The basic problem is that while it's easy to criticise Flash, the available alternatives simply aren't up to the job yet, nor are they going to be any time soon.
If you're a fan of open, portable standards and advocate HTML5 and CSS over Flash, please remember how much of HTML5 and CSS3 isn't actually standardised yet. Most of these clever demo pages are based on non-portable, browser-specific CSS, which looks similar to what might one day go in CSS3 but often varies subtly between rendering engines, so the CSS files are full of almost the same styling written in three not-quite-identical ways. How is this any better than the old IE vs. Netscape problems?
For serving video, obviously one of the most important applications of Flash today, please investigate which AV formats are actually supported by which HTML5-capable browsers, including Apple's iWhatever platforms. Bonus points are awarded for identifying the universally supported formats that are not encumbered by any kind of IP issues. (Hint: There aren't any.)
This whole Flash vs. HTML5 video debate reminds me a lot of people who criticise table-based layouts on web pages. There are many genuine advantages of CSS and many genuine problems with table-based layout. However, the anti-table crowd still look pretty stupid when you're talking about some trivial page layout and they are advocating 50-line CSS solutions that work on most browsers from the past three years in preference to 5-line table-based solutions that work reliably on every browser since forever. They look even more stupid when they "justify" their position based on usability and accessibility concerns that most of them have never experienced, with implications they don't even understand.
These things are all tools. We should use the best tool for each job. Hopefully, in time, new technologies and standards will leave behind less useful tools, and Flash will either evolve to keep up or it will die. For now, if you're going to bash Flash, please make sure you have a demonstrably better alternative to suggest first. Otherwise you're just a guy ranting on a forum.
I'm not arguing for this type of scanning, but I don't care if people want to look at my penis. [...] But that's just me.
While some people are comfortable with this particular invasion of privacy, clearly many others are not. There are probably things in life that many other people would find acceptable that you personally would find unacceptable too. First they came for the Communists...
That sounds like either you're being ripped off by your suppliers on the good stuff or you have access to cheaper cheap stuff than here in the UK. Every self-build system I've put together in the past decade had a 25–50% premium over what I could have ordered on-line from a large-scale manufacturer, but I don't think any were any worse than that (and they were all cheaper than what I could have bought off the shelf from the local PC World or similar retail outlets).
That said, I would happily even pay double the asking price of the typical cheap **** you get today if I could reasonably expect the PC/printer/whatever to last 5+ years rather than 2–3 if I'm lucky, and if came with a clean OS install, working drivers for everything, and with back-ups of all the basic software also supplied on original media. After all, no system I have built myself to a carefully chosen parts specification has ever failed, even after 5+ years of regular use, while the canned machine I'm writing this on was supposedly fairly high-end at the time it was bought yet has been showing warning signs of unreliable hardware since it was less than two years old. Either I've been remarkably lucky over an incredible period of time with the self-build boxes, which is of course still a possibility, or it really is worth buying the better brands of hardware and taking the time to assemble everything carefully.
However, as I get older and I have other priorities competing for my time, I don't really want to go through the self-build process any more. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any company trying to establish itself as a premium quality PC hardware supplier. Likewise, it seems like no-one really makes everyday software of what I would call acceptable professional quality any more: shipping bug-ridden, hard-to-use junkware and then patching later (or not) has become the norm in the Internet age. Maybe there just aren't enough people like me to make up for all the people who don't know any better and think it's normal for PC power supplies and hard drives to die after a couple of years, printers to stop working because a toner cartridge says you've printed the allowed number of pages with it even though it's still half full, and software to crash and lose your document/spoil your game/whatever at least once before you can finish what you were working on.:-(
In an industry where one is expected to lower your retails costs by 25% every year simply to stay competitive, I can't say I blame them.
Am I really the only one who would rather they put prices up by 25%, but supplied reliable hardware and a clean OS installation with original media?
I would be perfectly willing to pay a higher price in exchange for good quality products, where the hardware doesn't fail after only a year or two, the drivers don't get abandoned because a new OS I don't care about came out six months later, the software doesn't routinely crash or leak sensitive data, etc. Unfortunately, hardly anyone in this business seems to make such products any more.
Equally, one cannot help but notice that almost all of the objective data used to support the scientific theories of global warming today has been known for rather a long time, that the issue of potential man-made global warming has been known for rather a long time, that the IPCC has been reporting on this issue for around 20 years, and yet that climate change only became an earth-shattering, high-profile, media-backed, massive-IPCC-report-endorsed, question-it-and-you're-obviously-crazy Problem(TM) about three years ago.
