Ah...now we know why Apple's been buying up flash memory in spades.
That iPod nano looks ridiculously slick. Heh, and although I imagine I'm going to have my geek card forcibly removed after saying this, my first thought upon seeing it was, "What happened to all the colors?" Granted, it's form over function, but judging by the amount of iPod minis that I've seen, people like the colors.
Well, fear not: iPod nano tubes: Colorful iPod nano Tubes fit like a glove and offer full Click Wheel control from the outside. (Actually, as someone whose iPod sports an impressive amount of scrapes, I think this is a good idea.)
That Apple, they think of everything. Now I'm going to go back to waiting for my Dalmation iPod nano tube.
These points are not bad, per se, but I do have one very large problem with two of them, at least insofar as the same author has combined them into the same list:
2. OS GUI's are Designed for Beginners.
Ooooh. there's nothing wrong with that, as long as you can grow with your user interface. Problem is, we outgrow it in a matter of hours, and after that the OS is nothing but a nail in the eye
...and...
5. Our love of choice
I bet you my bunny the former Soviet union could have designed a better operating system GUI than any of the software vendors of today. Not only would their GUI allow you to get the job done faster, it would completely lack preferences, freedom of choice and any settings even remotely related to changing the way you interact.
Well, which is it? How can the same list bitch about the folly of designing interfaces solely toward beginners, and then later advocate for one (and only one) way of accomplishing various tasks. Here's a hint: there is not one and only user.
Am I wrong, or do these two points completely contradict each other?
I'd like to join the multitude welcoming Slashdot into 2005 (hell, welcoming Slashdot into 2002/2003, actually) and give them all at a pat on the back.
What's the biggest boon of this change? Custom stylesheets. When Slashdot's IT theme debuted, it was met with much scorn and derision, and rightfully so. A number of solutions appeared, including mine, which was a JavaScript bookmark that redirected the user to the same article, but using hireadesigner.slashdot.org as the URI, thereby removing the hideous pseudo-tan.
Well, now we won't have to worry about that. We can whip up a custom stylesheet, and apply it, and we're done, with much less effort than attempting to use a custom stylesheet to modify Slashdot's current bevy of table cells and nested font tags.
While you're out there, Slashdot admins, why not add in the ability for us to define a custom stylesheet, and save it in our user profile? I know browsers will do this, but do most browsers have per-site custom CSS stylesheets? Give us some options.
At any rate, that's a minor feature request. Thumbs up, Slashdot.
Of course, it's no coincidence that both the sites you linked to are much more alike (functionally) than they are different.
That's the double-edged sword of powerful systems like Mambo (and drupal for that matter, which I have used for community.auditionrocks.com, although more out of expediency than anything else): they excel at making sites that really require exactly the features that they offer, and no more. That may sound like a stupid statement, but it's no surprise that the vast majority of Mambo-powered and drupal-powered sites have a distinct Mambo or Drupal look and feel. At their best, they let you go from prototyping to actual building very quickly; at their worst, they dictate design. And breaking out of the CMSs presentation paradigm can frequently become more trouble than it's worth.
The first thing jumps to mind is a typical fanboy response: "The Mac is a desktop computer. If it runs MySQL good enough for a prototyping environment, that's fine. Where else can you get a great desktop environment that just works, along with a built-in Unix-like OS?"
But I should step back from that statement. It shouldn't be that way. We should have a truly world-class server combined with our desktop experience. I should be able to go from prototyping my web apps right to production, without a bunch of migration or guesstimation.
I really like Mac OS X, but I'm not above recognizing if it's flawed in certain aspects. Any word on whether Mac OS X Server performs these types of operations better than the client? That would be interesting - somewhat troubling, but interesting (and perhaps not even that troubling.)
and not one standard Slashdot grammar tirade...even though it's warranted?
