Exactly. Now all the sites that obnoxiously start playing videos when you load the pages (and nothing stops all of them) are going to pop open windows to do the same. Pop-up to the side, pop-up over top, pop-under...
And is there a limit to how many windows a site can open this way?
While it's possible you might see that kind of invention from a Friend, you're more likely to see them finding a way to simplify the process than in creating a new one.
But as to the question of whether they would drop the price or not, you also make a good point: Yes, they'd likely share the process with others, rather than keep it secret. Few people in any craft are going to turn down a simpler way to do something or a method that saves them money and time. Some may stick with the older way, but I wouldn't think that would be many.
I'm not sure just what the Friendly way of dealing with a situation would be, but that entire situation seems to be purely hypothetical.
But I'd like to stress that this is from your point of view, not from the point of view of a person who has the priorities of living according to the Testimonies of the Religious Society of Friends. While this would be a factor to many Friends today, I doubt it would have been a factor in the 1700s, in a simpler market without mass production or machines that would help in production.
Overall, I haven't known many Friends to object to the company being called "Quaker." In many ways their products are what Friends might produce: Simple and plain cereals, for the most part. There has been frustration, at times, with people thinking the man on the Quaker Oats logo is what Friends would look like today. (Actually, the logo is a kind of update of their original logo, which was an image of William Penn, the Quaker Pennsylvania is named after.)
There have been a few times (two that I'm aware of) where modern Friends have had issues with the Quaker Oats company. Both were when they had promotions on their cereal boxes that represented or tied in with characters known for violence. One was Popeye and the other was the Power Rangers.
And, just as a bit of something extra, here's an amusing Quaker/Quaker Oats story:
After my divorce, when I was teaching and having trouble making ends meet, I did market survey work. Usually that involved going into stores and recording shelf space amounts or product counts or price tag checks. I was doing an isotonic drink study, where we had to list all the isotonic drinks and count the number of items facing on the front of the shelf. At the time Quaker Oats owned Gatorade. I was there, with my clipboard and another man is at the other end of the isotonic section, probably doing about the same thing.
He saw me and said, "Are you Quaker?"
I didn't know Quaker Oats owned Gatorade and wondered if he recognized me from our Meeting or something. I was guarded but answered, "Yes. How did you know?" And he said, "Well, you seemed to focused on the Gatorade products," or something like that. It took me a second or two to figure out what he meant, then I started laughing, realizing he was asking if I was with Quaker Oats and not asking about religious affiliation.
You're thinking from your point of view, not the point of view of most Friends.
Regarding paying extra for a rush, remember this was in the 1700s. Yes, it's possible that someone could say, "I need a chair now and I'll pay $10." If they had a chair in stock, it would be the same to the shop owner as someone who was not in a hurry to get it. If they said, "I need a chair by tomorrow and I'll pay extra," likely the response (in that era) would be something like, "Friend, I wouldst be glad to make a chair for the as soon as I can, but I would not be able to complete it by tomorrow." On the other hand, if he could do it and it was something he could do easily, he would still do it without an extra charge. It's not likely he would stay up, for example an extra several hours, to get a chair done for a "rush" order.
As to the "true value," yes, that depends on what people are willing to pay for it, but Friends would have been making products that people can use. Furniture, tools, maybe simple toys, but not something like a fancy high end chair with extra features. A shopkeeper or tradesman would know what the value of his product or labor was. They'd know what was going on in the market and whether people were paying $5 for a chair or not. This was at a time when people weren't dealing with newer models or new features and products that were unknown quantities that are riskier to sell. These shops and businesses would generally be shy of taking risks, so they'd be staying with a proven market.
While this led to the idea of set prices (and price tags), yes, a lot has happened since this practice started and much of it has nothing to do with Friendly views or values, but with greed or profit.
(And it's worth noting that while accumulation of material wealth was not a Friend's goal, that many Friends did well in commerce because they had a reputation for fairness, quality, and integrity. Much of their income would often be saved up because of their simple lifestyle.)
