Will you be sharing the raw results of the survey, in, say, a week's time? I'd really like to see, for example, the percentage of people who prefer the new layout. I hope we don't just get a bland "we are using your feedback from our survey to make further enhancements to the UX".
WTF?? Why are you even on this thread if you don't know what the redesign is designed to achieve? How can you expect to respond to people here if you don't know what the objectives are? It doesn't bode well for the site, if the owners haven't bothered to communicate their objectives with their employees.
Perhaps you could list the benefits and features of the new site compared with the existing one? Currently all I can see is acres of whitespace, very restful I'm sure, but if I wanted that rather than comments, I could just open about:blank...
It's also similar to the challenge that hopefully the diamond industry will face some day, when synthetic diamonds become acceptable to the idiots that pay for real ones. A bit of a waste of technology, but anything that causes less money to flow into these cesspools of human idiocy the better. But IMO, it won't happen with fragrances, really these companies don't even sell the barest shred of a product, just the image, so tech can't really bring them to their knees. Diamonds and music are different while still relying on sign value - you do get something in the end, and if it serves it's main purpose just as well (looking expensive/sounding cool) then the consumer will probably go to the cheaper source.
Fake diamonds are already here. De Beers are trying to counteract the "problem" by saying things like:
"If people really love each other, then they give each other the real stone,"... "It is not a symbol of eternal love if it is something that was created last week."
Well, according to this US gov't report on titanium prices, titanium has never been cheaper...
The chart you link to only goes up to 2002, but the article talks about this year and last year. Think what oil prices were like 3 years ago for example...
There is more background about Quicktime and Microsoft's actions against it here.
Section headings from the downloadable PDF include:
# Microsoft has Designed its Multimedia Product to Exclude Competitors
and Extend its Monopoly Power
# Microsoft has Used its Monopoly Power and Anticompetitive Tactics
to Try to Defeat Quicktime
# Microsoft Repeatedly Pressured Apple to Give Up Quicktime and
Cede the Multimedia Playback Market to Microsoft
# to Thwart Quicktime, Microsoft Employed Punitive and Exclusionary
Actions
# The Technical Problems and Misleading Error Messages Introduced by
Microsoft Impair Quicktime's Performance and Impede Apple's Ability
to Compete
# Original Equipment Manufacturers and Independent Software Vendors
Fear Reprisal from Microsoft if their Business Conduct does not
Conform to Microsoft's Wishes
There are far too many examples of monopoly-abusing business practices to quote them all, but here are a few from the main PDF:
From paragraph 77: "As recounted in the sworn deposition of Phil Schiller and Tim Schaaf, Microsoft repeatedly pressured Apple to abandon its business of providing software that enables users to view multimedia content on their computers. In return, Microsoft offered Apple the much smaller portion of the market for software tools used to create multimedia content. Microsoft made it clear that if Apple refused to relinquish the playback market, Microsoft would use its monopoly power to drive Apple out of the entire multimedia market." See subsequent paragraphs for how they went about this.
From paragraph 97: "... Microsoft took several steps to sabotage QuickTime. These included creating misleading error messages and introducing technical bypasses that deprived QuickTime of the opportunity to process certain types of multimedia files. In some instances users were left with the false impression that QuickTime was not functioning properly"
From paragraph 104: "Microsoft has used undocumented changes to the Windows registry to impair the ability of QuickTime to play numerous multimedia file types. In some cases, Internet Explorer 4.0 bypasses QuickTime and uses Microsoft software to play a multimedia file from a Web server. For many formats the Microsoft software is not able to process the file at all. In other cases, the Microsoft multimedia software will play the file with a severly degraded quality."
