Actors are responsible for own words and actions. As an open source developer you effectively solicit help from the community and that should give you a pause on types of things that you are trying to promote. I feel uneasy with things which are used as vectors to spread an agenda, regardless of what brand of ideology is being promoted.
I just don't feel it's fair to the community to be engaged in irrelevant political controversies because some lead developer decided to air his controversial opinions through questionable means. As it stands right now, entire sourceforge is being punished because of actions of some idiot who decided to tie his political grievances into a notepad application that has fuckall to do with Tibet. You want a dialogue? Start a private blog or go harass Olympic torch-bearers. Keep that crap out of SF.
I think it's idiotic for these project leaders are attaching their pet causes to software with bunch of contributors. It should be a rule to keep one's politics separate from such projects.
To be honest, it's not the best idea to let a 100-year-old woman with a sword near a wheelchair-bound man who has all kinds of sensitive electronic devices around him that keep him alive.
I have a more elegant solution that all sides can agree on. We round up all the Republicans, wire them into an AI system like the Matrix and derive our energy from them to power our homes. In return they can continue to live in their fantasy land and enact whatever laws they want - prayer in schools, privatization of everything, and a constitution where the second amendment is bolded and underlined. Hell, we'll even resurrect Reagan and code him in as the permanent president.
"If You thought Duke Nukem 3D (1996) was good... then HOLD ON TO YOUR COCKS!"
This will be an amazing hit with people who went into coma a decade ago and the last thing they remember was playing Duke Nukem with their Voodoo 3 card.
I feel that the browser arrived at the right time, with the right idea and bunch of external factors created a perfect storm - most notable of which was Microsoft's abandonment of its browser innovation once it had reached critical mass.
If there is credit to be given to management I'd say it was the decision to keep it modular. Instead of including every known feature on the market they gave users the option of customizing the browser with plugins and kept the code uncluttered and very robust. An unintended consequence of that was user dependency. It took me about 2 weeks to quit Firefox and go to Safari 2. I kept going back because of all the cool extensions I got attached to over the years.
Having a propaganda arm to spread the word is helpful as well (see: spreadfirefox.com). Those guys were instrumental in making Firefox a success. Of course, none of this would have happened if it was just hype - the product behind it was pretty solid (not counting the horrendous memory management).
Kindle, Sony PRS-50x, and other e-Ink readers are niche products and will remain so because a) they're crippled from the outset with draconian DRM measures, and b) they try to reinvent the book rather than complement it.
Rather than list a lot of cons, I'll just say what measures these companies should take to revive these DOA products and take them into the mainstream.
1. Drop the price to $49. Make it a loss leader and sell content with extras and exclusives.
2. Get rid of DRM. It doesn't work. It's stupid. It's hostile. It insults your customers. It does not discourage piracy (those who want to steal something will find a way). Implement it in such a way that people feel unnecessary to pirate it.
3. Give away a free copy of ebook with most Hardcover purchases.
4. Get rid of the keyboard and strip all the unnecessary buttons from the device (Kindle). Rethink the jog dial and compact them into a single superbutton (PRS).
5. (Professionally) format all the public domain classics and make them available to users free of charge or for a nominal fee as a token of goodwill.
6. Get rid of the web browsing, mp3 capability, or any other extraneous feature that you won't find in an actual book. These things don't provide value, they diminish it. Think iPod. Simplicity sells.
7. Make it possible for developers to target and hack the device. Release an SDK and let nerds be nerds.
8. Lastly, make it such that it fits in a pocket. I'm sure there is a way. Make it fold like Nintendo DS.
I fully understand that some of these requests are not entirely up to device manufacturers. The publishing industry is just as boneheaded as RIAA when it comes to facts on the ground. However, Amazon and Sony do not help the situation by creating things which are severely flawed.
Lets face it, reading is not cool. It is the antithesis of cool. As a company you have to find a way to make it into something which creates a market of "cool" rather than taps into an existing one by "shifting the paradigm" (ugh). You can't realistically expect to provide an alternative to, at the very least, 500 year-old technology which isn't broken by any estimation.
...for professionals. It's absolutely true. Nevermind the the awful, glossy displays. For any kind of serious work you'd be better of getting a $30 CRT if you own a 20" iMac.
24" iMac displays are sourced from a different part and are much much superior, but the gloss ruins it again for any kind of real photography or print work.