The popular Mambo CMS developer team has severed its ties with Miro Corporation
Really? Would it have been so difficult to write "The developer team behind the popular Mambo CMS has severed ties with Miro Corporation" ? The way it's worded now, it sounds like it's the team that's popular.
Maybe I'm wrong though. Maybe the Mambo developers sport slick haircuts, get good grades, drive sweet cars, hang out with the jocks but still keep it real by getting baked occasionally.
Damn. Now I want someone to post those pictures of hipsters that get posted in every thread about Mac users.
Agreed. As a web developer, who created a hosted RSS reader (for the PHP5 developer contest), the current implementation of RSS was maddening.
I mean, it's fairly obvious from what they removed that the specification was never terribly well thought-out in the first place, so this can only help. Oh, and incidentally - I was going to chastize your spelling on "isPemraLink" - only to find that that's how it's spelled in the article. Who knew that the original specification was so flawed;-)
that bashing the XBox 360 is the Slashdot meme du jour, but the article actually consists of 10 reasons why it might fail, and 10 reasons why it might succeed.
How do I know this? Did I read the article? Bah! It's in the damn summary:
Warm up your typing fingers as we give you ten reasons why Xbox 360 could kick ass in Japan, and ten reasons why it could bomba bomba in Kutaragi's backyard
The company decided to switch to a software-only strategy and ported BeOS to the Macintosh platform. There were other reasons to justify this switch: it was clear that Apple was always going to be able to ship the latest PowerPC hardware faster than Be, Inc. could
Contrast with...
Apple decided to switch...and ported MacOS to the Intel platform. There were other reasons to justify this switch: it was clear that Intel was always going to be able to ship the latest CPU hardware faster than IBM, Inc. could
Now, you'll notice I removed the words "software-only" from my conversion. Does that mean something? I'm doubtful, but I thought the parallels were interesting. At one time it appeared that Apple might sadly go the way of Be; that is thankfully no longer the case.
You know, hordes of Slashdotters might descend upon me for the mere suggestion, but you might try looking at Flash:
Many more widgets, interfaces available
The user's browser - provided they have the Flash plugin installed, which most do - is irrelevant
Reusable, shareable components
And, the main reason I thought of Flash in the first place: Actionscript 2, which includes strict data typing, class files and structure, etc...
Flash can be really horrible for a great many things. As a Mac user, I'm unfortunately familiar with its occasionally lagging performance. But it can fit the bill for some things, and I think Macromedia - before they became Adobemedia, of course - were really trying to promote Flash as an application creation tool, rather than just some fancy rich media web plugin. Think about it.
Oh. And Flash had remoting with XML while the term AJAX was still a gleam in the eye of those folks at Adaptive Path.
As those who saw the 2000 Super Bowl (I believe that was the one) can attest, much of this money was indeed spent on marketing. At the time, this made sense: let's establish ourselves with high profile commercials, designed to reach a huge audience.
But that didn't work. If only these companies knew then what we know now: these internet services don't need to be marketed to the masses. They only need to be marketed to a select few. Take websites and software like MySpace (please!), CDBaby, Delicious Library, and even Google: these are just a handful of current web success stories that are profitable, and they've never used television advertising. The goal isn't to reach everyone; the goal is to reach early adopters who will use and actually benefit from your product. The masses will come along...eventually.
Well, our offices are situated above the Shanghai Tunnels; although to call that a tourist attraction is probably stretching it a bit. Do people come here to see the sprawling Nike campus? Maybe...but again, probably doubtful.
Oh, and no mention of nerd friendly Portland would be complete without including Stumptown Coffee, which is required sustenance for the first half of any workday, or some of Portland's outstandingbreweries, which are necessary for the afternoon.
Why couldn't they have done this several months ago, before my boss started looking closely at Wikipedia, and their method of allowing anyone - even users not logged into specific user accounts - to edit a given page? It's taken a bit of effort and time to reengineer our CMS to do the same, should someone desire the option.
Sigh. I fully expect to walk into work on Monday and see "One-button page locking" as the next feature to implement.
