Seems to me that file explorers seem to be just a very hard application to write right.
Nautilius is probably the biggest piece of crap in Gnome for this reason, and they try to make it worse by adding in the "feature" of it remember window positions at the cost of removing locality.
Finder's got threading problems, which, IMO will be faster to fix than anything else out there currently.
Explorer's got more holes than a chain link fence. It at one period of time had vonulnerabilites far beyond that of Finder's occasional bunking at corrupt mpegs; it could be used to let a virus into the system through a JPEG!? Come on.. blame it on the linked libraries all you want, but in the end it's the creator who linked those libraries in.
On another note? why the hell is the Toolbar a function of the file manager?! For example, when Finder goes south, I lose the Dock. When exploder.exe goes south, I lose the Start Menu. I don't recall if the same happens with Konquerer (but I believe it does); the only one I've seen get it right is GNOME, but then again, it does it at the price of looking fugly.
When we get down to it, nothing's perfect. Everything out there needs a lot of work, it's just there are a lot of GUIs which have made it much further along those changes than others. I still think OS X is an engineering marvel for all they got right, now it's just up to the designers to keep getting it right. And hopefully they won't forget to realize that while evolution is good, you can't leave everyone behind, and while new features are good, sometimes they are way ahead of their time. For example, I really, truthfully believe Spotlight is before its time. For all of the problems is has currently, for all of the file types out there that exist, for all of the broken standards and broken databasing systems, Spotlight works, but it doesn't do quite the good job as it should. For users of Mac OS X who are wondering why their system seems to perform a tad worse with Tiger, Spotlight's your answer. I'm not telling you to disable it, it's too valuable to live without, but you should at least realize the amount of effort Apple put into its design and how damned hard the problem of file recognition and metadata extraction is (Compare it to looking on your bookshelf and categorizing every book by title, author, publishing date, etc).
What has been happening with Firefox.. err Firebird.. err Pheonix.. err.. That damned new web browser from Mozilla.
How long before more of these "Stealth" (tm) words are trademarked? Should it be allowable to trademark dictionary words? I mean come on, it's implying ownership to a word, something that we need in language to describe something. Sure, other words can be used, but what if we're trying to rhyme or something?
By the way, I love the rediculous improbable slashdot stories.
While you have valid points (the space shuttle's weight), you are also missing some other crucial valid points.
The Saturn V only furnished the ability to lift 3 people into space at a time as it was constructed. While this was enough in the past, it simply isn't enough to construct something like the ISS, unless you want to have robots do it all, which adds lots of mass. The construction of something as complex as ISS needs to be done by human hands still to make sure everything is done right.
The Saturn V costs a lot to build, especially since none of the parts are getting reused. The shuttle is a constant cost per mission (refit, refit the SRBs, new fuel tank). This would have to be redesigned simply because the Saturn V's design would have bankruped NASA.
3rd, you missed a valid point about the Saturn V's design. You can always extend the Saturn V's lifting capacity by adding bigger engines, making it taller, making it wider, making it weigh less. The only thing you can do on the space shuttle without having to redesign the world is make the shuttle weigh less, which currently isn't even a notion since the damned things are so old that anyone's afraid to.
Also, space shuttle maintainance is probitively expensive to keep flying these catastrophies. We simply can't come up with a way to repair these things in space, where with a "launch and throw away" configuration, you simply never have this step. If a crew gets stranded in space, send another to catch them.
All and all, we know now that the ways we were doing things years ago was the right way to get things into orbit. Now we're doing something about it (finally... it's about damned time). Given all the cutbacks in NASA's funding, it was an eventuality we'd go back to cheap, disposable rocketry, but at the same time, we need to think about reusing what we can, simply because a lot of the parts CAN be reused and in the longer run will make it cheaper.. (Just think what would have happened if we had to build a new shuttle every time we went to space..).