Then again, if you're serious about the picture quality and pixel accuracy, what the hell are you doing with an obvious consumer machine?
There is not much to say, really. These people lack any form of human decency.
Attacking objectively bad groups like Scientology is somewhat justifiable, but to target people with disabilities is the lowest of the low. Fuck them.
The problem with flash isn't only the speed, but the way it would fit into the iPhone-style of browsing. With HTML pages you can pinch and zoom, do all kinds of weird things. My brain hurts when I try to imagine navigating a site that's built entirely with flash.
Flash killed WMV and Real for web video (for which I am thankful), but it's equally bad in other areas like holding up accessible site development.
As much as I want to believe how this "cloud computing" has supplanted the local one, it's not the case. Online services are in their infancy.
Okay, maybe email, but most of the stuff that deals with productivity is very much a client-side affair. Have you tried editing a picture in an ajax-y environment? It's a mess. The bandwidth isn't there and the browsers are retrofitted to perform functions no one really anticipated.
Audio/Video editing, image manipulation, or tasks with large files will keep the local computing relevant for a long time.
Contrary to popular belief, people don't love XP. It's just Vista was such a terrible upgrade that many came to appreciate their old OS.
Microsoft's problem was ambition. They looked at Apple innovations and kept moving the goalposts with every OSX release until they had a monster of an OS that beat the shit out of OSX... on paper. When it came time to implement it, Microsoft scrapped most good features (WinFS, etc) to make the release.
They let the perfect become the enemy of the good. As a web developer I am confronted with this with every project - should I upload a moderately buggy product and then make incremental changes or get stuck in first draft hell for the sake of having a perfect product from day one? The former is a more productive approach and results in a better overall output.
There was talk of some magical OS Microsoft was going to release back in 2003, named XP Reloaded. I don't know whether this was real or not, but they should have done this and refined the OS instead of sitting on their asses for half a decade.
Microsoft will always have office to generate refenue, for what it's worth...
I think you're on to something. Seeing how Office is the most reliable cash cow, Microsoft should probably spin off the division and release a standalone Office version as a consumer gadget - no OS required.
Throw in couple of faceplate options for the modding community and welcome the entire suite to the social.
It would be better if Sony jumped on this and gave him a PS3, signed by Bono, The Pope, and bunch of other A-List celebrities.
That's called a PR coup.
did you perhaps consider that such a big entity might utilize network attached storage?
Firms who have 10 or more Mac client workstations usually has a server which stores the data. Client maintenance isn't really that complicated.
Write a perl script which randomly swaps the filenames of the mp3s throughout the HDD, then for the second pass randomizes the ID3 tags.
Second option would be to install KDE XPde on the target box. Should be a riot watching someone trying to install a windows executable on Linux or searching for the Internet Explorer.
Intel ships BIOSes designed by Phoenix rival AMI with its desktop motherboards, an Intel spokesman said. Intel will discuss its own security solution, LaGrande, at its Intel Developer Forum in two weeks' time.
This is the silver lining I guess. When the market has different BIOS DRM schemes with different manufacturers, there is bound to be a major fuckup, since Intel (AMI) doesn't play fair and would surely try to re-invent the wheel by their own standards and on their own accord. As far as I'm aware, there is no world ISO to oversee standards in DRM implementation. Everyone is trying to be a pioneer.
(a conservative, not a neocon bush-head asshole...there's a BIG difference)
This is wrong. The Bush administration is not comprised of conservatives.
They are statist reactionaries. They want a very powerful state, a huge state in fact, a violent state and one that enforces obedience on the population. There is a kind of quasi-fascist spirit there, in the background, and they have been attempting to undermine civil rights in many ways. That's one of their long term objectives, and they have to do it quickly because in the US there is a strong tradition of protection of civil rights. But the kind of surveillance you are talking about of libraries and so on is a step towards it. They have also claimed the right to place a person - even an American citizen - in detention without charge, without access to lawyers and family, and to hold them there indefinitely, and that in fact has been upheld by the Courts, which is pretty shocking. But they have a new proposal, sometimes called Patriot II, a 80-page document inside the Justice department. Someone leaked it and it reached the press. There have been some outraged articles by law professors about it. This is only planned so far, but they would like to implement as secretly as they can. These plans would permit the Attorney General to remove citizenship from any individual whom the attorney general believes is acting in a way harmful to the US interests. I mean, this is going beyond anything contemplated in any democratic society. One law professor at New York University has written that this administration evidently will attempt to take away any civil rights that it can from citizens and I think its basically correct. That fits in with their reactionary statist policies which have a domestic aspect in the economy and social life but also in political life.
