The problem with complicated data models is that they require effort on the part of the user to understand the model and use it effectively. Tags work because they're simple: a user can get the concept in a few seconds and then, for every item, tag it just as quickly by typing a few words into a box. You can't beat tags for simplicity. The more complicated you make the model, the higher the barrier to entry and thus the less input you will recieve. Since most of these "folksonomy"-like systems rely on a high number of submissions to filter out junk, this could greatly impact the quality of your data.
Of course, if you've got some clever trick up your sleeve to make your data model intuitive and quick to use then I'm all for it. Anything has to be better than keywords as a data model.
I think the answer to the advertising problem is to make the advertising short and unobtrusive. All you really need is a little bit at the start of the video saying "This programme is presented in association with Acme Corp: Widgets for your Business!" along with some eye candy. Over within 15 seconds, so not really worth fast-forwarding through. If the named company is relevant to the target audience of the content, they're likely to remember the name and check it out later. For bonus points, include a link to the named company's website in the text accompanying the video, so the viewer doesn't have to remember the URL.
I don't know that much about electronics, so please excuse me if this is a ridiculous idea, but I think it'd be cool if the mains in houses had both AC sockets and DC sockets. The AC-to-DC would happen at one spot and the outlets would be augmented with a new little socket for the DC. It'd be even cooler if that socket could be a USB socket with the power wired up, ready to use with all of those little USB-powered gadgets you can get to use with your laptop. I'm sure someone's going to tell me that it'd be hard to supply USB-compatible power over an entire house with the conversion in one spot, but it'd sure be nice if it were possible!:)
It's unfortunate that the original mistake was on television while the apology is on the website. I'd guess that far more people watch the Newsnight TV show than read BBC News Online, and most people probably do one or the other rather than both. The apology should be made in the same medium that the mistake was made, to increase the likelyhood that those who recieved the misinformation will recieve the apology and correction.
I have experimented with DFS a bit, though I was using Samba as my server rather than Windows. It does work quite well as long as you are using a domain. Unfortunately in my initial experiments I wasn't using a domain and so there were some problems with credentials across the various machines. Still, it's a step in the right direction, and certainly better than nothing.
Most open source projects I contribute to -- particularly the webapps -- have simple enough bugs crop up from time to time. I often attack them if I've got an hour or so to spare and want something easy to busy myself with. Of course, in most cases these things aren't "easy" unless you really know the system, so it's difficult to just jump into some random open source project and fix their little bugs in your first few hours, particularly if you are an unskilled programmer.
A strange omission, though, is that you can't "mount" network paths in the filesystem. I can't make \\someserver\blah appear as c:\blah. This is quite an annoying special case, since it means you can't abstract away the names of servers to allow eg. moving stuff between servers without retraining users. Companies, including mine, instead use mnemonic drive letters as the aliases.
I've often wondered why Windows doesn't treat network shares as it does everything else: why can I mount one as a drive letter but I can't have one as a reparse point in my filesystem?
I would say that by the time you've noticed that it's a surround sound effect you've already lost, since you're thinking about the medium and not the content. I don't know about you, but when I'm watching a movie I tend to shut off the world around me. The use of surround sound, just like any such devices in a movie, should be subtle so that it adds to the fantasy environment, not brash and loud so it makes you think hmm! They used surround sound! That's very clever!.
I think I understand what the original poster is referring to. I don't have my own surround sound system, but sometimes when I'm in a cinema and they have a particularly loud noise "behind" the audience, I find myself looking around at it instinctively, only to see a dark room full of people. What should have been an unconcious thing has now become a concious issue, which acts as a distraction. For a short period you are "disconnected" from the movie world and thrust back into the real world.
It might make sense, but that doesn't make it any less distracting. I don't mind, however, when ambient sound or other quiet sound is played through the rear channels, since just like in the real world I don't instinctively look at the sources of ambient sounds.
This comment gives me a mental image of a big room full of orphaned CRT monitors on desks waiting for students to plug in their laptops. Instead of a computer lab you'd have a monitor lab! Brilliant!
I don't have to host the XMLHttpRequest library, so clearly it's okay for some libraries to be kept resident in the browser. Another alternative that would make things nicer is to precompile and link the scripts on the server so that only the required elements from the framework need to be sent to the client and the client browser just sees an opaque hunk of code that all appears to be one script. Of course, once you go down that road you might as well compile to a lower-level representation on the server, since there's no point in doing the parse and compile step both on the server and the client.
