Speaking from my own experience, it was very hard to get the time as an hourly worker (I don't miss those days) to get the time to work for change. Generally you're hourly because you're doing some mundane task. (In my case taking calls on a help desk). In situations like these there are usually metrics in place to determine if you're doing a 'good job' (which is code for not necessarily being good at your job, just doing more than X of task Y on day Z).
In these types of positions it's hard to work on change because any time not doing your day job impacts your metrics. And you could work past your normal hours, but only if you're allowed overtime (we weren't). Or you could do it on your own time, but why would you want to help a company that won't pay you to do it?
In the end I had to take a risk and let my numbers fall (and work on my own time), hoping that I'd have something to show for it when actually confronted about it. It paid off for me, and got me the hell out of there, but it could have easily gone the other way.
No, I agree with you that it's not right to download it if you're not paying for access in the first place. But the actual/act/ of downloading it is not what makes it wrong, rather downloading it when you're not entitles to view it in the first place.
Now, for your second point, no one 'pays for' over the air TV, at least not the viewers. Advertisers are the ones paying for broadcast TV. So, which scenario is on shaky ground: downloading with commercials included, or Tivoing and skipping commercials? The first one is the illegal one, while I think the second is the immoral one. (Not that this stops me from skipping commercials).
Following the same logic, if I pay for cable, what is the fundamental difference between downloading an episode with no commercials and Tivoing it?
I don't necessarily agree that downloading is ok, but just wanted to play the devil's advocate for a second.
Take these scenarios:
1. Let's say you have a VCR recording over the air broadcasts, and it's set to record Heroes on Monday. It does and you happily watch your show, commercials and all. Morally acceptable, right?
2. Ok, same thing, except you fast forward through the commericials. Is this still morally acceptable? Really you're not upholding your part of the bargain (watching commercials) for the free TV you're getting.
3. Ok, so now you discover on Tuesday that your VCR didn't change timezones properly (something about DST being moved forward or some other nonsense), and didn't record Heroes for you. You download it with commericials and watch it. Is that bad? Is there a fundamental difference between this and the first scenario?
4. Or, say you download it with no commercials, how is that different at all than the second scenario?
Where exactly does downloading previously broadcast material become immoral?
While I agree there's a 'theoretical' issue there, what I think most companies will realize is they aren't going to get a more competent IT staff than the people running Google's service. Additionally, I imagine a lot of people are going to be using pop3 to download their gmail, in which case you'd have a local copy anyway.
A large issue with javascript is it's hard to find any good information on the subject (or at least I haven't seen any). Searching for how to properly do OO in javascript you get 3 or 4 different approaches. It takes a lot of experience to figure out whether you're supposed to use.prototype. or this.function = function() or whatever. Then a whole lot more experience to figure out what leaks and what doesn't (and how to fix it).
A single comprehensive library would help a lot. (w3schools is good, but doesn't have enough macro information).
It's a reference to the movie "You and Me and Everyone We Know". A bit of a wierd indi flick, there's a very out there IM conversation involving "back and forth". It would be really hard to explain without seeing the movie.
Eliminate inheritance. Parents can provide for their kids through college, then it's hands off. When someone dies, their money can be donated to non-profits or is returned to the collective in taxes.
It would still allow for some kids to have an advantage, but not be professional consumers. It would also keep the capatalistic motivation in place.
To paraphrase Warren Buffet, why should your parents' accomplishments make your adult life better?
I'm sure my feelings on this will change when I have kids, but it sounds good now:)
I haven't seen a negative point of view yet, so I figured I'd throw in my two cents.
I was midly disappointed with the browser.
It feels natural to use the d-pad for scrolling, but that doesn't work. Instead it's a combination of using the pointer and holding B. This means that to read a web page you have to keep your wiimote pointed at the screen the whole time. (vs just holding it in your lap and scrolling with the d-pad).
There are no options. At all (unless I'm missing something). The first thing I wanted to do was increase the minimum font size but there's no way to do it. On my screen you can't read anything but headings without zooming in (which brings up the scroll issue above). The columnar view is nice, but it's so close to readable without it that a small bump in minimum font size would mean I could probably see a whole page and read it in the normal layout.
On my screen (16:9) it doesn't fill the whole screen. There's a black bar on the top and right of the browser window that the cursor can go into, but pages aren't rendered there. No clue why that is.
