What scares the industry most is that these days, any jackass in his home could make a movie of comparable quality to most of the non-SFX Hollywood films And there are millions of people out there who can act, not just a few dozen in Hollyweird, so there's no shortage of available talent. In effect, this means that commercial movies are too expensive by about a factor of a thousand.
The geek will rent a lamp and reflector and think that he has mastered theatrical lighting.
How to Train Your Dragon stands out from the animated pack because it makes an effort to be simple. The film was lit with motivated light sources --- the sun, a candle, even the glowing red flames of a dragon's fiery exhalation --- which meant that in low-light situations, darkness was a tool in its own right.
In all that he does --- whether it's live-action, animation, or 3-D ---- Richard Deakins has come to believe that less is more. He was reminded of this mantra not too long ago while giving a lighting seminar for animation cinematographers at Pixar:
"I had a bit of a laugh, actually. I was on a stage with all the things you'd think would be traditional to lighting. So, I lit the set in a very traditional way: with a hard light, lots of fill light, a back light, a front light, and a key light. I did this for about 20 minutes, and then I said, I can't keep this up anymore because I don't like lighting like this, at all."
He panned the camera around and saw an electrician standing by a work light. "Now that I really like," he said. "It's just the bare bulb in front of the angle of the face. To me, that's really good lighting. So I took everything down that I had been doing and I tried to do what I normally do."
It is the same with any the hundreds of other arts and crafts that go into the production of a film.
The jackass does not understand story or script. He doesn't know how to recruit and motivate talent, amateur or professional. He won't know why he needs to build sets and props when green screen, CGI and motion capture give him a quick-and-dirty solution....
The Coens produced their remake of True Grit on a bare-bones budget of $38 million. But essential to the success of the film was the casting of Mattie Ross:
The standout performance has to be newcomer Hailee Steinfeld, who beat out 15,000 other girls for the part. Open casting calls often provide disappointing results, as nonprofessional actors tend to be just that --- not professional. 14-year-old Steinfeld proves she is a talent to watch, though --- she totally commands the screen with her strong-willed, stubborn character, and manages to hold her own against Bridges, Damon and Josh Brolin, who makes a brief but memorable appearance later in the film. It is a fantastic, powerful performance that is an absolute joy to watch.
Barring a sea change in Congress' perception of copyright, we'll get another Mickey Mouse Protection Act by 2051. Remember, the Supreme Court already gave Congress permission to continue extending copyright indefinitely.
This is a policy decision.
Something for the Congress to decide --- or something for the Senate to ratify if the rules are framed by a treaty.
The political equation is quite simple, really:
All you have to do is win elections in the big electoral states like California, New York, Florida and so on.
The production centers. The financial centers.
The expiration of the copyright on Steamboat Willie doesn't give you access to primary sources. It doesn't give you access to state-of-the-art restorations. It doesn't fund your restoration project.
It doesn't give you the trademarked character designs.
What it does give you is the right to produce derivatives based on eight minures of silent era sight gags with a synchronized sound track and a thin narrative thread.
Of course Edison would have loved modern lightbulbs -- what's not too like? Cleaner more aesthetically pleasing light drawing lower power. Of course they last longer, and don't break as easy so people buy less, but hey -- can't have everything right?
The Centennial Fair of 1876 was all about steam. Every World's Fair that came after would be defined by its use of electricity --- for lighting, power, communication and theatrical effects.
The significance of the incandescent lamp has little to do with the technology of the light bulb. It has everything to do with urban and rural electrification.
"The City That Never Sleeps."
People are up and about at all hours. Demanding to be fed, transported, entertained. The market for electrical lighting, motors and appliances and devices of every sort grows exponentially.
Edison was the first to see and exploit the market for Christmas tree lights.
"The War of The Currents" doesn't amount to much until you need to generate a lot of off-site power and ship it some considerable distance. Fundamentally, it doesn't matter until you need to draw down enough power from Niagara Falls to light up Buffalo.