JavaScript lacks a good mechanism for dealing with libraries. This means that these so-called frameworks are really just a big mass of.js files which must be included into the source HTML document. Everyone ends up making their own local copies of these libraries because there is no secure way to transparently install these components in browsers for several sites to share. Consequently what you get from using one of these "frameworks" is a lot of extra cruft in your application or, if you're being conservative, your own home-rolled subset of the framework containing just the bits you're using.
So what do I want? I want some way to load, in the script itself rather than in the HTML document, a library written by someone else. I want to reference this library from its developer without having to mirror it. I want a mechanism where the browser can go off and fetch the library if it doesn't already exist, and the ability to import that module into any JavaScript object I want rather than polluting the global namespace. For all this to work without causing major problems, JavaScript's security model needs to be overhauled so that including someone else's library doesn't surrender my entire site to the library author.
Sure, I'm asking for a lot, but until something resembling the above is available we're not going to see many good "frameworks" for doing this kind of stuff, and lots of web developers will resist using them even where they do exist purely because it's far more efficient to just re-implement the little bits of framework you want than to pull in a gargantuan set of libraries just to call one function.
It is permissible to refuse the TV licence enforcers entry to your property. If they have evidence that you really do have TV-recieving apparatus they can then go and get a warrant, at which point you obviously must let them in by law. They can only get a warrant if they already have some evidence that you are watching without paying.
I suspect the grandparent merely let them in the first time because he had nothing to hide. Why make a fuss if you can just let them take a look and see that you aren't breaking the law?
Personally, my use-case for client-side XSLT is providing a client-side preview of what my server-side XSLT-based app will do rather than round-tripping to the server to do it. The most extreme implementation of this is Xopus, which provides a real-time WYSIWYG editor for XML documents based on XML Schema and XSLT. My app is meagre in comparison, but I have missed XSLT support in Opera for years since I've been using it as my primary browser since sometime during major version 3. I'm glad to see that this support is finally arriving in my browser of choice, since now I can (in theory!) use my own webapp as it was intended!
I think it's more interesting to research into why humans are starting puberty early. People normally point to changes in diet and such things, but I wonder if there isn't a social aspect to this as well. The problem with young children getting pregnant is that they are not yet able to properly care for a child. Per Darwinian evolution (which I know isn't the whole story, but just bare with me) a child whose parent is unable to care for it is more likely to die and fail to carry on the traits that lead to early onset of puberty. Therefore you'd expect that this trait would not proceed to the point where it is harmful.
However, due to the social nature of human beings we tend to care for one another. If a child has a baby and is unable to care for it the the baby's grandparent may, for example, take care of it. Sometimes such babies are also put up for adoption. This means that such non-beneficial traits can get carried forward and become more common over time until the burden of underage parents becomes too heavy for society to bear. We are starting to see such problems now, which is essentially what this article is about: society is not adapting very well to the early puberty of kids. Should the ages where the various stages of sex education are taught be brought earlier? I didn't hear a peep about STDs through school until I was 13, despite the fact that many of my peers were already sexually active by that point. I don't know when they teach this stuff these days, but I'd hope it's earlier than that. Can an increasingly conservative society even cope with the idea of 11-year-old parents? Will schools go downhill with younger children getting themselves into trouble at an earlier age and have to revert to smaller class sizes to retain quality teaching? Is there some way that early-onset puberty can be reduced ethically to avoid some of these problems?
There are so many social impacts to consider including many we haven't even realised are a problem yet; the outcome of this particular research is a little contrived, but I'm glad to see people thinking about these things nonetheless.
You make some good points, but my take on what the OP was getting at was that he wanted a manager who understands enough about the field to understand what the work entails. I assume from your comments that you are such a boss, in which case I would be happy to work under you if it wasn't for the fact that I already have such a boss! (maybe you're him; who knows?:) )
The original article attracted my attention because I currently work for a well-below-average salary at a little company with 10 employees, four of which are full-time software developers. It was started by my boss, also the owner, who had earlier on in his career decided to go freelance and eventually started a company around his work. I only recently joined this company, at quite a dramatic pay cut, because I was being driven insane by my previous job. They constantly provided unrealistic deadlines, forcing me to work overtime. I also, as with the OP, felt that I wasn't really making use of my talents.