It's okay you're not okay with the idea. The engines are only being used now because the current space shuttle uses them. If you really want to think about it, all they have done is strip the wings off the shuttle, stuck the shuttle on top of the liquid fuel tank, and taken two shuttle engine packages and stuck it to the bottom. Nothing more than an out of box reconfiguration of the parts, hardly nothing new has to be constructed, and all of the surplus shuttle parts get used. Not to mention it allows them to move on to more complex configurations such as 3 SRBs or 4 SRBs, or how ever many they can squeeze around that liquid fuel tank in the center with engineering feasability.
Don't worry about it.. This step is all about phasing out the parts of the space shuttle program that just didn't work. The whole "flight to recovery" step just didn't work, so they're stripping the wings off the shuttle. The whole "riding the back of the booster" instead of on top just didn't work, so they're stripping that away. The overall package becomes a hell of a lot more aerodynamic, cheaper to manufacture (other than the refit of the buildings to deal with something taller than the Saturn-V, which in it's own way is exciting and revolutionary), and cheaper to put things in space.
Just because the world wide web is growing faster than before, doesn't nessicarily mean that the Internet is healthy.
I would still argue that, while yes, the web is growing and a lot of good is happening on the Internet, it is still fatally flawed as evident in email, search engine, and blog spam. Putting it simply, the Internet is flawed because there isn't a structure in place for it to pay for itself without annoying advertisements. Google's made a lot of headway in this department, but even they're getting sued because they can't prevent scammers from ruining their attempts.
The Internet is broken, even if the world wide web is growing and working fine. More specifically, POP, IMAP, SMTP protocols are mortally broken, even if they work as built. Replacing the hardware underneath may help, but honestly, I think it's mainly the software's fault its in such bad shape.
Just remember, the World Wide Web is the most prevalent service running on the Internet. The Internet is much, much more than that though!
I don't think it's as big of a deal as you are saying. After all, even if they are known for having a huge embrace of Linux over at IBM, they also sell Microsoft products on their servers (now who'd buy those servers, I dunno, but they do sell them).
Basically, what they've done is dropped the cost of Microsoft on those boxes, increasing their profit margin. Of course, this can even go internally; they don't nessicarily have to sell those licenses they just got their hands on. They can use it on their own products or give them to their employees or whatever the hell they want to do with them, including selling those vouchers to Lenova for a petty price of $10 Million (that'd be my move; show how worthless Microsoft really is by giving away their software at a HUGE discount).
All this settlement really means is that instead of giving up closer to a billion dollars, they decided to lick their wounds and give up a few licenses (which cost them less in the long run). IBM must have been apt to accept, as $75 million in Microsoft money is money to burn.
Usually. It's worth more to the company to have a one-time contracted $30,000 piece of code that's closed and proprietary than a free to use GPL code if it requires them to open up the rest of their $1,000,000 software suite. That's why companies I know about fish around for libraries that are LGPL and latch on.
I think it's sad that even the developers of Open Source / Free Software can't make up their damned minds on how things should work, and we magically expect the developers of our Desktop Environments (and the rest of Linux, for that matter; even though Torvalds and crew have a really good handle on things now I believe..) to just sort everything out for us. One's completely free under both the Free Software and Open Source movement, the other's only free under the Free Software movement, and Open Source developers bicker to the ends of time about how it isn't open..
Please for the love of computers, let's stop the political arguments and GET BACK TO WORK. There's a lot of catch up we need to play on a lot of fields, and a lot of innovation that could happen if we'd just let ourselves go that route. Of course, it is your natural right to bitch about everything, and I'm not trying to silence you guys, but come on.. when you bitch to the point that nothing's getting done, you need to re-evaluate your bitching.
But seriously, I'm totally expecting to see this in the next version of Windows (whenever that will be). Whether it is a derivative of some BSD, a grounded up UNIX (with a compatible driver model to something that already exists), or if it's just a massive hack of NT and BSD together, it should happen.
Perhaps this is the real reason Microsoft flinched on the delivery of their MONAD shell?
