I'm gonna grant the author a free pass on the writing since it's obvious English is not his first language. But the rest of the article seems to be vague hand-wavy FUD and anecdotal complaints. To take two of the more cohesive statements:
IE7 was supposed to comply more with the standards what in fact isn't true.
The truth is that standards were not the first priority of IE7 (they are an evil mega-corporation after all), but they did do an awful lot of work on them. Just take a look at the list of CSS improvements over at the IEBlog. They acknowledge that there's a lot more work to do, but it's clear from this that they've solved a lot of headaches for CSS developers.
And the MOST killer thing was the DISability of IE to submit data through "input type img" which actually was the whole sites data...
I'm assuming the author means forms won't submit with an <input type="image"> tag. Without even testing it, I can't believe for one second this is true. This is a major backbone of HTML going back to at least HTML 2, and used in millions of websites. If this were broken it would have been fixed during beta. Microsoft may not care that much about web standards but they do care about backwards compatibility, and a lot of their decision making process has centered around not breaking things that worked in IE6.
It's likely IE7 is going to be a headache for web developers, but this article doesn't do anything to support that argument. As a web developer IE7 hasn't really taken any of my time. So far it's been more reliable than IE6, and I look forward to the day when IE7 is the standard and IE6 is an afterthought for picky clients.
Well consider squirting songs permanently. That alone could be a huge viral marketing scheme among the demographic that matters.
Not to mention that maybe the reason more people don't buy online music is because of DRM and other hassles. It's pretty easy to brainstorm ways to blow illegal P2P out of the water from a usability standpoint. Add a reasonable fee and you've got real potential to grow the market. I'm not saying it's a slamdunk.... but $10 for low-quality DRM albums? It drives kids straight to P2P.
If there were a reasonable priced subscription service without DRM, so you could easily use the music however you wanted, just think of the cool factor. Sure kids would pirate music, but the service would be so cool that everyone would want it anyway. It could actually cannibalize the piracy networks which depend on large numbers of people. By being easy to use, such a service could appeal to parents as well and make a better selling point for the kids (the best salesmen of all!).
I admit that's all pretty optimistic, but anecdotally the music industry has systematically destroyed my incentive to buy new music over the past 5 years. These days I'm hesitant to buy anything from major labels. They don't trust me, and they don't cultivate my interest as a music lover. As a customer I would be ecstatic to see exciting new products instead of boring new DRM and incompatibilities. The difference is the board members asking themselves "How can we make the music experience better?" instead of "How can we protect or IP?".
You actually think that people consider that [DRM] when buying something? Laf.
No, but overtime it will affect the popularity as people discover what they can and can't do. If Microsoft had convinced the music companies to drop the DRM then Zune would have real potential to grow by word of mouth once people found out how much more it could do than an iPod.
Google is in an arms race with spammers and blackhat seo firms. How are they supposed to know whether someone is honest or just mining them for information for their scam?
I gotta give this award to Bungie for the Marathon series. It didn't feature fancy cut scenes or voiceovers, but in the Doom era of FPS, having a plot was unheard of. The story was told through a series of terminals where you would communicate with one of several AIs or other people. The plot was central to the gameplay, and was very twisted, so your enemies and friends changed frequently. The level design was also quite a bit more varied and inspired by the story, then say, Doom where the levels are basically just designed around gameplay.
Although modern FPS stories are more cinematic, Marathon did more with less.
Windows exacerbates the problem by having the mixed window/application metaphor. The fact that some applications have containing windows full of sub-windows while some spawn free-floating windows. Not to mention that the task bar becomes undreadable once there are too many entries. Virtual desktops are a great tool for any heavy multitasker, but I find on Mac OS X it's easier to manage large number of windows. Typically I range from 5 slowly growing to 100 windows before I close things down to reclaim memory. In Windows this would make the task bar steadily unusable, but on OS X the dock remains relatively unchanged. To deal with clutter I mostly just use "Hide Others". Expose's desktop view is the other piece that lets me work effectively with tons of windows.
On Linux and Solaris virtual desktops seeemed more natural, but I never got into them on OS X. I am looking forward to Spaces to see how good a job Apple can do with the concept.
I suspect MySpace became so popular for the same reason as LiveJournal: users can pick skins for their personal pages, and for some strange reason American teenagers really dig unreadability
My own suspicion is that myspace succeeded primarily by targetting itself as a marketing medium for bands. The first hundred times I went to MySpace were to reference a band. I think this sucked a lot of people in (like myself) who have no interest in social networking per se. Of course, I do value the social networking aspect now that its achieved critical mass and I actually know a large number of people that are on it.
