a majority of the people who use IE are either forced or don't even know there are alternatives
Which is, in a nutshell, everything you need to know about Microsoft. It's also why comparing Microsoft desktop products to any alternatives in the last decade has been a purely academic exercise. When 90% of the market is owned by MS, why would MS logically choose to do anything to improve or change their products in any real way?
I say this because I have been an involuntary user of MS Outlook for about 10 years now. I'm now with Outlook 2007 and even now I can STILL accidentally book a meeting in the PAST. Powerpoint still doesn't have any useful keystrokes, MS Word is essentially the same manically controlling lunatic it always was (no, I do NOT want you to start auto-numbering my paragraphs...). I could go on for hours.
But it's pointless. Because ultimately MS has no reason to improve beyond keeping the DOJ and a bunch of toothless consumer rights groups off their back.
Hmm. Really? I work with 4 colleagues who all have iPhone 3Gs phones we use regularly. None of us has ever reported batteries lasting more than 24 hours without a charge unless we turn off Wi-Fi, push and 3G.
You are either incredibly blessed, or you are turning off services. If so, why are you using a smart phone at all when all that really leaves is the ability to send texts and voice calls?
This will just be another clump of dirt on the corpse of Segway. It actually sucks in a way. It was invented to try to radically mix up society and how we travel, change the way we travel in cities. Use less gas, get people moving, less space for parking, all that cool stuff. Instead it became a toy for Segway Polo, jokes for Mall Cops, and t tours. Never getting the impact it was intended for..
Any idea why? I'm guessing you don't think it was because the fundamental idea of the thing was wrong-headed and silly, as most people at the time believed when they first saw it.
"Journalists tend to be bad at covering tech news. "
Actually, if you ask anyone in any industry to comment on the quality of journalism as it relates to their field, you'll hear the same complaint.
The basic problem (not the only one though) with journalism is that it suffers from chronic and crippling lack of time. A journalist has to pick up on, research, spin, write and edit a story in a matter of hours sometimes. Most, if not all, news is going to suffer badly by that process.
If anyone here has ever read a news story about which they have had true first-hand knowledge on what was being reported, and can honestly say that what they read was fair, balanced and accurate - I'll give them a big prize.
I don't care what you say... If Socialism creates hell holes... Then I really don't know why Sweden and Norway aren't hellholes they should be.
There's something rather pathetic about the ridiculous use of the term "socialism" in America to demonize anything that's possibly left of main stream US politics.
The word "socialism" in the US seems to mean something more akin to Stalinism or Juche. Really, if you come to Europe and live in a place like Sweden, you'd have a pretty hard time trying to work out what all the fuss is about "socialism" back home. Free healthcare and high taxes have about as much to do with "socialism" as the Pope has to do with the Branch Davidians.
Nothing less than to abolish copyright will do. Copyrights and patents prevent progress in the sciences and the useful arts. They were an experiment that utterly failed.
I'd love to hear your evidence of this, because as far as I can tell, there are a lot of benefits of copyright and patents.
There's quite a lot of evidence against the efficacy of copyright (in its current form) in stimulating the creative industries, and more being researched all the time. Some of it indicates that in fact copyright does quite the opposite of its original intent. I know less about patents, since that's a completely separate thing, but a quick google will turn up a great deal.
Here, for example, is some recent research from the UK:
"There are few things more annoying than finding something impressive or good about someone I dislike and consider responsible for a lot of people suffering."
On the other hand, there are also few things more annoying than somebody in power recognising that something is objectively good while denying that good to those whom they rule.
"Like a form in a web site, that's highly interactive and can be accessed collaboratively by many people at once."
I can't see what problem that actually solves, unless the writers/contributors have control over when others can write/contribute to the wave. I mean, how often have you sat down to write an email, or a document, or make a PPT presentation and said to yourself "You know, it would be really cool if my colleagues could see me putting this together and could then jump in at any time and edit or discuss what I'm writing."
To me, that would be immensely annoying to the point of utter lunacy.
"In this paper, I shall show how a perpetual motion machine can be assembled from simple household items and..."
