The ONLY way that TiVo makes money is through its subscription service.
What, they're not selling all that juicy viewing habits data they're gathering? Morons! That's were the real money is, and why TiVo expects users to pay for that data gathering (TV listings are free from a number of sources) is beyond me.
I think it's interesting. I'm reading an article and what to learn more about something-I just click on a smart link. I don't even have to visit my local library to learn more (Voyagers:)
Here's a quick plug for Mac OS X and its concept of system services. You can use a service like InstantLinks to select any word/phrase and do a web search on it. You can do this not just from your browser, but from any Cocoa app. It doesn't alter the appearance of the text in the document and can be configured to use the search site you want, not taking you to some MS-approved site that IE would. Just as significant is the ability to extend the services to other information. Have a street address you want to get a map of? Select it with InstantLinks and just get a map!
OK, end of plug. I don't know why I plug free software (beer free, with the potential of being speech free) when it can only result in me having to do more support. I'd have put a link to InstantLinks, but perhaps by making people have to find it themselves will reenforce how useful a service it is.:-) Oh, and you might want to wait a bit, since an update is scheduled for release tomorrow.
. . . it allows them to get their hands on copyright material without paying for it.
Are you aware that this is the main function of the WWW and, in fact, any sharing technology (including libraries, radio, and TV)? Somebody pays at some point, but the actual user of the copyrighted information is rarely taking on the (full) burden. Computers just make it something individuals can do without construction of a publishing empire or a broadcast station. There is nothing special about P2P in this regard, either; it's just another way two computers can talk to each other and exchange information. After all, on the Internet all computers are peers.
It is quite likely illegal to demon dial them, so I would not suggest it. What I have my computer do instead is filter spam and, for messages containing toll free numbers, call them and play the Spam skit. One message inviting me to call equals one call from my computer. That seems fair to me. One spammer apparently spammed me enough to get sufficient calls to actually call me back and (he claimed) start doing a phone harassment investigation on me. I called him back and told him to go for it! If I only call (once) when I'm invited to call, I don't see a problem with it. If it comes to a legal battle, I'm quite willing to nail this jerk and set a precedence for email harassment.
The success of sites like AdCritic indicates that people will, if the content is good enough, actualy go out of their way to watch comercials. Hell, the 7up commercials had me laughing so hard I fell out of my chair once. Lo and behold I find myself drinking more 7up.
I have to agree. I have a TiVo myself and of course I use it to skip commercials, just like I did with the VCR before it. Still, I enjoy a good ad so long as it's not interrupting the flow of the show I'm watching, so I visit sites like AdCritic to see what I'm missing. Same applies to web advertising, where I'd like to see some ads for products that interest me, just not while I doing a search for router configuration information.
Like any technology, we make use of it, become adaptive and then become dependant on it. (Gosh, this is starting to sound like Ted's Manifesto, ). This has been going on since the day of fire.
Yes and no. Not every technology since fire is useful or becomes a necessary dependency. I can't count the number of products that die in the marketplace because they didn't serve a useful purpose. And the ones that do serve a purpose seem to change based on the marketplace. VHS ate Beta and DVD is eating VHS in many ways. I was using IRC a decade ago, but suddenly people are treating "instant messaging" as though it is some innovation that requires a proprietary tool. Slashdot forums serve the role that Usenet news did (and still does, for many of us).
I still haven't been convinced that videophone technology fills any fundamental role for the masses. I don't often need to see (to some limited degree of resolution) how someone looks most of the time, and people really don't need to see how I look most of the time! Sure, a videophone might sound like a natural progression, but what is the real need that makes it killer?
Flip side of the coin, VideoConference is a tool that we hopefully will adapt and then become dependent as well. I know the deaf community is actively using (out of necessity).
What is wrong with deaf people that they can't just type away like the rest of us? Yes, perhaps signing is as natural to a deaf person as spoken conversation is to us, but you can't really say it's a necessity.
Took telephone nearly 120-odd years, let's hope Video takes a lot shorter. The backbones seems to have the bandwidth, it's just the big-fat-pipe at the last-mile is not widely available yet.