I suppose the customizability is an important aspect of this. Setting up a MySpace page is a quick way for a band to get a rudimentary web page with integrated music player, announcements and guest book.
Even assuming you could figure out the position of the earbuds, how do you propose it measures the soundwaves at that point remotely? Sound waves there are not a function of sound waves here plus distance.
If this is a trend, the only thing disturbing is that a new football stadium is probably a higher priority for a University than better network equipment and bandwidth. My undergrad was at the U of MN and they constantly wanted their own football stadium--they would spend any amount of money and create any parking problems necessary to get it.
Me too. I paid $100 a month for parking in the Coffman ramp. However keep in mind the stadium is a drop in the bucket as far as parking problems go, the real problem is having 40,000 people crammed into a campus with no streets and very very few parking facilities. Also the of U of MN didn't do much censorship and they had awesome bandwidth. I worked there though, so I don't know if it was different in the dorms or whatever.
And they have been told by diebold and the like that the rest of us are merely luddites and our concerns are unwarranted. Which has a ring of truth to it.
This is so true, and yet the irony is almost unbearable since it's mostly computer scientists who are voicing concerns. I'm not so far left as to be anti-corporation, but god damn, you'd think some of these people had never heard of vested interests before. Big business and big government do enough harm by themselves, but these subconctractors are the worst of both worlds.
You may be right, never played either of those. Back in the day I played in some massive Marathon games, which I believe was the best multiplayer of that generation. Not only did it support more players (up to 16 I believe), but it had different game types and vertical aim was a component; I think it was the first game you could shoot a rocket at people's feet.
Marathon also had some very innovative maps due to the fact that the editor required polygons (ie. no computing polygons from sectors as Doom did), which allowed for some amazing effects, such as two separate rooms that occupy the exact same physical space, but are accessible from different entrances. Imagine a spiral staircase that doesn't go up, it just twirls around in the same plane.
Anyway, whether any other games were really better is a moot point. Doom had the popularity and got most of the credit. And what better way to measure video game quality then popularity?
It's all subjective, but I'm definitely right when I say that Quake 3 perfected the original FPS formula. The weapon balance, physics, interface. It was so perfect that no one needed to do another game like that. That's why Counter Strike was the next big thing.
Wolf3d invented the FPS genre. Doom perfected single player FPS and invented multiplayer FPS. QuakeWorld perfected multiplayer FPS.
Both Doom and Quake were so good they both deserve to make the top 5. As good as Quake is, the single player can't hold a candle to Doom. In fact, I've never seen another game that packs the visceral punch of Doom single player. The sheer quantities of enemies and satisfying weapons (especially the double-barrell shotgun in Doom 2). In Quake it was like, okay, now fight 3 guys, now fight 4 guys. Whatever happened to pick up a chainsaw, lights start strobing, and a wall drops behind you with 100 zombies behind it?
You may disagree, but I find that Slashdot moderators put more thought into how they shape the discussion - I know that I will mark a post insightful if it shows insight, regardless of whether I agree.
I agree with this. I'm always astonished at people who talk about how shitty/. discussions are and then talk about how they've switched to Digg. The/. system is far from perfect--moderators can't always be experts--but by and large there is much more opportunity for modding up of cogent arguments that go against popular opinion. Of course you still have the issues with earlier posts getting more moderated and so forth, but I don't see how anyone can even for a second say that Digg discussion is anywhere near the level of/. Digg's strength is in volume of stories.
That said, I think the best communities are smaller and more focused. Any large and general community is gonna be pretty ignorant about any given issue. If I'm really interested in a topic I don't want moderators to ham-fistedly attempt to pull out the knowledgeable posts. I'd rather go to a focused community where everyone has something relevant to say.
Could you have perhaps gotten a $12 bottle of wine instead, and used the savings to buy cookies? Of course. The child sees and understands this, even if you don't, and by adolescence there's a massive buildup of frustration from it.
Yes, kids understand that you have the means to purchase the cookies. They absolutely don't understand anything about budgeting. Hell, a lot of adults in America don't understand much about budgeting. Besides, who cares if kids learn that children have to do what they're told and adults get to do what they want... it's true isn't it? Giving children a sense of entitlement doesn't do them any favors later on in life.
In fact, whether you get your children cookies or not is a tangential issue (at best) to good parenting. Good parenting is not about analyzing how each minor decision is going to play out in their psyche over the next 50 years. Not only are 99.99% of parents wholly unqualified in child psychology, but every child is different and you have no way of seeing all ends. Meanwhile, while you've been obsessing over how to mold your child into the perfect human being, you're ignoring the basics: spending lots of time with your child, paying attention to them, empathizing with their desires.. basically showing that you love them. Giving your children material things is an awful substitute for love. The fact is that it's impossible to be a perfect parent, and your children will most likely grow up to have some issues. But if you genuinely cared for them then they will forgive your mistakes, and if you were cold, distant or resentful, even on a subconscious level, they will probably return the favor no matter how many bags of cookies or ponies you buy them.
