How much, if any, of this "testing" is to establish whether anyone who will have to use Vista be able to do so without going mad?
We know that Vista and Office Vista (or whatever the next version of Office will be called) will be the most bloated software onslaught known to man. Sure, Clippy is dead, but what about all the other "productivity enhancements" that are there simply to ensure that the MS product managers who pushed through these changes will get their pay rises?
God knows what this has to do with the story, but... I commute in to work through central London on my little 125cc every day, and the other morning rode behind a DeLorean in the traffic down Baker Street (Sherlock Holmes fans...) turning into Marylebone Road.
I drew up beside it at the lights - they have these weird window slots *inside* the windows. The thing looked really strange - like it was rusting very gently from inside or something. I didn't see the driver's face, but he had a tattoo on his arm that looked like it said "Fart Face." He drove off before I could get a closer look.
I think the sales figures have been so miniscule as to make any comparison pretty much meaningless.
Besides, it's not the fact that the Segway exists that's interesting, it's the fact that it exists at all. I think Kamen's genius was to make the whole thing a secret, because if he'd followed the normal route of product development he would have been laughed out of town. I wonder if he was thinking of Sir Clive Sinclair and the C5 when he came up with that tactic?
Ah yes, the old "Not American? Well, we have heard of these other places..." It's a new twist that it's not even valid though.
This reminds me: why is it that Americans think England is a country? I'm sure they'd think it odd if I put a form on my site that listed "Texas" separately from "United States." I'm glad I'm not Scottish, Irish or Welsh.
I have never run AV in the 12 years I've had computers at home - it just seems like too much hassle. And because there's obviously money to be made in conning people into thinking that it'll solve all their problems, I mistrust AV companies immensely.
I'm probably an idiot, but AFAIK I've only been infected twice in 12 years. Each time I simply re-installed.
What I would do if I were in charge of AllofMP3.com, with my rapidly rising market share (and ectoplasmically amazing typos), would be to really stick it 'em: announce that from now on all customers of the site will pay a 10 cent surcharge on each track. That surcharge would go directly to the artist (not the copyright holder), or the artist's nearest beneficiary, subject to those copyright holders applying for this to be done.
OK, OK I know it'll never happen, and that there would be massive admin and other problems, but that's what SHOULD happen.
Imagine though, like Amazon reviews: "I am the artist and I wish to claim my fee."
Is this intended to be used for peripherals as well? For example, I might have a handheld device that I can plug in to a desktop to use its CPU to do processor-intensive stuff on the handheld that it would not normally be used for when on its own.
So far in my career have I not worked in, nor have I even seen the "cubicles" everyone here is describing. Partitions between groups of people at desks, yes. Offices with one or two persons in them, yes, but not these weird cubicle things you're all on about.
I'm from the UK and pushing 40 years old. My work (technical project management for new media agencies) takes me inside many other company offices, mostly large companies in a variety of sectors. What they hell are these cubicle things? Working in them seems like hell on earth if you have to do anything other than write code all day. I'd go insane, certainly, because I need to talk to people face to face - people need to talk to me. If I want some peace and quiet to do something (like write a document) I stay at home and do it. We have VPNs and Skype these days - even easier.
I work for a UK company that does a lot of user testing for the Vodafone embedded client software. Last year we ran tests in Japan with a Nokia 6600 (although Voda didn't plan to ship anything there on that hardware). It's a brick even by Western standards. On the video playbacks, you can see the jaws of several users dropping to the floor when they were shown the device at the start of the test!
When somebody comes up with an obviously stupid idea and takes it right to the top like this, they tend to reply to all the people that laugh at them along the lines of "Well, whey laughed at <insert name of now recognised genius>."
This should be called "the <someone> effect" where <someone> is the name of somebody who had a chronically stupid idea that WAS indeed found to be completely stupid. Of course almost by definition the name of that <someone> would now mean nothing to anyone, but are there any exceptions? Any suggestions?
Finding how to format something in Word (or Excel, or PPT for that matter) is the least of my problems. What I want is for the features to WORK!
Still, after after 20 (TWENTY!) years of development of Word, I have Office 2003, and:
- Auto numbering: still a bugfest - Document linking: bugfest leading to file corruption - Chapter/section management: bugfest leading to other bugs - Styles: horrendous implementation compounded by the above bugs - The clipboard: AAAARGH!!
If anyone thinks that fiddling with popular culture like this is somehow new or bad then not only to they not understand what culture is, but they are so far up the publishing industry's arse that they obviously can't see out.