Put another way, the political climate is a hell of a lot more effective at determing in the popularly perceived "truth" of these issues than the scientific research. caveat lector.
If you really think Word has excellent styling tools, we will definitely have to agree to disagree. Compared to the sort of thing used in serious publishing software, or even to what you can do with CSS on the Web or tools like LaTeX, Word's stylesheets are basic at best. They used to be bug-ridden and almost impossible to configure as well, but even removing the bugs and improving the usability doesn't fix the limited character-paragraph-bigger-stuff model at the heart of the system. It's not as if those other tools are ideal, as any experienced web designer or two minutes on comp.text.tex will tell you, but their capabilities are still far beyond what Word's stylesheets and templates can do.
Likewise, take Word's collaboration features. You could do a lot to help formal document review by supporting the kinds of features that software developers take for granted in typical source control and code review systems: named versions, diff tools, annotating changes and so on. Word provides some basic features in these areas, but again nothing like as powerful as you find if you look for ideas outside of the small world of other word processing software.
As for panning Office 2007, as I noted before, I was criticising the release process, not the product itself. However, our experiences are very different if you think Slashdot is the only place people criticise it. Plenty of regular, non-geek people I know have expressed varying degrees of scepticism about the new Office UI before they've even tried it, even though those people I know who have tried it do seem to be more in favour than against after a few days getting used to it.
I'm not sure point (c) was such a bad idea; much to my surprise, the XBox eventually became successful.
That depends on your definition of "successful". If you are looking to build market share/mind share, then sure, the 360 has done well. If, however, you are a corporate investor looking for a product line to make more money than it costs, then even though the 360 has reached quarterly profitability, I think it's still a net loss so far, isn't it? If so, that is a very poor performance after several years running the XBox project with the kind of war chest and brand name that Microsoft brought to the game from the start.
Sure, of course it is. That's why someone who can do it is worth a seven-figure package.
In this case, however, the Vista project seems to have been a combination of poor expectation management in the market and poor technical management in the development team. The result was an OS that had promised a great deal for several years, but ultimately delivered almost none of the major technical innovations it was originally supposed to, and didn't even do as well as its predecessor on many counts when it finally turned up. That should all have been headed off years before the release, and failure to spot the over-ambitious requirements, mitigate market expectations, and refocus development on achievable technical goals is entirely down to bad management.
I don't agree with this; I think they handled it quite well. What changes would you have proposed?
They appear to have a product that is genuinely more usable than its predecessor for most people, given that the changes were based on hard data, and that the majority of people actually come to like quite quickly when they try it. And yet, in the wider marketplace, there seems to be a serious image problem such that those who have not tried it (who are the important ones from a commercial point of view, because they are your sales targets) assume they won't like it and don't want to upgrade or choose to look at other products instead. Again, this seems to be more about marketing than technical merit, and is something that should have been headed off long before the final release of the product, instead of letting the whole world get into some sort of echo chamber about how the new interface was all... different and stuff.
Also, they basically made the entire release about the new UI, and a few cute tricks you could do to format your documents with it (which are, in most cases, about as useful as WordArt: cute in a demo, but mostly pointless in the real world). There should have been at least one or two compelling improvements in the core functionality as well: a sensible stylesheet tool in Word, more powerful manipulation of multidimensional data in Excel, some improvements in the collaboration tools, something that isn't just pretty.
Except Office 2007 is exactly the kind of innovating that people have been asking for, and you just panned it.
No, I panned the way it was released. If you have a product with genuine merit, yet people don't even want to try it and just assume it will be worse than what you made before because it is different, then you have a basic marketing problem.
I'm hardly a Ballmer fan, but what could he have done substantially differently?
The three most obvious, from a commercial point of view, are probably (a) avoiding the whole Vista fiasco, (b) handling the release of the new Office UI better, and (c) not running so many loss-making divisions in the name of diversification.
Microsoft are in the business of making operating systems and office software, two products that almost everyone with a computer uses at some point. There is plenty that could be done to help people using these products to work more efficiently or enjoyably. That could legitimately drive both paid upgrades and, potentially, sales of back-end software and on-line services that support collaboration using those client-side tools.
But Microsoft aren't doing those things. They've had a catastrophic release for each of their main products, and in doing so, they have managed to kill the automatic upgrade cycle that has been their cash cow for a decade or more, with corporate IT types now seriously questioning why they should pay the Microsoft Tax and possibly upgrade their hardware as well every time a new release of Windows or Office comes along.