Slashdot Mirror
How many hours do you spend talking during those 5 days?
I'm gonna grant the author a free pass on the writing since it's obvious English is not his first language. But the rest of the article seems to be vague hand-wavy FUD and anecdotal complaints. To take two of the more cohesive statements:
The truth is that standards were not the first priority of IE7 (they are an evil mega-corporation after all), but they did do an awful lot of work on them. Just take a look at the list of CSS improvements over at the IEBlog. They acknowledge that there's a lot more work to do, but it's clear from this that they've solved a lot of headaches for CSS developers.
I'm assuming the author means forms won't submit with an <input type="image"> tag. Without even testing it, I can't believe for one second this is true. This is a major backbone of HTML going back to at least HTML 2, and used in millions of websites. If this were broken it would have been fixed during beta. Microsoft may not care that much about web standards but they do care about backwards compatibility, and a lot of their decision making process has centered around not breaking things that worked in IE6.
It's likely IE7 is going to be a headache for web developers, but this article doesn't do anything to support that argument. As a web developer IE7 hasn't really taken any of my time. So far it's been more reliable than IE6, and I look forward to the day when IE7 is the standard and IE6 is an afterthought for picky clients.
And you thought Windows was a security nightmare. no... really.
Well consider squirting songs permanently. That alone could be a huge viral marketing scheme among the demographic that matters.
Not to mention that maybe the reason more people don't buy online music is because of DRM and other hassles. It's pretty easy to brainstorm ways to blow illegal P2P out of the water from a usability standpoint. Add a reasonable fee and you've got real potential to grow the market. I'm not saying it's a slamdunk.... but $10 for low-quality DRM albums? It drives kids straight to P2P.
If there were a reasonable priced subscription service without DRM, so you could easily use the music however you wanted, just think of the cool factor. Sure kids would pirate music, but the service would be so cool that everyone would want it anyway. It could actually cannibalize the piracy networks which depend on large numbers of people. By being easy to use, such a service could appeal to parents as well and make a better selling point for the kids (the best salesmen of all!).
I admit that's all pretty optimistic, but anecdotally the music industry has systematically destroyed my incentive to buy new music over the past 5 years. These days I'm hesitant to buy anything from major labels. They don't trust me, and they don't cultivate my interest as a music lover. As a customer I would be ecstatic to see exciting new products instead of boring new DRM and incompatibilities. The difference is the board members asking themselves "How can we make the music experience better?" instead of "How can we protect or IP?".
No, but overtime it will affect the popularity as people discover what they can and can't do. If Microsoft had convinced the music companies to drop the DRM then Zune would have real potential to grow by word of mouth once people found out how much more it could do than an iPod.
Whu-huh? Have you been living under a rock? It's the wiimote dude. More generally, it's a focus on gameplay.
PS3 and 360 are priced very reasonably for what they offer. But let's face it, you have to be a gamer to see the value.
Unfortunately you're missing something too.
Google is in an arms race with spammers and blackhat seo firms. How are they supposed to know whether someone is honest or just mining them for information for their scam?
Please explain how a company can fix a bug in Windows by themselves.
Not to mention, as we all know from Hollywood, this will just encourage more cutting off of people's fingers.
I gotta give this award to Bungie for the Marathon series. It didn't feature fancy cut scenes or voiceovers, but in the Doom era of FPS, having a plot was unheard of. The story was told through a series of terminals where you would communicate with one of several AIs or other people. The plot was central to the gameplay, and was very twisted, so your enemies and friends changed frequently. The level design was also quite a bit more varied and inspired by the story, then say, Doom where the levels are basically just designed around gameplay.
Although modern FPS stories are more cinematic, Marathon did more with less.
Allegedly.
Windows exacerbates the problem by having the mixed window/application metaphor. The fact that some applications have containing windows full of sub-windows while some spawn free-floating windows. Not to mention that the task bar becomes undreadable once there are too many entries. Virtual desktops are a great tool for any heavy multitasker, but I find on Mac OS X it's easier to manage large number of windows. Typically I range from 5 slowly growing to 100 windows before I close things down to reclaim memory. In Windows this would make the task bar steadily unusable, but on OS X the dock remains relatively unchanged. To deal with clutter I mostly just use "Hide Others". Expose's desktop view is the other piece that lets me work effectively with tons of windows.