It staggers me I have even to write this down and spell it out, but...
Popular culture - indeed ALL culture - exists to be re-written, re-told, re-vamped or re-done. It's only in the last 100 years or so that the notion of completeness or "integrity" of stories or art has become important. Once the oral tradition gave way to writing the idea of recording began, and with it the idea of "ownership" of ideas.
Chaucer's stories weren't his own. Nobody expected them to be! People who acted out the mystery plays never considered whether they were being true to an "original" - that was simply the raw material they were expected to use, which was itself adapted from the Bible, which was adapted from tribal tales handed down from mother to daughter (men didn't really figure much in Europe culturally until the Romans got going). Shakespere re-told Hollinshed's histories; Milton embellished ancient themes; even Mark Twain was a "pirate" in our terms.
So what's changed to make people think differently? It is the idea of "intellectual property." It's crawled out of the sewer, down our throats and into our brains to control everything we see. We can't even recognise the corrosion of our own cultural assets by multinational media corporations who sue little children to protect the revenues off piss-poor ADAPTATIONS of what were once public domain artefacts! Instead, we wonder whether the engine of popular culture itself - COPYING - is a bad thing! How can adaptation be a bad thing??
LET IT HAPPEN! IT NEEDS TO HAPPEN! If anyone tells you to stop mashing up that Star Wars movie, or publishing fanfic versions of Buffy, or whatever, tell 'em you have to or none of our lives will be worth living when Disney, TimeWarner and Sony owns all our brains.
This has got to rank as the most depressing story on/. this year.
> How many of those, though, were really just multiple parts of a 'conversation'?
Most I would think, but the length and content of them would probably read like miniature essays.
My great grandfather corresponded with Darwin about chicken breeding. They exchanged about ten letters on the subject. Darwin's replies are in my aunt's cupboard and she showed them to me a few years ago. What's striking about them is that they are so densely written. The syntax, the length of sentences and the overall style seemed to me to be very labour intensive given the fact Darwin was not corresponding with a fellow scientist, but an enthusiastic hobbyist in the form of my great grandfather.
I don't think you can simply look at the numbers of letters and make a conclusion about the time or effort expended per day writing. Reading them shows you what an immense amount of intellectual power went into producing them.
That's what I did and do all the time. The user shouldn't recognize the migration,
Exactly. IT is a service just like accountancy, the cleaners or the sandwich man. Accountants can and do change methods (how your paycheck is worked out, delivered, printed etc.) without asking anyone, and nobody cares as long as the service isn't disrupted. Same goes for IT. A good MD will trust their IT staff to do what needs to be done within the budget. If that involves changing the network one weekend, then who cares? Nobody, least of all the board, are going to care if their servers are now running Linux, Windows, or a flavour of UNIX written by Groucho Marx.
Right is good! Left is bad! Oompah loompah, fiddle dee dee!
Here's a tip: if you reveal that your level of political sophistication is barely above a child's, then most people won't pay you much attention. At least try to make some *pretence* at having a considered opinion that you have arrived at by yourself.
Because if the artists got all the money that they are entitled from the sale of their works, then artists would pay sound engineers, recording studios, advertising agencies and music labels (if they wanted them) as services. This is how most other industries work. If I write software for a living, I employ a PR and marketing agency, and pay them from my (hopefully increased) sales.
Really, 100% is not such a silly idea when you have something called home recording equipment. Good music can still sound good if it's recorded in mono at 8KHz you know. All you need then is the Internet.
From TFA: "...the goal was to 'cooperate and make a platform for legal music downloads.'"
So imagine if instead of doing what we all assume they're probably going to do (cave in to Sony, BMG et al), China turns round and says "Protect the artists? Sure! We'll do that - but only if you help us build a network that passes 100% of the purchase price of each MP3 directly to the artists that wrote or performed the tracks."
Slashdot Mirror
Or more accurately - the USERS.
How much, if any, of this "testing" is to establish whether anyone who will have to use Vista be able to do so without going mad?
We know that Vista and Office Vista (or whatever the next version of Office will be called) will be the most bloated software onslaught known to man. Sure, Clippy is dead, but what about all the other "productivity enhancements" that are there simply to ensure that the MS product managers who pushed through these changes will get their pay rises?
Rant rant rant I could go on all day.
God knows what this has to do with the story, but... I commute in to work through central London on my little 125cc every day, and the other morning rode behind a DeLorean in the traffic down Baker Street (Sherlock Holmes fans...) turning into Marylebone Road.