Not innovating merely requires laziness, but not innovating and killing a tried and tested business model that all but runs itself and has been successful for years? That requires serious talent at executive level, and the buck stops with the CEO.
Apparently not, or we wouldn't be having this discussion.
If this sort of idiocy stands up, then all the people who warned about the viral nature of the GPL and all the corporate legal departments who banned any use of GPL'd software were right all along.
That said, having actually read the arguments made in the various links in TFS, pretty much all of the claims that themes are derived works and therefore must fall under the GPL appear to be legally and/or technically baseless, just wishful thinking from some pro-GPL people who would like everyone else to be forced to follow the GPL as well.
It was an elected house that passed this law in the first place, with little debate.
That was rather the problem, though: it wasn't really the elected house that passed the law, because an election had just been called and almost no-one was actually in the Commons for the debates and votes on wash-up bills. There was widespread criticism of pushing the Act through essentially on a technicality, from members of all the major parties.
I think we agree on a lot of these points. Diversity does have merit in this context, for one thing.
However, I am opposed to specifically a government-appointed second house, such as we have today. This system serves far too often as a way of keeping lifetime political animals in power when they no longer command popular support, rather than as a way to separate powers and create the kinds of checks and balances that reasonable government requires. Given that the fairness of our current voting system for general elections in the UK is in considerable dispute, allowing the winners to solidify their control via the Lords seems foolish. (The same is true of other senior government figures appointed in similar ways, e.g., most European government apart from MEPs, the US Supreme Court, etc.)
It is regrettable that the quality of debate in the Lords is often better than that of the Commons anyway. Then again, the quality of debate over dinner in a household full of reasonably experienced and well-informed adults is also often better than the quality of debate in the Commons, but we don't give everyone there the power to legislate. I suspect any credible second chamber needs either to have a clear popular mandate of some form or to be selected directly from the population in some unbiased way.
I completely agree about having oversight by a court before compelling any ISP to reveal someone's identity. I'm just saying that there are times when doing that is justified, because some times you do need to be able to catch the bad people.
Given the fact that I was modded Troll and lots of replies contradicting me were modded up, I'm trying to work out whether I'm misinterpreting the post I originally replied to, lots of people are misinterpreting my post, or we're just all talking at cross-purposes...
I am a firm believer in privacy being the default, and I have no problem with an absolute requirement for judicial oversight any time that privacy is going to be violated. (I never said I did, though a few people replying to my GP post seem to have read that into it for some reason.)
But an absolute right to privacy, including preservation of anonymity, by definition means that you can never be held accountable for your actions. The same practical measures that would let pirates get away with on-line copyright infringement (if they happen not to like copyright law and consider that to be ethical behaviour) would also let different people get away with other things, and those might be a lot worse.
Of the ways that have been seriously suggested recently, yes, I think it is. The other ways are essentially some balance of government-appointed vs. elected people.
I think this is a "best possible outcome" vs. "best outcome possible" situation. The best possible outcome may well be something very different; I have in the past suggested something based on random selection from the population, not so different to the juror idea mentioned by dotwaffle in another reply. However, realistically, the best outcome possible for now is moving to a system that at least doesn't give arbitrary government cronies the power to legislate, because.
You can not fight an extremist with reasonable moderation.
If you do, any compromise will result in loosing ground.
Well, I respectfully disagree. I'm completely with you on the seeking-a-middle-ground part. I just don't think when we're talking about rules that have the force of law, any sort of extreme is likely to be a good idea. The elected governments in a democracy are supposed to be there precisely to ensure that only a reasonable balance actually makes it to the statute books. Giving in to extremism is just as damaging, whether it is Big Media "we own your soul" or freeloader "information wants to be free".
There is no absolute right to free speech in this country (or any other than I am aware of, for that matter).
In any case, are you suggesting that spamming, phishing, credit card fraud or outright identity theft, selling life-threatening fake drugs, grooming vulnerable people (children or otherwise), DOS attacks, spreading malware, and all the other illegal things that get done on-line are just "occasional acts of digitial vandalism"?
Really, if you don't have enough freedom to break the law, you probably don't have enough freedom.
That may be an oversimplification, but it's probably true. I would perhaps qualify it slightly differently: if you are going to be completely, preemptively restrained from carrying out an act, the consequences of that act had better be serious and non-reversible enough to justify the constraints. Would I want to allow just anyone to have a large nuclear weapon that they could detonate in the middle of a city? No. Do I think that locking down the entire Internet to prevent a bit of song-swapping is justified? Also no.