The huge navigation bar at the bottom of the screen needs to auto hide or at least not take up 1/4 of the screen. There's precious little real estate as it is.
The favorites screen has a lot of lag. It seems that it's trying to download every favorite so it can render thems as icons every time you view your favorites.
It does handle flash video, though people have reported problems after some use (with it not rendering further videos). I haven't experienced this, you tube worked great for me.
As a renderer it's fine, as one would expect being based on Opera. This is about all that I like about it. I'd like the ease of selecting a favorite if they were snappier. I think on the whole it's got a lot of promise, but each piece needs work to get it where it needs to be. It's definitely simple, but simple to the point that it's almost not usable.
Also, it would be great to get quicktime support (trailers), but I imagine that's probably not on the todo list.
It's not just linux... It's like that South Park episode about Walmart. Everyone points out the flaws in whatever has the largest market share, and so someone creates a 'small' competitor to make up for those shortcomings. The new competitor ages and ends up either duplicating the old or creating brand new shortcomings. Rinse, repeat. With linux it's just all happening in the same space. (See: xfce).
It's the same with all sorts of conspiracy theories...
After the fact it's easy to point fingers at people who take advantage of or had something to gain from some action when all of the pieces are known. Before the action though, it's much, much harder to predict how everything is going to play out, which (I think) is giving way too much credit to possible conspirators. Too many things could go wrong in most cases for someone to take a risk in the conspiracy in the first place.
I do it in an attempt to convey meaning that I otherwise would have with body language, tone or tempo. In his case there's probably an expression that reflects what the 'Um' portrays, unfortunately we're not all writers.
Technically, atheism is the belief that there is no god. I would think agnostics are more in line with science. Not sure until we get some real data on the matter.
Opera is free (beer) now too, though last time I tried it wasn't as successful as FF in keeping IE only sites happy.
While I see your point on attempting to implement the isolation myself, I'm not inclined to do so (and I have seen it suggested in the past in official moz channels). There's a steep learning curve for digging into the source of a project as large as mozilla. Last time I tried I ended up writing a patch that I discovered had an about:config variable to do the same thing in a completely different location in the tree. (Ended up being a complete waste of time for something that a developer familiar with the code could have easily put in the account settings for that type of email box).
My point is rather that instead of focusing on feature requests that are pie in the sky type ideas, instead put effort into issues that are causing real and immediate frustrations with your most loyal (and vocal) users. It may not be as fun, glamorous or exciting as exciting new features, but it's not any less (and I would argue more) important for the long term health of the project.
I finally made the jump to 2GB of RAM, so the memory issue isn't a big deal for me. My point was rather that even if it's not a bug, it's the #1 or #2 complaint that people have, so some time should be spent trying to solution it as opposed to chanting "It's not a bug".
That link you sent is a perfect example of what user's shouldn't have to do to fix an issue. At the very least there should be happy checkbox in the options screen to disable the feature entirely. Or, taking it a step further, some smarts should be in place to let firefox determine "Oh, I'm using 110% of available system memory, maybe I should disable my tab caching feature".
I'm not saying either are perfect solutions, but neither is "It's not a bug."
I love firefox, but I question where they are going. If you look at the blog post every 3rd entry is complaining about memory issues or bloat. Now here comes FF 2.0, with more features, but these seem to only exacerbate the problems. Firefox's original claim to fame was "Not being IE". It didn't have ActiveX, supported tabs, and was super speedy. Firefox gained popularity because it was a viable option when people went looking for a replacement to IE. But that was the catch, people were looking for a replacement.
Now I find myself getting more and more frustrated with Firefox's bloat, and looking for a replacement for it. (I have way too many greasemonkey scripts to make the switch lightly).
The memory issue is huge for those with less than a gig of ram. The fast back/forward switching is nice, but not if it ends up getting paged out. Yes, users can turn it off in about:config, is that viable? And while the developers keep complaining about extensions being the culprit, it seems like some work there on the garbage collector is in order, or at least isolating and counting usage by each extension to show users which is causing the problem. (Instead of forcing each user to manually disable them until they happen upon the one that's causing the issue).
All of these new 2.0 features have an audience, and should probably even be included in the installer. But why aren't they extensions? Is there some technical reason my browser should have the overhead of a spellchecker if I don't want it? And finally, why aren't they solutioning what the users are asking for?
Why can't the extra featueres be first-party extensions that are installed by default, and the installer has a 'Custom' installation option that lets you uncheck all of them? Seems like that would be the best of both worlds.