But the storms that raged between Edison and Tesla are forgotten. What is remembered is the glow of that first Edison lamp,
...he just bought the patent from two Toronto inventors. (wikipedia.org)
Read on:
Thomas Edison obtained an exclusive license to the Canadian patent. Thomas Edison developed his own design of incandescent lamp with a high resistance thin filament of carbon in a high vacuum contained in a tightly sealed glass bulb which had a sufficiently long service life to be commercially practical.
Historians Robert Friedel and Paul Israel list 22 inventors of incandescent lamps prior to Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison. They conclude that Edison's version was able to outstrip the others because of a combination of three factors: an effective incandescent material, a higher vacuum than others were able to achieve and a high resistance that made power distribution from a centralized source economically viable.
Another historian, Thomas Hughes, has attributed Edison's success to the fact that he developed an entire, integrated system of electric lighting.
The lamp was a small component in his system of electric lighting, and no more critical to its effective functioning than the Edison Jumbo generator, the Edison main and feeder, and the parallel-distribution system. Other inventors with generators and incandescent lamps, and with comparable ingenuity and excellence, have long been forgotten because their creators did not preside over their introduction in a system of lighting.
Perhaps this will give you a small taste of Edison's achievement:
Much is said about the subdivision of the electric light by certain gentlemen, who hope to distribute it throughout our houses from one central [source] and furnish it cheaply and abundantly in our cities. I am one of those who do not believe in the impossible, but I say that, with our present knowledge, this problem is unsolvable. Sir William Armstrong can only keep thirty-seven lamps going ; Lane- Fox could only show twelve lights ; Professor Adams could only produce from the most powerful dynamo-electric machine, by calculation, one hundred and forty lamps. Where is the subdivision ?
The system that emerged from Edison's lab included practical designs for generators, mainline distribution systems, home wiring standards, switches, sockets, fuses, training programs for linesmen and electricians.
Essentially everything you would need for wiring a city without burning it to the ground or electrocuting half the population.
I mean the studios expect scripts to be written a certain way to even be considered.
If you mean that studios expect a screenplay to be written and submitted in a standard format, than, yeah.
The format is structured in a way that one page usually equates to one minute of screen time. In a "shooting script", each scene is numbered, and technical direction may be given. In a "spec" or a "draft" in various stages of development, the scenes are not numbered, and technical direction is at a minimum. The standard font for a screenplay is 12 point, 10 pitch Courier.
The standard format instantly eposes the length of your film or video --- and most of its production costs, casting and technical problems.
How about we work on the adoption of the metric system first. It makes more sense and means more in the long run.
In a federal republic of 50 states, a population of 312 million and a territory of 3.79 million square miles there are no compelling reasons to invest the enormous political captial required to force the abandonment of customary measures where they remain familiar, convenient and useful.
Funny that for decades we managed without 40inchers everywhere.
The resolution of a North American color TV set with RF input only was at best maybe 330 lines. The 46 inch rear projection set of 1992 weighed 300 lbs and cost $2000.
Only a geek would propose a boycott of a mass market consumer product the day after Christmas.
_____
To make a boycott of cabbage and potatoes succeed, you have to reach out to the buyers of cabbage and potatoes.
More than that, you have to be one of them.
Remember that you are trying to persuade these people that the boycott is more important to them than putting a meal on the table at a price they can afford.
If it is all about you and your causes, you will fail.
because it's a fucking phone. should i put BASIC in my car stereo too? how about my toaster oven! i cobbled together an assembler for my clock radio and i'm never lookin' back.
You wanted an appliance. You have an appliance.
The single purpose device whose internals are inaccssible to the user.
But don't come back here to complain when every high-tech consumer product is built on the same model. The smartphone. The touch tablet. The set-top box and video game console.
Want Internet radio or video in your car?
Download the app from the walled garden of your Ford app store.