The nice thing about a smaller company is that a single person can make more of a difference. I can see how my work directly affects the growth of the company, and my opinions on subjects outside of my job are listened to even if ultimately they decide I don't know what I'm talking about! Like the OP I don't have any major living costs so I really didn't need the salary I was earning before, and I'm much happier where I am now. For the OP I'd say that as long as he is sure about the security of the job he's transfering into then go for it. There are always other things to consider beyond salary and enjoyment, though as someone with no major financial responsibilities you can afford to take some chances in that respect. It certainly worked out for me, having now been at this company for about a year.
Indeed. I (through my company) have licences for a bunch of their Perl tools for Windows because at work I have to use a Windows machine. Having Windows around is good when it comes to ensuring code is portable, anyway. There are certain CPAN modules which do not currently build on Windows which one must avoid if attempting to cross-platform Perl apps.
I can understand why some would use Cygwin but I personally gave up on Cygwin for all uses a few years back since I was constantly running into issues with multiple applications installing their own copies of the cygwin DLL and it getting all confused, not to mention the fact that Cygwin stuff always starts up so slowly. Instead, I use native ports of most of the "standard" GNU command line utilities, ActivePerl and a bunch of other all-native bits and pieces to make my usage of Windows less of a pain in the rear.
Note also that ActiveState has a tool for packaging up perl applications into Windows executables. It's a total hack revolving around a self-extracting archive but it's transparent enough to the end user that at my office we have several little home-grown tools written in Perl but most users don't even have Perl installed let alone know or care that they're written in Perl.
Digest auth (which I assume from the URL is what LJ is using here) uses a one-time nonce as a challenge, so capturing your response would not benefit an attacker since the same response cannot be replayed. Also, the MD5 hash you're seeing your client send is based not only on your password and the nonce but also on the HTTP method being used and the URI being requested. Digest auth does have its flaws, but I think it's secure enough for this purpose.
My childhood mind may have distorted the facts a little, but as far as I remember there was no homework at all at my primary school until I reached my last year, which was in 1993. At that point, homework was introduced throughout the school, with a small weekly exercise for the infants and generally a few different homework tasks for us juniors.
My youngest brother is now in his penultimate year at the same primary school and he gets a small amount of homework each week. It remains to be seen whether he will get the same amount of homework next year as I did in my final year, but I can confirm that he is getting homework.
I can't really comment on most of the things you've mentioned since I'm actually living in Britain where there's no HDTV and PVR's are almost unheard of unless you roll one yourself. However, as to your point about adverts being useful for taking short breaks, that's another great reason why TV is annoying: you can't make it stop and wait for you without some kind of extra technology. PVRs and DVDs both allow you to pause the action at any point.
I wasn't completely honest about how I generally watch TV shows, anyway. While I do buy lots of TV series DVDs, I also watch a lot of American shows that never make it over here to Britain by downloading them. This is another limitation of TV as a medium: someone else decides for me what shows I can watch. If the shows were available for download online there would be no regional limitations to distribution; shows would be released simultaneously, and I would not be forced to commit copyright infringment in order to see certain shows.
Incidentally, I get around the "grab a drink of water" problem by having a TV in the kitchen!:)
I don't necessarily hate TV itself, I more just hate the way it is run these days. It's very distracting to have the action interrupted every 30 minutes for 10-15 minutes of advertising. Networks seem incapable of keeping shows on at a consistant time throughout their run, with gaps in the middle of seasons and shows run out of order, and even then they leap all over the schedule so you have to be eagerly monitoring your TV guide to make sure you don't miss it.
If they didn't have the advertising (charge more for cable!) and would keep a show on at a consistant time every week for an entire season I wouldn't mind so much. However, since TV can't provide me with the viewing experience I want, DVD makes a much better alternative, and one I'm certainly willing to pay for to get the ability to control my own viewing schedule and to watch entire episodes uninterrupted at my leisure. The only thing it's lacking is the ability to try the first episode before plonking down the cash for the rest; I took that gamble for Firefly at Christmas and it was worth it, but it'd be nice to be able to buy online an episode to watch before I decide whether I want to buy the DVD. From what the captions on TV shows have been telling me recently, some shows are now available for download on iTunes, which is a start.
I think if we're talking about office suites the list of needs is almost universal, at least such that most everyday needs apply to many businesses. The needs that differ between businesses are unlikely to be the kind of thing you'd want in the core codebase, so the benefit to the core code is mechanisms for extensibility, which again benefit everyone. Once the extensibility is there, the possibility arises for companies to produce closed-source add-ons which they can then sell to businesses with unusual needs, at which point we've arrived back where we started.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with complicated data models is that they require effort on the part of the user to understand the model and use it effectively. Tags work because they're simple: a user can get the concept in a few seconds and then, for every item, tag it just as quickly by typing a few words into a box. You can't beat tags for simplicity. The more complicated you make the model, the higher the barrier to entry and thus the less input you will recieve. Since most of these "folksonomy"-like systems rely on a high number of submissions to filter out junk, this could greatly impact the quality of your data.
