paid.
It's harder for me to listen to users justify their "need" for several hundred gigabytes or even terabytes of storage for their personal archives.
Call somebody a pat rat hoarder in real life and they'll likely become horribly offended. Accuse them of the same thing in virtual space, and they wear it like a badge of honor.
I wonder if the average consumer realizes that when they die, no one will give a shit about going through terabytes of crap.
Hoarding physical objects takes up increasing amounts of physical space. Instead of a basement filled with a hundred boxes, I have 8 TB of archived data that takes up about the same amount of physical space as a single hard cover book.
And I couldn't care less what anyone else thinks of my terabytes of stuff. it's for me, not them. And when I die I'm sure they'll just throw it out and free up those few precious square inches of 'wasted' space.
I was a subscriber back in the day. Sad to see it going, but it's not too surprising, given modern trends.
Ah yes. the modern trend of selling out.
From TFA: "Our parent company, United Business Media (UBM), has decided to sunset Dr. Dobb's."
Like so many others, the founders were happy to collect a big pay day and walk away, leaving it in the hands of some other company who only cares about maximizing profits at the expense of all else. And when the profits can't be maximized to their liking they are happy to shut it down. Oh well, Dr. Dobbs lasted a lot longer than most, so I guess there's that.
Yes, I'm glad to see someone is finally growing a pair and standing up to this nonsense.
Funny how, just like in Germany, the newspaper publishers scream that Google is killing them, but when Google leaves they complain that Google's leaving is killing them.
"At the heart of the case is that Apple's use of DRM harmed customers by raising the price of the iPod"
A couple of years ago I received an iPod Classic as a gift. At the time, the price was $259, which I consider to be ridiculous. Does this meant they were even more expensive previously?
Because you assume something easy like iTunes might have some sliver of intuitive design, but nope.. Took me a hour to try and get a CD onto my iPhone.
if you are trying to put a CD on your Phone, you're doing it wrong.
Certainly legal. There's nobody who can't hold your medial information..
Wrong.
HIPAA regulations are pretty strict about this. The company I work for does everything through a 3rd party because of this.
When I told my boss I had to have time off for surgery I was given the phone number for the 3rd party company and they handled everything. They contacted my doctor and obtained all the necessary medical information to verify that I was off work for a legitimate medical reason. When I was ready to return to work, I went to a doctor who examined me and then reported to the 3rd party company that I was OK. The third party company then notified my employer that I was OK to return to work. At no time was my employer ever given any medical information about me.
We have yet to produce anything that even remotely resembles 'intelligence' by any stretch of the imagination. So far we have only managed to create artifical stupidity. We are in no danger of producing Skynet and automated factories churning out armies of Terminators. Hell, 99% of the businesses in the world can't secure their networks from script kiddies or write software that doesn't have more holes than a metric ton of swiss cheese. Those are the real problems that will harm us, long before we even get close to creating 'artificial intelligence'.
So from this information alone, I'm not sure I see the problem.
You have a very large website that I'm sure gets unimaginable amounts of traffic, operating for free and supported by voluntary donations, and their budget is increasing because they've hired engineers to keep the thing running. That all sounds reasonable enough.
So what's the complaint here? Do you think someone is embezzling money, or that they're just stockpiling money for no reason? Do you think that they're spending money in the wrong places, and if so, where you do think they're spending money, and where do you think they should be spending money? I think you need to give me something before I can figure out how to be outraged at all of this.
That's because this is Slashdot and you haven't bothered to actually read TFA.
Improving Wikipedia’s content is not really in the budget. Nearly $20 million goes toward salaries and wages, despite the fact that none of the staff edit Wikipedia as part of their job function. Almost $6 million was spent last year on awards and grants which certainly help produce some content for Wikipedia,but the writers are not typically compensated with anything more than pizza, sandwiches, and soft drinks.
Less than 6% of the WMF budget is spent on Internet hosting even though most people probably believe it’s their biggest expense. Meanwhile, they spend almost as much money (about $2 million) on travel and conferences. There is also a huge bucket for “other operating expenses” totaling nearly $12.5 million — some of which certainly pays for expensive downtown office space in San Francisco.
The WMF staff busy themselves on things that rarely have anything to do with writing, organizing, or exercising editorial discretion over the actual written product of Wikipedia. Instead, the WMF now considers itself a software and technology organization, but ends up doing more harm than good with its software "innovations". The last two software roll-outs — Visual Editor and Media Viewer — were loathed by a wide swath of users. The WMF responded to the community’s rejection of its software by literally forcing it back on the community with a tool called “superprotect”.