Adding to that, you can find cards that give you up to 1% cash back or more like 2% in free airfare. If you have the discipline to pay them off every month, you can almost take a vacation a year just by paying with a different payment method. Trick is still the same: Don't spend more than you have. Oh, and watch annual fees, they'll negate the kickbacks most of the time.
I don't know, since paypal was picked up by ebay things have [seemingly] changed. I now have a real live 'account manager' that I have a direct number to. With the old paypal you couldn't even find a phone number at all. Also, annecdotally, there seem to be way fewer horror stories than a few years ago. Browsing the paypalsucks.com forums really quick it looks like most (if not all) of the recent complaints are issues that you'd get with any card processor (chargebacks are not paypal's fault).
I'm not saying I wouldn't switch in a heartbeat to a better or cheaper service, but I think paypal has leanred a lot about how to deal with the almost constant fraud they have to put up with.
Let's say Google wasn't public, that they only operate with altruistic intentions. Presented with the same China situation, what would/should they have done?
What would you have done? You're Google, you maintain (whether it's true or not) that your ultimate goal is anything good for users. You're faced with the China issue. How do you solve it? Do you attempt to make inroads, or do you take your ball and go home?
Or how about craig's list only taking money for ads 'to fight spam'. Is that not rationalizing it? What defines rationalization vs. comprimise?
I don't understand it. Why write a page in such a way that is guaranteed not to work properly in other browsers?
I can understand not making the effort to ensure pixel perfect comparisons between the various browsers, but this is like complete disregard for other browsers even existing. You're shooting yourself in the foot before you even publish.
For regular user sites it's almost understandable from MS's persepective I guess... easy way to force at least some IE use.
But for their ad program? If a user is going so far as to register ads on a search engine, chances are they've got enough of a clue to not be using IE in the first place. People buying ads are probably the same people who run websites, who themselves know (hopefully) that there exist browsers besides IE.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking from my own experience, it was very hard to get the time as an hourly worker (I don't miss those days) to get the time to work for change. Generally you're hourly because you're doing some mundane task. (In my case taking calls on a help desk). In situations like these there are usually metrics in place to determine if you're doing a 'good job' (which is code for not necessarily being good at your job, just doing more than X of task Y on day Z).
In these types of positions it's hard to work on change because any time not doing your day job impacts your metrics. And you could work past your normal hours, but only if you're allowed overtime (we weren't). Or you could do it on your own time, but why would you want to help a company that won't pay you to do it?
In the end I had to take a risk and let my numbers fall (and work on my own time), hoping that I'd have something to show for it when actually confronted about it. It paid off for me, and got me the hell out of there, but it could have easily gone the other way.
Anyway, just my two cents.
They're not doing voice overs for that reason. They're leaving dialogue as bubble text (can't find the link to the forum post at the moment).
No, I agree with you that it's not right to download it if you're not paying for access in the first place. But the actual /act/ of downloading it is not what makes it wrong, rather downloading it when you're not entitles to view it in the first place.
Now, for your second point, no one 'pays for' over the air TV, at least not the viewers. Advertisers are the ones paying for broadcast TV. So, which scenario is on shaky ground: downloading with commercials included, or Tivoing and skipping commercials? The first one is the illegal one, while I think the second is the immoral one. (Not that this stops me from skipping commercials).
Following the same logic, if I pay for cable, what is the fundamental difference between downloading an episode with no commercials and Tivoing it?
I don't necessarily agree that downloading is ok, but just wanted to play the devil's advocate for a second.
Take these scenarios:
1. Let's say you have a VCR recording over the air broadcasts, and it's set to record Heroes on Monday. It does and you happily watch your show, commercials and all. Morally acceptable, right?
2. Ok, same thing, except you fast forward through the commericials. Is this still morally acceptable? Really you're not upholding your part of the bargain (watching commercials) for the free TV you're getting.
3. Ok, so now you discover on Tuesday that your VCR didn't change timezones properly (something about DST being moved forward or some other nonsense), and didn't record Heroes for you. You download it with commericials and watch it. Is that bad? Is there a fundamental difference between this and the first scenario?
4. Or, say you download it with no commercials, how is that different at all than the second scenario?
Where exactly does downloading previously broadcast material become immoral?