No longer are they just an obscure cult most people have barely heard of - after the Anonymous-ran campaign on social media, everyone knows to avoid them.
When a bank is in trouble what usually happens is that its assets and customers are absorbed by a larger and much stronger bank.
You have fewer choices. Local branches are more distant. That is a small problem for the rich --- and a world of hurt for the poor. All benefit programs are moving to direct deposit. You must have a bank account.
No matter how hard it may be to maintain the minimal balance required and and avoid being mulcted by transaction fees and other charges,
need the rich guys to buy it first, so the rest of us can pick them up when they get mass market
Henry Ford did it the other way around.
What he saw were limited production run cars built for the luxury market and almost useless beyond the city limits because the infrastructure wasn't there to support them.
What he saw was that mass market sales would generate enormous funds for R&D.
The Ford could cruise comfortably at 35-45 miles an hour over the worst roads imaginable at a cost of a penny a mile. Portal to portal service for a family of four and their dog and cat for twenty percent of the price of a single streetcar ticket.
"Modding" the Ford body became something of a national obsession.
Pick-uo truck, delivery van, lunch wagon, camper, you name it. "You could afford a Ford."
And you do realize that they advertised it as a media box on which you could install an "OtherOS", right?
If you asked that question of PS3 FAT owners, how many could truthfully answer yes?
From the very beginning of this hooh-rah I have yet to see posted a convincing estimate of the number of OtherOS users in the PS3's consumer market space.
Companies don't get to arbitrarily make laws. They could add a provision that you'll give them your first born son, but I'm pretty sure that wouldn't stand if challenged in court.
There are contractual provisions that a court will simply refuse to enforce:
Contracts encouraging immorality such as selling a daughter for marriage, seeking to interfere with the administration of justice or injurious to the state, transacting in goods known to be stolen, to commit torts or crimes or to promote sedition or mutiny or, in time of war, enemy attacks have all been held to be unenforceable as against public policy, or seeking to enforce a contract obtained by fraud.
Absent evidence to the contrary, a court will treat you as a responsible adult who has learned to live with the choices he makes. Not every clause of the contract you sign with Sony has to be to your liking. That doesn't make it unconscionable as a matter of law.
As a non-profit organization, don't these things eventually have to show up in Mozilla's annual filings?
They do.
If only in an auditor's alert that about 97% of Mozilla's revenues come from a single search-engine source and a contract that is coming up for renewal.
I would be happier if Moz was far less dependent on the add-click.
What's so simple about having to reboot your computer every five minutes?
I don't remember having to reboot Windows every five minutes when all I had to work was a mid-nineties P75 Packard Bell.
Not that this has anything to do with the Windows UI, which is what I thought we wew talking about here.
You are talking about older versions of Windows, although you still need to reboot whenever you install or update anything whatever, unlike Linux.
I have 400+ programs installed under Win 7. The reboot for patches and updates average about once a month --- and as a home user I do this when it is convenient and otherwise don't give it any thought.
What's simple about Windows Registry? IMO they should have simply kept.ini files.
I doubt I have spent two hours mucking about with Registry and configuration files in the last fifteen years. Since there hasn't been a live geek spotted within rifle shot of these suburban wilds in the last five years, that is probably just as well.
KDE is more than user friendly, it's user obedient. It does things the way you want it to, Windows insists on you doing it the Windows way.
This works for me.
It makes it much easier to explain a problem and get it fixed when I do need help.
But the best part is that once you fix a bug in an automated system, it's fixed forever, whereas a fresh new crop of novices hits the roads/skies every day.
Is the bug fix forever --- or simply until the next version of the hardware and software?
The problem I have with the driverless car is "Fire and Forget."
The temptation for the layman will be to let the thing loose without really understanding the limits of the technology.
