Sounds more like you violently agree with the GP:)
Both of you are saying that there should be a clear distinction between updates to existing software and new software that the user might like.
Unfortunately, everyone is all too familiar with sleazy marketers slipping things in under the radar (don't forgot to uncheck the "send some private data to XYZ company" box on the advanced tab when installing our FREE* screensavers!) and when ANYONE does it, even generally trustworthy companies like Apple, it's very obvious that someone did it deliberately. There's really no excuse these days.
It's another small example of how Apple (and particularly their marketing department) would be just as bad as Microsoft, if they had the chance.
Hey guys, I think you can assume that if we're having a discussion on Slashdot, most people are more interested in whether its unethical than whether it's illegal. People like to talk about whether something is bad or good, legality is of secondary interest to most. So yet another post about Apple (or Microsoft, or Google) saying "it might be dodgy but it's not illegal" doesn't really add anything to the discussion. If it's dodgy, it's dodgy, we expect more from companies and people than merely following the letter of the law.
Seen the same thing. After UT3 came out there was a period of a few months where UT2004 faded a bit. Now it's come back again and having some decent games. I'd say at least 50% of the good players I knew of are playing 2k4 again. (Although it's still a considerably smaller pool than 2 yrs ago).
I'd say probably a lot of people that drifted away from UT2004 haven't come back even for UT3... gone onto other games, which there are a lot to choose from now.
When you write an article about an interesting machine, include a picture. When including a picture, you need to make sure that people can actually see what is in the picture. If the picture is a diagram including text, it might even be helpful to make the picture big enough to READ the text.
This means that fitting the picture into your page layout is the LEAST important factor.
The number of web designers and writers who include tiny, unreadable articles just to fit their page design is very annoying.
It's one thing that Wikipedia usually does much better: every picture is clickable to get the original full size.
30 seconds? Are you just making numbers up? Opera in Java launches in about 2 seconds on my lowly Nokia 6234. While I still don't like Java on the desktop, it is pretty slick on mobile devices.
Sure, it was quite well produced, the new ideas had some potential, and everyone was... well... earnest. But it just wasn't very funny. Maybe Adams just wasn't very good at visual humour, and they couldn't fit the literary humour into a movie. Maybe they needed someone who did understand visual humour to translate the spirit of HHGG to a movie.
Interesting. I think a lot of people outside USSR perceived Gorbachev as something of a hero, first for Perostroika, then for "ending" the USSR (even though he didn't mean to) and finally, for managing to do it peacefully. Not many people think so highly of George Bush Sr however.
I guess that the particular Flash video decoder is inefficient. The rest of Flash might be OK. But in fact, being all vector graphics I assume that Flash uses lots of floating point internally, and that goes badly on mobile devices.
This looks like a good opportunity to rant a little about the abysmal uploading support built into browsers. With all the effort going into interactive sites, AJAX, user communities, media distribution and so on, the actual process of uploading files to a site is just as crap as it was in 1995.
In both IE and Firefox, the sum total of the upload user interface is a text box with a browse button, followed by an almost unnoticeable progress indication in the status bar. If anything goes wrong, the upload is aborted, in some unknown state, and can't be restarted. There is no way to upload more than one file except by the web page author manually coding in duplicate entry fields.
Why is this acceptable as the basic way for users to contribute images, videos, documents, etc to the amazing new web2.0 universe?
I do realise that security is a concern here, but a bit more effort from browser vendors would help users a lot.
No, that would greatly increase the number of incompatible files as all those new implementations created fresh bugs and variations on ambiguous parts of the spec.
Indeed. Actually that form is just a form of negativity towards a solution and pretty much covers every possible approach, without recognising that a combination may make forward progress. It's not helpful, and not really funny after the first time you see it. The problems in it are things to think about, but using it as a blanket dismissal of every idea is not helpful.
If what you're doing is something fairly standard, and user interface isn't a big selling point, then - use standard controls and designs from your operating system - copy the best parts of other similar applications - think hard about how the user uses it and make it as smooth as possible for those cases. - be tidy. - use a few nice graphics sparingly. Most business apps fall into this category and just following the basics will make a reasonable app, but nothing world-beating.
If you are doing something for which the user interface is really important (e.g. ipod - done before, but the user interface made it better than the rest), then you also have to get a lot smarter - am I going to break some conventions to make it better than the standard approach? - should I do skinning? This will attract some users and repel others, but is often added because the developer thinks it will be fun. Not the right approach. - do lots of research and testing into how the users use your app and similar apps. - experiment
This would be my problem with the new Brainstorm site. It's easy to make these sites and collect information from users, but actually taking action on the requests - which might mean allocating huge resources to them - possibly in ways that all the developers think are unimportant or dumb, is a whole other thing.
Bugzilla for Mozilla apps has voting, and lots of bugs have votes. But the developers openly admit they mostly ignore votes and just work on what interests them or their company. Votes are "an input" which pretty much means, if someone has already decided to work on something seeing the votes will confirm it worth doing to them.
