Heh, I think maybe the idea of ECT being so drastic goes back to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
That scene is the only image I can think of that would make me think that ECT is less invasive than opening your head (even a little bit) and sticking things in your brain.
I rate how productive I feel on an OS based on how much effort it takes to do simple tasks and to jack around with the filesystem - everything else is more a question of applications. (Yeah yeah, I know that the culture provides different experiences with the apps, too, but I have enough of a problem with keyboard dysentery withou having to talk about that, too.)
I regularly work with OS X, Windows, KDE, and WindowMaker, and here is what I think of the first three. (For the sake of disclosure, I was definite Mac hater three years ago, I have had vague feelings of annoyance with Windows going back at least 7 years, and I have never been a fan of Gnome or KDE - I use WindowMaker on my home PC.)
On Windows, it takes a lot of effort to do simple things. Even bringing up an extra Explorer window seems to take a lot of time, because I can't seem to find a good keyboard command or menu item for it. (If there are, Windows fails at making them easy to find.) Navigating the filesystem takes time, because there doesn't seem to be a way to make the places I go most accessible from anywhere. "My Computer" seems to be in a different place (sometimes the Start menu, sometimes the desktop) on every @#$@% computer in the office. Functionality is hidden in random places, and menu items seem to never be hidden under the most appropriate menu. I can't drag and drop things I think I should logically be able to drag and drop, and the alt-tab twitcher completely fails to allow me to switch between applications quickly and seamlessly. Worst of all, it pops up dialogs for things that I don't think should require dialog pop-ups - I hate it when I eject my USB key (which takes too many clicks) and go back to some task (which takes too many clicks) and am just starting to re-orient my attention when Windows throws it all away by throwing up a dialog that tells me my USB key has been unmounted and requires a click to close. The overall effect makes me feel like Windows is hell-bent on wasting my time a second or two at a time and slowly destroying my ability to concentrate.
KDE and GNOME aren't much better. In fact, they're worse - they feel a lot like Windows, only even more disorganized, less consistent, and less logically arranged. The file managers are all half-implemented, and drag-and-drop is barely given a nod. It doesn't help that I find myself constantly dropping to the command line to do simple things that should have an easy GUI equivalent - kill and ps, for example.
OS X isn't perfect, but it's shangri-la compared to the rest. I love that document-oriented apps give you an icon in the window's title bar that acts as a proxy for the file that is open in that window, meaning I can send a document I'm working on to someone else via e-mail without having to waste my time hunting for it in the filesystem. There are keyboard commands for EVERYTHING, and it is easy to find them, I love that. The shelf is a thing of beauty - I think that it is a bit half-implemented, but it's far and away better than anything that any other popular GUI can provide. Expose took some getting used to, but now I can say that it rocks my butt off, and I miss it when I am using other OSes. (I used to use Codetek VirtualDesktop. I still run it, but I rarely use it unless I decide that I need to grab a clean sandbox real quick.) The Dock isn't without its problems either (its handling of placing files in the Dock is just completely broken), but it crams a lot of useful information into a small space, and takes a lot less staring and thinking to figure out what you want to know from it than a taskbar. It doesn't tell you about individual windows, and I have grown to like that - when I work, my mental state tree goes application first, window second, and OS X follows this mental flow. Besides, the window I want is usually on the top of the display after I click on an app's icon, because it is usually the window in that app that I was using the most recently. By contrast, the Windows Taskbar feels like it is jumping the gun. And when I want a window instead of an app, I use Expose, and it's easier and faster than having to deal with the taskbar, which gets real cluttered real fast.
I had a non-technical manager that can either be the best or the worst boss in the world.
He's the best boss in the world when he recognizes that he lacks knowledge of important details needed to make a lot of decisions, and doesn't make decisions without consulting his employees and considering our advice first.
But he is terrible when a decision comes up that involves something that he thinks he knows, so he starts ignoring the advice of people who know much better. It's pretty much the usual, "No, let's use FileMaker Pro because it says right here on the box that version 7.0 not supports true relational joins, can handle millions of records in a table, and works as an ODBC data source." type thing.
No, it makes sense to me. It means that you have a lighter load on the (already overloaded for the number of people managing it) airport security system, which I'm sure makes the airlines safer in an indirect way - much more so than a lot of other things they do for 'security."
It reminds me of when my town's high school started making kids wear their sudent ID's around their necks in response to Columbine, with the stated purpose of trying to prevent such a situation in our town by discouraging unauthorized people from entering the school.
Only problem is, there has not been a school shooting I know if that was not perpetrated by a student who is authorized to be at that school.