Maybe I'm being self-serving thinking this, but it seems to be RSF has frequently been at the forefront of Christian organizations or sects in believing in or standing up for fair and/or equal treatment in many situations. (Like slavery or racial rights, women's issues, and so on.)
I greatly dislike organized religion (though I find atheism to be equally irrational and presumptive) but damn; Quaker culture impresses me greatly.
Yeah, Friends don't aren't really an organized religion in the conventional sense. For unprogrammed meetings, you don't even have a minister telling you what to believe or think. All can speak out in Meeting for Worship equally.
One of the Testimonies of the Religious Society of Friends (Friends, to Quakers, but most people call them Quakers) is equality. Another is honesty and others include integrity, truth, and simplicity. Friends believe in doing their best, in other words, not doing shipshod work. If they have an item they have produced for sale, say, for example, a chair, then, as part of their belief in integrity, they will have put their best work and used quality material in making that chair.
With that in mind, at one point, and I don't know if this started with just one Friends' Meeting or how it spread, but the consensus was that if you've worked diligently on a chair and one person comes into your shop and offers you $10 for that chair, but the fair value (considering labor and materials) is $5, then it's being dishonest and acting without integrity to take the additional $5 because that person was not a good negotiator. It's taking advantage of their lack of time or inability to negotiate. On the other hand, if a Friend has put in conscientious work and has to make a choice between selling it for $3 or not selling it, that's not fair to them.
The consensus, for a while, had been on a fair price for a fair amount of work and materials. From there, it wasn't far to go to reach a conclusion that if $5 is a fair price for that chair, then, barring changes in costs for materials (or maybe labor or cost of living), then gaining more or accepting less through dickering is less than fair, to either the shop owner or the customer.
While I know many will say, "Well, if they don't take all they can get for it, they're idiots!" If your focus is on the accumulation of wealth and possessions, then, from that point of view, that may be true. But if your intent in life is not material, but on personal improvement, growth, and following your spiritual beliefs, than there is much more to be gained from turning down the extra money offered than there is in accepting it. Friends are big on fair gains as opposed to grabbing what you can when you can. (Which is why they don't gamble and generally are quite careful in selecting what stocks they will invest in.)
Remember, this may not seem moral or immoral to you or others. That's okay. For Friends, their concern is in doing what they believe is right.
Logitech has been the King of Mediocre for years. Average products that, with a bit of effort, could be quality work. For example, wrist pads instead of some products that don't force the wrist to bend back. They destroyed the Squeezebox system by Slim Devices. (When they bought the company, I knew the days it would work were numbered.)
The only reason to buy from them is not doing enough research to find who has a better product that's not necessarily as visible in the marketplace. I won't touch their products anymore.
Not all houses have evenly spaced studs and joists. My current house was built in the 1940s, after WWII and my grandparents moved in after my grandfather was discharged at the end of the war. We did some rewiring on this house (with the help/supervision of an electrician) and in the process found that there were places the studs were not evenly spaced.
About ten years ago I suspended two pieces of angle iron from attic joists, going down through the ceiling, to provide a mount for a plasma HDTV. (Since this was over the fireplace and in front of where the chimney was behind the wall, I didn't have studs there that would be a normal thickness and couldn't depend on them for something as heavy as a plasma HDTV.) Granted, that was around the chimney, which may have required special measurements, but the joists there varied from 12-18" apart. I positioned the angle irons so they were as close to centered on the chimney as possible while in the attic and when I got down into the living room and checked the holes I had made in the ceiling, they were not anywhere close to centered over the fireplace. (In other words, while the fireplace chimney was a straight line, the structure around it shifted - probably to allow room for the chimney for the furnace.)
These dimensions have been industry standards for 60 years or more (just addressing my own lifetime in that). All contractors know it, all architects know it. Anyone who works with lumber knows it. Those qualified to make plans, like architects, allow for the accepted sizes in their plans.