This is however genuinely useful for mobile phone browsers and the like. Especially the image (re)compression - on a wee mobile phone screen you hardly need a high quality JPG.
Actually I was bemused to see that Ubuntu 7.10 actually has two separate places to change the resolution in the GUI. One limited list in preferences that didn't include the resolution I wanted, and one more complete list in Adminstration, but that one involves a reboot and is not hinted at by the first. Um.... I'm sure there is a logic there somewhere. But I don't care. Also on the first boot of the CD the screen was in a corrupted text mode. Had to use safe mode graphics. I'm aware that people consider desktop Linux to have improved enormously, and that many people report that it "just works" but it just didn't for me. (All very average mainstream hardware). Dissappointing really. On the plus side it did point out I needed "restricted" drivers for the Nvidia card and installed them without any noticeable problem. Pretty nice.
In this case, they are offering no reasonable and dependable guidelines for a business to host itself with Yahoo without the business always worrying that they are "growing too fast." Whatever that means.
Indeed. I skipped Yahoo for this exact reason. Even though I have more faith in Yahoo's ability to actually deliver good value than $RANDOM_OVERSELLING_WEBHOST$ found on the net, if they are going to be deliberately vague about important aspects of the service then it's too risky to use, except for a brochure site that you don't really care about.
Our site is nothing strenuous but pushes the limits of typical shared hosting. So will Yahoo "flag" us if we install that 2GB of data immediately? How about if we decide to do some more software releases next week and that doubles to 4GB? No way to know - no sale.
Much to AMDs dismay, the new Intel 45nm chips are remarkably good. Only 4 watts idle and 50W when at max load and also a bit faster per clock. That idle figure is quite amazing considering 20-30W was considered good a generation or two ago.
So if Sony gets similar benefits from 4nm+high k, the new PS3 will use much less power. They managed to get it to work without active cooling as it was, so this should give them a lot of headroom to shrink the box or do something new (build in PS2 hardware again would be a good idea...).
Microsoft were able to buy up Connectix with their X86->PPC emulator and thus get a mostly working package in one hit. I guess Sony doesn't have the same luck, given that they want to emulate an old proprietary chip which nobody but they was allowed to work with.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds more like you violently agree with the GP :)
Both of you are saying that there should be a clear distinction between updates to existing software and new software that the user might like.
Unfortunately, everyone is all too familiar with sleazy marketers slipping things in under the radar (don't forgot to uncheck the "send some private data to XYZ company" box on the advanced tab when installing our FREE* screensavers!) and when ANYONE does it, even generally trustworthy companies like Apple, it's very obvious that someone did it deliberately. There's really no excuse these days.
It's another small example of how Apple (and particularly their marketing department) would be just as bad as Microsoft, if they had the chance.
Hey guys, I think you can assume that if we're having a discussion on Slashdot, most people are more interested in whether its unethical than whether it's illegal. People like to talk about whether something is bad or good, legality is of secondary interest to most.
So yet another post about Apple (or Microsoft, or Google) saying "it might be dodgy but it's not illegal" doesn't really add anything to the discussion. If it's dodgy, it's dodgy, we expect more from companies and people than merely following the letter of the law.
Seen the same thing. After UT3 came out there was a period of a few months where UT2004 faded a bit. Now it's come back again and having some decent games. I'd say at least 50% of the good players I knew of are playing 2k4 again. (Although it's still a considerably smaller pool than 2 yrs ago).
... gone onto other games, which there are a lot to choose from now.
I'd say probably a lot of people that drifted away from UT2004 haven't come back even for UT3
I'm one of them, but Ubuntu didn't make me very happy, because there still weren't the games I wanted available for it (UT3 in this case).
When you write an article about an interesting machine, include a picture. When including a picture, you need to make sure that people can actually see what is in the picture. If the picture is a diagram including text, it might even be helpful to make the picture big enough to READ the text.
This means that fitting the picture into your page layout is the LEAST important factor.
The number of web designers and writers who include tiny, unreadable articles just to fit their page design is very annoying.
It's one thing that Wikipedia usually does much better: every picture is clickable to get the original full size.
30 seconds? Are you just making numbers up? Opera in Java launches in about 2 seconds on my lowly Nokia 6234. While I still don't like Java on the desktop, it is pretty slick on mobile devices.
Sure, it was quite well produced, the new ideas had some potential, and everyone was ... well... earnest. But it just wasn't very funny. Maybe Adams just wasn't very good at visual humour, and they couldn't fit the literary humour into a movie. Maybe they needed someone who did understand visual humour to translate the spirit of HHGG to a movie.
Interesting. I think a lot of people outside USSR perceived Gorbachev as something of a hero, first for Perostroika, then for "ending" the USSR (even though he didn't mean to) and finally, for managing to do it peacefully.
Not many people think so highly of George Bush Sr however.
I guess that the particular Flash video decoder is inefficient. The rest of Flash might be OK.
But in fact, being all vector graphics I assume that Flash uses lots of floating point internally, and that goes badly on mobile devices.
Well, exactly. Good quality file upload should be built into browsers. It shouldn't require any sort of add-on. Whether Flash or ActiveX.