The thing about killer technology is that it's killer even if it's crap because it fills a role that nothing else can. Videophones have been around for nearly as long as TV. No, the resolution wasn't great and the price wasn't low, but it has not advanced one bit at the consumer level (that's the important bit) in the last 50 years, compared to things like the telephone and computers which do have killer roles. Videophone technology hasn't gone anywhere because nobody wants it, with the possible exception of porn (which has it's own issues that I noted).
But what do I know? Who am I to say what people like and don't like? If you are so strongly convinced that videophones are the next big revolution in communications, I encourage you to invest as much money as you can get your hands on into that industry. Then you'll not only be able to rub my nose in it when it takes off, you'll be stinking rich as well. Best of luck.
Your analysis falls very short of the social reality behind the technology involved. There is nothing that kept those rural types from walking a mile to talk to their neighbor if they wanted to, and the telephone has never intruded into anyone's life; you can always unplug it/leave the ringer off/whatever. In fact, you don't give even one plausible reason why there was resistance or why there was adoption; the original poster did at least that.
Quite simply, there is an advantage in being able to communicate with someone almost instantly from almost any distance. The telegraph was the start of that and the telephone was a natural progression. The videophone, however, doesn't get you much beyond that. Seldom is "visual participation" necessary to communicate. Yes, it can add helpful cues, just like voice communication adds cues beyond written communication, but the actual amount of signal that is broadcast visually is a relatively minor portion of the bandwidth. It's much more likely that when someone says they want to "see you", they want to be with you, not looking at a screen with your image on it.
And people might think it's at least a killer app for the porn industry, but think about the likely hood of you actually talking to someone who's as good looking as the person in the ad. The price for porn will definitely go up if you need to find women who are both sexy looking and sexy sounding on this video phone. Not to mention having to pay her to watch some butt ugly guy jack off into his camera.
No, video phones have not been killer for the 50 years or so the technology has been around, and the Internet doesn't change that. The porn industry itself has not adopted live, interactive video to any great extent (or maybe they have and I'm just disconnected), and I have absolutely no reason to believe the common consumer will suddenly think it a killer app without some really good reason. You have not provided that reason.
The reason is simple: it is relatively easy to write to the Mac environment, since all the API calls are standardized.
Standardization in itself doesn't ease development. I gave up Mac development in 1992 because the API at that time was horrible, and it's only gotten worse. Microsoft products under OS X will use that API (Carbon) if IE is any indication, and most existing Mac apps will move over to OS X via Carbon. This won't help Linux users at all, since there are no efforts (I know of) to get the Carbon API implemented directly (sans emulation) on Linux.
Cocoa on the other hand is based on OpenStep, which has seen active open source development at GNUstep. Clueful new development for Mac OS X will use this API. Slap whatever GUI you want on it; OpenStep doesn't care. If Linux users hope to take advantage of Mac OS X application development, they should put their efforts into GNUstep.
And Parents should be the ones monitoring this kind of thing, not some guy in a cubicle at AOL.
The thing is, AOL is monitoring. They're the ones employing the censors and making claims that their filtered version of the Internet is safe for kids. In doing so, they're no longer a common carrier, and now become accountable for the content they fail to police. You can call it bad parenting, but AOL bears considerable responsibility for failures on their part.
Speaking as "another web designer" myself that's also a tech, you're the kind that have given us all a bad name and screwed up the web. What you're looking for is more ways to push style over substance, and I'm asking you to reconsider that position. Yes, everyone has different preferences, so how about giving them content they can use regardless of those choices instead of trying to manage the myriad of different user preference combinations that might want to see your pages? You don't have to do jack to give the user what they want given the preferences they have chosen.
Imagine trying to explain the difference between a simple encrypted link and a fully authenticated connection in an unconfusing manner?
I don't think it's really that hard. You could put up a red, yellow, or green lock (or stoplight next to the the lock, to take into account the colorblind). You could make the lock clickable to bring up a dialog that showed a nice Alice, Bob, and Eve diagram with question marks or exclamation points slapped on the insecure points, along with a short description of how trusted the transaction should be considered. People are far smarter than most interface designers seem to be, so don't fault the users when they complain things are confusing.