"BZZT! Dude! You're full of shit!"
"Look, let me finish this please - you've not read the...."
"Dave - what? Are you seriously going to try to convince me that you can defy the laws of physics?"
"Oh FFS Frank, if I wanted to put commas all over the place, I would OK! Just stop editing my damn paper before I'm finished with it OK!!!!! Huh?? What has that video got anything to do with this??!!"... and so on.
If you read TFA, is says things like "we want to drive breakthroughs in computer science that dramatically improve our users’ lives" and "we are proud of the team for the ways in which they have pushed the boundaries of computer science."
Earth to Google: a computer scientific achievement does not a user experience make.
Really. It's not that hard. Just becase you can putting together bunch of crazy-ass techno doesn't means people will flock to your door any more than I should be president of the United States if I can solve a Rubuik's cube in under 10 seconds.
Pizza-munching geeks. It's crap like Wave that reassures me in my job as a user experience designer.
A monopoly? Interesting. I, along with a large proportion of the UK population, have Internet access via Virgin Media cable and telephone via SIP and a mobile - no money going to BT at all. Some people get ADSL without BT, but an increasing number of exchanges are covered by local loop unbundling, and they can.
No money going to BT Retail maybe, (which has a share of about 30% of the domestic broadband market and about 50% of domestic fixed lines, I believe - some general Googling will reveal this). BT Wholesale, on the other hand, basically has a government-regulated monopoly on backbone and infrastructure provision in the UK though. Virgin Media's cables go to BT's LLU exchanges, and their packets pass over BT's maintained ATM. And they pay them for that.
I'm curious: how does the fact that BP happens to be registered in the UK change anything? If it had been Shell, would Americans start calling Shell "Royal Dutch Shell" all of a sudden and start ranting about how the Dutch were awful? Shell is only Dutch because it's registered in Holland. BP is only British because they're registered in the UK. But BP (and indeed Shell) are substantially part-owned by Americans, employ thousands of US citizens in the US, and the drilling operation in question was in partnership with US and Japanese companies.
If the US president refers to "British Petroleum" when lambasting them, should the British remind Barack Hussein Obama that Union Carbide was an "American" company?
I write music for a living...I should only get paid for the first copy sold?
Depends. If you're any good, I'd like to see you paid for about 7 years after you wrote the work. Then I'd like to see your work go into the public domain to be used by others in any way they want, for free. Meanwhile, you're going to write other stuff, because you're good at what you do, aren't you? If not, fuck off and stack shelves for a living, like me.
The big problem at the moment is NOT that people are copying stuff, it's that artists (well, publishers really) are demanding payment for works for literally hundreds of years after they were first produced. That's wrong, and it must stop because without a public domain, you can forget about anyone producing any art at all.
Verizon would be big enough to subscribe to one of the Mortality Suppressions lists if it wanted to. This is what most large consumer subscriptions companies use to prevent fuck-ups like this.
So in short, it's absolutely Verizon's fault. They could have prevented it, and they deserve all the derision they get.
How the funk can it take 10 years to approve a new TLD? Was ICANN under the impression that if it approved it, the world would be flooded with pr0n, as if it's not flooded already and has been since pretty much the inception of the net as we know it? Only in America are organisations able to take themselves so incredibly seriously and be so incredibly prudish about it. Apple's another one: no nipples in the AppStore boys! Steve Jobs says they make you go blind (or is it just very thin?)
True. I run into email validation problems constantly. I have a two-part first name that has "-" in the middle, so my firstname.lastname email addresses (usually work addresses) always have a "-".
In the year 2010, why anyone would validate email addresses with anything other than "does it have an @ symbol?" and "do we have it on file already?" is totally beyond me. The chances of anyone inputting an invalid address by mistake (other than mistaking the email field for something else entirely) are infinitesimally lower than the chances of preventing somebody from inputting a valid one due to stupid rules.
I think you're not getting the rather veiled point of my comment: the machine is not infected.
The anti-virus industry feeds off the rather well-founded paranoia of geeks who surf infected porn sites all day. Just because *your* machine would get shot to hell after a couple of hours of *your* browsing habits, doesn't mean everyone else's does, and I think I can prove it.