In wind, and snow and ice, for example, a pedestrian or cyclist will find it difficult to keep his balance, he may take an unexpected fall, and since the sidewalks and bike paths haven't been cleared,he may be forced much farther out into road than he is comfortable with, and so bundled up he can't see or hear very well.
An experienced driver will see the possibilities.
The question is whether the robotic vehicle's sensors and AI will be anywhere near as alert and responsive.
The linux netbooks were seen by users as a new device, similar to how the ipad is perceived, while windows netbooks were seen as being inferior versions of regular laptops.
The problem with this theory is that the Linux netbook Titanic went straight to the bottom when it struck the XP iceburg,
Just because most recent Ubuntus foist this on users (and most feedback I've seen has been negative) - is there any data to show that Unity has even 10% of Linux desktops?
I would not be in the least surprised if the majority of Ubuntu users never change the default UI
or do any significant customization whatever.
The problem with "feedback" to tech sites like Slashdot is that the ordinary user is unrepresented and strong negative opinions draw an instant response.
Buy them something THEY want or would appreciate. The goal should be to please them, not your own inner child.
That is the first rule.
The second rule is that "you get what you pay for."
LEGO Mindstorms --- for example --- isn't cheap as projects get more ambitious, but it is well designed, highly regarded and has a strong user community.
As observed here, we could realistically defeat Lamar Smith in 2012 because his district picks up much of Austin, including the University of Texas.
[Lamar Smith's] district includes most of the wealthier sections of San Antonio and Austin, as well as nearly all of the Texas Hill Country. He is a member of the Republican Party.
Smith has been in Congress for 24 years and is the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
He holds a very strong hand.
The collegiate vote is significant only if students think of Austin as their home district and the students vote en bloc --- assumming they vote at all.
However, to MS's defense, WordPerfect never really go the GUI until MS was long out of the gate. However, MS used an entire series of underhanded tricks at the time to improve their products by using secret unpublished APIs that no one else knew about.
WordPerfect was a DOS era character based word processor that was ported to every OS and platform known to man, each with its own fiefdom within the company.
It struggled with the transition to a GUI world on both Windows and the Mac.
It struggled internally with the success of both Windows and the Mac --- at one point it was supporting 30 flavors of UNIX alone.
It struggled with the transition from a stand-alone word processor to the integrated office suite.
The "secret unpublished API" probably did less damage to WP than the exposed API for printing. The customized print drivers that helped carry WordPerfect to dominance in the eighties were no longer needed.
Or someone who's about to mysteriously come into a lot of money.
"Bribery!" is the geek's shout-out to any legal decision he doesn't like.
If it is not the judge who was bribed, it was the jury. If it was not the judge or the jury, it was the lawyers. If it was not the lawyers. it was the lawmakers.
Not that the juror can't shout back that "I was your hero --- the nullifier --- with the strength and will to hold out against a verdict I thought was morally wrong! "
"Until it came time to make a decision, and my decision went against you."
"Well, to hell with that, it doesn't make me a criminal."
You don't need "tools" or "toys" - when I was 5, I tested what this "it's HOT! you'll BURN YOURSELF!" stuff was all about with my index finger on an iron. Lost the fingerprint on the tip of that finger - and yet, I lived.
Your kid will be asking what an "iron" was --- because his clothes and bedding are permanent press.
The fundamental job of the engineer is to make tech safe and practical enough for everyday use. . Nolstagia for the difficult and the dangerous is not really his thing.
Slashdot Mirror
What scares the industry most is that these days, any jackass in his home could make a movie of comparable quality to most of the non-SFX Hollywood films
And there are millions of people out there who can act, not just a few dozen in Hollyweird, so there's no shortage of available talent.
In effect, this means that commercial movies are too expensive by about a factor of a thousand.
The geek will rent a lamp and reflector and think that he has mastered theatrical lighting.
How to Train Your Dragon stands out from the animated pack because it makes an effort to be simple. The film was lit with motivated light sources --- the sun, a candle, even the glowing red flames of a dragon's fiery exhalation --- which meant that in low-light situations, darkness was a tool in its own right.