Same thing with airplanes. "Ha ha, you dumb terrorists! Now you have to prove you bought the ticket to get on the airplane!" I'm sure this inconveniences them much more than it inconveniences me when getting on an airplane. In fact, I bet it inconveniences them so much that they would scrub years or decades of planning. Sure, I get on an airplane once every couple months, and it hasn't made life too much harder for me, but somehow it's magically different for terrorists.
Given that broadcasters run the gamot from large TV networks to small community radio stations, I think that this proportional fining is still not proportional.
I would much rather see proportional fining implemented as a range of percentages of some measure of the violator's financial status. (income, worth, something.)
It's why we need much smarter credit cards. Under the current system, all you need to fake a credit card is its number, person's name, and expiration date - all of which are read every time you use the card.
We need to update cards to include some type of authentication that includes a code that will work only once, and have the information required to generate new codes be encoded in the card in such a way that it is all but impossible to read those values back out of it. That way, you have to physically lose your card for someone else to be able to use it.
Or in some other way make it so that you can make purchases without having to give some random jerk all the information he needs to clean you out.
Grandparent wasn't talking about file formats. Similarly, I was talking about Microsoft deliberately making early versions of Windows not work with a competitor's DOS, and making their version of DOS not work with GEM, and so on and so on. It's not a matter of simple incompatibilities - in each of these cases, the software was designed to detect whether or not it was working with Microsoft software or not, and then behave poorly if it was working with a competitor's software. It wasn't an issue of compatibility - if you tricked Windows into thinking it was running in MS-DOS, it would behave perfectly, because the alarm that would make it not work never got tripped.
Given Microsoft's history of deliberately making their products not work with other companies' products at least once every couple of years, I wouldn't be inclined to think it's a coincidence at all.
I would suggest that any move that Microsoft makes to combat piracy is a shot in its own foot.
The simple fact of the matter is that Microsoft software, compared to its competitors, is far and away the most expensive desktop software ever. Most people I know who pirate Windows do so because they simply can't afford to buy a copy. Granted, that's not many people since Windows comes with the computer, but I can say that I only know two people who have paid for their copies of MS Office - everyone else either pirates it or uses OpenOffice because they aren't at liberty to drop over half a week's pay on it. And in college I didn't know a single person who actually paid for a legal copy of VisualStudio - the unscrupulous pirated, and the scrupulous moved to *nix.
Which leads me to my point - if Microsoft tightens Windows down too much, people are going to start thinking, "Holy shit, this is expensive, and I'm sick of hunting for friends with Windows CDs. Hey, my Mac using friend never has to reinstall his OS, and a Mac Mini only costs an extra two hundred. .." If Microsoft tightens down on Office too much, people just go to OO.o. And if Microsoft tightens down on VisualStudio much at all, the start hemmorhaging future developers - their lifeblood, since application support is (I think) the core of Windows's market dominance - over to Linux and OS X, where the dev tools come for free with the OS.
I honestly don't think Microsoft is free to get too strict with its licensing policies. Piracy is the only thing that is keeping skads of mildly dissatisfied people in their camp where they might not be contributing to M$'s coffers directly, but they aren't working against Microsoft's stranglehold on the market, either.
Gads, I'm annoyed that FireWire can't seem to catch on with PC users. I realize that it's mostly because most PCs castrate FireWire by using the 4-pin version, but I would seriously be after 6-pin firewire in a PC. With how much I travel for work and how much crap I already have, the fact that I can use one less cable for every device that I have which is FireWire rather than USB, combined with not having to carry a hub with me everywhere (daisychaining), and I don't see why FireWire isn't more popular.
Besides, FireWire 800 just kicks ass. I mean, I know that I'm a special case since I have to push tens of gigabytes around on a daily basis, but my god, 800mbit is just so awesome. And I don't even need to buy an expensive Fiber Channel card to do it!
For me, it's that I consider myself a Capitalist rather than a Monopolist. The guys who thought up capitalist economic theory did _NOT_ have the USA's current economy in mind when they thought of capitalism, and many of them even wrote about the need for people to be vigilant because of the constant danger of a capitalist economy turning into a monopolist or oligopolist economy like we have now.
I honestly believe that a true capitalism is better for consumers. You don't have monopolies like Microsoft stifling innovation and price-gouging. You don't have cartels like the RIAA stifling innovation and price-gouging. You don't have oligopolies like the big cable TV providers stifling innovation and price-gouging.