While I agree there's a 'theoretical' issue there, what I think most companies will realize is they aren't going to get a more competent IT staff than the people running Google's service. Additionally, I imagine a lot of people are going to be using pop3 to download their gmail, in which case you'd have a local copy anyway.
A large issue with javascript is it's hard to find any good information on the subject (or at least I haven't seen any). Searching for how to properly do OO in javascript you get 3 or 4 different approaches. It takes a lot of experience to figure out whether you're supposed to use .prototype. or this.function = function() or whatever. Then a whole lot more experience to figure out what leaks and what doesn't (and how to fix it).
A single comprehensive library would help a lot. (w3schools is good, but doesn't have enough macro information).
It's a reference to the movie "You and Me and Everyone We Know". A bit of a wierd indi flick, there's a very out there IM conversation involving "back and forth". It would be really hard to explain without seeing the movie.
Eliminate inheritance. Parents can provide for their kids through college, then it's hands off. When someone dies, their money can be donated to non-profits or is returned to the collective in taxes.
:)
It would still allow for some kids to have an advantage, but not be professional consumers. It would also keep the capatalistic motivation in place.
To paraphrase Warren Buffet, why should your parents' accomplishments make your adult life better?
I'm sure my feelings on this will change when I have kids, but it sounds good now
I haven't seen a negative point of view yet, so I figured I'd throw in my two cents.
I was midly disappointed with the browser.
It feels natural to use the d-pad for scrolling, but that doesn't work. Instead it's a combination of using the pointer and holding B. This means that to read a web page you have to keep your wiimote pointed at the screen the whole time. (vs just holding it in your lap and scrolling with the d-pad).
There are no options. At all (unless I'm missing something). The first thing I wanted to do was increase the minimum font size but there's no way to do it. On my screen you can't read anything but headings without zooming in (which brings up the scroll issue above). The columnar view is nice, but it's so close to readable without it that a small bump in minimum font size would mean I could probably see a whole page and read it in the normal layout.
On my screen (16:9) it doesn't fill the whole screen. There's a black bar on the top and right of the browser window that the cursor can go into, but pages aren't rendered there. No clue why that is.
The huge navigation bar at the bottom of the screen needs to auto hide or at least not take up 1/4 of the screen. There's precious little real estate as it is.
The favorites screen has a lot of lag. It seems that it's trying to download every favorite so it can render thems as icons every time you view your favorites.
It does handle flash video, though people have reported problems after some use (with it not rendering further videos). I haven't experienced this, you tube worked great for me.
As a renderer it's fine, as one would expect being based on Opera. This is about all that I like about it. I'd like the ease of selecting a favorite if they were snappier. I think on the whole it's got a lot of promise, but each piece needs work to get it where it needs to be. It's definitely simple, but simple to the point that it's almost not usable.
Also, it would be great to get quicktime support (trailers), but I imagine that's probably not on the todo list.
It's not just linux... It's like that South Park episode about Walmart. Everyone points out the flaws in whatever has the largest market share, and so someone creates a 'small' competitor to make up for those shortcomings. The new competitor ages and ends up either duplicating the old or creating brand new shortcomings. Rinse, repeat. With linux it's just all happening in the same space. (See: xfce).
It's the same with all sorts of conspiracy theories...
After the fact it's easy to point fingers at people who take advantage of or had something to gain from some action when all of the pieces are known. Before the action though, it's much, much harder to predict how everything is going to play out, which (I think) is giving way too much credit to possible conspirators. Too many things could go wrong in most cases for someone to take a risk in the conspiracy in the first place.
I do it in an attempt to convey meaning that I otherwise would have with body language, tone or tempo. In his case there's probably an expression that reflects what the 'Um' portrays, unfortunately we're not all writers.
Technically, atheism is the belief that there is no god. I would think agnostics are more in line with science. Not sure until we get some real data on the matter.
It's been said, but bears repeating: truly funny comment. Nice job.
Opera is free (beer) now too, though last time I tried it wasn't as successful as FF in keeping IE only sites happy.
While I see your point on attempting to implement the isolation myself, I'm not inclined to do so (and I have seen it suggested in the past in official moz channels). There's a steep learning curve for digging into the source of a project as large as mozilla. Last time I tried I ended up writing a patch that I discovered had an about:config variable to do the same thing in a completely different location in the tree. (Ended up being a complete waste of time for something that a developer familiar with the code could have easily put in the account settings for that type of email box).