From paragraphs 108,109: "Microsoft has caused misleading error messages to appear for consumers who used QuickTime for various file formats. For example,... Under certain conditions, an error dialog message would pop up when the user tried to gain access to types of media files, such as a QuickTime movie file, which were not associated with [Microsoft's] ActiveMovie. The Windows operating system would then ask the usser if he wished to reconfigure his system, suggesting that there was a problem that the consumer should fix although no actual error had occurred. If the user selected 'yes', Windows would reconfigure the system to select Microsoft's ActiveMovie instead of QuickTime -- even though QuickTime was capable of running the movie file. From the point forward, Internet Explorer would launch the ActiveMovie player whenever the consumer clicked on a file containing a QuickTime movie. This would cause problems for certain multimedi files because the ActiveMovie plater could only process a subset of the file formats that QuickTime could process. If a file could not be processed by ActiveMovie, an error message would appear telling the user that the player is not available -- even though QuickTime was capable of operating with the file. This could mislead consumers into believing that QuickTime was not operating properly.
From paragraphs 125,126: "At the conclusion of the meeting [between Apple and Compaq, to discuss Compaq bundling Apple's
There is a paper here with more detail. Note the conditions:
Exclusion criteria for participation were significant medical or
psychiatric illness, medication, smoking more than 15 cigarettes per day, and drug or alcohol abuse. Subjects were instructed to abstain from food and drink (other than water) for 2hr before the experiment, and from alcohol, smoking and caffeine for 24hr before the experiment.
Subjects received a single intranasal dose of 24 IU oxytocin (Syntocinon-Spray, Novartis; 3 puffs per nostril, each with 4 IU
oxytocin) or placebo 50 min before the start of the trust or the risk experiment.
It would seem unlikely that this would work for advertising if it required 50 minutes to take effect. It might work better for things like political rallies, where people are present for longer periods of time, but it's not clear how you would administer it to a crowd of people - would it be effective just released into the air? What kind of concentration would it need?
What's interesting about this one is that results can be viewed by domain. The highest proportion, and highest growth, of IIS seemed to be in the gov domain, where Apache is actually decreasing. IIS usage in education was also pretty high.
The UK currently doesn't allow general software patents, but they did have a discussion on this a couple of years ago - you can read their comments here: here
A particularly interesting comment they made (with respect to business method patents, but equally applicable to software) was:
The Government's conclusion is that those who favour some form of patentability for business methods have not provided the necessary evidence that it would be likely to increase innovation.
This states that there has to be a clear benefit in order to change the status quo; businesses should have to show that without software patents they are unable to innovate. This is clearly not the case.
You can read an interesting summary of user comments here
This is also being discussed over at dot.kde.org. It might not be the most unbiased discussion, but there are some neat tricks mentioned in the comments, for example, to create a customised KDE control centre, Melchior FRANZ writes:
Hey, I just wrote KNewbieControl, especially for you:
Actually, if you read the article, you'll find all the participants were using Netscape:
We gathered the data through the history and bookmark files that Netscape Navigator (versions 4.5-4.7) maintains. Netscape Navigator was the browser used by the participants in their everyday work,...
The Ohio FAQ has the following section in. I'm not sure if they're warning against Apache, or saying FrontPage is so hopelessly non-standards-compliant you shouldn't use it. A similar clause is in the Michigan Acknowledgement of Conditions and Notices form.
Is FrontPage recommended for use with my environment?
Before purchasing or developing your web pages with Microsoft FrontPage, ensure the web server for your pages will be the Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) running on Windows NT. FrontPage embeds proprietary and/or non-protocol-compliant features within HTML code, many of which are incompatible with many non-Microsoft web servers, including those utilized in OSU's OpenVMS and Novell architectures. The implications are twofold:
Web page creators can't just place FrontPage-generated HTML files in their OpenVMS accounts or in their Universal Disk Space and expect the web pages to work correctly.
Even if the pages are served successfully, they may only be fully readable by certain versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) web browser.
Having read comments here about character development, a good story, interesting concepts, believable science etc. I'm wondering why Star Trek (TNG) is so popular. After all, a typical episode might go something like:
Picard: Doctor Crusher, some of our crew seem to be ill with a highly contagious disease which we've never encountered before. Can you come up with an antidote?