Of course, if you've got some clever trick up your sleeve to make your data model intuitive and quick to use then I'm all for it. Anything has to be better than keywords as a data model.
I think the answer to the advertising problem is to make the advertising short and unobtrusive. All you really need is a little bit at the start of the video saying "This programme is presented in association with Acme Corp: Widgets for your Business!" along with some eye candy. Over within 15 seconds, so not really worth fast-forwarding through. If the named company is relevant to the target audience of the content, they're likely to remember the name and check it out later. For bonus points, include a link to the named company's website in the text accompanying the video, so the viewer doesn't have to remember the URL.
I agree. Is there some good reason why cubicles don't go right to the ceiling?
I don't know that much about electronics, so please excuse me if this is a ridiculous idea, but I think it'd be cool if the mains in houses had both AC sockets and DC sockets. The AC-to-DC would happen at one spot and the outlets would be augmented with a new little socket for the DC. It'd be even cooler if that socket could be a USB socket with the power wired up, ready to use with all of those little USB-powered gadgets you can get to use with your laptop. I'm sure someone's going to tell me that it'd be hard to supply USB-compatible power over an entire house with the conversion in one spot, but it'd sure be nice if it were possible! :)
It's unfortunate that the original mistake was on television while the apology is on the website. I'd guess that far more people watch the Newsnight TV show than read BBC News Online, and most people probably do one or the other rather than both. The apology should be made in the same medium that the mistake was made, to increase the likelyhood that those who recieved the misinformation will recieve the apology and correction.
I have experimented with DFS a bit, though I was using Samba as my server rather than Windows. It does work quite well as long as you are using a domain. Unfortunately in my initial experiments I wasn't using a domain and so there were some problems with credentials across the various machines. Still, it's a step in the right direction, and certainly better than nothing.
Most open source projects I contribute to -- particularly the webapps -- have simple enough bugs crop up from time to time. I often attack them if I've got an hour or so to spare and want something easy to busy myself with. Of course, in most cases these things aren't "easy" unless you really know the system, so it's difficult to just jump into some random open source project and fix their little bugs in your first few hours, particularly if you are an unskilled programmer.
A strange omission, though, is that you can't "mount" network paths in the filesystem. I can't make \\someserver\blah appear as c:\blah. This is quite an annoying special case, since it means you can't abstract away the names of servers to allow eg. moving stuff between servers without retraining users. Companies, including mine, instead use mnemonic drive letters as the aliases.
I've often wondered why Windows doesn't treat network shares as it does everything else: why can I mount one as a drive letter but I can't have one as a reparse point in my filesystem?
I would say that by the time you've noticed that it's a surround sound effect you've already lost, since you're thinking about the medium and not the content. I don't know about you, but when I'm watching a movie I tend to shut off the world around me. The use of surround sound, just like any such devices in a movie, should be subtle so that it adds to the fantasy environment, not brash and loud so it makes you think hmm! They used surround sound! That's very clever!.
I think I understand what the original poster is referring to. I don't have my own surround sound system, but sometimes when I'm in a cinema and they have a particularly loud noise "behind" the audience, I find myself looking around at it instinctively, only to see a dark room full of people. What should have been an unconcious thing has now become a concious issue, which acts as a distraction. For a short period you are "disconnected" from the movie world and thrust back into the real world.
It might make sense, but that doesn't make it any less distracting. I don't mind, however, when ambient sound or other quiet sound is played through the rear channels, since just like in the real world I don't instinctively look at the sources of ambient sounds.
This comment gives me a mental image of a big room full of orphaned CRT monitors on desks waiting for students to plug in their laptops. Instead of a computer lab you'd have a monitor lab! Brilliant!
I don't have to host the XMLHttpRequest library, so clearly it's okay for some libraries to be kept resident in the browser. Another alternative that would make things nicer is to precompile and link the scripts on the server so that only the required elements from the framework need to be sent to the client and the client browser just sees an opaque hunk of code that all appears to be one script. Of course, once you go down that road you might as well compile to a lower-level representation on the server, since there's no point in doing the parse and compile step both on the server and the client.