I think it speaks more to what kind of previous coding experience you can expect from a student entering a college CS program. I would say that any college using OO off the bat is assuming that students have a solid enough platform upon which to build the abstractions OO offers. I do worry about the bulk of students who don't have that background and thus won't understand the abstraction or have any kind of internal conceptualization of what the computer is really doing. So, like most things, it comes down to individual difference, and what might be the best CS program for one person could be the worst for another.
To me, the problem is that the company approach implies that, by default, the customer is a thief. By your logic, you don't think search warrants are necessary because, hey, why would you mind law enforcement barging into your house whenever they want unless you were doing something wrong. And can you prove you own the clothes you're wearing? I think we have a shoplifter in aisle 5...
Who's the brainchild that decided to make JavaScript a requirement for entering their site? They'll have to demonstrate some real intelligence before I'll be in interested in their articifical offerings.
Re:I hope she makes a lot of money off of this
on
Paper Phones
·
· Score: 1
for $10 I probably would buy one for cool value.
And while you're at it, run out and get one of those cool Yugos, too. It'll look great in the driveway of your mobile home, and you'll look hot scooting down the highway talking on your paper phone. Yeah, man, chicks really dig the cheap crap. You'll be the coolest cat in town!:-)
Well, we've been testing the same "access control mechanism" defense on www.datafetish.com, and no lawyers have huffed down my door yet. It's not a closed system, but it is a double-blind system (we don't reveal what pages have what content, and we don't reveal what pages use what encoding). Afterall, who are we to say what a particular series of 1's and 0's mean?:-)
Given that we're talking about exact duplicates, clones no more have an "original" and "copy" than twins do or, in reality, software does. There is a chronological order in which the duplicates are made (or a birth order, in the case of twins), but the code is the same. I'm not of a "first is always best" attitude, so in this brave new world I'll just continue to treat people as people and software as software (unless we nail hard AI in my lifetime:-).
... the Listar Project was asked to stop using the name 'Listar' because of a trademark conflict with a similar commercial product, ListSTAR, which is understandable...
No it isn't. What conflict have they demonstrated? What evidence of marketplace confusion is there? They can certainly request you change your name, but that doesn't mean they are on any solid legal ground in doing so (IANAL, of course). A company did a similar thing to my company, and we politely explained that use of the word in question did not violate their trademark but they were welcome to continue legal proceedings. They wisely didn't.
Looking at the ListSTAR trademark in question, an argument could be made that Listar is not "for use on personal computers". Your software clearly isn't intended to even be run on Macintosh computers. Their whole issue seems to be the use of the word "list" (feature description) in the name of the software, which I don't think will prove to be sufficient if challenged. The marks themselves are not particularly similar, and I can't imagine how the marketplace confusion would be exist. Politely decline their request based on that reasonable argument and it's unlikely they'll continue. They took the action necessary on what might be a possible IP infringement and you've demonstrated that it wasn't; case closed.
I read Feynman's report many years ago, and it has echoed in my head with almost every job I've had. Certainly the Challenger disaster was more significant than any of the disastrous projects I've worked on, but even the least qualified engineer couldn't do as much damage as the goons in management. It's unfortunate the article, in many ways, blames engineers for the disaster, which means the author didn't read the report. Fortunately, NASA management seem more inclined to listen to the engineers these days (a disaster will do that), so Feynman's report wasn't a waste. I'd be inlined to put it up there with the Mythical Man-Month as a must read for project managers.
It's ironic, then, that you choose to post to Slashdot differently (instead of like I'm posting now). Context is everything, and replying to points in turn has no substitute.
Every email client I've used, I've always changed it so my new text appears on top. Even my Linux ones.