Crusher: I'll do my best Captain.
50 minutes of people acting irrationally, wandering round the ship contaminating other people etc.
Crusher: I think I have the solution, Captain. I'll introduce it into the ship's ventilation system so everyone will be back to normal in time for the closing credits.
Captain: Excellent work Crusher.
Or how about the ever-popular "We'll reconfigure the deflector array to emit an inverse tachyon pulse."
And why don't they have any robotic probes they can send down to unknown planets to explore? No, instead, we'll send down half of our most senior officers, then a storm will start up and the transporters won't work through the interference... Will the crew get transported back to the ship before they die of exposure/radiation/disease/killer plants/boredom?
Actually Sun now ship many of the GNU tools with Solaris, as you can see here. They ship 2 CDs, one of software supported by Sun, and one of software packaged by Sun, but "community supported".
Shipped but unsupported software includes: emacs, vim, lynx, mutt, pine, mySQL, rpm, KDE 3.0 (Gnome comes as standard, along with CDE), KOffice, qt3, gcc 2.95.3, gdb, ddd, cvs, python, gimp, autoconf, automake, GNU make, many standard Linux libraries...
Basically, you can now have a complete GNU development environment out-of-the-box.
As the cost of the clients is so much less than the servers, I'm sure that they will just add clients until the server cluster reaches maximum throughput.
I noticed a few things when looking at the break-down of costs:
For the clients, a 1G 133Mhz SDRAM DIMM is $880! ouch. The cost per client is $7172, for which you get a dual 1.4Ghz Pentium III with 4Gb of RAM... and a whopping 15" CRT. The clients only make up 5% of the overall cost though.
The Oracle software is $35000/CPU, for 3 years. What happens after 3 years? Does Oracle lease the software or something? Oracle support is shown as 2,000 * 24. Where does the 24 come from?
The small minority of geeks who adhere to the cultish mindset of the GPL and Linux will definitely take offense to this, but there is no reasoning with someone who blindly follows the precepts of open source and the GPL...those people will never understand why the NSA would reject the GPL. For rational people, I can sum up exactly why the GPL is not and in its current form will never be useful for the NSA or any similar enterprise: "Open" is the exact opposite of "secure."
read the quote: "mechanical television" I can't remember ever having owned an tv that was not all electronic.
I can't remember ever having owned a computer that used valves - it doesn't mean valves weren't important in the development of computers. What will your grandchildren say? "I can't remember ever having owned a TV that uses a CRT"?
Anyway, I was posting in reply to the quote in the Slashdot story: " Philo T. Farnsworth... He transmitted the first television image... 1927". It doesn't say the first electronic image. This then links to an article that says: "The sponsors of this website - which includes family and friends of Philo T. Farnsworth", which leads me to suppose I might not be seeing the bigger picture.
Try reading the whole of the linked-to article. It talks about other developments of Baird's, for example colour television and also:
Baird sent a "cable" television transmission 438 miles from London to Glasgow in 1927. The following year he transmitted images to the cellar of an amateur radio operator in Hartsdale, New York. It was the first transatlantic demonstration of television.
The same article also has some background on Farnsworth:
Farnsworth conceived his television system in 1923, while still in high school. Utilizing a cathode ray tube, his design predated Zworykin's Iconoscope by a decade. By 1927 the boy wonder had transmitted straight line images from his first Image Dissector. In 1934, the year he met Baird, he was deeply entangled in patent litigation suits with RCA. By licensing the Image Dissector in Great Britain, he hoped to sidestep RCA and claim a piece of the European market.
Some people might recall John Logie Baird as being the creator of telveision. Have a look at this article for more background. Here's a relevant quote:
On January 26, 1926 Baird demonstrated a fully working prototype of mechanical television to members of the Royal Institution at 22 Frith Street, Baird's residence and laboratory. This was the world's first demonstration of true television because it showed moving human faces with tonal gradients and detail. Far from perfect, the images flickered quite a bit, but the individuals on screen were fully recognizable.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's our official survey. Thanks for contributing.
