What the original poster is trying to get at is that if you pick a name that isn't immediately obviously, the onus is now on you to brand and market the hell out of it so that your name comes to mean what you want it to. The examples you gave, minus google, spent millions upon millions to accomplish that goal... like monster. It's a barrier to users thing; by choosing not to go that route, you're creating an extra burden for yourself when it comes to marketing, although if you're willing to put in the juice the gains for going the other route can be there.
Sometimes this works out out really well, and the brand becomes very valuable. There's a whole marketing strategy around choosing names that are memorable and easily stick in your brain, but sometimes this just turns weird: i still have the names 'fatbrain' and 'flipdog' in my head, or something like that, but for the life of you I couldn't tell you what they were actually associated with.
It's too bad you felt that way. It isn't about a dearth, it's about relative market share. Windows currently has something akin to 40 RSS readers of various qualities, while OSX has something like 6-8 of decent quality, past that and you're going to be stretching your idea of what you can call an aggregator.
That said, Apple is a pretty miniscule marketshare at the moment. While you can fudge things by talking about installed base, going by that installed base still decimates OS X's marketshare numbers. In most areas of software selection on the Mac, this is reflected pretty starkly. But not for RSS readers, and that's what I was after.
I'll admit they were a little ra-ra, but that was how they wanted to take it. I simply posed the question, I think it's a worthwhile one.
Um, possibly for a new revision with a beefier CPU. Ogg, for all its benefits, its not kind to most embedded CPUs out there (relies heavily on floating point math, etc).
was given a copy of Snowcrash and have to say I didn't think it was that great. It read like a comic..err, graphic novel, but without the graphics.
That was his... debut... novel, and not his best. If it read like a comic, it's because it was originally intended to be a graphic novel and was retooled.
The bikes at the end were pretty silly, but there are some neat concepts in it. Still, not his best work.
Organisms can die from diseases. A virus won't destroy a computer, the worst case scenario is a wipe and fresh install. This means that Microsoft can make their software bug-ridden.
Actually there has been cases where hardware has been fried from software, as computers get more 'advanced' it isn't hard to imagine a virus disabling protections and running the CPUs at max on your G5 until they boil themselves. But that's beside the point.
Step into a corner of the box, and realize that while your computer may work, you may not be able to do anything useful with it. A server that is offline isn't a server anymore. If your CD drive is busted, your computer can work, but your game can't detect that you have a license.
Thinking back to where things were 20 years ago, it isn't hard to imagine that in 20 years it may be hard to run a lot of software you will consider 'must have for useful computing' without a net connection, and a truly scary virus of the time will let you wipe the computer, but not be able to connect for fear of infection. You've just become a bubble-boy; you're alive, but your capabilities are severely limited. And its already entirely too easy for machines to become infected just by plugging them into the net fresh.
Desktop computers, on the the other hand, are not static systems at all. So there's no really good way for a system to differentiate what's not really supposed to be there from something that was deliberately put there by the user.
Read about some of the trusted computing technologies. That is almost exactly what they provide, down to the bit level in memory.
The fact that the federal and state governments are formed as republics isn't a due to idealism or even cynicism -- rather, it's one chosen because of the impossibility of direct democracy at anything other than the very local level.
You're way off here, and need to read some of Jefferson's writings. "Of the cities, by the cities, and for the cities" is what you'll want to look for.
Cool. I wonder, if they made one you could hold in your hand, and you just walked around doing it to the side of buildings, or even someones home... would your argument still work?
I'd say anyone knowingly risking their life for the sake of (theoretically) advancing the state of human knowledge and achievement is a hero. These just happen to be heros who have died, rather than the many who haven't.
As an aside, I have to say that the best thing about the status-quo Internet is that we don't know what color or gender the person on the other end of the words happens to be.
Sometimes I wondered if the editor was adding his own remarks to the interview, since the parentheticals were italicized
Just to clear this up, I didn't add anything to his remarks in any way, I did however format what was in parantheses in italics, simply because that's how I like to read (with something in italics being the continuation of a thought, and italics helps me jump out of it and back to the main thread). Whether or not that is the correct thing to do is something I'll have to be educated on.
This is part of a larger series of chats I'm doing with people whose work/projects I find interesting, or topics I feel deserve some thought... and its obviously a case of a soup chef being given a piece of filet mignon and doing the best he can with it.
They didn't look at Reagan and shit their pants like the right would have you believe.
Weird, I've never heard that argument. I have heard that the people who came out of that wanted everything that they thought the West represented at the time... prosperity being a big dream.
Um, perhaps it had more to do with the idea that the giant squid is pervasively thought to be what the kraken was based upon worldwide, but now they're found something bigger... so calling it a giant squid doesn't seem right, and calling it a kraken, well, everyone knows a kraken is a giant squid...