I don't believe in the need to. By the time my battery dies, I'll be ready to purchase a new one. Apple expects the same from you. If you have a problem with that, tough. Apple's got a system you can send in and have them replace your battery for you, if you'd like.
If you care so much about user replaceable batteries, use some other player.
Why must we fight? I could pick out a hundred billion things I can't stand about both GNOME/GTK+ and KDE/Qt. Neither's a good solution to the problem, and evangelizing one over the other is really what keeps the mythical Linux Desktop from existing.
That being said, GTK can't be folded into Qt due to licencing issues. GNOME might be able to, but that's a hell of a lot of developers to contact, and the bets are on that many would say no.
Why can't we simply build a system where programmers are allowed to use whichever programming paradigm they want, and it render to the same outcome, be it GNOME or KDE? It works under Windows (Win32/C preceeded the MFCs/C++, and both generate an application that looks and feels the same). WxWindows is almost that, but they decided to make their own widget system, which I believe to be a total failure; we need a unified widget system!!!
Constant look and feel is absolutely the number one goal we should be working towards, and yet its the one thing that nobody wants to work at. Everyone harps about choice, but the only thing users get to choose is which developmental faction to follow.
That being said, the ONLY reason I chose GNOME over KDE is that it looks closest to something I'm used to (Mac OS X). I felt the KDE toolbar to be a bit clunky for my tastes (even after a few hours of poking at configs), which is a jab to me, especially since I love WebCore and Konq.
Sometimes I wish I'd wake up in the morning and hear that Y-Windows has completed a complete recast of a windowing environment, and that both GNOME and KDE would port or die, simply because I can't stand the politics of the situation. I'm a user and don't want to be a developer. I don't want to be on either side of that war. I just want a working system.
Really? I thought the iPod was a single processor ARM7 derivative made by PortalPlayer called something like PP5020D (I'd Google it, but I've really got to be getting some sleep).
Add an onboard MPEG-4 video decoder and you could also do some serious video work. Of course, both of these additions would drastically raise the price of the iPod, so this might be something they would introduce in the higher end first (like they did with the iPod Photo).
It'll be interesting to see what happens for sure.
Kinda shows that they're listening to the customers. I grumbled when I saw the price of the iPod Colors, and I wanted one so badly, but there was no way I could afford it, and settled with the iPod deal that came with my iBook.
I'd say they're cooking a lot more inside of Apple; this is still major revision 4 of the iPod. Gen 5 could bring us a whole host of things we weren't expecting (bluetooth remote? sync to cell? wifi? bigger color screen? video?). The options are really limitless. This is just more to quell the customers who really wanted a feature that couldn't get it until now.
To me, it looks like Apple hasn't stopped innovating, but as any company, innovation can only take place in steps. The iPod, just like the iMac, iBook, Power Mac, PowerBook, and Mac OS X products all have their own release cycles now, and you can't ask them to continously flood the market with new warez; not only would this bankrupt the company, the consumers would get bored of the almost constant updates.
You know, it's not a far cry to add a new CPU, or a second CPU, now that they've upped the battery life to a steady 15 hours. Sure, video will drop it back to the 8 hour range, but that's the trade off.
Oh, and DAMN IT ALL. I just had my iPod serviced and they replaced it with the equivalent 4th gen. Guess you can't always win;)
What about a sound captcha? A link on the page you click says "Read Captcha", linking to an mp3 file constructed of the letters put together. Not hard to implement, not too harsh on bandwidth. Of course, then the deaf would complain, and you'd have to use both. And of course then the blind and deaf would have to complain... *sigh*
Sure, I totally agree that nuclear is ready for use, and that it should be used. I simply stated I don't agree with the way our laws are structured in dealing with Nuclear Waste. If we are to use nuclear power as a power source, we had damned well learn to tap out every bit of power we can get from it, because Uranium spitting off neutrons and gamma rays is a million more times dangerous than a few tonnes of excess carbon dioxide (dealt with by trees) and more harmful nitrates and sulfides.