My point is rather that instead of focusing on feature requests that are pie in the sky type ideas, instead put effort into issues that are causing real and immediate frustrations with your most loyal (and vocal) users. It may not be as fun, glamorous or exciting as exciting new features, but it's not any less (and I would argue more) important for the long term health of the project.
I finally made the jump to 2GB of RAM, so the memory issue isn't a big deal for me. My point was rather that even if it's not a bug, it's the #1 or #2 complaint that people have, so some time should be spent trying to solution it as opposed to chanting "It's not a bug".
That link you sent is a perfect example of what user's shouldn't have to do to fix an issue. At the very least there should be happy checkbox in the options screen to disable the feature entirely. Or, taking it a step further, some smarts should be in place to let firefox determine "Oh, I'm using 110% of available system memory, maybe I should disable my tab caching feature".
I'm not saying either are perfect solutions, but neither is "It's not a bug."
I love firefox, but I question where they are going. If you look at the blog post every 3rd entry is complaining about memory issues or bloat. Now here comes FF 2.0, with more features, but these seem to only exacerbate the problems. Firefox's original claim to fame was "Not being IE". It didn't have ActiveX, supported tabs, and was super speedy. Firefox gained popularity because it was a viable option when people went looking for a replacement to IE. But that was the catch, people were looking for a replacement.
Now I find myself getting more and more frustrated with Firefox's bloat, and looking for a replacement for it. (I have way too many greasemonkey scripts to make the switch lightly).
The memory issue is huge for those with less than a gig of ram. The fast back/forward switching is nice, but not if it ends up getting paged out. Yes, users can turn it off in about:config, is that viable? And while the developers keep complaining about extensions being the culprit, it seems like some work there on the garbage collector is in order, or at least isolating and counting usage by each extension to show users which is causing the problem. (Instead of forcing each user to manually disable them until they happen upon the one that's causing the issue).
All of these new 2.0 features have an audience, and should probably even be included in the installer. But why aren't they extensions? Is there some technical reason my browser should have the overhead of a spellchecker if I don't want it? And finally, why aren't they solutioning what the users are asking for?
Finally, a legal situation where lawyers lose. Karma's a bitch.
Usually they're the only ones that come out ahead...
Why can't the extra featueres be first-party extensions that are installed by default, and the installer has a 'Custom' installation option that lets you uncheck all of them? Seems like that would be the best of both worlds.
Adding to that, you can find cards that give you up to 1% cash back or more like 2% in free airfare. If you have the discipline to pay them off every month, you can almost take a vacation a year just by paying with a different payment method. Trick is still the same: Don't spend more than you have. Oh, and watch annual fees, they'll negate the kickbacks most of the time.
I paid for my movie ticket, shouldn't I be able to record it with my camcorder so I can watch it later?
I don't know, since paypal was picked up by ebay things have [seemingly] changed. I now have a real live 'account manager' that I have a direct number to. With the old paypal you couldn't even find a phone number at all. Also, annecdotally, there seem to be way fewer horror stories than a few years ago. Browsing the paypalsucks.com forums really quick it looks like most (if not all) of the recent complaints are issues that you'd get with any card processor (chargebacks are not paypal's fault).
I'm not saying I wouldn't switch in a heartbeat to a better or cheaper service, but I think paypal has leanred a lot about how to deal with the almost constant fraud they have to put up with.
Let's say Google wasn't public, that they only operate with altruistic intentions. Presented with the same China situation, what would/should they have done?
What would you have done? You're Google, you maintain (whether it's true or not) that your ultimate goal is anything good for users. You're faced with the China issue. How do you solve it? Do you attempt to make inroads, or do you take your ball and go home?
Or how about craig's list only taking money for ads 'to fight spam'. Is that not rationalizing it? What defines rationalization vs. comprimise?
Why why why are people still doing this?
I don't understand it. Why write a page in such a way that is guaranteed not to work properly in other browsers?
I can understand not making the effort to ensure pixel perfect comparisons between the various browsers, but this is like complete disregard for other browsers even existing. You're shooting yourself in the foot before you even publish.
For regular user sites it's almost understandable from MS's persepective I guess... easy way to force at least some IE use.
But for their ad program? If a user is going so far as to register ads on a search engine, chances are they've got enough of a clue to not be using IE in the first place. People buying ads are probably the same people who run websites, who themselves know (hopefully) that there exist browsers besides IE.