JavaScript lacks a good mechanism for dealing with libraries. This means that these so-called frameworks are really just a big mass of .js files which must be included into the source HTML document. Everyone ends up making their own local copies of these libraries because there is no secure way to transparently install these components in browsers for several sites to share. Consequently what you get from using one of these "frameworks" is a lot of extra cruft in your application or, if you're being conservative, your own home-rolled subset of the framework containing just the bits you're using.
So what do I want? I want some way to load, in the script itself rather than in the HTML document, a library written by someone else. I want to reference this library from its developer without having to mirror it. I want a mechanism where the browser can go off and fetch the library if it doesn't already exist, and the ability to import that module into any JavaScript object I want rather than polluting the global namespace. For all this to work without causing major problems, JavaScript's security model needs to be overhauled so that including someone else's library doesn't surrender my entire site to the library author.
Sure, I'm asking for a lot, but until something resembling the above is available we're not going to see many good "frameworks" for doing this kind of stuff, and lots of web developers will resist using them even where they do exist purely because it's far more efficient to just re-implement the little bits of framework you want than to pull in a gargantuan set of libraries just to call one function.
It is permissible to refuse the TV licence enforcers entry to your property. If they have evidence that you really do have TV-recieving apparatus they can then go and get a warrant, at which point you obviously must let them in by law. They can only get a warrant if they already have some evidence that you are watching without paying.
I suspect the grandparent merely let them in the first time because he had nothing to hide. Why make a fuss if you can just let them take a look and see that you aren't breaking the law?
Personally, my use-case for client-side XSLT is providing a client-side preview of what my server-side XSLT-based app will do rather than round-tripping to the server to do it. The most extreme implementation of this is Xopus, which provides a real-time WYSIWYG editor for XML documents based on XML Schema and XSLT. My app is meagre in comparison, but I have missed XSLT support in Opera for years since I've been using it as my primary browser since sometime during major version 3. I'm glad to see that this support is finally arriving in my browser of choice, since now I can (in theory!) use my own webapp as it was intended!
I think it's more interesting to research into why humans are starting puberty early. People normally point to changes in diet and such things, but I wonder if there isn't a social aspect to this as well. The problem with young children getting pregnant is that they are not yet able to properly care for a child. Per Darwinian evolution (which I know isn't the whole story, but just bare with me) a child whose parent is unable to care for it is more likely to die and fail to carry on the traits that lead to early onset of puberty. Therefore you'd expect that this trait would not proceed to the point where it is harmful.
However, due to the social nature of human beings we tend to care for one another. If a child has a baby and is unable to care for it the the baby's grandparent may, for example, take care of it. Sometimes such babies are also put up for adoption. This means that such non-beneficial traits can get carried forward and become more common over time until the burden of underage parents becomes too heavy for society to bear. We are starting to see such problems now, which is essentially what this article is about: society is not adapting very well to the early puberty of kids. Should the ages where the various stages of sex education are taught be brought earlier? I didn't hear a peep about STDs through school until I was 13, despite the fact that many of my peers were already sexually active by that point. I don't know when they teach this stuff these days, but I'd hope it's earlier than that. Can an increasingly conservative society even cope with the idea of 11-year-old parents? Will schools go downhill with younger children getting themselves into trouble at an earlier age and have to revert to smaller class sizes to retain quality teaching? Is there some way that early-onset puberty can be reduced ethically to avoid some of these problems?
There are so many social impacts to consider including many we haven't even realised are a problem yet; the outcome of this particular research is a little contrived, but I'm glad to see people thinking about these things nonetheless.
You make some good points, but my take on what the OP was getting at was that he wanted a manager who understands enough about the field to understand what the work entails. I assume from your comments that you are such a boss, in which case I would be happy to work under you if it wasn't for the fact that I already have such a boss! (maybe you're him; who knows? :) )
The original article attracted my attention because I currently work for a well-below-average salary at a little company with 10 employees, four of which are full-time software developers. It was started by my boss, also the owner, who had earlier on in his career decided to go freelance and eventually started a company around his work. I only recently joined this company, at quite a dramatic pay cut, because I was being driven insane by my previous job. They constantly provided unrealistic deadlines, forcing me to work overtime. I also, as with the OP, felt that I wasn't really making use of my talents.
