I invented that collaborative networking for Roger Wilco, the gamers voice radio applet of 6 years ago or so. It had dynamically optimizing broadcast trees amongst the nodes... helped us do the impossible while keeping 90% of your modem free for the game. The tech worked well in a fairly interactive environment and should work BETTER in a broadcaster/audience model as these guys are doing it.
I'd also explore the patents we cited in background.
I'd wanted to bend the old RW tech to the same purpose, but I'm not coder enough to have done it right. Pity I did not know of this work -- good luck!
Burn them to a disk, re-import as MP3's. iTunes allows this.
Is it convenient? No. Is it a civil tort? Not unless selling music on CD's is, because they also force you to import them to turn the tracks into MP3s.
Therefore, I believe that this whiner is simply upset by the apparent ease with which Apple COULD permit the process to occur but has opted against in order to seek a balance of interests that placates the rights holders enough that the entire enterprise can exist in the first place, albeit by denying users the flexibility they would find optimal if their interests were the only ones at play here.
Is this not irrelevant? The point is knowing that you are running the code the Mozilla people have steered you toward. This colorful anecdote suggests if I were interested in spyware, I could confidently know who was infesting my computer if I used the supplier you mention.
Not having to hug our parents is an important advance, but we long since sent them to live (or not) on an ice floe. Are these robots arctic-safe?
tone
The Mac is better than it was a few years ago
on
Jef Raskin On The Mac
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
MacOS was ugly and poorly organized before OS X, what with extensions and many tack-on technologies on an OS built for yesterday.
In 1984, it really could not do much (as I recall my original 128K Mac... though my use was soon marred by a bad motherboard as soon as the warranty expired), and it sure did it simply.
Flexibility is what makes a computer useful to the clever person, but it always comes with a concomitant need for the users to understand how to express their desires to the machine. Making the computer just "do what I mean" is nice, and can take your surprisingly far, but it overlooks that "the right thing" is often ambiguous to those designers who are not constraining the users from "thinking different'.
I use XP and OS X in even doses these days, and find that both platforms have come a long way in the past several years. But most of the things I wish were done better on the Mac are longstanding deficiencies.... not new ones. To put the short list together, I'd cite these usability blunders:
1. The flower or cloverleaf key. It has an Apple on it too. Why don't they LOSE the cloverleaf, so people can clearly and succinctly name it in verbal dialog without having to EXPLAIN which key they mean? It might also help to toss even the Apple and just call this what it is: the command key (of course, that word would have to be painted on it).
2. Similarly... the control key. The iconic label for indicating its use in shortcuts is some weird diagonalized hatch which does not appear on the key itself and is used nowhere else in the world. What rocket scientist thought up THAT one, and decided that this was the right choice for 'the rest of us'? That icon should be what is printed on the damn key, too: 'ctrl'. Failing that, at least go to ^ !!
And, sadly, one must wonder who at Apple thinks the users can't understand a second mousebutton after all these years. It must be by extrapolation that they withold scroll wheels. Before you ask, YES I have a mouse I use that has these, but why is the basics of simple computing kept from the basic experience Apple presents to the user?
tone
When did Germany and France say there was no WMD? They repeatedly said that there was WMD, right up to the war. Revisionist, indeed.
Bush was the guy caught holding the bag when a global consensus on WMD proved incorrect... to this date, inexplicably so.
I can understand people disagreeing with Bush and his actions, but when they start out with ad hominem labels such as "warmonger" and charges of lying that enjoy no support in fact, they lose the ability to argue the merits of their viscerally-held opinions.
People who capitalize "internet" are the same grandmas who call it "the world wide web" and "the information super-highway". And those who use 'net look like persnickety wankers right off.
Is this even a very "green" choice? battery life (of 13 car batteries) of 1-4 years?
How nice is it to throw out a battery every 1-4 months?