However, a number of the same folks who listened to the Beatles in the '60s railed against Marilyn Manson in the '90s. Games as a medium may be more accepted in the future, but, if history is any indication, scapegoating will never die.
Your mention of Britney Spears confirms what I already thought this to be: an argument straight out of 2003.
Seriously. We have the iTunes Music Store. It costs, but it's very successful. People have proven that they are willing to pay for music online, even if the ability to pirate it still exists.
I think you're missing the point. Apple has held out with one-button mice for as long as they have for exactly the reason you specify: you should be able to do everything in a Mac program by using a one-button mouse. This includes options that you can access via Ctrl-Click: they should be accessible without with or without a Ctrl-Click, via menus. No option should ever require the use of Ctrl-Click (the Mac's version of the second mouse button), or the second mouse button on a Mighty Mouse.
This doesn't seem to be hurting Firefox or Safari, though; I browse with both, and can't recall when a site wouldn't render properly. As far as sites that employ IE-specific technology, are concerned, these sites won't render properly anyway, unless Opera embeds an actual IE rendering layer, like the new Netscape is trying to do.
I, personally, wonder what has taken them so long. Just make it a user-changeable preference, and be done with it. If they want to get clever about it, perhaps make it so that Opera can recognize certain times when it's being blocked from a website because of its UserAgent string, and offer to change it.
Computer science curriculum seems to be wasting a lot of bright young potential on buzzwords. Patterns, paradigms, bleh. People somehow manage to get masters degrees in CS from Berkeley without even knowing what "turing complete", "Karnaugh map", "Rice's theorem", "Goedel's completeness theorem", "planar graph", "functional language", "church-turing thesis" are. But you ask them about a singleton, model-view controller or Java's security model in reflection and they're the fucking expert.
Interesting - that you decry the popularity of "buzzwords" with a list of what are, essentially, buzzwords.
Yes, but oftentimes these can only be discovered after the fact. It's not like these people are identified solely through their interview questions - no matter how innovative those questions may be - or even, dare I say it, through their academic qualifications.
You're right about the small number, but we won't know just who will be among those who change the world until they suck it up and just do it.
Well, sort of - except none of the goods being sold are tangible. Instead, it's access to a web service.
This, of course, does not refute your original point, about this simply being a business directory. I think idea is actually a pretty interesting one, although interesting and patentable are two very different things.
Agreed. For similar evidence of this mentality, check out any article about HP. The amount of completely off-topic posts bashing Carly Fiorina is stunning. I'm not saying that she was a great, good or even terrible CEO - but she is villified more than Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Michael Robertson combined. She's probably inching toward Darl Mcbride.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah...now we know why Apple's been buying up flash memory in spades.
That iPod nano looks ridiculously slick. Heh, and although I imagine I'm going to have my geek card forcibly removed after saying this, my first thought upon seeing it was, "What happened to all the colors?" Granted, it's form over function, but judging by the amount of iPod minis that I've seen, people like the colors.
Well, fear not: iPod nano tubes: Colorful iPod nano Tubes fit like a glove and offer full Click Wheel control from the outside. (Actually, as someone whose iPod sports an impressive amount of scrapes, I think this is a good idea.)
That Apple, they think of everything. Now I'm going to go back to waiting for my Dalmation iPod nano tube.
Am I wrong, or do these two points completely contradict each other?
I'd like to join the multitude welcoming Slashdot into 2005 (hell, welcoming Slashdot into 2002/2003, actually) and give them all at a pat on the back.
What's the biggest boon of this change? Custom stylesheets. When Slashdot's IT theme debuted, it was met with much scorn and derision, and rightfully so. A number of solutions appeared, including mine, which was a JavaScript bookmark that redirected the user to the same article, but using hireadesigner.slashdot.org as the URI, thereby removing the hideous pseudo-tan.