I'll put it to you this way: try telling an LA Harley rider to wear a helmet. See what they say about that.
My wife bought a new Dell laptop 3 years ago. Its hard disk crashed out a couple of weeks later, so we were given a new one and I re-installed Vista. This time, however, I decided not the chase the AV dragon, to see what would happen. So, no AV installed. At all.
Long story short, it's 3 years later and she's not had a single problem. She uses Firefox and Windows Mail, and Office 2003. She surfs the web daily, but mostly looks at YouTube and maybe about 5 other sites on a regular basis (discussion boards mainly).
Make of that what you will. Obviously, her machine may be a hopeless zombie sending out gigabytes of spam a day, but if it doesn't crash, or run slowly, then what does she care?
The alternative would be me having to install and explain AV to her and why she's getting pestered to renew shit she doesn't need.
Here in the UK, I had a conversation about 3G with two British Telecom marketing managers, and a senior technology bloke of some kind, around about 1996. They told me 3G was going to "bring 2 megabits per second to your handset", and that these speeds would be "reliable" over about 80% of the UK for average consumer mobiles "by about 2005".
Let's hope this 4G business delivers. Really, the "mobile broadband revolution" has been a complete and utter joke. I'm here in central London in the year 2010 using my iPhone 3Gs and it's about as fast as I remember my 28.8K modem was in 1995. Quite often I just turn off 3G just to save battery life - it hardly seems to matter to the overall speed of data access I get here.
Absolutely. The distributors might even partner with ISPs to help them foot the bandwidth costs of high-resolution downloads (eg via static routes or whatever).
Plan trip, drive/travel long distances, dedicate almost an entire evening, spend more than you want to on popcorn, etc. etc. May not be for everyone (the disabled, agoraphobic, the lazy...). But it's my preferred choice if I think the movie demands it (eg Avatar)
2. Buy the DVD/Blu-Ray
Hideously expensive compared to downloading it for free (and that's excluding the hardware cost of a player).
3. Rent the DVD/Blu-Ray
Forced to watch anti-piracy nagging, ads etc. and can be expensive if you have a subscription plan and don't watch movies very often.
4. Watch on Pay Per View Cable/DBS
Low quality, can work out extremely expensive if you don't watch films enough. 12-month contract lock-in, ads, etc.
5. Watch on HBO/Showtime pay cable
No different from 4.
6. Wait until it's rerun on basic cable.
Years later. Low quality, Encrusted with ads every 10 seconds. Not an option at all.
I also think it may be an example of "copyright theatre" - OFCOM is seen to "do something" which in reality has very little effect on anything at all, and - crucially - puts the legal ball in the copyright holders' court. You wanna sue somebody you suspect of downloading your movie? Go ahead and have lots of fun proving it, just don't complain that OFCOM got in your way.
It just could be an example of some crafty legislation to get the crazy music and recording industries off the government's back while actually protecting the voting public. Nice!
It is great that people who create content might get paid for doing so (*genuinely).
Really? As far as I understand the music and recording industry at least, if you are an artist, you will have a contract with a publisher (eg a record company). That contract usually says you get some money up front, then some percentage of sales as determined by a collection agency like ASCAP. If the publisher shops a bunch of people downloading your stuff and gets the courts to fine them, then there is probably nothing in your contract that says you get any of that money at all.
So in other words, this isn't about protecting existing artists, it's about the publishing and recording industry making money for themselves. The publishers' line is that in fining and jailing transgressors, people will be terrorised into paying for music and films in the future, which of course does in theory put money in the pockets of artists, but that's a purely theoretical outcome. It may be just as likely that being terrorised means you simply watch and listen to less media - or at least less that's owned by litigious publishers.
Slashdot Mirror
a majority of the people who use IE are either forced or don't even know there are alternatives
Which is, in a nutshell, everything you need to know about Microsoft. It's also why comparing Microsoft desktop products to any alternatives in the last decade has been a purely academic exercise. When 90% of the market is owned by MS, why would MS logically choose to do anything to improve or change their products in any real way?