I much prefer the video game market of the early 1990s, where there were lots of games being put out by small start-ups, and they could get attention. The simple fact of the matter was there was a lot of variety on the market because you had a lot of people taking risks to try to break into the market rather than a lot of people churning out the same tired old shite in order to protect their market dominance.
As for your crap about helping disadvantaged youths, how do you think they got to be disadvantaged? Maybe because the middle class works for chicken-feed at massive companies like EA, and their relatively low income drives down the price of low-income services and such, which drives down the pay of the parents of those disadvantaged kids. Or maybe because big companies like EA like to work with as few employees as possible, which increases unemployment and competition for other jobs, which drops pay, which also leads to those disadvantaged kids being poor.
As a TiVo user and someone who has seen Cable DVR, here's what I can tell you:
Compared to TiVo, Cable-provided DVR just plain sucks. The interfaces are generally nightmarish, and they are lacking featuers that TiVo has. The difference is so great that I dropped digital cable shortly after getting a TiVo. I mainly had digital cable for the channel guide, but the channel guide on TiVo is so vastly superior to the one that comes with digital cable in every way, that I fail to get any real value for my money with digital cable anymore.
Given that the cable company provided ones had plenty of time to sit back, take a look at TiVo, and consider what they would improve and what they wonldn't, and that they quite obviously didn't do this, I think it is quite obvious that Comcast et al have no interest in providing a superior product. They simply plan on letting vendor lock-in win the day in this market.
I think that TiVo is a better buy than people realize, too. Going back to digital cable, it cost me about 13 bucks a month to get digital cable. Digital cable is a product that provides you with a channel guide, video on demand, and a solution to the "nothing's on" problem in the form of a huge mess of channels with lower quality programming.
TiVo gives you a channel guide, a sort of video on demand in the form of playing back stuff you've recorded, and a solution to the "nothing's on" problem in the form of being able to record stuff on the channels you already have at times when you can't normally watch TV.
In that respect, digital cable brought me about 60 or 70 per cent more content, while TiVo more than quadrupled the amount of content that is available to me. For the same price. With overall higher quality additional content, too.
There have already been opening salvos of FUD fired at the Open Source movement for not having a "certified" credential system for contributing programmers and writers.
I can give anyone a certificate right now. Just give me some scrap paper and a green crayon, and I'll certify you for anything. Heck, I'll even ask you a few lame questions first to make sure you're qualified.
And that's about how I'll feel about certificates for as long as there are VeriSign certificates for spyware companies, MCSEs, and the like.
On-click popups annoy me, anyway. If I want a webpage to open in a new window or a new tab, I have key combinations designed to do that for me. If I want it to open in the same window, I have a click for that, two. I would prefer if webmasters wrote webpages that respect my wishes about what window a page appears in.
These on-click ads are just the final straw in convincing me that a webpage should never be allowed to open new windows.
If Firefox doesn't quickly add a feature to block all on-click popups except for websites that I specifically allow to do it, I'll likely be hacking the feature in myself.
It is them trying to say they've changed when they haven't. It takes more fossil fuel (and creates more emissions) to keep a hydrogen fuel cell car on the road than it does to keep a normal gasoline car on the road. The only reason hydrogen fuel cells are being pushed so hard is because it is the only change anyone has suggested that doesn't require the energy industry to make any overly large changes to their business model. The hydrogen future is a future where we will still be pumping oil out of the ground and burning it at an ever-increasing rate until we finally run out and end up royally fucked. (It certainly helps that the vast majority of Americans don't know the law of conservation of energy or the second law of thermodynamics when it comes to getting them to believe all this bullshit, too.)
If folks were really interested in making cars cleaner, maybe they would pay attention to the research showing a few simple changes you can make to a diesel engine and its exhaust system to make a diesel car cleaner and more fuel efficient than a gas-electric hybrid. There would also be some more interest put into biodiesel.
If folks were really interested in being environmentally responsible, they would be moving the hell out of the suburbs and living in cities so they can sell their cars, take the bus or the train, walk to the grocery that's only two blocks away, and ride bikes to work. That simple change is going to do more for your childrens' future than all the hydrogen powered SUVs in the world.
Is the 'retail price' they charge really the retail price, and, if so, is this the price Blockbuster is charging in their store, or the price that the most expensive video store in town is charging? Or is it the price that Blockbuster pays for the video, which is probably upwards of $100? I figure Blockbuster can take advantage of the fact that they are a retailer to set their 'retail price' at whatever they want.
I'm just remembering when I was a kid and had rented a video game from Blockbuster, and my dog tore up the crappy photocopy of the manual. They charged my parents $100 for that photocopy.