And if having complete privacy is legislated, criminals will do whatever the f**k they want, safely hidden behind an anonymity shield that means they can never be held accountable for their actions.
I completely agree about the writing. The latest series has had its moments, but often lacked subtlety and did a terrible job of wrapping up loose ends. I'm not sure what the production team collectively was thinking when it produced the two-part season finale; another comparison makes the point better than anything I can write.
Daleks, as portrayed in the Tenth Doctor episode Doomsday:
Cyberman: Daleks, be warned: you have declared war upon the Cybermen.
Dalek Sec: This is not war. This is pest control.
Cyberman: We have five million Cybermen. How many are you?
Dalek Sec: Four.
Cyberman: You would destroy the Cybermen with four Daleks?
Dalek Sec: We would destroy the Cybermen with one Dalek. You are superior in only one respect.
Cyberman: What is that?
Dalek Sec: You are better at dying.
Daleks, as portrayed in the Eleventh Doctor season episode The Pandorica Opens:
Look at us, we're made of brightly coloured plastic like children's toys! But don't mess with us, because we're marginally more important than all these zillions of other Enemy Races(TM) with Big Spaceships(TM) flying overhead like something out of Close Encounters. We're so bad, we're going to almost completely disappear by the season finale next week, and the only one of us left will have become weak and feeble enough to beg for its life when facing a human with a little gun, even though a mere automaton we created based on another dead human can survive the same intervening hundreds of years completely unharmed! See, look how scary we are!!!!11!eleven!
This is my biggest reservation about Smith, and the reason that I think the jury is still out on his Doctor.
David Tennant had a remarkable ability to flip personality in a heartbeat. One second, he's the happy, adventurous Doctor. Next, he's the awesomely powerful Time Lord with the weight of the whole universe resting on his shoulders. Next, he's somehow the saddest character in the universe, profoundly alone even when surrounded by life. Sometimes, the character traits showed up in a big storyline with a tragic fate for one of his companions, but more telling were the simple acts scattered throughout the series. Compare the eleventh Doctor (Smith) in the big speech at the end of his first episode with just a typical tenth Doctor (Tennant) moment in mid-series:
Doctor #11: Okay, one more, just one. Is this world protected? Because you're not the first one to attack it. Oh, there have been so many. And what you've got to ask is, what happened to them? [Cue montage.] Hello! I'm the Doctor. Basically, run.
Doctor #10: Don't play games with me. You just killed someone I like, and that is not a safe place to stand. I'm the Doctor, and you're in the biggest library in the universe. Look me up.
Somehow, for all the build-up in the first scene, the second one was far more powerful. Whether that was due to the actors, the writing, the direction or something else, I'm not sure.
But hey, if you can't handle an environment with occasional high stress, I wouldn't want you there.
You seem to be confusing refusal to accept unprofessional behaviour by idiot management with an inability to handle high stress situations. I suggest to you that the kind of person the GP poster is talking about may well be quite capable of handling the stress, but prefers to avoid the problem situation in the first place by working for a more professional organisation instead.
That's the great thing about recruitment processes: they're two-way deals, and revealing in both directions. If the interviewer is an ass, or you're good but your CV doesn't get past the HR weenies for some silly reason, then you can pretty much always bet that the corporate culture is poor and the employer isn't somewhere you want to work anyway, so not getting the interview or walking out early is no problem.
You are mistaken. The DMCA provides for both notification by the copyright holder to a hosting service and counter-notification by the person who put the content on the hosting service. Essentially, one of these negates the default safe harbour protections, and the other restores them (but at a price: the person responsible must provide their real identity, and therefore expose themselves to legal action if the takedown notification was justified).
A full lawsuit is far too slow in the age of the Internet, unless there is also some mechanism to get a judge to make a temporary injunction within a matter of hours, preventing further potentially damaging distribution while any case with merit is heard.
It also requires knowing whom to sue, which is not a trivial problem if the host service does not require confirmed ID before people can upload files. Personally, I am of the view that on balance it should be possible to compel an ISP to reveal the identity of someone alleged to be committing copyright infringement for the purposes of legitimate legal actions, as long as the order comes from a judge who is satisfied that this really is the case and it's not just a fishing expedition, intimidation tactic, etc. The problem with a lot of the proposals for dealing with alleged infringers is not that it would allow people to be identified and penalised for breaking the law, it is that it would allow people to be identified and penalised by special interest groups, without due process and proper judicial involvement.
Slashdot Mirror
The basic problem is that while it's easy to criticise Flash, the available alternatives simply aren't up to the job yet, nor are they going to be any time soon.