If you are actually expecting a 2x4 to be 2" x 4", then that tells us, right off, you have no idea what you're doing.
I guess you missed the entire point of what I said. Parents with terminal diseases - you can't just ignore those calls and if it's an emergency or there's a new caregiver on duty you don't know, the call could be from numbers or area codes you don't recognize. You can't just silence the phone and figure you won't be getting an important call.
I alluded to that before - guess you didn't read that part of the response.
I can't put on a whitelist doctors that I don't yet know in case she ends up in the ER. There were also times when someone, like a substitute caregiver, would call and their area code was someplace away from us because they still have the same cell number from before they moved. I made a reference to this in my post.
Some of us cannot turn off our phones at night. I had to deal with my Father dying of leukemia for 3 years or so, then an over-anxious Mother who was having panic attacks and then we found she was developing Alzheimer's. For 10 years, I had to be on call 24/7 because I never knew what would happen or if that out-of-town phone call was a friend or an EMT or someone calling on their cell phone to tell me she needed help or was in serious trouble.
It must be a wonderful privilege to live in a world where it's easy to imagine not having to be on call 24/7.
It depends on whether you want something that works or not. I spent years, as a kid, seeing how easily Mattel toys break. I'm not about to trust them with $300 of my money.
Anyone who's read or studied or even gone lightly over the research of Elizabeth Loftus will not be surprised by this and will know it's about more than just gullibility.
Yes, that's true. I didn't want to go into all the detail, but what is ironic is that one of the major points of the article (that it was radiation pressure from the A-Bomb that triggered the H-Bomb) was wrong and if the DoE had let it go, that would have been released as misinformation and nobody would have known. But since the DoE did get involved, that eventually led to the correct information being revealed.
I'm still astounded the editors actually sent the article to the DoE to get approval or verification.
Actually, it could tie into the First Amendment. They point out that it's a journalism issue. This would be closely related to issues that journalists deal with when protecting sources. While that doesn't always work, the idea is that the press needs a certain amount of latitude in being able to protect their sources or have access to material that, for various reasons, may not be printable without consequences.
But, since the internet is an international object, something else comes into play here. In college I had a chance to meet and talk with Howard Morland, who was, at the time, semi-famous for having (inaccurately, it turned out later) figured out the linking mechanism between how an atom bomb triggered a hydrogen bomb. He had travelled around the country, doing different interviews and talking with people to figure out more about this. At the time, of course, it was all top secret. He wrote an article for a magazine called "The Progressive." Unwisely, the editors at "The Progressive" sent the article into the DoE for verification. All sorts of men in black with guns showed up and there was a huge court case. The design, which had been worked out from completely non-classified material, was given a classified status and was censored.
There was, however, one copy of the paper that had not been confiscated by the government and was with someone who, at the time, was travelling internationally. This person got it to a publication that was able to print it in their country. Once that information was published and openly available, even if it wasn't in the U.S. (and I think copies were sent into the U.S.), it became public knowledge and was no longer classified. (For details, read "The Secret that Exploded," by Howard Morland.)
So Sony may try going after Americans with that information, but once the documents become published and public knowledge, they can't really do too much about it.
Logitech is just as much a "stagnator" as the bigger guys. I bought a few Squeezeboxes years ago and loved the system, but once Logitech bought out SlimDevices and took over the Squeezeboxes, I knew the days were numbered.
Logitech is the kind of mediocre and great and creating products that are average and could, with minimal effort, have been made great.
While that may work for many people, I've had two times, due to hurricanes, in recent years, where I did not have artificial light in the evening. Both times the power outage lasted 8 or more days and it did little to shift my sleep schedule, so I'm not so sure that applies to everyone.