It appears that the Wikimedia Foundation has nearly run out of legitimate ways to spend the donors’ money, because much of it ends up in the organization’s savings accounts and bonds, or pays for software programmers who don't really seem to be doing anything worthwhile.
You're absolutely right. Hipsters are killing open source projects left and right with their fucking awful UI changes.
Just look at what happened to gedit. It's a text editor that comes with GNOME.
It's absolutely fucking moronic what they've done to gedit. They've managed to completely destroy the UI of a text editor, for crying out loud!
Why the fuck would I want to contribute anything but a total and complete reversion back to the old UI? Getting rid of this shit-for-brains UI is the best possible bugfix that gedit could undergo right now. But will it be accepted? Of course not! The hipsters can't possibly be wrong about the UI.
Substitute 'Firefox' or just about any other open source program in place of 'Gedit' and you have a perfect description of what is wrong with open source today.
Because closed source almost never has a publicly viewable bug tracker. At best, there's a forum where you can post bugs that most likely will be ignored and rarely acknowledged even if accepted and fixed..
Because closed source never has people from outside the company submitting patches By definition, people other than the developers can't see the source (hence 'closed'). For example. the vast majority of people who work at Microsoft are not allowed to see the Windows source code.
Because closed source rarely solicits or accepts work of any kind from people outside the company, except under NDA.
Slashdot Mirror
The original acting was pretty bad as well. Not to mention the sets, the entire premise (Really, the Captain, First Officer and Chief Doctor of a star ship beams down to $random planet in T-shirts? What Starfleet manual did that come out of?).It was the time and place that made Star Trek what is was. This was 1966. We hadn't made it to the moon but NASA was on a roll. 2001 hadn't even hit the screens.
The stories really don't age well, the characters really don't age well and we sure the hell didn't age well.
Ultimately, that's the problem. I thought the original Star Trek was great. But, it was 1966 and I was 12 years old. In reality, the "good old days" never actually existed and they weren't actually as good as we remember them.
A faithful re-creation of the original Star Trek is NOT a good idea. There simply have been too many advances in the last 40 years. The cheap sets, cheesey special effects and bad acting just aren't tolerable any more.
Sure was. My DVD remote still has the Angle button. I can't recall a single title that used it.
That's because it's a useless gimmick. And it requires lot of extra work to produce, with little or no real benefit.
"Mobile" is basically a trailer for the cryptographically sealed dystopia after the demise of the general purpose computer. Your options are basically 'consume that content, just the way its creator intended you to' or 'walk away'..
Yes, that is correct. And 'walk away' is exactly what people need to do. .The ADD/OCD stare-at-your-phone-every-minute-of-the-day crowd doesn't want to hear it, but if you're having problems surfing the web on your phone, it's because you're doing it wrong.
Browsing the Internet on a phone is a perfect example of the old saying: "Just because you *CAN* do something, doesn't mean you *SHOULD*." Other than the occasional "I need to look up directions to somewhere" I leave my Internet use to comfortably browsing on a real computer where I am in complete control of what software is installed and how it is configured.
If people would 'walk away', a huge drop in mobile ad revenue just might get the message across that websites need to clean up their act. Until then, you're just part of the problem.
Smartphones, Tablets and EBay had very little to do with the demise of SkyMall. Long before those things ever existed people weren't buying SkyMall's useless, overpriced crap. It's amazing they held on for this long. They must have a parent company with lots of money to waste.
That most people don't give a damn about security "because it is hard"?
Actually, security is not hard. But, security done properly requires you to commit substantial resources -- people, time, money. And that cuts into profits, so most most companies are not interested.
But why now? Even back in the 1980s they were selling random overpriced crap, and there were rarely any customers in the stores. They were openly hostile to the few that ventured in, demanding name, address, and phone number for the privilege of buying a battery. Why is it only now, three decades later, that they are finally going under?
In the 80s they at least sold stuff that people wanted. VCRs, computers and computer components, stereo systems and components (speakers, receivers, turntables, etc). And there weren't a lot of other companies selling those products (at least where I live).
But nobody buys those things any more. As the demand for those products disappeared Radio Shack removed them from their stores, leaving them with nothing to sell. And the few things they do have that someone might want can be bought elsewhere, probably cheaper and with less hassle.
But this is a weak analogy at best. I now pay for a bunch of sports channels and kids TV that I don't care about. Your example of internet access; if I'm not going to use it on the plane I don't have to pay for it. Same thing for the light snack or entertainment. I don't have to pay for it. Or I can bring my own candy bar. But with cable, if I want Channels X & Y, I have no choice but to get the package that offers Channels M through Z whether I want them or not. The idea that now you have to pay for a lot of things individually on airlines that you used to get for "free" assumes that I cared about any of those "free" things in the first place.