Slashdot Mirror
Actors are responsible for own words and actions. As an open source developer you effectively solicit help from the community and that should give you a pause on types of things that you are trying to promote. I feel uneasy with things which are used as vectors to spread an agenda, regardless of what brand of ideology is being promoted.
I just don't feel it's fair to the community to be engaged in irrelevant political controversies because some lead developer decided to air his controversial opinions through questionable means. As it stands right now, entire sourceforge is being punished because of actions of some idiot who decided to tie his political grievances into a notepad application that has fuckall to do with Tibet. You want a dialogue? Start a private blog or go harass Olympic torch-bearers. Keep that crap out of SF.
See here
I think it's idiotic for these project leaders are attaching their pet causes to software with bunch of contributors. It should be a rule to keep one's politics separate from such projects.
To be honest, it's not the best idea to let a 100-year-old woman with a sword near a wheelchair-bound man who has all kinds of sensitive electronic devices around him that keep him alive.
I have a more elegant solution that all sides can agree on. We round up all the Republicans, wire them into an AI system like the Matrix and derive our energy from them to power our homes. In return they can continue to live in their fantasy land and enact whatever laws they want - prayer in schools, privatization of everything, and a constitution where the second amendment is bolded and underlined. Hell, we'll even resurrect Reagan and code him in as the permanent president.
Some people pay good money to see bugs penalize female characters.
"12 YEARS in the Making"
"Most Anticipated Game of Last 3 Generations."
"If You thought Duke Nukem 3D (1996) was good... then HOLD ON TO YOUR COCKS!"
This will be an amazing hit with people who went into coma a decade ago and the last thing they remember was playing Duke Nukem with their Voodoo 3 card.
I feel that the browser arrived at the right time, with the right idea and bunch of external factors created a perfect storm - most notable of which was Microsoft's abandonment of its browser innovation once it had reached critical mass. If there is credit to be given to management I'd say it was the decision to keep it modular. Instead of including every known feature on the market they gave users the option of customizing the browser with plugins and kept the code uncluttered and very robust. An unintended consequence of that was user dependency. It took me about 2 weeks to quit Firefox and go to Safari 2. I kept going back because of all the cool extensions I got attached to over the years. Having a propaganda arm to spread the word is helpful as well (see: spreadfirefox.com). Those guys were instrumental in making Firefox a success. Of course, none of this would have happened if it was just hype - the product behind it was pretty solid (not counting the horrendous memory management).
Great minds misapprehend alike. I did too and immediately followed the link out of my RSS reader to investigate it.
- 1. Drop the price to $49. Make it a loss leader and sell content with extras and exclusives.
- 2. Get rid of DRM. It doesn't work. It's stupid. It's hostile. It insults your customers. It does not discourage piracy (those who want to steal something will find a way). Implement it in such a way that people feel unnecessary to pirate it.
- 3. Give away a free copy of ebook with most Hardcover purchases.
- 4. Get rid of the keyboard and strip all the unnecessary buttons from the device (Kindle). Rethink the jog dial and compact them into a single superbutton (PRS).
- 5. (Professionally) format all the public domain classics and make them available to users free of charge or for a nominal fee as a token of goodwill.
- 6. Get rid of the web browsing, mp3 capability, or any other extraneous feature that you won't find in an actual book. These things don't provide value, they diminish it. Think iPod. Simplicity sells.
- 7. Make it possible for developers to target and hack the device. Release an SDK and let nerds be nerds.
- 8. Lastly, make it such that it fits in a pocket. I'm sure there is a way. Make it fold like Nintendo DS.
I fully understand that some of these requests are not entirely up to device manufacturers. The publishing industry is just as boneheaded as RIAA when it comes to facts on the ground. However, Amazon and Sony do not help the situation by creating things which are severely flawed.Lets face it, reading is not cool. It is the antithesis of cool. As a company you have to find a way to make it into something which creates a market of "cool" rather than taps into an existing one by "shifting the paradigm" (ugh). You can't realistically expect to provide an alternative to, at the very least, 500 year-old technology which isn't broken by any estimation.