Waste is still waste. As long as we think of a great potential energy source as waste, then it will be waste, and we will have to find good, effective ways of dealing with it. A great way is to ensure that it's no longer waste when we're done with it. This implies that we burn the fuel until it's usable as something else (every heavy radioisotope fizzes to iron eventually, just give it enough time and a room it can sit with a neutron ray batheing it). It's for the same reasons I believe we should be investigating burning all garbage; metals in the trash will fall and can be easily recycled, the contaminates it introduces into air can be filtered out (though this is the clincher; it's more expensive to be clean than to pollute), and we can use what we didn't use earlier for something more constructive.
For fuck's sake, neither is the Internet. Just because I put something on the Internet, doesn't mean anyone's ever going to see it!!!!
If Google brings it up as a top match, USE ANOTHER SEARCH ENGINE. The problem is you think services should cater specifically to you, while the company that runs the services is trying to think of the greater good of everyone.
Freedom of Speech is all the Internet is. Audience is you. If you want to look at the site, go right on ahead, and if you don't, then you know how to avoid it, assuming you are an intellegent human being, and care enough to do the work to avoid it. If not, then use a better service that caters more specifically to you. It's as simple as that.
Personally, I have no problem with nuclear power, and yes, radioactive ore is in nature not so dangerous. The problem is just that; we dig it up, concentrate it, extract roughly 2% of its potential yield, and then expect to dump it back into nature since we're done with it?
Good designs I agree with, and nuclear power is reasonably cheap with very high yields, but we've really got to get a handle on how we're going to dispose of the material once we're through with it, or learn to continue our recycling facilities before we unleash the burden on our children's children.
Take it up with them personally, then. Oh, or you could just use a search engine that actively removes blogs from their indicies. Or you could make your own and remove them personally. Or you could subtract out the sites you don't want in existing search engines.
As I can see it, choice is on your side. They have the choice of posting or not posting. You have the choice of how you want to deal with it.
Wait, how many Slashdot editors are there? Oh right, not thousands. Not even hundreds.
Secondly, haven't you ever heard of the Freedom of Speech, as guarenteed to us by the Second Amendement in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution of the United States of America? By your comment, I'll assume not.
Why should we quash out individuality so that one person can get to the content they want better? Why shouldn't we just solve the damned problem, instead of creating more?
I'd say blogs are more than just what you've said. Hear me out.
Blogs are a new form of communication. Before, we had "editorials" which were published in newspapers, where someone of stature is making their opinion well known, simply to spark debate and interest in the public's mind. Now this is a turn for everyone to have their own editorial, and to foster debate and discusion. Welcome to Slashdot, by the way.
Secondly, they offer a form of sympathy to the author; normally someone either says "I like your book" or "I don't like your book". This gives people a chance to say "Well, I liked your book, but the ending could be better. I don't think Saffron shoulda died when she fell into the swimming pool" or something like that. Sometimes it's rewarding to write something, but you never know how other people relate to it, and this is just a great opportunity to get that feedback, instantly.
Lastly, it's an insight into the person. It shows what that person values by what they write about often. It shows how educated the person is by word choice and by sentence structure. It shows how thoughtful the person is when they ask questions. It shows how we're different, as people.
Honestly, I think the problem is that nobody thought about the problem before it existed. When we thought of the Internet, we thought of it as a number of infinitely flexible services accessible by port interfaces. When we sat down and thought of the way we wanted to put the web together, we wrote a common interfacing language, and ways of accessing that information, by a standard, over the internet. But what we didn't think of was how different the kinds of media transported over the internet would become. Had we thought of it, we might be using blog:// to access blogs today, instead of a certain http address, just as we might be using images:// or video://. Honestly, it shows how well the original system was designed, but then again it also shows how we pretty much stopped designing the system after it solved our problem (same with email, IMO).
Slashdot Mirror
Seems to me that file explorers seem to be just a very hard application to write right.
Nautilius is probably the biggest piece of crap in Gnome for this reason, and they try to make it worse by adding in the "feature" of it remember window positions at the cost of removing locality.