Why not just install one of the many multi-client messengers? Miranda is nice and light weight on Windows.
This looks like a good opportunity to rant a little about the abysmal uploading support built into browsers.
With all the effort going into interactive sites, AJAX, user communities, media distribution and so on, the actual process of uploading files to a site is just as crap as it was in 1995.
In both IE and Firefox, the sum total of the upload user interface is a text box with a browse button, followed by an almost unnoticeable progress indication in the status bar. If anything goes wrong, the upload is aborted, in some unknown state, and can't be restarted. There is no way to upload more than one file except by the web page author manually coding in duplicate entry fields.
Why is this acceptable as the basic way for users to contribute images, videos, documents, etc to the amazing new web2.0 universe?
I do realise that security is a concern here, but a bit more effort from browser vendors would help users a lot.
No, that would greatly increase the number of incompatible files as all those new implementations created fresh bugs and variations on ambiguous parts of the spec.
Indeed. Actually that form is just a form of negativity towards a solution and pretty much covers every possible approach, without recognising that a combination may make forward progress. It's not helpful, and not really funny after the first time you see it. The problems in it are things to think about, but using it as a blanket dismissal of every idea is not helpful.
Like USB?
Combine an efficient PC-power supply in a box with (say) 12 USB sockets, and that could in theory take care of many things.
If what you're doing is something fairly standard, and user interface isn't a big selling point, then
- use standard controls and designs from your operating system
- copy the best parts of other similar applications
- think hard about how the user uses it and make it as smooth as possible for those cases.
- be tidy.
- use a few nice graphics sparingly.
Most business apps fall into this category and just following the basics will make a reasonable app, but nothing world-beating.
If you are doing something for which the user interface is really important (e.g. ipod - done before, but the user interface made it better than the rest), then you also have to get a lot smarter
- am I going to break some conventions to make it better than the standard approach?
- should I do skinning? This will attract some users and repel others, but is often added because the developer thinks it will be fun. Not the right approach.
- do lots of research and testing into how the users use your app and similar apps.
- experiment
This would be my problem with the new Brainstorm site. It's easy to make these sites and collect information from users, but actually taking action on the requests - which might mean allocating huge resources to them - possibly in ways that all the developers think are unimportant or dumb, is a whole other thing.
Bugzilla for Mozilla apps has voting, and lots of bugs have votes. But the developers openly admit they mostly ignore votes and just work on what interests them or their company. Votes are "an input" which pretty much means, if someone has already decided to work on something seeing the votes will confirm it worth doing to them.
This is however genuinely useful for mobile phone browsers and the like. Especially the image (re)compression - on a wee mobile phone screen you hardly need a high quality JPG.
Bookmark the #xxxx comment number link - thats a unique, lasting link to the comment.
Actually I was bemused to see that Ubuntu 7.10 actually has two separate places to change the resolution in the GUI. One limited list in preferences that didn't include the resolution I wanted, and one more complete list in Adminstration, but that one involves a reboot and is not hinted at by the first.
Um....
I'm sure there is a logic there somewhere. But I don't care.
Also on the first boot of the CD the screen was in a corrupted text mode. Had to use safe mode graphics.
I'm aware that people consider desktop Linux to have improved enormously, and that many people report that it "just works" but it just didn't for me. (All very average mainstream hardware).
Dissappointing really.
On the plus side it did point out I needed "restricted" drivers for the Nvidia card and installed them without any noticeable problem. Pretty nice.
In this case, they are offering no reasonable and dependable guidelines for a business to host itself with Yahoo without the business always worrying that they are "growing too fast." Whatever that means.
Indeed. I skipped Yahoo for this exact reason. Even though I have more faith in Yahoo's ability to actually deliver good value than $RANDOM_OVERSELLING_WEBHOST$ found on the net, if they are going to be deliberately vague about important aspects of the service then it's too risky to use, except for a brochure site that you don't really care about.
Our site is nothing strenuous but pushes the limits of typical shared hosting. So will Yahoo "flag" us if we install that 2GB of data immediately? How about if we decide to do some more software releases next week and that doubles to 4GB? No way to know - no sale.
Much to AMDs dismay, the new Intel 45nm chips are remarkably good. Only 4 watts idle and 50W when at max load and also a bit faster per clock. That idle figure is quite amazing considering 20-30W was considered good a generation or two ago.
So if Sony gets similar benefits from 4nm+high k, the new PS3 will use much less power. They managed to get it to work without active cooling as it was, so this should give them a lot of headroom to shrink the box or do something new (build in PS2 hardware again would be a good idea...).
Microsoft were able to buy up Connectix with their X86->PPC emulator and thus get a mostly working package in one hit. I guess Sony doesn't have the same luck, given that they want to emulate an old proprietary chip which nobody but they was allowed to work with.
Why the hell is the parent a troll? It's interesting at least. Come on mods...
Um, no. A realistic transfer rate for a laptop hard disk would be 20-30MB/sec.
:)
Even server drives cannot do sustained 250MB/sec.
Have you been reading the marketing materials again hey? You know what that does