But, taking it as it is, I've also read studies that point out that nightbirds are modifying the environment to suit themselves, which would support the point that night people tend to handle marathon sessions better, since they're intentionally altering their environment to allow them to work as long as they can. It's also possible that the habits attributed to morning and to night people are from other factors and that the early bird or late night habits are an outgrowth of other personality factors.
I've seen, over and over, night people going on for hours and hours - many more hours than can be accounted for by the time difference of when they started and when morning people started. I've also read a few studies about that as well - that night people are better for marathon sessions. If I can start at noon or 1 PM and be sure I'm uninterrupted, I can often keep going in good form until after sun-up the next day. That's much longer than finishing at 9 PM when you've started any time on that day.
There are a lot of jokes about morning and night people, but studies show there is validity to this. I learned to work with this when teaching special ed and later, when I ran my own software company, where I did all the programming, I saw a dramatic illustration of some of those issues.
Morning people get up and are perky and ready to start. However, they're the ones who often need a nap in the afternoon and work well with an 8 hour day, but do not do well with marathon sessions. Night people do not start quickly. They wake up and need time to adjust to the world again and often are not ready to really focus until the afternoon. But they gain in strength and focus over time. They can often work marathon sessions, working all through the night and into the next morning.
I found that when I was coding and could work on my own schedule, I could get some work done in the afternoon and this is when I set things up, did simpler tasks, and caught up on things. But my real work hours started about 8:00 pm, when I could start focusing and I would often work through until sunrise or longer. 18 hour coding sessions were not unusual for me, but, of course, if I did a few in a row because I was working on something difficult, then I'd need several days to just recover. But I might be able to do 5 days straight of mega-sessions if needed. It's also worth noting this was in my 40s, not when I was some over-energetic teen or 20-something. In fact, in one month, when I was over 45, I did more all-nighters (with good code as a result) than I did in all my time in high school and college combined.
It does vary according to the person. Forcing night people to try to work in the morning will always be an issue for them and will not produce the good code they can produce. Forcing morning people who tend not to do well in marathons to stay for 10 hour days four times a week is just as bad.
Corporations don't understand these things, which is one reason I never wanted to be involved with any larger corporations. If you want coders to do their best work, you can't regiment them and dictate how they work. You need to let them find their style. Let them work on their own schedule. If they need music, let them have it. If they need silence, find a way to make quiet places available. Some need neat work spaces, others need chaos.
I remember with Amarok 2.0 not being able to find the UI for 1.x - was it added later? Even recently, when I tried it on MacPorts, there was a different UI, and I did check through all the preferences. Is it possible the ability to use both UIs wasn't on all platforms?
I'm on an iMac, I love it. It's not perfect, but after 10 years or so on Linux, there was no f---ing way I was going back to Windows, but I needed to be able to do professional video editing and there was nothing suitable on Linux for that. (Last I looked, none of the FOSS video editors were quite up to professional specs yet.) But on the other hand, I know what you're talking about. It's the Doctrine of Insufficient Adulation: If you're not 100% committed to OS X, then many fan boys will get quite nasty. I'm sorry that happened to your project. While I use Skype, I don't use it much and it sounds like the plugin market was kind of like the App Store or the App Market on Android -- that ratings and nasty comments can really do a program in. I take it you made it clear in your description it wasn't intended for those markets - I know even with that, people will get snotty because they think they can force a developer to do what they want.
As for Facebook, it's possible users don't always express themselves well. But, on the other hand, what part of, "We HATE Timeline!" is hard to understand? There's no need to force it on people who don't want it. For that matter, it's been a continual issue that people don't like the forced updates. FB could easily just publish an API, offer a few skins, and allow others to make and share skins. That would easily eliminate many of the complaints about FB - but they're never going to allow that because it's all about control, and this is an example of what I'm talking about. It's a company run by developers, so they don't care what users want, they, in their infinite wisdom, feel they know and will make users do what's best, instead of giving them choices.
Slashdot Mirror
My first thought, too.
Also, "The Terminal Man."