If you're a fan of open, portable standards and advocate HTML5 and CSS over Flash, please remember how much of HTML5 and CSS3 isn't actually standardised yet. Most of these clever demo pages are based on non-portable, browser-specific CSS, which looks similar to what might one day go in CSS3 but often varies subtly between rendering engines, so the CSS files are full of almost the same styling written in three not-quite-identical ways. How is this any better than the old IE vs. Netscape problems?
For serving video, obviously one of the most important applications of Flash today, please investigate which AV formats are actually supported by which HTML5-capable browsers, including Apple's iWhatever platforms. Bonus points are awarded for identifying the universally supported formats that are not encumbered by any kind of IP issues. (Hint: There aren't any.)
This whole Flash vs. HTML5 video debate reminds me a lot of people who criticise table-based layouts on web pages. There are many genuine advantages of CSS and many genuine problems with table-based layout. However, the anti-table crowd still look pretty stupid when you're talking about some trivial page layout and they are advocating 50-line CSS solutions that work on most browsers from the past three years in preference to 5-line table-based solutions that work reliably on every browser since forever. They look even more stupid when they "justify" their position based on usability and accessibility concerns that most of them have never experienced, with implications they don't even understand.
These things are all tools. We should use the best tool for each job. Hopefully, in time, new technologies and standards will leave behind less useful tools, and Flash will either evolve to keep up or it will die. For now, if you're going to bash Flash, please make sure you have a demonstrably better alternative to suggest first. Otherwise you're just a guy ranting on a forum.
I'm not arguing for this type of scanning, but I don't care if people want to look at my penis. [...] But that's just me.
While some people are comfortable with this particular invasion of privacy, clearly many others are not. There are probably things in life that many other people would find acceptable that you personally would find unacceptable too. First they came for the Communists...
It's about double for a similarly-sounding spec.
That sounds like either you're being ripped off by your suppliers on the good stuff or you have access to cheaper cheap stuff than here in the UK. Every self-build system I've put together in the past decade had a 25–50% premium over what I could have ordered on-line from a large-scale manufacturer, but I don't think any were any worse than that (and they were all cheaper than what I could have bought off the shelf from the local PC World or similar retail outlets).
That said, I would happily even pay double the asking price of the typical cheap **** you get today if I could reasonably expect the PC/printer/whatever to last 5+ years rather than 2–3 if I'm lucky, and if came with a clean OS install, working drivers for everything, and with back-ups of all the basic software also supplied on original media. After all, no system I have built myself to a carefully chosen parts specification has ever failed, even after 5+ years of regular use, while the canned machine I'm writing this on was supposedly fairly high-end at the time it was bought yet has been showing warning signs of unreliable hardware since it was less than two years old. Either I've been remarkably lucky over an incredible period of time with the self-build boxes, which is of course still a possibility, or it really is worth buying the better brands of hardware and taking the time to assemble everything carefully.
However, as I get older and I have other priorities competing for my time, I don't really want to go through the self-build process any more. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any company trying to establish itself as a premium quality PC hardware supplier. Likewise, it seems like no-one really makes everyday software of what I would call acceptable professional quality any more: shipping bug-ridden, hard-to-use junkware and then patching later (or not) has become the norm in the Internet age. Maybe there just aren't enough people like me to make up for all the people who don't know any better and think it's normal for PC power supplies and hard drives to die after a couple of years, printers to stop working because a toner cartridge says you've printed the allowed number of pages with it even though it's still half full, and software to crash and lose your document/spoil your game/whatever at least once before you can finish what you were working on. :-(
In an industry where one is expected to lower your retails costs by 25% every year simply to stay competitive, I can't say I blame them.
Am I really the only one who would rather they put prices up by 25%, but supplied reliable hardware and a clean OS installation with original media?
I would be perfectly willing to pay a higher price in exchange for good quality products, where the hardware doesn't fail after only a year or two, the drivers don't get abandoned because a new OS I don't care about came out six months later, the software doesn't routinely crash or leak sensitive data, etc. Unfortunately, hardly anyone in this business seems to make such products any more.
Equally, one cannot help but notice that almost all of the objective data used to support the scientific theories of global warming today has been known for rather a long time, that the issue of potential man-made global warming has been known for rather a long time, that the IPCC has been reporting on this issue for around 20 years, and yet that climate change only became an earth-shattering, high-profile, media-backed, massive-IPCC-report-endorsed, question-it-and-you're-obviously-crazy Problem(TM) about three years ago.