The problem is, getting rid of the things that you don't want and only getting the things you want, doesn't necessarily lead to lower prices.
People want unbundling of cable channels because they have done the following math:
200 channels for $100 a month = 50 cents per channel.
Therefore, if I pick only the 50 channels I might ever possibly care about, my bill will be 50 x 0.50 = $25, a substantial savings.
But there's nothing forcing the cable company to charge the same price for every channel. If you have odd tastes and most of the 50 channels you like are very unpopular, you might actually get your 50 channels for around $25.. But there's nothing stopping the cable company from charging much higher prices for the channels they know are the most popular, so, you could end up choosing your 50 channels and still end up paying about the same amount of money that you pay now for 200 channels.
The entire premise here is flawed. The code didn't just accidentally do something bad.
That would be like me randomly shooting a gun and if a bullet happens to kill someone I say "I didn't do it deliberately so it's OK".
It's an interesting idea, but getting *TO* Mars isn't the real problem. The biggest problem, that nobody is talking about (because they have no idea how to solve it), is *LANDING* on Mars.
http://www.universetoday.com/7...
The real problem is the combination of Mars’ atmosphere and the size of spacecraft needed for human missions. While the Apollo lunar lander weighed approximately 10 metric tons, a human mission to Mars will require three to six times that mass, given the restraints of staying on the planet for a year. Landing a payload that heavy on Mars is currently impossible, using our existing capabilities. "It’s this ugly, grey zone. There’s too much atmosphere on Mars to land heavy vehicles like we do on the moon, using propulsive technology, and there’s too little atmosphere to land like we do on Earth. Until we come up with a whole new system, landing humans on Mars will be an ugly and scary proposition."
Worldwide Pants is the production company owned by David Letterman. Looks like he won't be getting a cut of the new Colbert Show. But that's OK. Worldwide Pants owns Everybody Loves Raymond, which is still in syndication and has made a few gazillion dollars.. When Letterman retires next year I'm pretty sure he won't have to get a job as a Wal-Mart greeter to make ends meet.
Content owners want you to watch on cable TV, not YouTube.
Why? They still get paid regardless.
Viacom and the other "content owners" collect billions of dollars a year from all the cable/satellite companies, just for the right to carry their programming. If I never watch a single minute of TV, Viacom and all the others still get paid.
Viacom has Google running scared.
People keep posting video content of "banned" content on a regular basis.
Google keeps taking down content that should be allowed.
It's harder for me to listen to users justify their "need" for several hundred gigabytes or even terabytes of storage for their personal archives.
Call somebody a pat rat hoarder in real life and they'll likely become horribly offended. Accuse them of the same thing in virtual space, and they wear it like a badge of honor.
I wonder if the average consumer realizes that when they die, no one will give a shit about going through terabytes of crap.
Hoarding physical objects takes up increasing amounts of physical space. Instead of a basement filled with a hundred boxes, I have 8 TB of archived data that takes up about the same amount of physical space as a single hard cover book.
And I couldn't care less what anyone else thinks of my terabytes of stuff. it's for me, not them. And when I die I'm sure they'll just throw it out and free up those few precious square inches of 'wasted' space.
I was a subscriber back in the day. Sad to see it going, but it's not too surprising, given modern trends.
Ah yes. the modern trend of selling out.
From TFA:
"Our parent company, United Business Media (UBM), has decided to sunset Dr. Dobb's."
Like so many others, the founders were happy to collect a big pay day and walk away, leaving it in the hands of some other company who only cares about maximizing profits at the expense of all else. And when the profits can't be maximized to their liking they are happy to shut it down. Oh well, Dr. Dobbs lasted a lot longer than most, so I guess there's that.
Google needs to play this card more often.
Yes, I'm glad to see someone is finally growing a pair and standing up to this nonsense.
Funny how, just like in Germany, the newspaper publishers scream that Google is killing them, but when Google leaves they complain that Google's leaving is killing them.
ARIN requires operators accept something called the Relying Party Agreement.
But the provider community . . . is choosing not to implement it
So ARIN apparently has no ability to enforce the 'requirement', making the 'requirement' meaningless.
"At the heart of the case is that Apple's use of DRM harmed customers by raising the price of the iPod"
A couple of years ago I received an iPod Classic as a gift. At the time, the price was $259, which I consider to be ridiculous. Does this meant they were even more expensive previously?
No one wants this but you so please give up.
Seriously, what don't you get... Unity was released in 2010. Here's a graph showing distro use:
http://royal.pingdom.com/wp-co...
See how your distro use tanked in 2010? And Mint Spiked? Your users have spoken... listen!