I'd say a hybrid might be wiser, as it gets you away from the extension cord, gives you cargo/multipassenger, adds great range, and puts you into the market where the momentum resides (helpful when one must get it repaired)
The difference between thoughtfully-provided and carelessly hatched together whitelisting is night and day. My service provider offers whitelisting with these wrinkles:
1. Anyone I send email to is whitelisted for me, unless previously explicitly blacklisted
2. I can wildcard white- (or black-) list a domain
3. I can upload my addressbook to whitelist all current correspondents, to feather my nest
4. Anyone successfully answering a challenge response for any user of the service is by default trusted to email any user of the service. This keeps many people from having to answer challenges more than one time EVER.
5. IMAP email service... very nice for many people who make due with POP3 which is the mass market standard
6. works with existing email addresses and mailboxes (POP3 or IMAP) --- this means your old addresses still work and yet you do not personally shoulder a role in the infrastructure.
Whitelisting on this caliber makes content analysis seem ludicrously misguided as a basis for protection, but it is not perfect for ever -- its popularity will lead to its undermining (e.g.: emails seeming to come from eBay's alert bot would give a pass to anyone who had decided that this was traffic they wanted to receive).
I hope to soon complete my first year with not a single SPAM message. That's right... 365 days with no spam reaching me and 175 being bitbucketed at day. But I know that over the long haul an even more stringent form of protection based on stamps or similar will be needed.
Filter them out to your detriment. The only issue I have with Plaxo at the moment is that it does not support enough platforms.
I feel complaint about privacy that are cited above reflect a lack of time and attention spent to reading how Plaxo works. I am not affiliated with them, but I was developing a similar tool when I saw that they were far ahead and had ALL the right ideas either in-place or on their futures list.
My embrace of Plaxo is provisional at the moment. Plaxo is not fully "there yet", but I felt when I looked at it that they were indeed working toward an ideal model of how contact information should be handled: each user maintains only their own personal contact record, and then determines who should have access to it. Considering that a person with N contacts would evolve to enjoy an N-fold savings of contact record maintenance while at the same time obtaining a sense of who knows how to reach him, I'd say this is a principle worthy of tolerance at the very least. I'd rather make my 400 contacts be responsible for maintaining their record in my contact database... who wouldn't? After all.. this is THEIR data, not mine.
As others point out, Plaxo is true that it is not a P2P tool, technically, and even the common points between it and the P2P systems we've all come to know (enabling information exchange between the "unwashed masses") are subtly different in a way that benefits those who run the client without hazarding their privacy one iota.
To wit: putting your personal contact information into Plaxo is not the same as posting it to all the world. Rather, it is only disseminated to those you choose to share it with -- and you are offered a valuable view of the people in your address book and email traffic who might be suitable. Indeed, I find even the drive-by benefit of letting Plaxo show you which people you NEED contacts for but do not yet have sufficient reason to use the tool.
The emails you refer to DO encourage the recipient to download Plaxo -- and this notice may not be helpful to those using a yet unsupported platform. But to filter out the messages is to lose track of your contacts when they apprise you of changes in their data, in which case you both lose.
Why complain when AOL disables a feature 99% of users don't want without asking them, and withhold complaint when Microsoft puts in a feature 99% of the users don't want?
AOL is merely correcting a poorly chosen default, and experience suggests that AOL users don't know how to change default settings -- that is why they are AOL users.
Oh, to have billions so I might buy up odious tech patents and then sue the bejeezus out of anyone who employs the abusive ideas they protect!
Re:better: let recipient choose when to charge
on
Another Whack at Spam
·
· Score: 1
I didn't mean that you give the money to the button-presser: send it to a charity and/or use some to defray costs of the charging infrastructure itself.
I think a better model is to enregister senders so that they can be charged, but not to charge to send emails as a matter of course. Rather, email clients can sport buttons which, when pushed, charge the email sender $0.25 for what the RECIPIENT determines is unwelcome email.
In such a model, we would be free to send good email, and the fear of the likely costs of widely disseminating unwelcome email would do "the right thing".
The file extensions "innovation" is horrendously damaging to usability. Hiding them denies an experienced remote user from having a concrete way to describe files over a phone to a neophyte user who is having problems.
Have you ever tried to describe the Windows Explorer icon that is the most common symbol for HTML? WHy not just say "delete index.html?"
Moreover, since the applications registered to open a file may differ between the two machines in question, they cannot even be guaranteed a visual language for communication.
"Hide file extensions" should simply be removed outright.