Well, now we won't have to worry about that. We can whip up a custom stylesheet, and apply it, and we're done, with much less effort than attempting to use a custom stylesheet to modify Slashdot's current bevy of table cells and nested font tags.
While you're out there, Slashdot admins, why not add in the ability for us to define a custom stylesheet, and save it in our user profile? I know browsers will do this, but do most browsers have per-site custom CSS stylesheets? Give us some options.
At any rate, that's a minor feature request. Thumbs up, Slashdot.
Of course, it's no coincidence that both the sites you linked to are much more alike (functionally) than they are different.
That's the double-edged sword of powerful systems like Mambo (and drupal for that matter, which I have used for community.auditionrocks.com, although more out of expediency than anything else): they excel at making sites that really require exactly the features that they offer, and no more. That may sound like a stupid statement, but it's no surprise that the vast majority of Mambo-powered and drupal-powered sites have a distinct Mambo or Drupal look and feel. At their best, they let you go from prototyping to actual building very quickly; at their worst, they dictate design. And breaking out of the CMSs presentation paradigm can frequently become more trouble than it's worth.
Jokes about the XBox control may commense...starting NOW!
The first thing jumps to mind is a typical fanboy response: "The Mac is a desktop computer. If it runs MySQL good enough for a prototyping environment, that's fine. Where else can you get a great desktop environment that just works, along with a built-in Unix-like OS?"
But I should step back from that statement. It shouldn't be that way. We should have a truly world-class server combined with our desktop experience. I should be able to go from prototyping my web apps right to production, without a bunch of migration or guesstimation.
I really like Mac OS X, but I'm not above recognizing if it's flawed in certain aspects. Any word on whether Mac OS X Server performs these types of operations better than the client? That would be interesting - somewhat troubling, but interesting (and perhaps not even that troubling.)
and not one standard Slashdot grammar tirade...even though it's warranted?
The popular Mambo CMS developer team has severed its ties with Miro Corporation
Really? Would it have been so difficult to write "The developer team behind the popular Mambo CMS has severed ties with Miro Corporation" ? The way it's worded now, it sounds like it's the team that's popular.
Maybe I'm wrong though. Maybe the Mambo developers sport slick haircuts, get good grades, drive sweet cars, hang out with the jocks but still keep it real by getting baked occasionally.
Damn. Now I want someone to post those pictures of hipsters that get posted in every thread about Mac users.
Agreed. As a web developer, who created a hosted RSS reader (for the PHP5 developer contest), the current implementation of RSS was maddening.
;-)
I mean, it's fairly obvious from what they removed that the specification was never terribly well thought-out in the first place, so this can only help. Oh, and incidentally - I was going to chastize your spelling on "isPemraLink" - only to find that that's how it's spelled in the article. Who knew that the original specification was so flawed
Why?
that bashing the XBox 360 is the Slashdot meme du jour, but the article actually consists of 10 reasons why it might fail, and 10 reasons why it might succeed.
How do I know this? Did I read the article? Bah! It's in the damn summary:
Warm up your typing fingers as we give you ten reasons why Xbox 360 could kick ass in Japan, and ten reasons why it could bomba bomba in Kutaragi's backyard
The company decided to switch to a software-only strategy and ported BeOS to the Macintosh platform. There were other reasons to justify this switch: it was clear that Apple was always going to be able to ship the latest PowerPC hardware faster than Be, Inc. could
Contrast with...
Apple decided to switch...and ported MacOS to the Intel platform. There were other reasons to justify this switch: it was clear that Intel was always going to be able to ship the latest CPU hardware faster than IBM, Inc. could
Now, you'll notice I removed the words "software-only" from my conversion. Does that mean something? I'm doubtful, but I thought the parallels were interesting. At one time it appeared that Apple might sadly go the way of Be; that is thankfully no longer the case.