Finder's got threading problems, which, IMO will be faster to fix than anything else out there currently.
Explorer's got more holes than a chain link fence. It at one period of time had vonulnerabilites far beyond that of Finder's occasional bunking at corrupt mpegs; it could be used to let a virus into the system through a JPEG!? Come on.. blame it on the linked libraries all you want, but in the end it's the creator who linked those libraries in.
On another note? why the hell is the Toolbar a function of the file manager?! For example, when Finder goes south, I lose the Dock. When exploder.exe goes south, I lose the Start Menu. I don't recall if the same happens with Konquerer (but I believe it does); the only one I've seen get it right is GNOME, but then again, it does it at the price of looking fugly.
When we get down to it, nothing's perfect. Everything out there needs a lot of work, it's just there are a lot of GUIs which have made it much further along those changes than others. I still think OS X is an engineering marvel for all they got right, now it's just up to the designers to keep getting it right. And hopefully they won't forget to realize that while evolution is good, you can't leave everyone behind, and while new features are good, sometimes they are way ahead of their time. For example, I really, truthfully believe Spotlight is before its time. For all of the problems is has currently, for all of the file types out there that exist, for all of the broken standards and broken databasing systems, Spotlight works, but it doesn't do quite the good job as it should. For users of Mac OS X who are wondering why their system seems to perform a tad worse with Tiger, Spotlight's your answer. I'm not telling you to disable it, it's too valuable to live without, but you should at least realize the amount of effort Apple put into its design and how damned hard the problem of file recognition and metadata extraction is (Compare it to looking on your bookshelf and categorizing every book by title, author, publishing date, etc).
What has been happening with Firefox.. err Firebird.. err Pheonix.. err.. That damned new web browser from Mozilla.
How long before more of these "Stealth" (tm) words are trademarked? Should it be allowable to trademark dictionary words? I mean come on, it's implying ownership to a word, something that we need in language to describe something. Sure, other words can be used, but what if we're trying to rhyme or something?
By the way, I love the rediculous improbable slashdot stories.
While you have valid points (the space shuttle's weight), you are also missing some other crucial valid points.
The Saturn V only furnished the ability to lift 3 people into space at a time as it was constructed. While this was enough in the past, it simply isn't enough to construct something like the ISS, unless you want to have robots do it all, which adds lots of mass. The construction of something as complex as ISS needs to be done by human hands still to make sure everything is done right.
The Saturn V costs a lot to build, especially since none of the parts are getting reused. The shuttle is a constant cost per mission (refit, refit the SRBs, new fuel tank). This would have to be redesigned simply because the Saturn V's design would have bankruped NASA.
3rd, you missed a valid point about the Saturn V's design. You can always extend the Saturn V's lifting capacity by adding bigger engines, making it taller, making it wider, making it weigh less. The only thing you can do on the space shuttle without having to redesign the world is make the shuttle weigh less, which currently isn't even a notion since the damned things are so old that anyone's afraid to.
Also, space shuttle maintainance is probitively expensive to keep flying these catastrophies. We simply can't come up with a way to repair these things in space, where with a "launch and throw away" configuration, you simply never have this step. If a crew gets stranded in space, send another to catch them.
All and all, we know now that the ways we were doing things years ago was the right way to get things into orbit. Now we're doing something about it (finally... it's about damned time). Given all the cutbacks in NASA's funding, it was an eventuality we'd go back to cheap, disposable rocketry, but at the same time, we need to think about reusing what we can, simply because a lot of the parts CAN be reused and in the longer run will make it cheaper.. (Just think what would have happened if we had to build a new shuttle every time we went to space..).
It's okay you're not okay with the idea. The engines are only being used now because the current space shuttle uses them. If you really want to think about it, all they have done is strip the wings off the shuttle, stuck the shuttle on top of the liquid fuel tank, and taken two shuttle engine packages and stuck it to the bottom. Nothing more than an out of box reconfiguration of the parts, hardly nothing new has to be constructed, and all of the surplus shuttle parts get used. Not to mention it allows them to move on to more complex configurations such as 3 SRBs or 4 SRBs, or how ever many they can squeeze around that liquid fuel tank in the center with engineering feasability.