The difference between a poor family, or even a lower middle-class family, and a rich family is that when the rich family saves $200 on taxes, they buy another big screen TV. When poor or middle-class family saves money on taxes, they buy *groceries*. Bush cut taxes, maybe, but the bottom 50% or so isn't any better off.
Hmmm. I have a brother who makes about $25k/year or so teaching some of the worst kids you could imagine in a public school. He is also bringing up 2 kids. I distinctly remember him being very, very positively surprised at the tax credit he got and it helping quite a bit.
I predict that the next versions of CD recording software will bundle their own hardware-banging IDE/ATAPI drivers to get around tricks like these.
Heh, I predict the next versions (or most of the bigger companies) will end up adopting this "tricks" so that they aren't sued into oblivion, rather right or wrong, for helping to circumvent copyright.
Sorry, but people like Roxio really, really can't afford huge lawsuits right now, especially ones that would drag on and on. A $20-30 million slush fund by the RIAA would tie up the top 10 makers of this type of software like you wouldn't believe.
It's a simple fact that people expect to be able copy their CDs.
They do, but most people (read, not you and i, but hey) have very limited usage patterns for their music as far as their computer is concerned. Rip from CD, listen in music program, listen on portable device, upload to friends.
Presumably if things are "sandboxed" enough down the software chain so that only the last usage pattern is made really hard, people would bitch like crazy but it would kinda be hard to argue against. Smaller usage patterns would of course be infringed upon, but people would find a way around it. But those finding a way around it would be a small, small minority.
It's hard to believe that a band that has prided itself on pushing the envelope and being controversial would do something like this
They're still the beasty boys, but they've come a... long way... from the giant inflatable dildos on stage. They do good some really interesting music but they're much, much, much tamer and polished now.
I dunno about that. I would agree with the statement that until NASA has a serious mandate for what it is supposed to actually be doing, and how, little of the genius that is there is able to be put to focused use.
Think of it this way, the target market (A graphics professional- Photoshop, Quark, Illustrator, InDesign) has no need for 3D acceleration. The NVidea card in the G5s have plenty enough power for Quartz Extreme, so they put them in.
Not when you're driving a decently high resolution (like a cinema display) and it your expose key. Or are using smaller resolutions with dual displays... the lack of VRAM is killer for these.
But my point is that we, the survivors, need to relearn how to distinguish between valuable data and stuff better left forgotten.
When you lose someone who is very close to you, everything of theirs becomes insanely valuable to you. There's nothing wrong with it, unless you are committing hari-kari if you lose it or it becomes a stumbling block to carrying on with ones life if they have a desire to do so.
This is probably a case where it would behoove one to actually have the experience in question before they start deciding what "society needs to do".
And leave Clinton out of this - like it or not he a damn good President, the adultery has nothing to do with any of this (And shouldn't have led to the attempted impeachment nor morons like you bitching about it - the man has a private life to and is entitled to it.)
I don't think most people who really, really took issue with his "adultery" were up in arms that it happened, but rather he was boffing interns in the lincoln room. IE, some would say that there is a qualifiable difference in gravity between meeting your mistress at a hotel instead of boffing whores in the bed you share with your wife.
I'm not big into the whole clinton bashing thing, but I will admit that the idea of him sticking cigars into an interns twat in the oval office seems to show a certain... disrespect... for the office he was holding.
It's like the joke that Bush is supreme commander of American troops -- a man who has no real military experience. If I was in the armed services I would find that insulting.
Some might, but I think that anyone who has been in the military long enough has had the importance of the military being under civilian control impressed upon them enough that while they may bristle if their advice is unheeded, they understand why it is so.
I didn't mind that they were essentially space operas... that's fine. What the originals had were a sense of fun... rollicking good time. They were cliche'd but entertaining. I don't mind cliches when I'm entertained, I do when I'm watching ep1 & ep2.
Wtf? Stuff is fun. I'm perfectly aware that the evironment was raped to create this computer I'm writing this on or my treo. But I'm also aware that I don't want to use this same computer in a year because new stuff will be out and it'll be fun to explore it and use it, and I'll be raping the environment even more by "not making do".
We're talking about degrees here (how did you post this again?) and you're setting the bar at your level, and measuring else by it.
Sure I could decide I don't like things that don't rape the environment, and build a garden and try to find enjoyment in stacking rocks or something. But then I'd be changing wind patterns or something... and I'd want to not use my hands, so I'd have to use a hoe, which I suppose could be wood and just rape the environment of a tree, but I'd prefer metal, and then I'd want a hoe that was of a better metal to see how if it worked better, and I'd find enjoyment in the fact that it held its edge longer and cut through roots faster... then I'd want whatever new hoe that came out that did it even better...