Exactly. Now all the sites that obnoxiously start playing videos when you load the pages (and nothing stops all of them) are going to pop open windows to do the same. Pop-up to the side, pop-up over top, pop-under...
And is there a limit to how many windows a site can open this way?
What could possibly go wrong?
While it's possible you might see that kind of invention from a Friend, you're more likely to see them finding a way to simplify the process than in creating a new one.
But as to the question of whether they would drop the price or not, you also make a good point: Yes, they'd likely share the process with others, rather than keep it secret. Few people in any craft are going to turn down a simpler way to do something or a method that saves them money and time. Some may stick with the older way, but I wouldn't think that would be many.
I'm not sure just what the Friendly way of dealing with a situation would be, but that entire situation seems to be purely hypothetical.
But I'd like to stress that this is from your point of view, not from the point of view of a person who has the priorities of living according to the Testimonies of the Religious Society of Friends. While this would be a factor to many Friends today, I doubt it would have been a factor in the 1700s, in a simpler market without mass production or machines that would help in production.
Overall, I haven't known many Friends to object to the company being called "Quaker." In many ways their products are what Friends might produce: Simple and plain cereals, for the most part. There has been frustration, at times, with people thinking the man on the Quaker Oats logo is what Friends would look like today. (Actually, the logo is a kind of update of their original logo, which was an image of William Penn, the Quaker Pennsylvania is named after.)
There have been a few times (two that I'm aware of) where modern Friends have had issues with the Quaker Oats company. Both were when they had promotions on their cereal boxes that represented or tied in with characters known for violence. One was Popeye and the other was the Power Rangers.
And, just as a bit of something extra, here's an amusing Quaker/Quaker Oats story:
After my divorce, when I was teaching and having trouble making ends meet, I did market survey work. Usually that involved going into stores and recording shelf space amounts or product counts or price tag checks. I was doing an isotonic drink study, where we had to list all the isotonic drinks and count the number of items facing on the front of the shelf. At the time Quaker Oats owned Gatorade. I was there, with my clipboard and another man is at the other end of the isotonic section, probably doing about the same thing.
He saw me and said, "Are you Quaker?"
I didn't know Quaker Oats owned Gatorade and wondered if he recognized me from our Meeting or something. I was guarded but answered, "Yes. How did you know?" And he said, "Well, you seemed to focused on the Gatorade products," or something like that. It took me a second or two to figure out what he meant, then I started laughing, realizing he was asking if I was with Quaker Oats and not asking about religious affiliation.
You're thinking from your point of view, not the point of view of most Friends.
Regarding paying extra for a rush, remember this was in the 1700s. Yes, it's possible that someone could say, "I need a chair now and I'll pay $10." If they had a chair in stock, it would be the same to the shop owner as someone who was not in a hurry to get it. If they said, "I need a chair by tomorrow and I'll pay extra," likely the response (in that era) would be something like, "Friend, I wouldst be glad to make a chair for the as soon as I can, but I would not be able to complete it by tomorrow." On the other hand, if he could do it and it was something he could do easily, he would still do it without an extra charge. It's not likely he would stay up, for example an extra several hours, to get a chair done for a "rush" order.
As to the "true value," yes, that depends on what people are willing to pay for it, but Friends would have been making products that people can use. Furniture, tools, maybe simple toys, but not something like a fancy high end chair with extra features. A shopkeeper or tradesman would know what the value of his product or labor was. They'd know what was going on in the market and whether people were paying $5 for a chair or not. This was at a time when people weren't dealing with newer models or new features and products that were unknown quantities that are riskier to sell. These shops and businesses would generally be shy of taking risks, so they'd be staying with a proven market.
While this led to the idea of set prices (and price tags), yes, a lot has happened since this practice started and much of it has nothing to do with Friendly views or values, but with greed or profit.
(And it's worth noting that while accumulation of material wealth was not a Friend's goal, that many Friends did well in commerce because they had a reputation for fairness, quality, and integrity. Much of their income would often be saved up because of their simple lifestyle.)