In all that he does --- whether it's live-action, animation, or 3-D ---- Richard Deakins has come to believe that less is more. He was reminded of this mantra not too long ago while giving a lighting seminar for animation cinematographers at Pixar:
"I had a bit of a laugh, actually. I was on a stage with all the things you'd think would be traditional to lighting. So, I lit the set in a very traditional way: with a hard light, lots of fill light, a back light, a front light, and a key light. I did this for about 20 minutes, and then I said, I can't keep this up anymore because I don't like lighting like this, at all."
He panned the camera around and saw an electrician standing by a work light. "Now that I really like," he said. "It's just the bare bulb in front of the angle of the face. To me, that's really good lighting. So I took everything down that I had been doing and I tried to do what I normally do."
How To Light Your Dragon
It is the same with any the hundreds of other arts and crafts that go into the production of a film.
The jackass does not understand story or script. He doesn't know how to recruit and motivate talent, amateur or professional. He won't know why he needs to build sets and props when green screen, CGI and motion capture give him a quick-and-dirty solution....
The Coens produced their remake of True Grit on a bare-bones budget of $38 million. But essential to the success of the film was the casting of Mattie Ross:
The standout performance has to be newcomer Hailee Steinfeld, who beat out 15,000 other girls for the part. Open casting calls often provide disappointing results, as nonprofessional actors tend to be just that --- not professional. 14-year-old Steinfeld proves she is a talent to watch, though --- she totally commands the screen with her strong-willed, stubborn character, and manages to hold her own against Bridges, Damon and Josh Brolin, who makes a brief but memorable appearance later in the film. It is a fantastic, powerful performance that is an absolute joy to watch.
True Grit (2010) (In User Reviews)
Barring a sea change in Congress' perception of copyright, we'll get another Mickey Mouse Protection Act by 2051. Remember, the Supreme Court already gave Congress permission to continue extending copyright indefinitely.
This is a policy decision.
Something for the Congress to decide --- or something for the Senate to ratify if the rules are framed by a treaty.
The political equation is quite simple, really:
All you have to do is win elections in the big electoral states like California, New York, Florida and so on.
The production centers. The financial centers.
The expiration of the copyright on Steamboat Willie doesn't give you access to primary sources. It doesn't give you access to state-of-the-art restorations. It doesn't fund your restoration project.
It doesn't give you the trademarked character designs.
What it does give you is the right to produce derivatives based on eight minures of silent era sight gags with a synchronized sound track and a thin narrative thread.
Of course Edison would have loved modern lightbulbs -- what's not too like? Cleaner more aesthetically pleasing light drawing lower power. Of course they last longer, and don't break as easy so people buy less, but hey -- can't have everything right?
The Centennial Fair of 1876 was all about steam. Every World's Fair that came after would be defined by its use of electricity --- for lighting, power, communication and theatrical effects.
The significance of the incandescent lamp has little to do with the technology of the light bulb. It has everything to do with urban and rural electrification.
"The City That Never Sleeps."
People are up and about at all hours. Demanding to be fed, transported, entertained. The market for electrical lighting, motors and appliances and devices of every sort grows exponentially.
Edison was the first to see and exploit the market for Christmas tree lights.
"The War of The Currents" doesn't amount to much until you need to generate a lot of off-site power and ship it some considerable distance. Fundamentally, it doesn't matter until you need to draw down enough power from Niagara Falls to light up Buffalo.
But the storms that raged between Edison and Tesla are forgotten. What is remembered is the glow of that first Edison lamp,
...he just bought the patent from two Toronto inventors. (wikipedia.org)
Read on:
Thomas Edison obtained an exclusive license to the Canadian patent. Thomas Edison developed his own design of incandescent lamp with a high resistance thin filament of carbon in a high vacuum contained in a tightly sealed glass bulb which had a sufficiently long service life to be commercially practical.