It's somewhat telling that, from a programming perspective, this (for Cocoa anyway) is controlled by a single method, applicationShouldTerminateAfterLastWindowClosed:
(no doubt a space will be stuck in that by Slashdot). The default behavior of the OS is to keep applications open, with the application responding YES to that method if they want the kind of behavior you prefer. I don't know of a mechanism currently in place that changes the OS default, but don't be surprised if it shows up.
I actually prefer to keep applications open, as having to relaunch them every time I open and close a document under Windows is, well, one of the reasons I don't use Windows much. The ugly window-in-a-window solution to this that many apps use is yet another reason I avoid Windows.
file systems will make way for object systems
on
MySQL FS
·
· Score: 1
I think its wrong to treat this direction of information storage as having anything to do with a file system. I prefer to call it an object system, as that paves the way for management of things other than files. I'm working on implementing something along these lines myself called a Meta Object Manager (MOM).
It takes a different view than you're saying (although it's very much in line with what you're thinking) by simply, for file objects, assigning them methods and attributes which can be used to organize them. It does this at the object level, not with categories or classes or any other hierarchical restrictions. To reference an object, you specify the attributes necessary to bring it in focus (an object system "change focus" as opposed to a file system "change directory").
The command line implementation (working on the GUI now) has come pretty far, and you can access the same object with/etc/wtanksle/ppp.conf and/wtanksle/etc/ppp.conf or even just ppp.conf, if that focus resolves to one object. In the future, getting a list of all configuration files on your system could as simple as "cf conf; ls". Once the abstraction of a file system to an object system is made, though, I don't see any going back.
These people are often spending sizeable amounts of their own money to keep their site going for the sole purpose of entertaining the public.
Then these people are morons. I personally don't have anything worth saying that would have me parting with $2K every month, but if I did it would be valuable enough for me not to taint with some bad banner ads. That's quadruplely true if those ads only cover 25% of my expenses.
Blocking their ads is the rough equivalent of saying, "I want you to have to pay more so I can see your site every day."
No. Blocking their ads is the exact equivalent of saying, "I don't want to see your ads." There are better ways to advertise than banner ads, and ways other than advertising for a site to generate revenue. You are not allowed to blame the visitors because the tired old ad banner networks won't make you money anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
The ONLY way that TiVo makes money is through its subscription service.
What, they're not selling all that juicy viewing habits data they're gathering? Morons! That's were the real money is, and why TiVo expects users to pay for that data gathering (TV listings are free from a number of sources) is beyond me.
I think it's interesting. I'm reading an article and what to learn more about something-I just click on a smart link. I don't even have to visit my local library to learn more (Voyagers :)
Here's a quick plug for Mac OS X and its concept of system services. You can use a service like InstantLinks to select any word/phrase and do a web search on it. You can do this not just from your browser, but from any Cocoa app. It doesn't alter the appearance of the text in the document and can be configured to use the search site you want, not taking you to some MS-approved site that IE would. Just as significant is the ability to extend the services to other information. Have a street address you want to get a map of? Select it with InstantLinks and just get a map!
OK, end of plug. I don't know why I plug free software (beer free, with the potential of being speech free) when it can only result in me having to do more support. I'd have put a link to InstantLinks, but perhaps by making people have to find it themselves will reenforce how useful a service it is. :-) Oh, and you might want to wait a bit, since an update is scheduled for release tomorrow.
. . . it allows them to get their hands on copyright material without paying for it.
Are you aware that this is the main function of the WWW and, in fact, any sharing technology (including libraries, radio, and TV)? Somebody pays at some point, but the actual user of the copyrighted information is rarely taking on the (full) burden. Computers just make it something individuals can do without construction of a publishing empire or a broadcast station. There is nothing special about P2P in this regard, either; it's just another way two computers can talk to each other and exchange information. After all, on the Internet all computers are peers.
It is quite likely illegal to demon dial them, so I would not suggest it. What I have my computer do instead is filter spam and, for messages containing toll free numbers, call them and play the Spam skit. One message inviting me to call equals one call from my computer. That seems fair to me. One spammer apparently spammed me enough to get sufficient calls to actually call me back and (he claimed) start doing a phone harassment investigation on me. I called him back and told him to go for it! If I only call (once) when I'm invited to call, I don't see a problem with it. If it comes to a legal battle, I'm quite willing to nail this jerk and set a precedence for email harassment.