Put another way, the political climate is a hell of a lot more effective at determing in the popularly perceived "truth" of these issues than the scientific research. caveat lector.
If you really think Word has excellent styling tools, we will definitely have to agree to disagree. Compared to the sort of thing used in serious publishing software, or even to what you can do with CSS on the Web or tools like LaTeX, Word's stylesheets are basic at best. They used to be bug-ridden and almost impossible to configure as well, but even removing the bugs and improving the usability doesn't fix the limited character-paragraph-bigger-stuff model at the heart of the system. It's not as if those other tools are ideal, as any experienced web designer or two minutes on comp.text.tex will tell you, but their capabilities are still far beyond what Word's stylesheets and templates can do.
Likewise, take Word's collaboration features. You could do a lot to help formal document review by supporting the kinds of features that software developers take for granted in typical source control and code review systems: named versions, diff tools, annotating changes and so on. Word provides some basic features in these areas, but again nothing like as powerful as you find if you look for ideas outside of the small world of other word processing software.
As for panning Office 2007, as I noted before, I was criticising the release process, not the product itself. However, our experiences are very different if you think Slashdot is the only place people criticise it. Plenty of regular, non-geek people I know have expressed varying degrees of scepticism about the new Office UI before they've even tried it, even though those people I know who have tried it do seem to be more in favour than against after a few days getting used to it.
I'm not sure point (c) was such a bad idea; much to my surprise, the XBox eventually became successful.
That depends on your definition of "successful". If you are looking to build market share/mind share, then sure, the 360 has done well. If, however, you are a corporate investor looking for a product line to make more money than it costs, then even though the 360 has reached quarterly profitability, I think it's still a net loss so far, isn't it? If so, that is a very poor performance after several years running the XBox project with the kind of war chest and brand name that Microsoft brought to the game from the start.
How? That's a lot easier said than done...
Sure, of course it is. That's why someone who can do it is worth a seven-figure package.
In this case, however, the Vista project seems to have been a combination of poor expectation management in the market and poor technical management in the development team. The result was an OS that had promised a great deal for several years, but ultimately delivered almost none of the major technical innovations it was originally supposed to, and didn't even do as well as its predecessor on many counts when it finally turned up. That should all have been headed off years before the release, and failure to spot the over-ambitious requirements, mitigate market expectations, and refocus development on achievable technical goals is entirely down to bad management.
I don't agree with this; I think they handled it quite well. What changes would you have proposed?
They appear to have a product that is genuinely more usable than its predecessor for most people, given that the changes were based on hard data, and that the majority of people actually come to like quite quickly when they try it. And yet, in the wider marketplace, there seems to be a serious image problem such that those who have not tried it (who are the important ones from a commercial point of view, because they are your sales targets) assume they won't like it and don't want to upgrade or choose to look at other products instead. Again, this seems to be more about marketing than technical merit, and is something that should have been headed off long before the final release of the product, instead of letting the whole world get into some sort of echo chamber about how the new interface was all... different and stuff.
Also, they basically made the entire release about the new UI, and a few cute tricks you could do to format your documents with it (which are, in most cases, about as useful as WordArt: cute in a demo, but mostly pointless in the real world). There should have been at least one or two compelling improvements in the core functionality as well: a sensible stylesheet tool in Word, more powerful manipulation of multidimensional data in Excel, some improvements in the collaboration tools, something that isn't just pretty.
Except Office 2007 is exactly the kind of innovating that people have been asking for, and you just panned it.
No, I panned the way it was released. If you have a product with genuine merit, yet people don't even want to try it and just assume it will be worse than what you made before because it is different, then you have a basic marketing problem.
I'm hardly a Ballmer fan, but what could he have done substantially differently?
The three most obvious, from a commercial point of view, are probably (a) avoiding the whole Vista fiasco, (b) handling the release of the new Office UI better, and (c) not running so many loss-making divisions in the name of diversification.
Microsoft are in the business of making operating systems and office software, two products that almost everyone with a computer uses at some point. There is plenty that could be done to help people using these products to work more efficiently or enjoyably. That could legitimately drive both paid upgrades and, potentially, sales of back-end software and on-line services that support collaboration using those client-side tools.
But Microsoft aren't doing those things. They've had a catastrophic release for each of their main products, and in doing so, they have managed to kill the automatic upgrade cycle that has been their cash cow for a decade or more, with corporate IT types now seriously questioning why they should pay the Microsoft Tax and possibly upgrade their hardware as well every time a new release of Windows or Office comes along.