The nice thing about a smaller company is that a single person can make more of a difference. I can see how my work directly affects the growth of the company, and my opinions on subjects outside of my job are listened to even if ultimately they decide I don't know what I'm talking about! Like the OP I don't have any major living costs so I really didn't need the salary I was earning before, and I'm much happier where I am now. For the OP I'd say that as long as he is sure about the security of the job he's transfering into then go for it. There are always other things to consider beyond salary and enjoyment, though as someone with no major financial responsibilities you can afford to take some chances in that respect. It certainly worked out for me, having now been at this company for about a year.
Indeed. I (through my company) have licences for a bunch of their Perl tools for Windows because at work I have to use a Windows machine. Having Windows around is good when it comes to ensuring code is portable, anyway. There are certain CPAN modules which do not currently build on Windows which one must avoid if attempting to cross-platform Perl apps.
I can understand why some would use Cygwin but I personally gave up on Cygwin for all uses a few years back since I was constantly running into issues with multiple applications installing their own copies of the cygwin DLL and it getting all confused, not to mention the fact that Cygwin stuff always starts up so slowly. Instead, I use native ports of most of the "standard" GNU command line utilities, ActivePerl and a bunch of other all-native bits and pieces to make my usage of Windows less of a pain in the rear.
Note also that ActiveState has a tool for packaging up perl applications into Windows executables. It's a total hack revolving around a self-extracting archive but it's transparent enough to the end user that at my office we have several little home-grown tools written in Perl but most users don't even have Perl installed let alone know or care that they're written in Perl.
Digest auth (which I assume from the URL is what LJ is using here) uses a one-time nonce as a challenge, so capturing your response would not benefit an attacker since the same response cannot be replayed. Also, the MD5 hash you're seeing your client send is based not only on your password and the nonce but also on the HTTP method being used and the URI being requested. Digest auth does have its flaws, but I think it's secure enough for this purpose.
My childhood mind may have distorted the facts a little, but as far as I remember there was no homework at all at my primary school until I reached my last year, which was in 1993. At that point, homework was introduced throughout the school, with a small weekly exercise for the infants and generally a few different homework tasks for us juniors.
My youngest brother is now in his penultimate year at the same primary school and he gets a small amount of homework each week. It remains to be seen whether he will get the same amount of homework next year as I did in my final year, but I can confirm that he is getting homework.
I can't really comment on most of the things you've mentioned since I'm actually living in Britain where there's no HDTV and PVR's are almost unheard of unless you roll one yourself. However, as to your point about adverts being useful for taking short breaks, that's another great reason why TV is annoying: you can't make it stop and wait for you without some kind of extra technology. PVRs and DVDs both allow you to pause the action at any point.
I wasn't completely honest about how I generally watch TV shows, anyway. While I do buy lots of TV series DVDs, I also watch a lot of American shows that never make it over here to Britain by downloading them. This is another limitation of TV as a medium: someone else decides for me what shows I can watch. If the shows were available for download online there would be no regional limitations to distribution; shows would be released simultaneously, and I would not be forced to commit copyright infringment in order to see certain shows.
Incidentally, I get around the "grab a drink of water" problem by having a TV in the kitchen! :)
Nope. I think you're thinking of a different Nurgled...
I don't necessarily hate TV itself, I more just hate the way it is run these days. It's very distracting to have the action interrupted every 30 minutes for 10-15 minutes of advertising. Networks seem incapable of keeping shows on at a consistant time throughout their run, with gaps in the middle of seasons and shows run out of order, and even then they leap all over the schedule so you have to be eagerly monitoring your TV guide to make sure you don't miss it.
If they didn't have the advertising (charge more for cable!) and would keep a show on at a consistant time every week for an entire season I wouldn't mind so much. However, since TV can't provide me with the viewing experience I want, DVD makes a much better alternative, and one I'm certainly willing to pay for to get the ability to control my own viewing schedule and to watch entire episodes uninterrupted at my leisure. The only thing it's lacking is the ability to try the first episode before plonking down the cash for the rest; I took that gamble for Firefly at Christmas and it was worth it, but it'd be nice to be able to buy online an episode to watch before I decide whether I want to buy the DVD. From what the captions on TV shows have been telling me recently, some shows are now available for download on iTunes, which is a start.
GAH! I was going to watch this movie for the first time this evening, you insensitive clod!
I think if we're talking about office suites the list of needs is almost universal, at least such that most everyday needs apply to many businesses. The needs that differ between businesses are unlikely to be the kind of thing you'd want in the core codebase, so the benefit to the core code is mechanisms for extensibility, which again benefit everyone. Once the extensibility is there, the possibility arises for companies to produce closed-source add-ons which they can then sell to businesses with unusual needs, at which point we've arrived back where we started.