Yes, we all agree it's better to steal an artists work with their permission.
The success of sites like AdCritic indicates that people will, if the content is good enough, actualy go out of their way to watch comercials. Hell, the 7up commercials had me laughing so hard I fell out of my chair once. Lo and behold I find myself drinking more 7up.
I have to agree. I have a TiVo myself and of course I use it to skip commercials, just like I did with the VCR before it. Still, I enjoy a good ad so long as it's not interrupting the flow of the show I'm watching, so I visit sites like AdCritic to see what I'm missing. Same applies to web advertising, where I'd like to see some ads for products that interest me, just not while I doing a search for router configuration information.
Like any technology, we make use of it, become adaptive and then become dependant on it. (Gosh, this is starting to sound like Ted's Manifesto, ). This has been going on since the day of fire.
Yes and no. Not every technology since fire is useful or becomes a necessary dependency. I can't count the number of products that die in the marketplace because they didn't serve a useful purpose. And the ones that do serve a purpose seem to change based on the marketplace. VHS ate Beta and DVD is eating VHS in many ways. I was using IRC a decade ago, but suddenly people are treating "instant messaging" as though it is some innovation that requires a proprietary tool. Slashdot forums serve the role that Usenet news did (and still does, for many of us).
I still haven't been convinced that videophone technology fills any fundamental role for the masses. I don't often need to see (to some limited degree of resolution) how someone looks most of the time, and people really don't need to see how I look most of the time! Sure, a videophone might sound like a natural progression, but what is the real need that makes it killer?
Flip side of the coin, VideoConference is a tool that we hopefully will adapt and then become dependent as well. I know the deaf community is actively using (out of necessity).
What is wrong with deaf people that they can't just type away like the rest of us? Yes, perhaps signing is as natural to a deaf person as spoken conversation is to us, but you can't really say it's a necessity.
Took telephone nearly 120-odd years, let's hope Video takes a lot shorter. The backbones seems to have the bandwidth, it's just the big-fat-pipe at the last-mile is not widely available yet.
The thing about killer technology is that it's killer even if it's crap because it fills a role that nothing else can. Videophones have been around for nearly as long as TV. No, the resolution wasn't great and the price wasn't low, but it has not advanced one bit at the consumer level (that's the important bit) in the last 50 years, compared to things like the telephone and computers which do have killer roles. Videophone technology hasn't gone anywhere because nobody wants it, with the possible exception of porn (which has it's own issues that I noted).
But what do I know? Who am I to say what people like and don't like? If you are so strongly convinced that videophones are the next big revolution in communications, I encourage you to invest as much money as you can get your hands on into that industry. Then you'll not only be able to rub my nose in it when it takes off, you'll be stinking rich as well. Best of luck.
Your analysis falls very short of the social reality behind the technology involved. There is nothing that kept those rural types from walking a mile to talk to their neighbor if they wanted to, and the telephone has never intruded into anyone's life; you can always unplug it/leave the ringer off/whatever. In fact, you don't give even one plausible reason why there was resistance or why there was adoption; the original poster did at least that.
Quite simply, there is an advantage in being able to communicate with someone almost instantly from almost any distance. The telegraph was the start of that and the telephone was a natural progression. The videophone, however, doesn't get you much beyond that. Seldom is "visual participation" necessary to communicate. Yes, it can add helpful cues, just like voice communication adds cues beyond written communication, but the actual amount of signal that is broadcast visually is a relatively minor portion of the bandwidth. It's much more likely that when someone says they want to "see you", they want to be with you, not looking at a screen with your image on it.
And people might think it's at least a killer app for the porn industry, but think about the likely hood of you actually talking to someone who's as good looking as the person in the ad. The price for porn will definitely go up if you need to find women who are both sexy looking and sexy sounding on this video phone. Not to mention having to pay her to watch some butt ugly guy jack off into his camera.