I say this because I have been an involuntary user of MS Outlook for about 10 years now. I'm now with Outlook 2007 and even now I can STILL accidentally book a meeting in the PAST. Powerpoint still doesn't have any useful keystrokes, MS Word is essentially the same manically controlling lunatic it always was (no, I do NOT want you to start auto-numbering my paragraphs...). I could go on for hours.
But it's pointless. Because ultimately MS has no reason to improve beyond keeping the DOJ and a bunch of toothless consumer rights groups off their back.
Battery lasts two days, easily.
Hmm. Really? I work with 4 colleagues who all have iPhone 3Gs phones we use regularly. None of us has ever reported batteries lasting more than 24 hours without a charge unless we turn off Wi-Fi, push and 3G.
You are either incredibly blessed, or you are turning off services. If so, why are you using a smart phone at all when all that really leaves is the ability to send texts and voice calls?
This will just be another clump of dirt on the corpse of Segway. It actually sucks in a way. It was invented to try to radically mix up society and how we travel, change the way we travel in cities. Use less gas, get people moving, less space for parking, all that cool stuff. Instead it became a toy for Segway Polo, jokes for Mall Cops, and t tours. Never getting the impact it was intended for..
Any idea why? I'm guessing you don't think it was because the fundamental idea of the thing was wrong-headed and silly, as most people at the time believed when they first saw it.
A Segway is better than a bicycle because...??
The US might have not ran over any of its own college students with a tank,
Indeed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings
slowloris.pl is a better way - I'm told.
"Journalists tend to be bad at covering tech news. "
Actually, if you ask anyone in any industry to comment on the quality of journalism as it relates to their field, you'll hear the same complaint.
The basic problem (not the only one though) with journalism is that it suffers from chronic and crippling lack of time. A journalist has to pick up on, research, spin, write and edit a story in a matter of hours sometimes. Most, if not all, news is going to suffer badly by that process.
If anyone here has ever read a news story about which they have had true first-hand knowledge on what was being reported, and can honestly say that what they read was fair, balanced and accurate - I'll give them a big prize.
I don't care what you say... If Socialism creates hell holes... Then I really don't know why Sweden and Norway aren't hellholes they should be.
There's something rather pathetic about the ridiculous use of the term "socialism" in America to demonize anything that's possibly left of main stream US politics.
The word "socialism" in the US seems to mean something more akin to Stalinism or Juche. Really, if you come to Europe and live in a place like Sweden, you'd have a pretty hard time trying to work out what all the fuss is about "socialism" back home. Free healthcare and high taxes have about as much to do with "socialism" as the Pope has to do with the Branch Davidians.
Gasoline prices in the US are comparatively very low, about the same in dollars as Bangladesh and Romania, which is really saying something:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_gas_pri-energy-gasoline-prices
So if the likes of Japan and the United Kingdom can sustain their economies with oil-fuel prices about 80-100% higher, why not the US?
Nothing less than to abolish copyright will do. Copyrights and patents prevent progress in the sciences and the useful arts. They were an experiment that utterly failed.
I'd love to hear your evidence of this, because as far as I can tell, there are a lot of benefits of copyright and patents.
There's quite a lot of evidence against the efficacy of copyright (in its current form) in stimulating the creative industries, and more being researched all the time. Some of it indicates that in fact copyright does quite the opposite of its original intent. I know less about patents, since that's a completely separate thing, but a quick google will turn up a great deal.
Here, for example, is some recent research from the UK:
http://bit.ly/9NRmLa
"There are few things more annoying than finding something impressive or good about someone I dislike and consider responsible for a lot of people suffering."
On the other hand, there are also few things more annoying than somebody in power recognising that something is objectively good while denying that good to those whom they rule.
"Like a form in a web site, that's highly interactive and can be accessed collaboratively by many people at once."
I can't see what problem that actually solves, unless the writers/contributors have control over when others can write/contribute to the wave. I mean, how often have you sat down to write an email, or a document, or make a PPT presentation and said to yourself "You know, it would be really cool if my colleagues could see me putting this together and could then jump in at any time and edit or discuss what I'm writing."