Slashdot Mirror
They're expecting us to take 5 days away from gaming each year?
In a world that already has a Linux of web browsers
tone
The brave efforts of the past will never be repeated!
Then: "Torpedo Eight has been wiped out, sir!"
Now: "Torpedo Eight is stuck in a tree, sir!"
tone
Exactly. It's amazing how blind some people are to this distinction. tone
Check out patent #6633570
I invented that collaborative networking for Roger Wilco, the gamers voice radio applet of 6 years ago or so. It had dynamically optimizing broadcast trees amongst the nodes... helped us do the impossible while keeping 90% of your modem free for the game. The tech worked well in a fairly interactive environment and should work BETTER in a broadcaster/audience model as these guys are doing it.
I'd also explore the patents we cited in background.
I'd wanted to bend the old RW tech to the same purpose, but I'm not coder enough to have done it right. Pity I did not know of this work -- good luck!
tone
Burn them to a disk, re-import as MP3's. iTunes allows this.
Is it convenient? No.
Is it a civil tort? Not unless selling music on CD's is, because they also force you to import them to turn the tracks into MP3s.
Therefore, I believe that this whiner is simply upset by the apparent ease with which Apple COULD permit the process to occur but has opted against in order to seek a balance of interests that placates the rights holders enough that the entire enterprise can exist in the first place, albeit by denying users the flexibility they would find optimal if their interests were the only ones at play here.
tone
Is this not irrelevant? The point is knowing that you are running the code the Mozilla people have steered you toward. This colorful anecdote suggests if I were interested in spyware, I could confidently know who was infesting my computer if I used the supplier you mention.
Not having to hug our parents is an important advance, but we long since sent them to live (or not) on an ice floe. Are these robots arctic-safe?
tone
MacOS was ugly and poorly organized before OS X, what with extensions and many tack-on technologies on an OS built for yesterday. In 1984, it really could not do much (as I recall my original 128K Mac... though my use was soon marred by a bad motherboard as soon as the warranty expired), and it sure did it simply. Flexibility is what makes a computer useful to the clever person, but it always comes with a concomitant need for the users to understand how to express their desires to the machine. Making the computer just "do what I mean" is nice, and can take your surprisingly far, but it overlooks that "the right thing" is often ambiguous to those designers who are not constraining the users from "thinking different'. I use XP and OS X in even doses these days, and find that both platforms have come a long way in the past several years. But most of the things I wish were done better on the Mac are longstanding deficiencies.... not new ones. To put the short list together, I'd cite these usability blunders: 1. The flower or cloverleaf key. It has an Apple on it too. Why don't they LOSE the cloverleaf, so people can clearly and succinctly name it in verbal dialog without having to EXPLAIN which key they mean? It might also help to toss even the Apple and just call this what it is: the command key (of course, that word would have to be painted on it). 2. Similarly... the control key. The iconic label for indicating its use in shortcuts is some weird diagonalized hatch which does not appear on the key itself and is used nowhere else in the world. What rocket scientist thought up THAT one, and decided that this was the right choice for 'the rest of us'? That icon should be what is printed on the damn key, too: 'ctrl'. Failing that, at least go to ^ !! And, sadly, one must wonder who at Apple thinks the users can't understand a second mousebutton after all these years. It must be by extrapolation that they withold scroll wheels. Before you ask, YES I have a mouse I use that has these, but why is the basics of simple computing kept from the basic experience Apple presents to the user? tone
Bush was the guy caught holding the bag when a global consensus on WMD proved incorrect... to this date, inexplicably so.
I can understand people disagreeing with Bush and his actions, but when they start out with ad hominem labels such as "warmonger" and charges of lying that enjoy no support in fact, they lose the ability to argue the merits of their viscerally-held opinions.
People who capitalize "internet" are the same grandmas who call it "the world wide web" and "the information super-highway". And those who use 'net look like persnickety wankers right off.
This is no longer the case. I believe 555 is now an active exchange in many area codes.
Is this even a very "green" choice?
battery life (of 13 car batteries) of 1-4 years?
How nice is it to throw out a battery every 1-4 months?