Don't worry about it.. This step is all about phasing out the parts of the space shuttle program that just didn't work. The whole "flight to recovery" step just didn't work, so they're stripping the wings off the shuttle. The whole "riding the back of the booster" instead of on top just didn't work, so they're stripping that away. The overall package becomes a hell of a lot more aerodynamic, cheaper to manufacture (other than the refit of the buildings to deal with something taller than the Saturn-V, which in it's own way is exciting and revolutionary), and cheaper to put things in space.
Donald Trump: You're Sued!
How grass grows, the scientific miracle!
Just because the world wide web is growing faster than before, doesn't nessicarily mean that the Internet is healthy.
I would still argue that, while yes, the web is growing and a lot of good is happening on the Internet, it is still fatally flawed as evident in email, search engine, and blog spam. Putting it simply, the Internet is flawed because there isn't a structure in place for it to pay for itself without annoying advertisements. Google's made a lot of headway in this department, but even they're getting sued because they can't prevent scammers from ruining their attempts.
The Internet is broken, even if the world wide web is growing and working fine. More specifically, POP, IMAP, SMTP protocols are mortally broken, even if they work as built. Replacing the hardware underneath may help, but honestly, I think it's mainly the software's fault its in such bad shape.
Just remember, the World Wide Web is the most prevalent service running on the Internet. The Internet is much, much more than that though!
Richard Stallman nominates GNU/Free.
I don't think it's as big of a deal as you are saying. After all, even if they are known for having a huge embrace of Linux over at IBM, they also sell Microsoft products on their servers (now who'd buy those servers, I dunno, but they do sell them).
Basically, what they've done is dropped the cost of Microsoft on those boxes, increasing their profit margin. Of course, this can even go internally; they don't nessicarily have to sell those licenses they just got their hands on. They can use it on their own products or give them to their employees or whatever the hell they want to do with them, including selling those vouchers to Lenova for a petty price of $10 Million (that'd be my move; show how worthless Microsoft really is by giving away their software at a HUGE discount).
All this settlement really means is that instead of giving up closer to a billion dollars, they decided to lick their wounds and give up a few licenses (which cost them less in the long run). IBM must have been apt to accept, as $75 million in Microsoft money is money to burn.
Usually. It's worth more to the company to have a one-time contracted $30,000 piece of code that's closed and proprietary than a free to use GPL code if it requires them to open up the rest of their $1,000,000 software suite. That's why companies I know about fish around for libraries that are LGPL and latch on.
I think it's sad that even the developers of Open Source / Free Software can't make up their damned minds on how things should work, and we magically expect the developers of our Desktop Environments (and the rest of Linux, for that matter; even though Torvalds and crew have a really good handle on things now I believe..) to just sort everything out for us. One's completely free under both the Free Software and Open Source movement, the other's only free under the Free Software movement, and Open Source developers bicker to the ends of time about how it isn't open..
Please for the love of computers, let's stop the political arguments and GET BACK TO WORK. There's a lot of catch up we need to play on a lot of fields, and a lot of innovation that could happen if we'd just let ourselves go that route. Of course, it is your natural right to bitch about everything, and I'm not trying to silence you guys, but come on.. when you bitch to the point that nothing's getting done, you need to re-evaluate your bitching.
Simple; Apple beat them to the punch ;).
But seriously, I'm totally expecting to see this in the next version of Windows (whenever that will be). Whether it is a derivative of some BSD, a grounded up UNIX (with a compatible driver model to something that already exists), or if it's just a massive hack of NT and BSD together, it should happen.
Perhaps this is the real reason Microsoft flinched on the delivery of their MONAD shell?