Slashdot Mirror
What the original poster is trying to get at is that if you pick a name that isn't immediately obviously, the onus is now on you to brand and market the hell out of it so that your name comes to mean what you want it to. The examples you gave, minus google, spent millions upon millions to accomplish that goal... like monster. It's a barrier to users thing; by choosing not to go that route, you're creating an extra burden for yourself when it comes to marketing, although if you're willing to put in the juice the gains for going the other route can be there.
Sometimes this works out out really well, and the brand becomes very valuable. There's a whole marketing strategy around choosing names that are memorable and easily stick in your brain, but sometimes this just turns weird: i still have the names 'fatbrain' and 'flipdog' in my head, or something like that, but for the life of you I couldn't tell you what they were actually associated with.
It's too bad you felt that way. It isn't about a dearth, it's about relative market share. Windows currently has something akin to 40 RSS readers of various qualities, while OSX has something like 6-8 of decent quality, past that and you're going to be stretching your idea of what you can call an aggregator.
That said, Apple is a pretty miniscule marketshare at the moment. While you can fudge things by talking about installed base, going by that installed base still decimates OS X's marketshare numbers. In most areas of software selection on the Mac, this is reflected pretty starkly. But not for RSS readers, and that's what I was after.
I'll admit they were a little ra-ra, but that was how they wanted to take it. I simply posed the question, I think it's a worthwhile one.
Um, possibly for a new revision with a beefier CPU. Ogg, for all its benefits, its not kind to most embedded CPUs out there (relies heavily on floating point math, etc).
was given a copy of Snowcrash and have to say I didn't think it was that great. It read like a comic..err, graphic novel, but without the graphics.
That was his... debut... novel, and not his best. If it read like a comic, it's because it was originally intended to be a graphic novel and was retooled.
The bikes at the end were pretty silly, but there are some neat concepts in it. Still, not his best work.
Organisms can die from diseases. A virus won't destroy a computer, the worst case scenario is a wipe and fresh install. This means that Microsoft can make their software bug-ridden.
Actually there has been cases where hardware has been fried from software, as computers get more 'advanced' it isn't hard to imagine a virus disabling protections and running the CPUs at max on your G5 until they boil themselves. But that's beside the point.
Step into a corner of the box, and realize that while your computer may work, you may not be able to do anything useful with it. A server that is offline isn't a server anymore. If your CD drive is busted, your computer can work, but your game can't detect that you have a license.
Thinking back to where things were 20 years ago, it isn't hard to imagine that in 20 years it may be hard to run a lot of software you will consider 'must have for useful computing' without a net connection, and a truly scary virus of the time will let you wipe the computer, but not be able to connect for fear of infection. You've just become a bubble-boy; you're alive, but your capabilities are severely limited. And its already entirely too easy for machines to become infected just by plugging them into the net fresh.
Desktop computers, on the the other hand, are not static systems at all. So there's no really good way for a system to differentiate what's not really supposed to be there from something that was deliberately put there by the user.
Read about some of the trusted computing technologies. That is almost exactly what they provide, down to the bit level in memory.
you just dont know enough people. exact same drives, exact same quality levels. i've lost a lot of mac drives lately in powerbooks.
Funnily enough, you'd prolly have the most opposition to this from the teachers union. Teaching to the test and all.
The fact that the federal and state governments are formed as republics isn't a due to idealism or even cynicism -- rather, it's one chosen because of the impossibility of direct democracy at anything other than the very local level.
You're way off here, and need to read some of Jefferson's writings. "Of the cities, by the cities, and for the cities" is what you'll want to look for.
Cool. I wonder, if they made one you could hold in your hand, and you just walked around doing it to the side of buildings, or even someones home... would your argument still work?
I'd say anyone knowingly risking their life for the sake of (theoretically) advancing the state of human knowledge and achievement is a hero. These just happen to be heros who have died, rather than the many who haven't.
I wonder how many slashdotters are black
As an aside, I have to say that the best thing about the status-quo Internet is that we don't know what color or gender the person on the other end of the words happens to be.
Freeing, that.
Sometimes I wondered if the editor was adding his own remarks to the interview, since the parentheticals were italicized
Just to clear this up, I didn't add anything to his remarks in any way, I did however format what was in parantheses in italics, simply because that's how I like to read (with something in italics being the continuation of a thought, and italics helps me jump out of it and back to the main thread). Whether or not that is the correct thing to do is something I'll have to be educated on.
This is part of a larger series of chats I'm doing with people whose work/projects I find interesting, or topics I feel deserve some thought... and its obviously a case of a soup chef being given a piece of filet mignon and doing the best he can with it.
They didn't look at Reagan and shit their pants like the right would have you believe.
Weird, I've never heard that argument. I have heard that the people who came out of that wanted everything that they thought the West represented at the time... prosperity being a big dream.
Um, perhaps it had more to do with the idea that the giant squid is pervasively thought to be what the kraken was based upon worldwide, but now they're found something bigger... so calling it a giant squid doesn't seem right, and calling it a kraken, well, everyone knows a kraken is a giant squid...