To me, that would be immensely annoying to the point of utter lunacy.
"In this paper, I shall show how a perpetual motion machine can be assembled from simple household items and ..."
"BZZT! Dude! You're full of shit!"
"Look, let me finish this please - you've not read the...."
"Dave - what? Are you seriously going to try to convince me that you can defy the laws of physics?"
"Oh FFS Frank, if I wanted to put commas all over the place, I would OK! Just stop editing my damn paper before I'm finished with it OK!!!!! Huh?? What has that video got anything to do with this??!!" ... and so on.
If you read TFA, is says things like "we want to drive breakthroughs in computer science that dramatically improve our users’ lives" and "we are proud of the team for the ways in which they have pushed the boundaries of computer science."
Earth to Google: a computer scientific achievement does not a user experience make.
Really. It's not that hard. Just becase you can putting together bunch of crazy-ass techno doesn't means people will flock to your door any more than I should be president of the United States if I can solve a Rubuik's cube in under 10 seconds.
Pizza-munching geeks. It's crap like Wave that reassures me in my job as a user experience designer.
A monopoly? Interesting. I, along with a large proportion of the UK population, have Internet access via Virgin Media cable and telephone via SIP and a mobile - no money going to BT at all. Some people get ADSL without BT, but an increasing number of exchanges are covered by local loop unbundling, and they can.
No money going to BT Retail maybe, (which has a share of about 30% of the domestic broadband market and about 50% of domestic fixed lines, I believe - some general Googling will reveal this). BT Wholesale, on the other hand, basically has a government-regulated monopoly on backbone and infrastructure provision in the UK though. Virgin Media's cables go to BT's LLU exchanges, and their packets pass over BT's maintained ATM. And they pay them for that.
"F***k you British Petroleum"
I'm curious: how does the fact that BP happens to be registered in the UK change anything? If it had been Shell, would Americans start calling Shell "Royal Dutch Shell" all of a sudden and start ranting about how the Dutch were awful? Shell is only Dutch because it's registered in Holland. BP is only British because they're registered in the UK. But BP (and indeed Shell) are substantially part-owned by Americans, employ thousands of US citizens in the US, and the drilling operation in question was in partnership with US and Japanese companies.
If the US president refers to "British Petroleum" when lambasting them, should the British remind Barack Hussein Obama that Union Carbide was an "American" company?
I write music for a living...I should only get paid for the first copy sold?
Depends. If you're any good, I'd like to see you paid for about 7 years after you wrote the work. Then I'd like to see your work go into the public domain to be used by others in any way they want, for free. Meanwhile, you're going to write other stuff, because you're good at what you do, aren't you? If not, fuck off and stack shelves for a living, like me.
The big problem at the moment is NOT that people are copying stuff, it's that artists (well, publishers really) are demanding payment for works for literally hundreds of years after they were first produced. That's wrong, and it must stop because without a public domain, you can forget about anyone producing any art at all.
Verizon would be big enough to subscribe to one of the Mortality Suppressions lists if it wanted to. This is what most large consumer subscriptions companies use to prevent fuck-ups like this.
So in short, it's absolutely Verizon's fault. They could have prevented it, and they deserve all the derision they get.
How the funk can it take 10 years to approve a new TLD? Was ICANN under the impression that if it approved it, the world would be flooded with pr0n, as if it's not flooded already and has been since pretty much the inception of the net as we know it? Only in America are organisations able to take themselves so incredibly seriously and be so incredibly prudish about it. Apple's another one: no nipples in the AppStore boys! Steve Jobs says they make you go blind (or is it just very thin?)
True. I run into email validation problems constantly. I have a two-part first name that has "-" in the middle, so my firstname.lastname email addresses (usually work addresses) always have a "-".
In the year 2010, why anyone would validate email addresses with anything other than "does it have an @ symbol?" and "do we have it on file already?" is totally beyond me. The chances of anyone inputting an invalid address by mistake (other than mistaking the email field for something else entirely) are infinitesimally lower than the chances of preventing somebody from inputting a valid one due to stupid rules.