I don't believe in the need to. By the time my battery dies, I'll be ready to purchase a new one. Apple expects the same from you. If you have a problem with that, tough. Apple's got a system you can send in and have them replace your battery for you, if you'd like.
If you care so much about user replaceable batteries, use some other player.
Why must we fight? I could pick out a hundred billion things I can't stand about both GNOME/GTK+ and KDE/Qt. Neither's a good solution to the problem, and evangelizing one over the other is really what keeps the mythical Linux Desktop from existing.
That being said, GTK can't be folded into Qt due to licencing issues. GNOME might be able to, but that's a hell of a lot of developers to contact, and the bets are on that many would say no.
Why can't we simply build a system where programmers are allowed to use whichever programming paradigm they want, and it render to the same outcome, be it GNOME or KDE? It works under Windows (Win32/C preceeded the MFCs/C++, and both generate an application that looks and feels the same). WxWindows is almost that, but they decided to make their own widget system, which I believe to be a total failure; we need a unified widget system!!!
Constant look and feel is absolutely the number one goal we should be working towards, and yet its the one thing that nobody wants to work at. Everyone harps about choice, but the only thing users get to choose is which developmental faction to follow.
That being said, the ONLY reason I chose GNOME over KDE is that it looks closest to something I'm used to (Mac OS X). I felt the KDE toolbar to be a bit clunky for my tastes (even after a few hours of poking at configs), which is a jab to me, especially since I love WebCore and Konq.
Sometimes I wish I'd wake up in the morning and hear that Y-Windows has completed a complete recast of a windowing environment, and that both GNOME and KDE would port or die, simply because I can't stand the politics of the situation. I'm a user and don't want to be a developer. I don't want to be on either side of that war. I just want a working system.
I'll just stick with my Mac for now.
Really? I thought the iPod was a single processor ARM7 derivative made by PortalPlayer called something like PP5020D (I'd Google it, but I've really got to be getting some sleep).
Add an onboard MPEG-4 video decoder and you could also do some serious video work. Of course, both of these additions would drastically raise the price of the iPod, so this might be something they would introduce in the higher end first (like they did with the iPod Photo).
It'll be interesting to see what happens for sure.
Kinda shows that they're listening to the customers. I grumbled when I saw the price of the iPod Colors, and I wanted one so badly, but there was no way I could afford it, and settled with the iPod deal that came with my iBook.
I'd say they're cooking a lot more inside of Apple; this is still major revision 4 of the iPod. Gen 5 could bring us a whole host of things we weren't expecting (bluetooth remote? sync to cell? wifi? bigger color screen? video?). The options are really limitless. This is just more to quell the customers who really wanted a feature that couldn't get it until now.
To me, it looks like Apple hasn't stopped innovating, but as any company, innovation can only take place in steps. The iPod, just like the iMac, iBook, Power Mac, PowerBook, and Mac OS X products all have their own release cycles now, and you can't ask them to continously flood the market with new warez; not only would this bankrupt the company, the consumers would get bored of the almost constant updates.
They also updated the U2 edition to the color screen, and the price is now only $30 over the default iPod price of 299.
:)
I like the U2 edition's colors, but it just wouldn't match my snowflake iBook.
..yet.
;)
You know, it's not a far cry to add a new CPU, or a second CPU, now that they've upped the battery life to a steady 15 hours. Sure, video will drop it back to the 8 hour range, but that's the trade off.
Oh, and DAMN IT ALL. I just had my iPod serviced and they replaced it with the equivalent 4th gen. Guess you can't always win
What about a sound captcha? A link on the page you click says "Read Captcha", linking to an mp3 file constructed of the letters put together. Not hard to implement, not too harsh on bandwidth. Of course, then the deaf would complain, and you'd have to use both. And of course then the blind and deaf would have to complain... *sigh*
Sure, I totally agree that nuclear is ready for use, and that it should be used. I simply stated I don't agree with the way our laws are structured in dealing with Nuclear Waste. If we are to use nuclear power as a power source, we had damned well learn to tap out every bit of power we can get from it, because Uranium spitting off neutrons and gamma rays is a million more times dangerous than a few tonnes of excess carbon dioxide (dealt with by trees) and more harmful nitrates and sulfides.