Will you be sharing the raw results of the survey, in, say, a week's time? I'd really like to see, for example, the percentage of people who prefer the new layout. I hope we don't just get a bland "we are using your feedback from our survey to make further enhancements to the UX".
I'll ask the design team.
WTF?? Why are you even on this thread if you don't know what the redesign is designed to achieve? How can you expect to respond to people here if you don't know what the objectives are? It doesn't bode well for the site, if the owners haven't bothered to communicate their objectives with their employees.
Perhaps you could list the benefits and features of the new site compared with the existing one? Currently all I can see is acres of whitespace, very restful I'm sure, but if I wanted that rather than comments, I could just open about:blank ...
Fake diamonds are already here. De Beers are trying to counteract the "problem" by saying things like:
"If people really love each other, then they give each other the real stone," ... "It is not a symbol of eternal love if it is something that was created last week."
The chart you link to only goes up to 2002, but the article talks about this year and last year. Think what oil prices were like 3 years ago for example...
Section headings from the downloadable PDF include:
# Microsoft has Designed its Multimedia Product to Exclude Competitors and Extend its Monopoly Power
# Microsoft has Used its Monopoly Power and Anticompetitive Tactics to Try to Defeat Quicktime
# Microsoft Repeatedly Pressured Apple to Give Up Quicktime and Cede the Multimedia Playback Market to Microsoft
# to Thwart Quicktime, Microsoft Employed Punitive and Exclusionary Actions
# The Technical Problems and Misleading Error Messages Introduced by Microsoft Impair Quicktime's Performance and Impede Apple's Ability to Compete
# Original Equipment Manufacturers and Independent Software Vendors Fear Reprisal from Microsoft if their Business Conduct does not Conform to Microsoft's Wishes
There are far too many examples of monopoly-abusing business practices to quote them all, but here are a few from the main PDF:
From paragraph 77: "As recounted in the sworn deposition of Phil Schiller and Tim Schaaf, Microsoft repeatedly pressured Apple to abandon its business of providing software that enables users to view multimedia content on their computers. In return, Microsoft offered Apple the much smaller portion of the market for software tools used to create multimedia content. Microsoft made it clear that if Apple refused to relinquish the playback market, Microsoft would use its monopoly power to drive Apple out of the entire multimedia market." See subsequent paragraphs for how they went about this.
From paragraph 97: "... Microsoft took several steps to sabotage QuickTime. These included creating misleading error messages and introducing technical bypasses that deprived QuickTime of the opportunity to process certain types of multimedia files. In some instances users were left with the false impression that QuickTime was not functioning properly"
From paragraph 104: "Microsoft has used undocumented changes to the Windows registry to impair the ability of QuickTime to play numerous multimedia file types. In some cases, Internet Explorer 4.0 bypasses QuickTime and uses Microsoft software to play a multimedia file from a Web server. For many formats the Microsoft software is not able to process the file at all. In other cases, the Microsoft multimedia software will play the file with a severly degraded quality."
From paragraphs 108,109: "Microsoft has caused misleading error messages to appear for consumers who used QuickTime for various file formats. For example, ... Under certain conditions, an error dialog message would pop up when the user tried to gain access to types of media files, such as a QuickTime movie file, which were not associated with [Microsoft's] ActiveMovie. The Windows operating system would then ask the usser if he wished to reconfigure his system, suggesting that there was a problem that the consumer should fix although no actual error had occurred. If the user selected 'yes', Windows would reconfigure the system to select Microsoft's ActiveMovie instead of QuickTime -- even though QuickTime was capable of running the movie file. From the point forward, Internet Explorer would launch the ActiveMovie player whenever the consumer clicked on a file containing a QuickTime movie. This would cause problems for certain multimedi files because the ActiveMovie plater could only process a subset of the file formats that QuickTime could process. If a file could not be processed by ActiveMovie, an error message would appear telling the user that the player is not available -- even though QuickTime was capable of operating with the file. This could mislead consumers into believing that QuickTime was not operating properly.