No, video phones have not been killer for the 50 years or so the technology has been around, and the Internet doesn't change that. The porn industry itself has not adopted live, interactive video to any great extent (or maybe they have and I'm just disconnected), and I have absolutely no reason to believe the common consumer will suddenly think it a killer app without some really good reason. You have not provided that reason.
The reason is simple: it is relatively easy to write to the Mac environment, since all the API calls are standardized.
Standardization in itself doesn't ease development. I gave up Mac development in 1992 because the API at that time was horrible, and it's only gotten worse. Microsoft products under OS X will use that API (Carbon) if IE is any indication, and most existing Mac apps will move over to OS X via Carbon. This won't help Linux users at all, since there are no efforts (I know of) to get the Carbon API implemented directly (sans emulation) on Linux.
Cocoa on the other hand is based on OpenStep, which has seen active open source development at GNUstep. Clueful new development for Mac OS X will use this API. Slap whatever GUI you want on it; OpenStep doesn't care. If Linux users hope to take advantage of Mac OS X application development, they should put their efforts into GNUstep.
And Parents should be the ones monitoring this kind of thing, not some guy in a cubicle at AOL.
The thing is, AOL is monitoring. They're the ones employing the censors and making claims that their filtered version of the Internet is safe for kids. In doing so, they're no longer a common carrier, and now become accountable for the content they fail to police. You can call it bad parenting, but AOL bears considerable responsibility for failures on their part.
Speaking as "another web designer" myself that's also a tech, you're the kind that have given us all a bad name and screwed up the web. What you're looking for is more ways to push style over substance, and I'm asking you to reconsider that position. Yes, everyone has different preferences, so how about giving them content they can use regardless of those choices instead of trying to manage the myriad of different user preference combinations that might want to see your pages? You don't have to do jack to give the user what they want given the preferences they have chosen.
Imagine trying to explain the difference between a simple encrypted link and a fully authenticated connection in an unconfusing manner?
I don't think it's really that hard. You could put up a red, yellow, or green lock (or stoplight next to the the lock, to take into account the colorblind). You could make the lock clickable to bring up a dialog that showed a nice Alice, Bob, and Eve diagram with question marks or exclamation points slapped on the insecure points, along with a short description of how trusted the transaction should be considered. People are far smarter than most interface designers seem to be, so don't fault the users when they complain things are confusing.
I think it speaks more to what kind of previous coding experience you can expect from a student entering a college CS program. I would say that any college using OO off the bat is assuming that students have a solid enough platform upon which to build the abstractions OO offers. I do worry about the bulk of students who don't have that background and thus won't understand the abstraction or have any kind of internal conceptualization of what the computer is really doing. So, like most things, it comes down to individual difference, and what might be the best CS program for one person could be the worst for another.
To me, the problem is that the company approach implies that, by default, the customer is a thief. By your logic, you don't think search warrants are necessary because, hey, why would you mind law enforcement barging into your house whenever they want unless you were doing something wrong. And can you prove you own the clothes you're wearing? I think we have a shoplifter in aisle 5 ...
Who's the brainchild that decided to make JavaScript a requirement for entering their site? They'll have to demonstrate some real intelligence before I'll be in interested in their articifical offerings.
for $10 I probably would buy one for cool value.
And while you're at it, run out and get one of those cool Yugos, too. It'll look great in the driveway of your mobile home, and you'll look hot scooting down the highway talking on your paper phone. Yeah, man, chicks really dig the cheap crap. You'll be the coolest cat in town! :-)
Well, we've been testing the same "access control mechanism" defense on www.datafetish.com, and no lawyers have huffed down my door yet. It's not a closed system, but it is a double-blind system (we don't reveal what pages have what content, and we don't reveal what pages use what encoding). Afterall, who are we to say what a particular series of 1's and 0's mean? :-)
Given that we're talking about exact duplicates, clones no more have an "original" and "copy" than twins do or, in reality, software does. There is a chronological order in which the duplicates are made (or a birth order, in the case of twins), but the code is the same. I'm not of a "first is always best" attitude, so in this brave new world I'll just continue to treat people as people and software as software (unless we nail hard AI in my lifetime :-).