You're quite welcome!
Maybe I'm being self-serving thinking this, but it seems to be RSF has frequently been at the forefront of Christian organizations or sects in believing in or standing up for fair and/or equal treatment in many situations. (Like slavery or racial rights, women's issues, and so on.)
I greatly dislike organized religion (though I find atheism to be equally irrational and presumptive) but damn; Quaker culture impresses me greatly.
Yeah, Friends don't aren't really an organized religion in the conventional sense. For unprogrammed meetings, you don't even have a minister telling you what to believe or think. All can speak out in Meeting for Worship equally.
One of the Testimonies of the Religious Society of Friends (Friends, to Quakers, but most people call them Quakers) is equality. Another is honesty and others include integrity, truth, and simplicity. Friends believe in doing their best, in other words, not doing shipshod work. If they have an item they have produced for sale, say, for example, a chair, then, as part of their belief in integrity, they will have put their best work and used quality material in making that chair.
With that in mind, at one point, and I don't know if this started with just one Friends' Meeting or how it spread, but the consensus was that if you've worked diligently on a chair and one person comes into your shop and offers you $10 for that chair, but the fair value (considering labor and materials) is $5, then it's being dishonest and acting without integrity to take the additional $5 because that person was not a good negotiator. It's taking advantage of their lack of time or inability to negotiate. On the other hand, if a Friend has put in conscientious work and has to make a choice between selling it for $3 or not selling it, that's not fair to them.
The consensus, for a while, had been on a fair price for a fair amount of work and materials. From there, it wasn't far to go to reach a conclusion that if $5 is a fair price for that chair, then, barring changes in costs for materials (or maybe labor or cost of living), then gaining more or accepting less through dickering is less than fair, to either the shop owner or the customer.
While I know many will say, "Well, if they don't take all they can get for it, they're idiots!" If your focus is on the accumulation of wealth and possessions, then, from that point of view, that may be true. But if your intent in life is not material, but on personal improvement, growth, and following your spiritual beliefs, than there is much more to be gained from turning down the extra money offered than there is in accepting it. Friends are big on fair gains as opposed to grabbing what you can when you can. (Which is why they don't gamble and generally are quite careful in selecting what stocks they will invest in.)
Remember, this may not seem moral or immoral to you or others. That's okay. For Friends, their concern is in doing what they believe is right.
Logitech has been the King of Mediocre for years. Average products that, with a bit of effort, could be quality work. For example, wrist pads instead of some products that don't force the wrist to bend back. They destroyed the Squeezebox system by Slim Devices. (When they bought the company, I knew the days it would work were numbered.)
The only reason to buy from them is not doing enough research to find who has a better product that's not necessarily as visible in the marketplace. I won't touch their products anymore.
Not all houses have evenly spaced studs and joists. My current house was built in the 1940s, after WWII and my grandparents moved in after my grandfather was discharged at the end of the war. We did some rewiring on this house (with the help/supervision of an electrician) and in the process found that there were places the studs were not evenly spaced.
About ten years ago I suspended two pieces of angle iron from attic joists, going down through the ceiling, to provide a mount for a plasma HDTV. (Since this was over the fireplace and in front of where the chimney was behind the wall, I didn't have studs there that would be a normal thickness and couldn't depend on them for something as heavy as a plasma HDTV.) Granted, that was around the chimney, which may have required special measurements, but the joists there varied from 12-18" apart. I positioned the angle irons so they were as close to centered on the chimney as possible while in the attic and when I got down into the living room and checked the holes I had made in the ceiling, they were not anywhere close to centered over the fireplace. (In other words, while the fireplace chimney was a straight line, the structure around it shifted - probably to allow room for the chimney for the furnace.)
These dimensions have been industry standards for 60 years or more (just addressing my own lifetime in that). All contractors know it, all architects know it. Anyone who works with lumber knows it. Those qualified to make plans, like architects, allow for the accepted sizes in their plans.