From paragraphs 125,126: "At the conclusion of the meeting [between Apple and Compaq, to discuss Compaq bundling Apple's
An epicanthal fold?
Is this the same Nokia that is pushing hard for software patents?
..."
Software patents held by Nokia
Nokia has over 70% of Finnish software patents
Nokia argues that software patents "provide incentives to undertake research and development in Europe,
How does Nokia reconcile open source with software patents?
Exclusion criteria for participation were significant medical or psychiatric illness, medication, smoking more than 15 cigarettes per day, and drug or alcohol abuse. Subjects were instructed to abstain from food and drink (other than water) for 2hr before the experiment, and from alcohol, smoking and caffeine for 24hr before the experiment.
Subjects received a single intranasal dose of 24 IU oxytocin (Syntocinon-Spray, Novartis; 3 puffs per nostril, each with 4 IU oxytocin) or placebo 50 min before the start of the trust or the risk experiment.
It would seem unlikely that this would work for advertising if it required 50 minutes to take effect. It might work better for things like political rallies, where people are present for longer periods of time, but it's not clear how you would administer it to a crowd of people - would it be effective just released into the air? What kind of concentration would it need?
What's interesting about this one is that results can be viewed by domain. The highest proportion, and highest growth, of IIS seemed to be in the gov domain, where Apache is actually decreasing. IIS usage in education was also pretty high.
Use of Apache was particularly high in Germany .
A: None of them, presumably.
Q: Do anti-lock brakes (ABS) save lives?
A: Yes
Q: Do car manufacturers fit ABS as standard to all cars?
A: No
Q: Should there be legislation to make ABS compulsory on all cars?
A: ??
A particularly interesting comment they made (with respect to business method patents, but equally applicable to software) was:
The Government's conclusion is that those who favour some form of patentability for business methods have not provided the necessary evidence that it would be likely to increase innovation.
This states that there has to be a clear benefit in order to change the status quo; businesses should have to show that without software patents they are unable to innovate. This is clearly not the case.
You can read an interesting summary of user comments here
So which sector is he talking about? The investment banking sector?
It worked for me. Maybe it only works if you run it within KDE, or maybe you have different versions of the KDE/QT libraries.
Hey, I just wrote KNewbieControl, especially for you:
, fonts,screensaver}
$ kcmshell LookNFeel/{background,kwindecoration,style,colors
Well, I was impressed anyway.
Actually, if you read the article, you'll find all the participants were using Netscape:
We gathered the data through the history and bookmark files that Netscape Navigator (versions 4.5-4.7) maintains. Netscape Navigator was the browser used by the participants in their everyday work, ...
Is FrontPage recommended for use with my environment?
Before purchasing or developing your web pages with Microsoft FrontPage, ensure the web server for your pages will be the Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) running on Windows NT. FrontPage embeds proprietary and/or non-protocol-compliant features within HTML code, many of which are incompatible with many non-Microsoft web servers, including those utilized in OSU's OpenVMS and Novell architectures. The implications are twofold:
Web page creators can't just place FrontPage-generated HTML files in their OpenVMS accounts or in their Universal Disk Space and expect the web pages to work correctly.
Even if the pages are served successfully, they may only be fully readable by certain versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) web browser.
Picard: Doctor Crusher, some of our crew seem to be ill with a highly contagious disease which we've never encountered before. Can you come up with an antidote?
Crusher: I'll do my best Captain.
50 minutes of people acting irrationally, wandering round the ship contaminating other people etc.
Crusher: I think I have the solution, Captain. I'll introduce it into the ship's ventilation system so everyone will be back to normal in time for the closing credits.