Not innovating merely requires laziness, but not innovating and killing a tried and tested business model that all but runs itself and has been successful for years? That requires serious talent at executive level, and the buck stops with the CEO.
Take it or leave it, the choice is yours.
Apparently not, or we wouldn't be having this discussion.
If this sort of idiocy stands up, then all the people who warned about the viral nature of the GPL and all the corporate legal departments who banned any use of GPL'd software were right all along.
That said, having actually read the arguments made in the various links in TFS, pretty much all of the claims that themes are derived works and therefore must fall under the GPL appear to be legally and/or technically baseless, just wishful thinking from some pro-GPL people who would like everyone else to be forced to follow the GPL as well.
It was an elected house that passed this law in the first place, with little debate.
That was rather the problem, though: it wasn't really the elected house that passed the law, because an election had just been called and almost no-one was actually in the Commons for the debates and votes on wash-up bills. There was widespread criticism of pushing the Act through essentially on a technicality, from members of all the major parties.
I think we agree on a lot of these points. Diversity does have merit in this context, for one thing.
However, I am opposed to specifically a government-appointed second house, such as we have today. This system serves far too often as a way of keeping lifetime political animals in power when they no longer command popular support, rather than as a way to separate powers and create the kinds of checks and balances that reasonable government requires. Given that the fairness of our current voting system for general elections in the UK is in considerable dispute, allowing the winners to solidify their control via the Lords seems foolish. (The same is true of other senior government figures appointed in similar ways, e.g., most European government apart from MEPs, the US Supreme Court, etc.)
It is regrettable that the quality of debate in the Lords is often better than that of the Commons anyway. Then again, the quality of debate over dinner in a household full of reasonably experienced and well-informed adults is also often better than the quality of debate in the Commons, but we don't give everyone there the power to legislate. I suspect any credible second chamber needs either to have a clear popular mandate of some form or to be selected directly from the population in some unbiased way.
I completely agree about having oversight by a court before compelling any ISP to reveal someone's identity. I'm just saying that there are times when doing that is justified, because some times you do need to be able to catch the bad people.
Given the fact that I was modded Troll and lots of replies contradicting me were modded up, I'm trying to work out whether I'm misinterpreting the post I originally replied to, lots of people are misinterpreting my post, or we're just all talking at cross-purposes...
And which right would that be?
I am a firm believer in privacy being the default, and I have no problem with an absolute requirement for judicial oversight any time that privacy is going to be violated. (I never said I did, though a few people replying to my GP post seem to have read that into it for some reason.)
But an absolute right to privacy, including preservation of anonymity, by definition means that you can never be held accountable for your actions. The same practical measures that would let pirates get away with on-line copyright infringement (if they happen not to like copyright law and consider that to be ethical behaviour) would also let different people get away with other things, and those might be a lot worse.
Of the ways that have been seriously suggested recently, yes, I think it is. The other ways are essentially some balance of government-appointed vs. elected people.
I think this is a "best possible outcome" vs. "best outcome possible" situation. The best possible outcome may well be something very different; I have in the past suggested something based on random selection from the population, not so different to the juror idea mentioned by dotwaffle in another reply. However, realistically, the best outcome possible for now is moving to a system that at least doesn't give arbitrary government cronies the power to legislate, because.
You can not fight an extremist with reasonable moderation.
If you do, any compromise will result in loosing ground.
Well, I respectfully disagree. I'm completely with you on the seeking-a-middle-ground part. I just don't think when we're talking about rules that have the force of law, any sort of extreme is likely to be a good idea. The elected governments in a democracy are supposed to be there precisely to ensure that only a reasonable balance actually makes it to the statute books. Giving in to extremism is just as damaging, whether it is Big Media "we own your soul" or freeloader "information wants to be free".
There is no absolute right to free speech in this country (or any other than I am aware of, for that matter).
In any case, are you suggesting that spamming, phishing, credit card fraud or outright identity theft, selling life-threatening fake drugs, grooming vulnerable people (children or otherwise), DOS attacks, spreading malware, and all the other illegal things that get done on-line are just "occasional acts of digitial vandalism"?
Really, if you don't have enough freedom to break the law, you probably don't have enough freedom.
That may be an oversimplification, but it's probably true. I would perhaps qualify it slightly differently: if you are going to be completely, preemptively restrained from carrying out an act, the consequences of that act had better be serious and non-reversible enough to justify the constraints. Would I want to allow just anyone to have a large nuclear weapon that they could detonate in the middle of a city? No. Do I think that locking down the entire Internet to prevent a bit of song-swapping is justified? Also no.