I'd say a hybrid might be wiser, as it gets you away from the extension cord, gives you cargo/multipassenger, adds great range, and puts you into the market where the momentum resides (helpful when one must get it repaired)
1 inch = 25.4 mm
3 lousy digits to remember... how can anyone get it wrong?
tone
What could it be, other than "ever downward"?
A browsing session is so obviously a directed graph of pages and transitions between them. This counts as an innovation?!?
How about a spammers head on a stake? tone
The difference between thoughtfully-provided and carelessly hatched together whitelisting is night and day. My service provider offers whitelisting with these wrinkles:
1. Anyone I send email to is whitelisted for me, unless previously explicitly blacklisted
2. I can wildcard white- (or black-) list a domain
3. I can upload my addressbook to whitelist all current correspondents, to feather my nest
4. Anyone successfully answering a challenge response for any user of the service is by default trusted to email any user of the service. This keeps many people from having to answer challenges more than one time EVER.
5. IMAP email service... very nice for many people who make due with POP3 which is the mass market standard
6. works with existing email addresses and mailboxes (POP3 or IMAP) --- this means your old addresses still work and yet you do not personally shoulder a role in the infrastructure.
Whitelisting on this caliber makes content analysis seem ludicrously misguided as a basis for protection, but it is not perfect for ever -- its popularity will lead to its undermining (e.g.: emails seeming to come from eBay's alert bot would give a pass to anyone who had decided that this was traffic they wanted to receive).
I hope to soon complete my first year with not a single SPAM message. That's right... 365 days with no spam reaching me and 175 being bitbucketed at day. But I know that over the long haul an even more stringent form of protection based on stamps or similar will be needed.
Why else R2D2 but not C3PO?
Filter them out to your detriment. The only issue I have with Plaxo at the moment is that it does not support enough platforms.
I feel complaint about privacy that are cited above reflect a lack of time and attention spent to reading how Plaxo works. I am not affiliated with them, but I was developing a similar tool when I saw that they were far ahead and had ALL the right ideas either in-place or on their futures list.
My embrace of Plaxo is provisional at the moment.
Plaxo is not fully "there yet", but I felt when I looked at it that they were indeed working toward an ideal model of how contact information should be handled: each user maintains only their own personal contact record, and then determines who should have access to it. Considering that a person with N contacts would evolve to enjoy an N-fold savings of contact record maintenance while at the same time obtaining a sense of who knows how to reach him, I'd say this is a principle worthy of tolerance at the very least. I'd rather make my 400 contacts be responsible for maintaining their record in my contact database... who wouldn't? After all.. this is THEIR data, not mine.
As others point out, Plaxo is true that it is not a P2P tool, technically, and even the common points between it and the P2P systems we've all come to know (enabling information exchange between the "unwashed masses") are subtly different in a way that benefits those who run the client without hazarding their privacy one iota.
To wit: putting your personal contact information into Plaxo is not the same as posting it to all the world. Rather, it is only disseminated to those you choose to share it with -- and you are offered a valuable view of the people in your address book and email traffic who might be suitable. Indeed, I find even the drive-by benefit of letting Plaxo show you which people you NEED contacts for but do not yet have sufficient reason to use the tool.
The emails you refer to DO encourage the recipient to download Plaxo -- and this notice may not be helpful to those using a yet unsupported platform. But to filter out the messages is to lose track of your contacts when they apprise you of changes in their data, in which case you both lose.
AOL is merely correcting a poorly chosen default, and experience suggests that AOL users don't know how to change default settings -- that is why they are AOL users.
Oh, to have billions so I might buy up odious tech patents and then sue the bejeezus out of anyone who employs the abusive ideas they protect!
I didn't mean that you give the money to the button-presser: send it to a charity and/or use some to defray costs of the charging infrastructure itself.
In such a model, we would be free to send good email, and the fear of the likely costs of widely disseminating unwelcome email would do "the right thing".
Have you ever tried to describe the Windows Explorer icon that is the most common symbol for HTML? WHy not just say "delete index.html?"
Moreover, since the applications registered to open a file may differ between the two machines in question, they cannot even be guaranteed a visual language for communication.
"Hide file extensions" should simply be removed outright.