If you are actually expecting a 2x4 to be 2" x 4", then that tells us, right off, you have no idea what you're doing.
I guess you missed the entire point of what I said. Parents with terminal diseases - you can't just ignore those calls and if it's an emergency or there's a new caregiver on duty you don't know, the call could be from numbers or area codes you don't recognize. You can't just silence the phone and figure you won't be getting an important call.
I alluded to that before - guess you didn't read that part of the response.
I can't put on a whitelist doctors that I don't yet know in case she ends up in the ER. There were also times when someone, like a substitute caregiver, would call and their area code was someplace away from us because they still have the same cell number from before they moved. I made a reference to this in my post.
Some of us cannot turn off our phones at night. I had to deal with my Father dying of leukemia for 3 years or so, then an over-anxious Mother who was having panic attacks and then we found she was developing Alzheimer's. For 10 years, I had to be on call 24/7 because I never knew what would happen or if that out-of-town phone call was a friend or an EMT or someone calling on their cell phone to tell me she needed help or was in serious trouble.
It must be a wonderful privilege to live in a world where it's easy to imagine not having to be on call 24/7.
It depends on whether you want something that works or not. I spent years, as a kid, seeing how easily Mattel toys break. I'm not about to trust them with $300 of my money.
It's not about just gullibility.
Anyone who's read or studied or even gone lightly over the research of Elizabeth Loftus will not be surprised by this and will know it's about more than just gullibility.
Yes, that's true. I didn't want to go into all the detail, but what is ironic is that one of the major points of the article (that it was radiation pressure from the A-Bomb that triggered the H-Bomb) was wrong and if the DoE had let it go, that would have been released as misinformation and nobody would have known. But since the DoE did get involved, that eventually led to the correct information being revealed.
I'm still astounded the editors actually sent the article to the DoE to get approval or verification.
And, at this point, with two years left in his term as a lame duck, he cares about the votes he'll get because .... why?
Actually, it could tie into the First Amendment. They point out that it's a journalism issue. This would be closely related to issues that journalists deal with when protecting sources. While that doesn't always work, the idea is that the press needs a certain amount of latitude in being able to protect their sources or have access to material that, for various reasons, may not be printable without consequences.
But, since the internet is an international object, something else comes into play here. In college I had a chance to meet and talk with Howard Morland, who was, at the time, semi-famous for having (inaccurately, it turned out later) figured out the linking mechanism between how an atom bomb triggered a hydrogen bomb. He had travelled around the country, doing different interviews and talking with people to figure out more about this. At the time, of course, it was all top secret. He wrote an article for a magazine called "The Progressive." Unwisely, the editors at "The Progressive" sent the article into the DoE for verification. All sorts of men in black with guns showed up and there was a huge court case. The design, which had been worked out from completely non-classified material, was given a classified status and was censored.
There was, however, one copy of the paper that had not been confiscated by the government and was with someone who, at the time, was travelling internationally. This person got it to a publication that was able to print it in their country. Once that information was published and openly available, even if it wasn't in the U.S. (and I think copies were sent into the U.S.), it became public knowledge and was no longer classified. (For details, read "The Secret that Exploded," by Howard Morland.)
So Sony may try going after Americans with that information, but once the documents become published and public knowledge, they can't really do too much about it.
Logitech is just as much a "stagnator" as the bigger guys. I bought a few Squeezeboxes years ago and loved the system, but once Logitech bought out SlimDevices and took over the Squeezeboxes, I knew the days were numbered.
Logitech is the kind of mediocre and great and creating products that are average and could, with minimal effort, have been made great.
While that may work for many people, I've had two times, due to hurricanes, in recent years, where I did not have artificial light in the evening. Both times the power outage lasted 8 or more days and it did little to shift my sleep schedule, so I'm not so sure that applies to everyone.