Historians Robert Friedel and Paul Israel list 22 inventors of incandescent lamps prior to Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison. They conclude that Edison's version was able to outstrip the others because of a combination of three factors: an effective incandescent material, a higher vacuum than others were able to achieve and a high resistance that made power distribution from a centralized source economically viable.
Another historian, Thomas Hughes, has attributed Edison's success to the fact that he developed an entire, integrated system of electric lighting.
The lamp was a small component in his system of electric lighting, and no more critical to its effective functioning than the Edison Jumbo generator, the Edison main and feeder, and the parallel-distribution system. Other inventors with generators and incandescent lamps, and with comparable ingenuity and excellence, have long been forgotten because their creators did not preside over their introduction in a system of lighting.
Incandescent light bulb
Perhaps this will give you a small taste of Edison's achievement:
Much is said about the subdivision of the electric light by certain gentlemen, who hope to distribute it throughout our houses from one central [source] and furnish it cheaply and abundantly in our cities. I am one of those who do not believe in the impossible, but I say that, with our present knowledge, this problem is unsolvable. Sir William Armstrong can only keep thirty-seven lamps going ; Lane- Fox could only show twelve lights ; Professor Adams could only produce from the most powerful dynamo-electric machine, by calculation, one hundred and forty lamps. Where is the subdivision ?
Popular Science Monthly/Volume 19/July 1881/Recent Advances in Electric Lighting
The system that emerged from Edison's lab included practical designs for generators, mainline distribution systems, home wiring standards, switches, sockets, fuses, training programs for linesmen and electricians.
Essentially everything you would need for wiring a city without burning it to the ground or electrocuting half the population.
I mean the studios expect scripts to be written a certain way to even be considered.
If you mean that studios expect a screenplay to be written and submitted in a standard format, than, yeah.
The format is structured in a way that one page usually equates to one minute of screen time. In a "shooting script", each scene is numbered, and technical direction may be given. In a "spec" or a "draft" in various stages of development, the scenes are not numbered, and technical direction is at a minimum. The standard font for a screenplay is 12 point, 10 pitch Courier.
The standard format instantly eposes the length of your film or video --- and most of its production costs, casting and technical problems.
How about we work on the adoption of the metric system first. It makes more sense and means more in the long run.
In a federal republic of 50 states, a population of 312 million and a territory of 3.79 million square miles there are no compelling reasons to invest the enormous political captial required to force the abandonment of customary measures where they remain familiar, convenient and useful.
Funny that for decades we managed without 40inchers everywhere.
The resolution of a North American color TV set with RF input only was at best maybe 330 lines. The 46 inch rear projection set of 1992 weighed 300 lbs and cost $2000.
Only a geek would propose a boycott of a mass market consumer product the day after Christmas.
_____
To make a boycott of cabbage and potatoes succeed, you have to reach out to the buyers of cabbage and potatoes.
More than that, you have to be one of them.
Remember that you are trying to persuade these people that the boycott is more important to them than putting a meal on the table at a price they can afford.
If it is all about you and your causes, you will fail.
because it's a fucking phone. should i put BASIC in my car stereo too? how about my toaster oven! i cobbled together an assembler for my clock radio and i'm never lookin' back.
You wanted an appliance. You have an appliance.
The single purpose device whose internals are inaccssible to the user.
But don't come back here to complain when every high-tech consumer product is built on the same model. The smartphone. The touch tablet. The set-top box and video game console.
Want Internet radio or video in your car?
Download the app from the walled garden of your Ford app store.
No longer are they just an obscure cult most people have barely heard of - after the Anonymous-ran campaign on social media, everyone knows to avoid them.
Bull.
Scientology Exposed [May 6, 1991]. [cover art]
The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power [full text and illustration]
The Apostate: Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology [Feb 14, 2001]
Anonymous is the a geek's carnival Wheel of Fortune. Each week it gets another spin. More often if the crowd gets bored.