No it isn't. What conflict have they demonstrated? What evidence of marketplace confusion is there? They can certainly request you change your name, but that doesn't mean they are on any solid legal ground in doing so (IANAL, of course). A company did a similar thing to my company, and we politely explained that use of the word in question did not violate their trademark but they were welcome to continue legal proceedings. They wisely didn't.
Looking at the ListSTAR trademark in question, an argument could be made that Listar is not "for use on personal computers". Your software clearly isn't intended to even be run on Macintosh computers. Their whole issue seems to be the use of the word "list" (feature description) in the name of the software, which I don't think will prove to be sufficient if challenged. The marks themselves are not particularly similar, and I can't imagine how the marketplace confusion would be exist. Politely decline their request based on that reasonable argument and it's unlikely they'll continue. They took the action necessary on what might be a possible IP infringement and you've demonstrated that it wasn't; case closed.
Now they're not only going to be talking when they're driving, they'll be warming up their road rage at the same time with a FPS...
I read Feynman's report many years ago, and it has echoed in my head with almost every job I've had. Certainly the Challenger disaster was more significant than any of the disastrous projects I've worked on, but even the least qualified engineer couldn't do as much damage as the goons in management. It's unfortunate the article, in many ways, blames engineers for the disaster, which means the author didn't read the report. Fortunately, NASA management seem more inclined to listen to the engineers these days (a disaster will do that), so Feynman's report wasn't a waste. I'd be inlined to put it up there with the Mythical Man-Month as a must read for project managers.
It's ironic, then, that you choose to post to Slashdot differently (instead of like I'm posting now). Context is everything, and replying to points in turn has no substitute.
Every email client I've used, I've always changed it so my new text appears on top. Even my Linux ones.
It's somewhat telling that, from a programming perspective, this (for Cocoa anyway) is controlled by a single method, applicationShouldTerminateAfterLastWindowClosed:
(no doubt a space will be stuck in that by Slashdot). The default behavior of the OS is to keep applications open, with the application responding YES to that method if they want the kind of behavior you prefer. I don't know of a mechanism currently in place that changes the OS default, but don't be surprised if it shows up.
I actually prefer to keep applications open, as having to relaunch them every time I open and close a document under Windows is, well, one of the reasons I don't use Windows much. The ugly window-in-a-window solution to this that many apps use is yet another reason I avoid Windows.
I think its wrong to treat this direction of information storage as having anything to do with a file system. I prefer to call it an object system, as that paves the way for management of things other than files. I'm working on implementing something along these lines myself called a Meta Object Manager (MOM).
/etc/wtanksle/ppp.conf and /wtanksle/etc/ppp.conf or even just ppp.conf, if that focus resolves to one object. In the future, getting a list of all configuration files on your system could as simple as "cf conf; ls". Once the abstraction of a file system to an object system is made, though, I don't see any going back.
It takes a different view than you're saying (although it's very much in line with what you're thinking) by simply, for file objects, assigning them methods and attributes which can be used to organize them. It does this at the object level, not with categories or classes or any other hierarchical restrictions. To reference an object, you specify the attributes necessary to bring it in focus (an object system "change focus" as opposed to a file system "change directory").
The command line implementation (working on the GUI now) has come pretty far, and you can access the same object with
These people are often spending sizeable amounts of their own money to keep their site going for the sole purpose of entertaining the public.
Then these people are morons. I personally don't have anything worth saying that would have me parting with $2K every month, but if I did it would be valuable enough for me not to taint with some bad banner ads. That's quadruplely true if those ads only cover 25% of my expenses.
Blocking their ads is the rough equivalent of saying, "I want you to have to pay more so I can see your site every day."
No. Blocking their ads is the exact equivalent of saying, "I don't want to see your ads." There are better ways to advertise than banner ads, and ways other than advertising for a site to generate revenue. You are not allowed to blame the visitors because the tired old ad banner networks won't make you money anymore.