Flash can be really horrible for a great many things. As a Mac user, I'm unfortunately familiar with its occasionally lagging performance. But it can fit the bill for some things, and I think Macromedia - before they became Adobemedia, of course - were really trying to promote Flash as an application creation tool, rather than just some fancy rich media web plugin. Think about it.
Oh. And Flash had remoting with XML while the term AJAX was still a gleam in the eye of those folks at Adaptive Path.
As those who saw the 2000 Super Bowl (I believe that was the one) can attest, much of this money was indeed spent on marketing. At the time, this made sense: let's establish ourselves with high profile commercials, designed to reach a huge audience.
But that didn't work. If only these companies knew then what we know now: these internet services don't need to be marketed to the masses. They only need to be marketed to a select few. Take websites and software like MySpace (please!), CDBaby, Delicious Library, and even Google: these are just a handful of current web success stories that are profitable, and they've never used television advertising. The goal isn't to reach everyone; the goal is to reach early adopters who will use and actually benefit from your product. The masses will come along...eventually.
Well, our offices are situated above the Shanghai Tunnels; although to call that a tourist attraction is probably stretching it a bit. Do people come here to see the sprawling Nike campus? Maybe...but again, probably doubtful.
Oh, and no mention of nerd friendly Portland would be complete without including Stumptown Coffee, which is required sustenance for the first half of any workday, or some of Portland's outstanding breweries, which are necessary for the afternoon.
Why couldn't they have done this several months ago, before my boss started looking closely at Wikipedia, and their method of allowing anyone - even users not logged into specific user accounts - to edit a given page? It's taken a bit of effort and time to reengineer our CMS to do the same, should someone desire the option.
Sigh. I fully expect to walk into work on Monday and see "One-button page locking" as the next feature to implement.
However, a number of the same folks who listened to the Beatles in the '60s railed against Marilyn Manson in the '90s. Games as a medium may be more accepted in the future, but, if history is any indication, scapegoating will never die.
Your mention of Britney Spears confirms what I already thought this to be: an argument straight out of 2003.
Seriously. We have the iTunes Music Store. It costs, but it's very successful. People have proven that they are willing to pay for music online, even if the ability to pirate it still exists.
No kidding. Darkmail. It sounds like something I'd take along with my vorpal sword, and +10 boots of speed.
I think you're missing the point. Apple has held out with one-button mice for as long as they have for exactly the reason you specify: you should be able to do everything in a Mac program by using a one-button mouse. This includes options that you can access via Ctrl-Click: they should be accessible without with or without a Ctrl-Click, via menus. No option should ever require the use of Ctrl-Click (the Mac's version of the second mouse button), or the second mouse button on a Mighty Mouse.
Unfortunately, there will always be new fodder for Apple trolls.
This doesn't seem to be hurting Firefox or Safari, though; I browse with both, and can't recall when a site wouldn't render properly. As far as sites that employ IE-specific technology, are concerned, these sites won't render properly anyway, unless Opera embeds an actual IE rendering layer, like the new Netscape is trying to do.
I, personally, wonder what has taken them so long. Just make it a user-changeable preference, and be done with it. If they want to get clever about it, perhaps make it so that Opera can recognize certain times when it's being blocked from a website because of its UserAgent string, and offer to change it.
*ducks*
Yes, but oftentimes these can only be discovered after the fact. It's not like these people are identified solely through their interview questions - no matter how innovative those questions may be - or even, dare I say it, through their academic qualifications.
You're right about the small number, but we won't know just who will be among those who change the world until they suck it up and just do it.
Well, sort of - except none of the goods being sold are tangible. Instead, it's access to a web service.
This, of course, does not refute your original point, about this simply being a business directory. I think idea is actually a pretty interesting one, although interesting and patentable are two very different things.
Agreed. For similar evidence of this mentality, check out any article about HP. The amount of completely off-topic posts bashing Carly Fiorina is stunning. I'm not saying that she was a great, good or even terrible CEO - but she is villified more than Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Michael Robertson combined. She's probably inching toward Darl Mcbride.