We don't need our deposits protected.
The protection is not unlimited.
This matters in your retirement and estate planning. Deposit Insurance Summary
Just let the banks fail already.
When a bank is in trouble what usually happens is that its assets and customers are absorbed by a larger and much stronger bank.
You have fewer choices. Local branches are more distant. That is a small problem for the rich --- and a world of hurt for the poor. All benefit programs are moving to direct deposit. You must have a bank account.
No matter how hard it may be to maintain the minimal balance required and and avoid being mulcted by transaction fees and other charges,
need the rich guys to buy it first, so the rest of us can pick them up when they get mass market
Henry Ford did it the other way around.
What he saw were limited production run cars built for the luxury market and almost useless beyond the city limits because the infrastructure wasn't there to support them.
What he saw was that mass market sales would generate enormous funds for R&D.
The Ford could cruise comfortably at 35-45 miles an hour over the worst roads imaginable at a cost of a penny a mile. Portal to portal service for a family of four and their dog and cat for twenty percent of the price of a single streetcar ticket.
"Modding" the Ford body became something of a national obsession.
Pick-uo truck, delivery van, lunch wagon, camper, you name it. "You could afford a Ford."
And you do realize that they advertised it as a media box on which you could install an "OtherOS", right?
If you asked that question of PS3 FAT owners, how many could truthfully answer yes?
From the very beginning of this hooh-rah I have yet to see posted a convincing estimate of the number of OtherOS users in the PS3's consumer market space.
Companies don't get to arbitrarily make laws. They could add a provision that you'll give them your first born son, but I'm pretty sure that wouldn't stand if challenged in court.
There are contractual provisions that a court will simply refuse to enforce:
Contracts encouraging immorality such as selling a daughter for marriage, seeking to interfere with the administration of justice or injurious to the state, transacting in goods known to be stolen, to commit torts or crimes or to promote sedition or mutiny or, in time of war, enemy attacks have all been held to be unenforceable as against public policy, or seeking to enforce a contract obtained by fraud.
Public Policy
But you have to be realistic.
Freedom of Contract is also public policy.
Absent evidence to the contrary, a court will treat you as a responsible adult who has learned to live with the choices he makes. Not every clause of the contract you sign with Sony has to be to your liking. That doesn't make it unconscionable as a matter of law.
As a non-profit organization, don't these things eventually have to show up in Mozilla's annual filings?
They do.
If only in an auditor's alert that about 97% of Mozilla's revenues come from a single search-engine source and a contract that is coming up for renewal.
I would be happier if Moz was far less dependent on the add-click.
What's so simple about having to reboot your computer every five minutes?
I don't remember having to reboot Windows every five minutes when all I had to work was a mid-nineties P75 Packard Bell.
Not that this has anything to do with the Windows UI, which is what I thought we wew talking about here.
You are talking about older versions of Windows, although you still need to reboot whenever you install or update anything whatever, unlike Linux.
I have 400+ programs installed under Win 7. The reboot for patches and updates average about once a month --- and as a home user I do this when it is convenient and otherwise don't give it any thought.
What's simple about Windows Registry? IMO they should have simply kept .ini files.
I doubt I have spent two hours mucking about with Registry and configuration files in the last fifteen years. Since there hasn't been a live geek spotted within rifle shot of these suburban wilds in the last five years, that is probably just as well.
KDE is more than user friendly, it's user obedient. It does things the way you want it to, Windows insists on you doing it the Windows way.
This works for me.
It makes it much easier to explain a problem and get it fixed when I do need help.
It's also bonus points when the thing that's changed was only something Baby Boomers really experienced
The geek has no sense of time
and, arguably, no social instincts whatever.
But there are things in this world best experienced off-line.
We have scrapbooks and photographs of family reunions and other gatherings that reach back deep into the nineteeth century
I am quite certain that with a bit of effort we could find some many earlier examples.