I drew up beside it at the lights - they have these weird window slots *inside* the windows. The thing looked really strange - like it was rusting very gently from inside or something. I didn't see the driver's face, but he had a tattoo on his arm that looked like it said "Fart Face." He drove off before I could get a closer look.
"If the patch is critical, it will get criticized for being, in effect, mandatory degradation of capability"
What makes you think M$ cares what users think, let alone tech users?
Newsflash: Microsoft is a M O N O P O L Y. They don't give a crap about C U S T O M E R S.
They'll mark it "critical." Of course.
I think the sales figures have been so miniscule as to make any comparison pretty much meaningless.
Besides, it's not the fact that the Segway exists that's interesting, it's the fact that it exists at all. I think Kamen's genius was to make the whole thing a secret, because if he'd followed the normal route of product development he would have been laughed out of town. I wonder if he was thinking of Sir Clive Sinclair and the C5 when he came up with that tactic?
Ah yes, the old "Not American? Well, we have heard of these other places..." It's a new twist that it's not even valid though.
This reminds me: why is it that Americans think England is a country? I'm sure they'd think it odd if I put a form on my site that listed "Texas" separately from "United States." I'm glad I'm not Scottish, Irish or Welsh.
I have never run AV in the 12 years I've had computers at home - it just seems like too much hassle. And because there's obviously money to be made in conning people into thinking that it'll solve all their problems, I mistrust AV companies immensely.
I'm probably an idiot, but AFAIK I've only been infected twice in 12 years. Each time I simply re-installed.
WHY SHOULD I PAY FOR YOUR FAILED BUSSINESS MODEL?
What I would do if I were in charge of AllofMP3.com, with my rapidly rising market share (and ectoplasmically amazing typos), would be to really stick it 'em: announce that from now on all customers of the site will pay a 10 cent surcharge on each track. That surcharge would go directly to the artist (not the copyright holder), or the artist's nearest beneficiary, subject to those copyright holders applying for this to be done.
OK, OK I know it'll never happen, and that there would be massive admin and other problems, but that's what SHOULD happen.
Imagine though, like Amazon reviews: "I am the artist and I wish to claim my fee."
Is this intended to be used for peripherals as well? For example, I might have a handheld device that I can plug in to a desktop to use its CPU to do processor-intensive stuff on the handheld that it would not normally be used for when on its own.
Or is that completely wrong?
> Are you acting stupid just so you can brag that you've never worked in a cubicle before?
No. I have have never seen, let alone worked in, a "cubicle."
> could have Googled the answer if you were clueless
The answer to what, exactly? "Have I worked in a cubicle?"
So far in my career have I not worked in, nor have I even seen the "cubicles" everyone here is describing. Partitions between groups of people at desks, yes. Offices with one or two persons in them, yes, but not these weird cubicle things you're all on about.
I'm from the UK and pushing 40 years old. My work (technical project management for new media agencies) takes me inside many other company offices, mostly large companies in a variety of sectors. What they hell are these cubicle things? Working in them seems like hell on earth if you have to do anything other than write code all day. I'd go insane, certainly, because I need to talk to people face to face - people need to talk to me. If I want some peace and quiet to do something (like write a document) I stay at home and do it. We have VPNs and Skype these days - even easier.
I work for a UK company that does a lot of user testing for the Vodafone embedded client software. Last year we ran tests in Japan with a Nokia 6600 (although Voda didn't plan to ship anything there on that hardware). It's a brick even by Western standards. On the video playbacks, you can see the jaws of several users dropping to the floor when they were shown the device at the start of the test!
> having a better ID card doesn't do anything to bring those abuses closer, because the goverment
> will abuse you in *either case*.
So are you for or against ID cards? If you are for them, what problem(s) do you think they will solve?
"Control can never be a means to any practical end... It can never be a means to anything but more control..."
When somebody comes up with an obviously stupid idea and takes it right to the top like this, they tend to reply to all the people that laugh at them along the lines of "Well, whey laughed at <insert name of now recognised genius>."
This should be called "the <someone> effect" where <someone> is the name of somebody who had a chronically stupid idea that WAS indeed found to be completely stupid. Of course almost by definition the name of that <someone> would now mean nothing to anyone, but are there any exceptions? Any suggestions?
Finding how to format something in Word (or Excel, or PPT for that matter) is the least of my problems. What I want is for the features to WORK!