And if having complete privacy is legislated, criminals will do whatever the f**k they want, safely hidden behind an anonymity shield that means they can never be held accountable for their actions.
The world is not black and white.
An excellent example of why a fully elected second chamber is the only democratic way forward...
I completely agree about the writing. The latest series has had its moments, but often lacked subtlety and did a terrible job of wrapping up loose ends. I'm not sure what the production team collectively was thinking when it produced the two-part season finale; another comparison makes the point better than anything I can write.
Daleks, as portrayed in the Tenth Doctor episode Doomsday:
Cyberman: Daleks, be warned: you have declared war upon the Cybermen.
Dalek Sec: This is not war. This is pest control.
Cyberman: We have five million Cybermen. How many are you?
Dalek Sec: Four.
Cyberman: You would destroy the Cybermen with four Daleks?
Dalek Sec: We would destroy the Cybermen with one Dalek. You are superior in only one respect.
Cyberman: What is that?
Dalek Sec: You are better at dying.
Daleks, as portrayed in the Eleventh Doctor season episode The Pandorica Opens:
Look at us, we're made of brightly coloured plastic like children's toys! But don't mess with us, because we're marginally more important than all these zillions of other Enemy Races(TM) with Big Spaceships(TM) flying overhead like something out of Close Encounters. We're so bad, we're going to almost completely disappear by the season finale next week, and the only one of us left will have become weak and feeble enough to beg for its life when facing a human with a little gun, even though a mere automaton we created based on another dead human can survive the same intervening hundreds of years completely unharmed! See, look how scary we are!!!!11!eleven!
Smith might be the most likable of the lot.
This is my biggest reservation about Smith, and the reason that I think the jury is still out on his Doctor.
David Tennant had a remarkable ability to flip personality in a heartbeat. One second, he's the happy, adventurous Doctor. Next, he's the awesomely powerful Time Lord with the weight of the whole universe resting on his shoulders. Next, he's somehow the saddest character in the universe, profoundly alone even when surrounded by life. Sometimes, the character traits showed up in a big storyline with a tragic fate for one of his companions, but more telling were the simple acts scattered throughout the series. Compare the eleventh Doctor (Smith) in the big speech at the end of his first episode with just a typical tenth Doctor (Tennant) moment in mid-series:
Doctor #11: Okay, one more, just one. Is this world protected? Because you're not the first one to attack it. Oh, there have been so many. And what you've got to ask is, what happened to them? [Cue montage.] Hello! I'm the Doctor. Basically, run.
Doctor #10: Don't play games with me. You just killed someone I like, and that is not a safe place to stand. I'm the Doctor, and you're in the biggest library in the universe. Look me up.
Somehow, for all the build-up in the first scene, the second one was far more powerful. Whether that was due to the actors, the writing, the direction or something else, I'm not sure.
But hey, if you can't handle an environment with occasional high stress, I wouldn't want you there.
You seem to be confusing refusal to accept unprofessional behaviour by idiot management with an inability to handle high stress situations. I suggest to you that the kind of person the GP poster is talking about may well be quite capable of handling the stress, but prefers to avoid the problem situation in the first place by working for a more professional organisation instead.
That's the great thing about recruitment processes: they're two-way deals, and revealing in both directions. If the interviewer is an ass, or you're good but your CV doesn't get past the HR weenies for some silly reason, then you can pretty much always bet that the corporate culture is poor and the employer isn't somewhere you want to work anyway, so not getting the interview or walking out early is no problem.
You are mistaken. The DMCA provides for both notification by the copyright holder to a hosting service and counter-notification by the person who put the content on the hosting service. Essentially, one of these negates the default safe harbour protections, and the other restores them (but at a price: the person responsible must provide their real identity, and therefore expose themselves to legal action if the takedown notification was justified).
A full lawsuit is far too slow in the age of the Internet, unless there is also some mechanism to get a judge to make a temporary injunction within a matter of hours, preventing further potentially damaging distribution while any case with merit is heard.
It also requires knowing whom to sue, which is not a trivial problem if the host service does not require confirmed ID before people can upload files. Personally, I am of the view that on balance it should be possible to compel an ISP to reveal the identity of someone alleged to be committing copyright infringement for the purposes of legitimate legal actions, as long as the order comes from a judge who is satisfied that this really is the case and it's not just a fishing expedition, intimidation tactic, etc. The problem with a lot of the proposals for dealing with alleged infringers is not that it would allow people to be identified and penalised for breaking the law, it is that it would allow people to be identified and penalised by special interest groups, without due process and proper judicial involvement.