Waste is still waste. As long as we think of a great potential energy source as waste, then it will be waste, and we will have to find good, effective ways of dealing with it. A great way is to ensure that it's no longer waste when we're done with it. This implies that we burn the fuel until it's usable as something else (every heavy radioisotope fizzes to iron eventually, just give it enough time and a room it can sit with a neutron ray batheing it). It's for the same reasons I believe we should be investigating burning all garbage; metals in the trash will fall and can be easily recycled, the contaminates it introduces into air can be filtered out (though this is the clincher; it's more expensive to be clean than to pollute), and we can use what we didn't use earlier for something more constructive.
For fuck's sake, neither is the Internet. Just because I put something on the Internet, doesn't mean anyone's ever going to see it!!!!
If Google brings it up as a top match, USE ANOTHER SEARCH ENGINE. The problem is you think services should cater specifically to you, while the company that runs the services is trying to think of the greater good of everyone.
Freedom of Speech is all the Internet is. Audience is you. If you want to look at the site, go right on ahead, and if you don't, then you know how to avoid it, assuming you are an intellegent human being, and care enough to do the work to avoid it. If not, then use a better service that caters more specifically to you. It's as simple as that.
Personally, I have no problem with nuclear power, and yes, radioactive ore is in nature not so dangerous. The problem is just that; we dig it up, concentrate it, extract roughly 2% of its potential yield, and then expect to dump it back into nature since we're done with it?
Good designs I agree with, and nuclear power is reasonably cheap with very high yields, but we've really got to get a handle on how we're going to dispose of the material once we're through with it, or learn to continue our recycling facilities before we unleash the burden on our children's children.
Take it up with them personally, then. Oh, or you could just use a search engine that actively removes blogs from their indicies. Or you could make your own and remove them personally. Or you could subtract out the sites you don't want in existing search engines.
As I can see it, choice is on your side. They have the choice of posting or not posting. You have the choice of how you want to deal with it.
Wait, how many Slashdot editors are there? Oh right, not thousands. Not even hundreds.
Secondly, haven't you ever heard of the Freedom of Speech, as guarenteed to us by the Second Amendement in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution of the United States of America? By your comment, I'll assume not.
Why should we quash out individuality so that one person can get to the content they want better? Why shouldn't we just solve the damned problem, instead of creating more?
I'd say blogs are more than just what you've said. Hear me out.
Blogs are a new form of communication. Before, we had "editorials" which were published in newspapers, where someone of stature is making their opinion well known, simply to spark debate and interest in the public's mind. Now this is a turn for everyone to have their own editorial, and to foster debate and discusion. Welcome to Slashdot, by the way.
Secondly, they offer a form of sympathy to the author; normally someone either says "I like your book" or "I don't like your book". This gives people a chance to say "Well, I liked your book, but the ending could be better. I don't think Saffron shoulda died when she fell into the swimming pool" or something like that. Sometimes it's rewarding to write something, but you never know how other people relate to it, and this is just a great opportunity to get that feedback, instantly.
Lastly, it's an insight into the person. It shows what that person values by what they write about often. It shows how educated the person is by word choice and by sentence structure. It shows how thoughtful the person is when they ask questions. It shows how we're different, as people.
Honestly, I think the problem is that nobody thought about the problem before it existed. When we thought of the Internet, we thought of it as a number of infinitely flexible services accessible by port interfaces. When we sat down and thought of the way we wanted to put the web together, we wrote a common interfacing language, and ways of accessing that information, by a standard, over the internet. But what we didn't think of was how different the kinds of media transported over the internet would become. Had we thought of it, we might be using blog:// to access blogs today, instead of a certain http address, just as we might be using images:// or video://. Honestly, it shows how well the original system was designed, but then again it also shows how we pretty much stopped designing the system after it solved our problem (same with email, IMO).