According to that chart, Ubuntu has been steadily declining since 2005 and didn't "tank" in 2010 any worse than it did in any other year.
Because you assume something easy like iTunes might have some sliver of intuitive design, but nope.. Took me a hour to try and get a CD onto my iPhone.
if you are trying to put a CD on your Phone, you're doing it wrong.
Certainly legal. There's nobody who can't hold your medial information. .
Wrong.
HIPAA regulations are pretty strict about this. The company I work for does everything through a 3rd party because of this.
When I told my boss I had to have time off for surgery I was given the phone number for the 3rd party company and they handled everything. They contacted my doctor and obtained all the necessary medical information to verify that I was off work for a legitimate medical reason. When I was ready to return to work, I went to a doctor who examined me and then reported to the 3rd party company that I was OK. The third party company then notified my employer that I was OK to return to work. At no time was my employer ever given any medical information about me.
Another doomsday rubbish article.
We have yet to produce anything that even remotely resembles 'intelligence' by any stretch of the imagination. So far we have only managed to create artifical stupidity. We are in no danger of producing Skynet and automated factories churning out armies of Terminators. Hell, 99% of the businesses in the world can't secure their networks from script kiddies or write software that doesn't have more holes than a metric ton of swiss cheese. Those are the real problems that will harm us, long before we even get close to creating 'artificial intelligence'.
So from this information alone, I'm not sure I see the problem.
You have a very large website that I'm sure gets unimaginable amounts of traffic, operating for free and supported by voluntary donations, and their budget is increasing because they've hired engineers to keep the thing running. That all sounds reasonable enough.
So what's the complaint here? Do you think someone is embezzling money, or that they're just stockpiling money for no reason? Do you think that they're spending money in the wrong places, and if so, where you do think they're spending money, and where do you think they should be spending money? I think you need to give me something before I can figure out how to be outraged at all of this.
That's because this is Slashdot and you haven't bothered to actually read TFA.
Improving Wikipedia’s content is not really in the budget. Nearly $20 million goes toward salaries and wages, despite the fact that none of the staff edit Wikipedia as part of their job function. Almost $6 million was spent last year on awards and grants which certainly help produce some content for Wikipedia,but the writers are not typically compensated with anything more than pizza, sandwiches, and soft drinks.
Less than 6% of the WMF budget is spent on Internet hosting even though most people probably believe it’s their biggest expense. Meanwhile, they spend almost as much money (about $2 million) on travel and conferences. There is also a huge bucket for “other operating expenses” totaling nearly $12.5 million — some of which certainly pays for expensive downtown office space in San Francisco.
The WMF staff busy themselves on things that rarely have anything to do with writing, organizing, or exercising editorial discretion over the actual written product of Wikipedia. Instead, the WMF now considers itself a software and technology organization, but ends up doing more harm than good with its software "innovations". The last two software roll-outs — Visual Editor and Media Viewer — were loathed by a wide swath of users. The WMF responded to the community’s rejection of its software by literally forcing it back on the community with a tool called “superprotect”.
It appears that the Wikimedia Foundation has nearly run out of legitimate ways to spend the donors’ money, because much of it ends up in the organization’s savings accounts and bonds, or pays for software programmers who don't really seem to be doing anything worthwhile.
Most open source projects are
999 header files
355 directories
2345 code files
3 intermixed build systems
A python script or so just because
AND (&&)
There will be not a single line of documentation on how the source tree is laid out, and where to start understanding the project.
2). The response when asking where do I begin. RTFSC ? I'd rather pay for the software than be involved with that crap.
You' re being too kind.
Most are worse than that.
You're absolutely right. Hipsters are killing open source projects left and right with their fucking awful UI changes.
Just look at what happened to gedit. It's a text editor that comes with GNOME.
It's absolutely fucking moronic what they've done to gedit. They've managed to completely destroy the UI of a text editor, for crying out loud!
Why the fuck would I want to contribute anything but a total and complete reversion back to the old UI? Getting rid of this shit-for-brains UI is the best possible bugfix that gedit could undergo right now. But will it be accepted? Of course not! The hipsters can't possibly be wrong about the UI.
Substitute 'Firefox' or just about any other open source program in place of 'Gedit' and you have a perfect description of what is wrong with open source today.
But, how is that specific to open source?
Because closed source almost never has a publicly viewable bug tracker. At best, there's a forum where you can post bugs that most likely will be ignored and rarely acknowledged even if accepted and fixed..
Because closed source never has people from outside the company submitting patches By definition, people other than the developers can't see the source (hence 'closed'). For example. the vast majority of people who work at Microsoft are not allowed to see the Windows source code.
Because closed source rarely solicits or accepts work of any kind from people outside the company, except under NDA.