But, taking it as it is, I've also read studies that point out that nightbirds are modifying the environment to suit themselves, which would support the point that night people tend to handle marathon sessions better, since they're intentionally altering their environment to allow them to work as long as they can. It's also possible that the habits attributed to morning and to night people are from other factors and that the early bird or late night habits are an outgrowth of other personality factors.
I've seen, over and over, night people going on for hours and hours - many more hours than can be accounted for by the time difference of when they started and when morning people started. I've also read a few studies about that as well - that night people are better for marathon sessions. If I can start at noon or 1 PM and be sure I'm uninterrupted, I can often keep going in good form until after sun-up the next day. That's much longer than finishing at 9 PM when you've started any time on that day.
There are a lot of jokes about morning and night people, but studies show there is validity to this. I learned to work with this when teaching special ed and later, when I ran my own software company, where I did all the programming, I saw a dramatic illustration of some of those issues.
Morning people get up and are perky and ready to start. However, they're the ones who often need a nap in the afternoon and work well with an 8 hour day, but do not do well with marathon sessions. Night people do not start quickly. They wake up and need time to adjust to the world again and often are not ready to really focus until the afternoon. But they gain in strength and focus over time. They can often work marathon sessions, working all through the night and into the next morning.
I found that when I was coding and could work on my own schedule, I could get some work done in the afternoon and this is when I set things up, did simpler tasks, and caught up on things. But my real work hours started about 8:00 pm, when I could start focusing and I would often work through until sunrise or longer. 18 hour coding sessions were not unusual for me, but, of course, if I did a few in a row because I was working on something difficult, then I'd need several days to just recover. But I might be able to do 5 days straight of mega-sessions if needed. It's also worth noting this was in my 40s, not when I was some over-energetic teen or 20-something. In fact, in one month, when I was over 45, I did more all-nighters (with good code as a result) than I did in all my time in high school and college combined.
It does vary according to the person. Forcing night people to try to work in the morning will always be an issue for them and will not produce the good code they can produce. Forcing morning people who tend not to do well in marathons to stay for 10 hour days four times a week is just as bad.
Corporations don't understand these things, which is one reason I never wanted to be involved with any larger corporations. If you want coders to do their best work, you can't regiment them and dictate how they work. You need to let them find their style. Let them work on their own schedule. If they need music, let them have it. If they need silence, find a way to make quiet places available. Some need neat work spaces, others need chaos.
I remember with Amarok 2.0 not being able to find the UI for 1.x - was it added later? Even recently, when I tried it on MacPorts, there was a different UI, and I did check through all the preferences. Is it possible the ability to use both UIs wasn't on all platforms?
I'm on an iMac, I love it. It's not perfect, but after 10 years or so on Linux, there was no f---ing way I was going back to Windows, but I needed to be able to do professional video editing and there was nothing suitable on Linux for that. (Last I looked, none of the FOSS video editors were quite up to professional specs yet.) But on the other hand, I know what you're talking about. It's the Doctrine of Insufficient Adulation: If you're not 100% committed to OS X, then many fan boys will get quite nasty. I'm sorry that happened to your project. While I use Skype, I don't use it much and it sounds like the plugin market was kind of like the App Store or the App Market on Android -- that ratings and nasty comments can really do a program in. I take it you made it clear in your description it wasn't intended for those markets - I know even with that, people will get snotty because they think they can force a developer to do what they want.
As for Facebook, it's possible users don't always express themselves well. But, on the other hand, what part of, "We HATE Timeline!" is hard to understand? There's no need to force it on people who don't want it. For that matter, it's been a continual issue that people don't like the forced updates. FB could easily just publish an API, offer a few skins, and allow others to make and share skins. That would easily eliminate many of the complaints about FB - but they're never going to allow that because it's all about control, and this is an example of what I'm talking about. It's a company run by developers, so they don't care what users want, they, in their infinite wisdom, feel they know and will make users do what's best, instead of giving them choices.