...for professionals. It's absolutely true. Nevermind the the awful, glossy displays. For any kind of serious work you'd be better of getting a $30 CRT if you own a 20" iMac.
24" iMac displays are sourced from a different part and are much much superior, but the gloss ruins it again for any kind of real photography or print work.
Then again, if you're serious about the picture quality and pixel accuracy, what the hell are you doing with an obvious consumer machine?
There is not much to say, really. These people lack any form of human decency. Attacking objectively bad groups like Scientology is somewhat justifiable, but to target people with disabilities is the lowest of the low. Fuck them.
I can spin too:
Supply Outstrips Demand for Silverlight
Undownloaded Installers Prove Problematic for Redmond Giant
The problem with flash isn't only the speed, but the way it would fit into the iPhone-style of browsing. With HTML pages you can pinch and zoom, do all kinds of weird things. My brain hurts when I try to imagine navigating a site that's built entirely with flash. Flash killed WMV and Real for web video (for which I am thankful), but it's equally bad in other areas like holding up accessible site development.
As much as I want to believe how this "cloud computing" has supplanted the local one, it's not the case. Online services are in their infancy.
Okay, maybe email, but most of the stuff that deals with productivity is very much a client-side affair. Have you tried editing a picture in an ajax-y environment? It's a mess. The bandwidth isn't there and the browsers are retrofitted to perform functions no one really anticipated.
Audio/Video editing, image manipulation, or tasks with large files will keep the local computing relevant for a long time.
Contrary to popular belief, people don't love XP. It's just Vista was such a terrible upgrade that many came to appreciate their old OS.
Microsoft's problem was ambition. They looked at Apple innovations and kept moving the goalposts with every OSX release until they had a monster of an OS that beat the shit out of OSX... on paper. When it came time to implement it, Microsoft scrapped most good features (WinFS, etc) to make the release.
They let the perfect become the enemy of the good. As a web developer I am confronted with this with every project - should I upload a moderately buggy product and then make incremental changes or get stuck in first draft hell for the sake of having a perfect product from day one? The former is a more productive approach and results in a better overall output.
There was talk of some magical OS Microsoft was going to release back in 2003, named XP Reloaded. I don't know whether this was real or not, but they should have done this and refined the OS instead of sitting on their asses for half a decade.
It would be better if Sony jumped on this and gave him a PS3, signed by Bono, The Pope, and bunch of other A-List celebrities. That's called a PR coup.
did you perhaps consider that such a big entity might utilize network attached storage? Firms who have 10 or more Mac client workstations usually has a server which stores the data. Client maintenance isn't really that complicated.
Write a perl script which randomly swaps the filenames of the mp3s throughout the HDD, then for the second pass randomizes the ID3 tags.
Second option would be to install KDE XPde on the target box. Should be a riot watching someone trying to install a windows executable on Linux or searching for the Internet Explorer.
This is why I alays wash Linux CD images prior to installing.
to make a Dell Jukebox? You have to wonder sometime
I think they should get students' attention with nicely illustrated comics
...and Macs are like a Trojan Horse to Microsoft. Once you go Mac, you never go back.
Funny how it all works.
This is wrong. The Bush administration is not comprised of conservatives.
They are statist reactionaries. They want a very powerful state, a huge state in fact, a violent state and one that enforces obedience on the population. There is a kind of quasi-fascist spirit there, in the background, and they have been attempting to undermine civil rights in many ways. That's one of their long term objectives, and they have to do it quickly because in the US there is a strong tradition of protection of civil rights. But the kind of surveillance you are talking about of libraries and so on is a step towards it. They have also claimed the right to place a person - even an American citizen - in detention without charge, without access to lawyers and family, and to hold them there indefinitely, and that in fact has been upheld by the Courts, which is pretty shocking. But they have a new proposal, sometimes called Patriot II, a 80-page document inside the Justice department. Someone leaked it and it reached the press. There have been some outraged articles by law professors about it. This is only planned so far, but they would like to implement as secretly as they can. These plans would permit the Attorney General to remove citizenship from any individual whom the attorney general believes is acting in a way harmful to the US interests. I mean, this is going beyond anything contemplated in any democratic society. One law professor at New York University has written that this administration evidently will attempt to take away any civil rights that it can from citizens and I think its basically correct. That fits in with their reactionary statist policies which have a domestic aspect in the economy and social life but also in political life.