The difference between a poor family, or even a lower middle-class family, and a rich family is that when the rich family saves $200 on taxes, they buy another big screen TV. When poor or middle-class family saves money on taxes, they buy *groceries*. Bush cut taxes, maybe, but the bottom 50% or so isn't any better off.
Hmmm. I have a brother who makes about $25k/year or so teaching some of the worst kids you could imagine in a public school. He is also bringing up 2 kids. I distinctly remember him being very, very positively surprised at the tax credit he got and it helping quite a bit.
I predict that the next versions of CD recording software will bundle their own hardware-banging IDE/ATAPI drivers to get around tricks like these.
Heh, I predict the next versions (or most of the bigger companies) will end up adopting this "tricks" so that they aren't sued into oblivion, rather right or wrong, for helping to circumvent copyright.
Sorry, but people like Roxio really, really can't afford huge lawsuits right now, especially ones that would drag on and on. A $20-30 million slush fund by the RIAA would tie up the top 10 makers of this type of software like you wouldn't believe.
It's a simple fact that people expect to be able copy their CDs.
They do, but most people (read, not you and i, but hey) have very limited usage patterns for their music as far as their computer is concerned. Rip from CD, listen in music program, listen on portable device, upload to friends.
Presumably if things are "sandboxed" enough down the software chain so that only the last usage pattern is made really hard, people would bitch like crazy but it would kinda be hard to argue against. Smaller usage patterns would of course be infringed upon, but people would find a way around it. But those finding a way around it would be a small, small minority.
Oh well, I hope I'm wrong and you're right.
It's hard to believe that a band that has prided itself on pushing the envelope and being controversial would do something like this
They're still the beasty boys, but they've come a... long way... from the giant inflatable dildos on stage. They do good some really interesting music but they're much, much, much tamer and polished now.
I dunno about that. I would agree with the statement that until NASA has a serious mandate for what it is supposed to actually be doing, and how, little of the genius that is there is able to be put to focused use.
Think of it this way, the target market (A graphics professional- Photoshop, Quark, Illustrator, InDesign) has no need for 3D acceleration. The NVidea card in the G5s have plenty enough power for Quartz Extreme, so they put them in.
Not when you're driving a decently high resolution (like a cinema display) and it your expose key. Or are using smaller resolutions with dual displays... the lack of VRAM is killer for these.
But my point is that we, the survivors, need to relearn how to distinguish between valuable data and stuff better left forgotten.
When you lose someone who is very close to you, everything of theirs becomes insanely valuable to you. There's nothing wrong with it, unless you are committing hari-kari if you lose it or it becomes a stumbling block to carrying on with ones life if they have a desire to do so.
This is probably a case where it would behoove one to actually have the experience in question before they start deciding what "society needs to do".
And leave Clinton out of this - like it or not he a damn good President, the adultery has nothing to do with any of this (And shouldn't have led to the attempted impeachment nor morons like you bitching about it - the man has a private life to and is entitled to it.)
I don't think most people who really, really took issue with his "adultery" were up in arms that it happened, but rather he was boffing interns in the lincoln room. IE, some would say that there is a qualifiable difference in gravity between meeting your mistress at a hotel instead of boffing whores in the bed you share with your wife.
I'm not big into the whole clinton bashing thing, but I will admit that the idea of him sticking cigars into an interns twat in the oval office seems to show a certain... disrespect... for the office he was holding.
It's like the joke that Bush is supreme commander of American troops -- a man who has no real military experience. If I was in the armed services I would find that insulting.
Some might, but I think that anyone who has been in the military long enough has had the importance of the military being under civilian control impressed upon them enough that while they may bristle if their advice is unheeded, they understand why it is so.
I didn't mind that they were essentially space operas... that's fine. What the originals had were a sense of fun... rollicking good time. They were cliche'd but entertaining. I don't mind cliches when I'm entertained, I do when I'm watching ep1 & ep2.
Wtf? Stuff is fun. I'm perfectly aware that the evironment was raped to create this computer I'm writing this on or my treo. But I'm also aware that I don't want to use this same computer in a year because new stuff will be out and it'll be fun to explore it and use it, and I'll be raping the environment even more by "not making do".
We're talking about degrees here (how did you post this again?) and you're setting the bar at your level, and measuring else by it.
Sure I could decide I don't like things that don't rape the environment, and build a garden and try to find enjoyment in stacking rocks or something. But then I'd be changing wind patterns or something... and I'd want to not use my hands, so I'd have to use a hoe, which I suppose could be wood and just rape the environment of a tree, but I'd prefer metal, and then I'd want a hoe that was of a better metal to see how if it worked better, and I'd find enjoyment in the fact that it held its edge longer and cut through roots faster... then I'd want whatever new hoe that came out that did it even better...