I think you're not getting the rather veiled point of my comment: the machine is not infected.
The anti-virus industry feeds off the rather well-founded paranoia of geeks who surf infected porn sites all day. Just because *your* machine would get shot to hell after a couple of hours of *your* browsing habits, doesn't mean everyone else's does, and I think I can prove it.
I'll put it to you this way: try telling an LA Harley rider to wear a helmet. See what they say about that.
My wife bought a new Dell laptop 3 years ago. Its hard disk crashed out a couple of weeks later, so we were given a new one and I re-installed Vista. This time, however, I decided not the chase the AV dragon, to see what would happen. So, no AV installed. At all.
Long story short, it's 3 years later and she's not had a single problem. She uses Firefox and Windows Mail, and Office 2003. She surfs the web daily, but mostly looks at YouTube and maybe about 5 other sites on a regular basis (discussion boards mainly).
Make of that what you will. Obviously, her machine may be a hopeless zombie sending out gigabytes of spam a day, but if it doesn't crash, or run slowly, then what does she care?
The alternative would be me having to install and explain AV to her and why she's getting pestered to renew shit she doesn't need.
Here in the UK, I had a conversation about 3G with two British Telecom marketing managers, and a senior technology bloke of some kind, around about 1996. They told me 3G was going to "bring 2 megabits per second to your handset", and that these speeds would be "reliable" over about 80% of the UK for average consumer mobiles "by about 2005".
Let's hope this 4G business delivers. Really, the "mobile broadband revolution" has been a complete and utter joke. I'm here in central London in the year 2010 using my iPhone 3Gs and it's about as fast as I remember my 28.8K modem was in 1995. Quite often I just turn off 3G just to save battery life - it hardly seems to matter to the overall speed of data access I get here.
Absolutely. The distributors might even partner with ISPs to help them foot the bandwidth costs of high-resolution downloads (eg via static routes or whatever).
1. See it in the theater.
Plan trip, drive/travel long distances, dedicate almost an entire evening, spend more than you want to on popcorn, etc. etc. May not be for everyone (the disabled, agoraphobic, the lazy...). But it's my preferred choice if I think the movie demands it (eg Avatar)
2. Buy the DVD/Blu-Ray
Hideously expensive compared to downloading it for free (and that's excluding the hardware cost of a player).
3. Rent the DVD/Blu-Ray
Forced to watch anti-piracy nagging, ads etc. and can be expensive if you have a subscription plan and don't watch movies very often.
4. Watch on Pay Per View Cable/DBS
Low quality, can work out extremely expensive if you don't watch films enough. 12-month contract lock-in, ads, etc.
5. Watch on HBO/Showtime pay cable
No different from 4.
6. Wait until it's rerun on basic cable.
Years later. Low quality, Encrusted with ads every 10 seconds. Not an option at all.
I also think it may be an example of "copyright theatre" - OFCOM is seen to "do something" which in reality has very little effect on anything at all, and - crucially - puts the legal ball in the copyright holders' court. You wanna sue somebody you suspect of downloading your movie? Go ahead and have lots of fun proving it, just don't complain that OFCOM got in your way.
It just could be an example of some crafty legislation to get the crazy music and recording industries off the government's back while actually protecting the voting public. Nice!
It is great that people who create content might get paid for doing so (*genuinely).
Really? As far as I understand the music and recording industry at least, if you are an artist, you will have a contract with a publisher (eg a record company). That contract usually says you get some money up front, then some percentage of sales as determined by a collection agency like ASCAP. If the publisher shops a bunch of people downloading your stuff and gets the courts to fine them, then there is probably nothing in your contract that says you get any of that money at all.
So in other words, this isn't about protecting existing artists, it's about the publishing and recording industry making money for themselves. The publishers' line is that in fining and jailing transgressors, people will be terrorised into paying for music and films in the future, which of course does in theory put money in the pockets of artists, but that's a purely theoretical outcome. It may be just as likely that being terrorised means you simply watch and listen to less media - or at least less that's owned by litigious publishers.