On Linux and Solaris virtual desktops seeemed more natural, but I never got into them on OS X. I am looking forward to Spaces to see how good a job Apple can do with the concept.
My own suspicion is that myspace succeeded primarily by targetting itself as a marketing medium for bands. The first hundred times I went to MySpace were to reference a band. I think this sucked a lot of people in (like myself) who have no interest in social networking per se. Of course, I do value the social networking aspect now that its achieved critical mass and I actually know a large number of people that are on it.
I suppose the customizability is an important aspect of this. Setting up a MySpace page is a quick way for a band to get a rudimentary web page with integrated music player, announcements and guest book.
Your mom's a Saturday!
March 13, 2004 was a Saturday.
Even assuming you could figure out the position of the earbuds, how do you propose it measures the soundwaves at that point remotely? Sound waves there are not a function of sound waves here plus distance.
Me too. I paid $100 a month for parking in the Coffman ramp. However keep in mind the stadium is a drop in the bucket as far as parking problems go, the real problem is having 40,000 people crammed into a campus with no streets and very very few parking facilities. Also the of U of MN didn't do much censorship and they had awesome bandwidth. I worked there though, so I don't know if it was different in the dorms or whatever.
This is so true, and yet the irony is almost unbearable since it's mostly computer scientists who are voicing concerns. I'm not so far left as to be anti-corporation, but god damn, you'd think some of these people had never heard of vested interests before. Big business and big government do enough harm by themselves, but these subconctractors are the worst of both worlds.
You may be right, never played either of those. Back in the day I played in some massive Marathon games, which I believe was the best multiplayer of that generation. Not only did it support more players (up to 16 I believe), but it had different game types and vertical aim was a component; I think it was the first game you could shoot a rocket at people's feet.
Marathon also had some very innovative maps due to the fact that the editor required polygons (ie. no computing polygons from sectors as Doom did), which allowed for some amazing effects, such as two separate rooms that occupy the exact same physical space, but are accessible from different entrances. Imagine a spiral staircase that doesn't go up, it just twirls around in the same plane.
Anyway, whether any other games were really better is a moot point. Doom had the popularity and got most of the credit. And what better way to measure video game quality then popularity?
That's pretty scary. Do you think they're getting kickbacks? Follow the money...
It's all subjective, but I'm definitely right when I say that Quake 3 perfected the original FPS formula. The weapon balance, physics, interface. It was so perfect that no one needed to do another game like that. That's why Counter Strike was the next big thing.
Let's get this straight.
Wolf3d invented the FPS genre.
Doom perfected single player FPS and invented multiplayer FPS.
QuakeWorld perfected multiplayer FPS.
Both Doom and Quake were so good they both deserve to make the top 5. As good as Quake is, the single player can't hold a candle to Doom. In fact, I've never seen another game that packs the visceral punch of Doom single player. The sheer quantities of enemies and satisfying weapons (especially the double-barrell shotgun in Doom 2). In Quake it was like, okay, now fight 3 guys, now fight 4 guys. Whatever happened to pick up a chainsaw, lights start strobing, and a wall drops behind you with 100 zombies behind it?
I agree with this. I'm always astonished at people who talk about how shitty
That said, I think the best communities are smaller and more focused. Any large and general community is gonna be pretty ignorant about any given issue. If I'm really interested in a topic I don't want moderators to ham-fistedly attempt to pull out the knowledgeable posts. I'd rather go to a focused community where everyone has something relevant to say.
Because the moderator is a moron.
Yes, kids understand that you have the means to purchase the cookies. They absolutely don't understand anything about budgeting. Hell, a lot of adults in America don't understand much about budgeting. Besides, who cares if kids learn that children have to do what they're told and adults get to do what they want... it's true isn't it? Giving children a sense of entitlement doesn't do them any favors later on in life.
In fact, whether you get your children cookies or not is a tangential issue (at best) to good parenting. Good parenting is not about analyzing how each minor decision is going to play out in their psyche over the next 50 years. Not only are 99.99% of parents wholly unqualified in child psychology, but every child is different and you have no way of seeing all ends. Meanwhile, while you've been obsessing over how to mold your child into the perfect human being, you're ignoring the basics: spending lots of time with your child, paying attention to them, empathizing with their desires.. basically showing that you love them. Giving your children material things is an awful substitute for love. The fact is that it's impossible to be a perfect parent, and your children will most likely grow up to have some issues. But if you genuinely cared for them then they will forgive your mistakes, and if you were cold, distant or resentful, even on a subconscious level, they will probably return the favor no matter how many bags of cookies or ponies you buy them.