But the best part is that once you fix a bug in an automated system, it's fixed forever, whereas a fresh new crop of novices hits the roads/skies every day.
Is the bug fix forever --- or simply until the next version of the hardware and software?
The problem I have with the driverless car is "Fire and Forget."
The temptation for the layman will be to let the thing loose without really understanding the limits of the technology.
In wind, and snow and ice, for example, a pedestrian or cyclist will find it difficult to keep his balance, he may take an unexpected fall, and since the sidewalks and bike paths haven't been cleared,he may be forced much farther out into road than he is comfortable with, and so bundled up he can't see or hear very well.
An experienced driver will see the possibilities.
The question is whether the robotic vehicle's sensors and AI will be anywhere near as alert and responsive.
The linux netbooks were seen by users as a new device, similar to how the ipad is perceived, while windows netbooks were seen as being inferior versions of regular laptops.
The problem with this theory is that the Linux netbook Titanic went straight to the bottom when it struck the XP iceburg,
Just because most recent Ubuntus foist this on users (and most feedback I've seen has been negative) - is there any data to show that Unity has even 10% of Linux desktops?
I would not be in the least surprised if the majority of Ubuntu users never change the default UI
or do any significant customization whatever.
The problem with "feedback" to tech sites like Slashdot is that the ordinary user is unrepresented and strong negative opinions draw an instant response.
Buy them something THEY want or would appreciate. The goal should be to please them, not your own inner child.
That is the first rule.
The second rule is that "you get what you pay for."
LEGO Mindstorms --- for example --- isn't cheap as projects get more ambitious, but it is well designed, highly regarded and has a strong user community.
As observed here, we could realistically defeat Lamar Smith in 2012 because his district picks up much of Austin, including the University of Texas.
[Lamar Smith's] district includes most of the wealthier sections of San Antonio and Austin, as well as nearly all of the Texas Hill Country. He is a member of the Republican Party.
Lamar S. Smith
Smith has been in Congress for 24 years and is the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
He holds a very strong hand.
The collegiate vote is significant only if students think of Austin as their home district and the students vote en bloc --- assumming they vote at all.
However, to MS's defense, WordPerfect never really go the GUI until MS was long out of the gate. However, MS used an entire series of underhanded tricks at the time to improve their products by using secret unpublished APIs that no one else knew about.
WordPerfect was a DOS era character based word processor that was ported to every OS and platform known to man, each with its own fiefdom within the company.
It struggled with the transition to a GUI world on both Windows and the Mac.
It struggled internally with the success of both Windows and the Mac --- at one point it was supporting 30 flavors of UNIX alone.
It struggled with the transition from a stand-alone word processor to the integrated office suite.
The "secret unpublished API" probably did less damage to WP than the exposed API for printing. The customized print drivers that helped carry WordPerfect to dominance in the eighties were no longer needed.
Almost Perfect
Or someone who's about to mysteriously come into a lot of money.
"Bribery!" is the geek's shout-out to any legal decision he doesn't like.
If it is not the judge who was bribed, it was the jury. If it was not the judge or the jury, it was the lawyers. If it was not the lawyers. it was the lawmakers.
Not that the juror can't shout back that "I was your hero --- the nullifier --- with the strength and will to hold out against a verdict I thought was morally wrong! "
"Until it came time to make a decision, and my decision went against you."
"Well, to hell with that, it doesn't make me a criminal."
You don't need "tools" or "toys" - when I was 5, I tested what this "it's HOT! you'll BURN YOURSELF!" stuff was all about with my index finger on an iron. Lost the fingerprint on the tip of that finger - and yet, I lived.
Your kid will be asking what an "iron" was --- because his clothes and bedding are permanent press.
The fundamental job of the engineer is to make tech safe and practical enough for everyday use. . Nolstagia for the difficult and the dangerous is not really his thing.