Captain: Excellent work Crusher.
Or how about the ever-popular "We'll reconfigure the deflector array to emit an inverse tachyon pulse."
And why don't they have any robotic probes they can send down to unknown planets to explore? No, instead, we'll send down half of our most senior officers, then a storm will start up and the transporters won't work through the interference ... Will the crew get transported back to the ship before they die of exposure/radiation/disease/killer plants/boredom?
Supported software includes: Glib, GTK, Apache, bind, Samba, Tomcat, Perl, bash, bzip2, gzip.
Shipped but unsupported software includes: emacs, vim, lynx, mutt, pine, mySQL, rpm, KDE 3.0 (Gnome comes as standard, along with CDE), KOffice, qt3, gcc 2.95.3, gdb, ddd, cvs, python, gimp, autoconf, automake, GNU make, many standard Linux libraries ...
Basically, you can now have a complete GNU development environment out-of-the-box.
I noticed a few things when looking at the break-down of costs:
... and a whopping 15" CRT. The clients only make up 5% of the overall cost though.
For the clients, a 1G 133Mhz SDRAM DIMM is $880! ouch. The cost per client is $7172, for which you get a dual 1.4Ghz Pentium III with 4Gb of RAM
The Oracle software is $35000/CPU, for 3 years. What happens after 3 years? Does Oracle lease the software or something? Oracle support is shown as 2,000 * 24. Where does the 24 come from?
New Linux virus creates peer-to-peer terror network
HP finally fires their anti-business business strategist for Linux
Disbanding the RIAA will turn the music scene into 17th Century Europe
The GPL, open source freedoms and the Cold War
This last article has this classic quote:
The small minority of geeks who adhere to the cultish mindset of the GPL and Linux will definitely take offense to this, but there is no reasoning with someone who blindly follows the precepts of open source and the GPL ...those people will never understand why the NSA would reject the GPL. For rational people, I can sum up exactly why the GPL is not and in its current form will never be useful for the NSA or any similar enterprise: "Open" is the exact opposite of "secure."
You're out-of-date. kword does support RTF in KOffice 1.2
I can't remember ever having owned a computer that used valves - it doesn't mean valves weren't important in the development of computers. What will your grandchildren say? "I can't remember ever having owned a TV that uses a CRT"?
Anyway, I was posting in reply to the quote in the Slashdot story: " Philo T. Farnsworth ... He transmitted the first television image ... 1927". It doesn't say the first electronic image. This then links to an article that says: "The sponsors of this website - which includes family and friends of Philo T. Farnsworth", which leads me to suppose I might not be seeing the bigger picture.
Try reading the whole of the linked-to article. It talks about other developments of Baird's, for example colour television and also:
Baird sent a "cable" television transmission 438 miles from London to Glasgow in 1927. The following year he transmitted images to the cellar of an amateur radio operator in Hartsdale, New York. It was the first transatlantic demonstration of television.
The same article also has some background on Farnsworth:
Farnsworth conceived his television system in 1923, while still in high school. Utilizing a cathode ray tube, his design predated Zworykin's Iconoscope by a decade. By 1927 the boy wonder had transmitted straight line images from his first Image Dissector. In 1934, the year he met Baird, he was deeply entangled in patent litigation suits with RCA. By licensing the Image Dissector in Great Britain, he hoped to sidestep RCA and claim a piece of the European market.
Patent litigation - plus ça change ...
On January 26, 1926 Baird demonstrated a fully working prototype of mechanical television to members of the Royal Institution at 22 Frith Street, Baird's residence and laboratory. This was the world's first demonstration of true television because it showed moving human faces with tonal gradients and detail. Far from perfect, the images flickered quite a bit, but the individuals on screen were fully recognizable.
4. The voter is prevented from voting for the wrong party...
???
Where did you get that message? I'm using Konqueror from KDE 3 and it seems OK (and I haven't changed the user agent setting).