Still, after after 20 (TWENTY!) years of development of Word, I have Office 2003, and:
- Auto numbering: still a bugfest
- Document linking: bugfest leading to file corruption
- Chapter/section management: bugfest leading to other bugs
- Styles: horrendous implementation compounded by the above bugs
- The clipboard: AAAARGH!!
It staggers me I have even to write this down and spell it out, but...
Popular culture - indeed ALL culture - exists to be re-written, re-told, re-vamped or re-done. It's only in the last 100 years or so that the notion of completeness or "integrity" of stories or art has become important. Once the oral tradition gave way to writing the idea of recording began, and with it the idea of "ownership" of ideas.
Chaucer's stories weren't his own. Nobody expected them to be! People who acted out the mystery plays never considered whether they were being true to an "original" - that was simply the raw material they were expected to use, which was itself adapted from the Bible, which was adapted from tribal tales handed down from mother to daughter (men didn't really figure much in Europe culturally until the Romans got going). Shakespere re-told Hollinshed's histories; Milton embellished ancient themes; even Mark Twain was a "pirate" in our terms.
So what's changed to make people think differently? It is the idea of "intellectual property." It's crawled out of the sewer, down our throats and into our brains to control everything we see. We can't even recognise the corrosion of our own cultural assets by multinational media corporations who sue little children to protect the revenues off piss-poor ADAPTATIONS of what were once public domain artefacts! Instead, we wonder whether the engine of popular culture itself - COPYING - is a bad thing! How can adaptation be a bad thing??
LET IT HAPPEN! IT NEEDS TO HAPPEN! If anyone tells you to stop mashing up that Star Wars movie, or publishing fanfic versions of Buffy, or whatever, tell 'em you have to or none of our lives will be worth living when Disney, TimeWarner and Sony owns all our brains.
This has got to rank as the most depressing story on /. this year.
> How many of those, though, were really just multiple parts of a 'conversation'?
Most I would think, but the length and content of them would probably read like miniature essays.
My great grandfather corresponded with Darwin about chicken breeding. They exchanged about ten letters on the subject. Darwin's replies are in my aunt's cupboard and she showed them to me a few years ago. What's striking about them is that they are so densely written. The syntax, the length of sentences and the overall style seemed to me to be very labour intensive given the fact Darwin was not corresponding with a fellow scientist, but an enthusiastic hobbyist in the form of my great grandfather.
I don't think you can simply look at the numbers of letters and make a conclusion about the time or effort expended per day writing. Reading them shows you what an immense amount of intellectual power went into producing them.
As William S Burroughs put it:
"Control can never be a means to any practical end... It can never be a means to anything but more control..."
And this is precisely what we are seeing.
Exactly. IT is a service just like accountancy, the cleaners or the sandwich man. Accountants can and do change methods (how your paycheck is worked out, delivered, printed etc.) without asking anyone, and nobody cares as long as the service isn't disrupted. Same goes for IT. A good MD will trust their IT staff to do what needs to be done within the budget. If that involves changing the network one weekend, then who cares? Nobody, least of all the board, are going to care if their servers are now running Linux, Windows, or a flavour of UNIX written by Groucho Marx.
> I have about 20 credit cards
/. I'd have you down for a complete fool!
"About 20" - don't you *know* how many you have?
Good god man, if you weren't posting on
> leftist groupthink crowd
Right is good! Left is bad! Oompah loompah, fiddle dee dee!
Here's a tip: if you reveal that your level of political sophistication is barely above a child's, then most people won't pay you much attention. At least try to make some *pretence* at having a considered opinion that you have arrived at by yourself.
Because if the artists got all the money that they are entitled from the sale of their works, then artists would pay sound engineers, recording studios, advertising agencies and music labels (if they wanted them) as services. This is how most other industries work. If I write software for a living, I employ a PR and marketing agency, and pay them from my (hopefully increased) sales.
Really, 100% is not such a silly idea when you have something called home recording equipment. Good music can still sound good if it's recorded in mono at 8KHz you know. All you need then is the Internet.
So imagine if instead of doing what we all assume they're probably going to do (cave in to Sony, BMG et al), China turns round and says "Protect the artists? Sure! We'll do that - but only if you help us build a network that passes 100% of the purchase price of each MP3 directly to the artists that wrote or performed the tracks."
A few yuan multiplied by a few billion makes...?
"In fact, if I were to simply track the 30 pieces of Goodness on my machine, and allow nothing else to run..."
I thought Trusted Computing was a bad idea? No?
> limbs falling and trees cracking
Where the hell do you live? A war zone?