There are also a lot more things you can do with physical devices than you can do with a GUI.
There is not a single widget that annoys me more than the twisty-knob, and the only reason I can see for its existence is that some UI people who spend more time talking about how to use computers than they do using computers think that we need to have twisty-knob widgets because real devices have jog dials and volume knobs and the like.
The "UI should mimic real life" idea was obviously designed by people who don't realize just how different "four articulated fingers with an opposable thumb" is from "tiny little clicky arrow."
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Heh, I think maybe the idea of ECT being so drastic goes back to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
That scene is the only image I can think of that would make me think that ECT is less invasive than opening your head (even a little bit) and sticking things in your brain.
I rate how productive I feel on an OS based on how much effort it takes to do simple tasks and to jack around with the filesystem - everything else is more a question of applications. (Yeah yeah, I know that the culture provides different experiences with the apps, too, but I have enough of a problem with keyboard dysentery withou having to talk about that, too.)
I regularly work with OS X, Windows, KDE, and WindowMaker, and here is what I think of the first three. (For the sake of disclosure, I was definite Mac hater three years ago, I have had vague feelings of annoyance with Windows going back at least 7 years, and I have never been a fan of Gnome or KDE - I use WindowMaker on my home PC.)
On Windows, it takes a lot of effort to do simple things. Even bringing up an extra Explorer window seems to take a lot of time, because I can't seem to find a good keyboard command or menu item for it. (If there are, Windows fails at making them easy to find.) Navigating the filesystem takes time, because there doesn't seem to be a way to make the places I go most accessible from anywhere. "My Computer" seems to be in a different place (sometimes the Start menu, sometimes the desktop) on every @#$@% computer in the office. Functionality is hidden in random places, and menu items seem to never be hidden under the most appropriate menu. I can't drag and drop things I think I should logically be able to drag and drop, and the alt-tab twitcher completely fails to allow me to switch between applications quickly and seamlessly. Worst of all, it pops up dialogs for things that I don't think should require dialog pop-ups - I hate it when I eject my USB key (which takes too many clicks) and go back to some task (which takes too many clicks) and am just starting to re-orient my attention when Windows throws it all away by throwing up a dialog that tells me my USB key has been unmounted and requires a click to close. The overall effect makes me feel like Windows is hell-bent on wasting my time a second or two at a time and slowly destroying my ability to concentrate.
KDE and GNOME aren't much better. In fact, they're worse - they feel a lot like Windows, only even more disorganized, less consistent, and less logically arranged. The file managers are all half-implemented, and drag-and-drop is barely given a nod. It doesn't help that I find myself constantly dropping to the command line to do simple things that should have an easy GUI equivalent - kill and ps, for example.
OS X isn't perfect, but it's shangri-la compared to the rest. I love that document-oriented apps give you an icon in the window's title bar that acts as a proxy for the file that is open in that window, meaning I can send a document I'm working on to someone else via e-mail without having to waste my time hunting for it in the filesystem. There are keyboard commands for EVERYTHING, and it is easy to find them, I love that. The shelf is a thing of beauty - I think that it is a bit half-implemented, but it's far and away better than anything that any other popular GUI can provide. Expose took some getting used to, but now I can say that it rocks my butt off, and I miss it when I am using other OSes. (I used to use Codetek VirtualDesktop. I still run it, but I rarely use it unless I decide that I need to grab a clean sandbox real quick.) The Dock isn't without its problems either (its handling of placing files in the Dock is just completely broken), but it crams a lot of useful information into a small space, and takes a lot less staring and thinking to figure out what you want to know from it than a taskbar. It doesn't tell you about individual windows, and I have grown to like that - when I work, my mental state tree goes application first, window second, and OS X follows this mental flow. Besides, the window I want is usually on the top of the display after I click on an app's icon, because it is usually the window in that app that I was using the most recently. By contrast, the Windows Taskbar feels like it is jumping the gun. And when I want a window instead of an app, I use Expose, and it's easier and faster than having to deal with the taskbar, which gets real cluttered real fast.
I had a non-technical manager that can either be the best or the worst boss in the world.
He's the best boss in the world when he recognizes that he lacks knowledge of important details needed to make a lot of decisions, and doesn't make decisions without consulting his employees and considering our advice first.
But he is terrible when a decision comes up that involves something that he thinks he knows, so he starts ignoring the advice of people who know much better. It's pretty much the usual, "No, let's use FileMaker Pro because it says right here on the box that version 7.0 not supports true relational joins, can handle millions of records in a table, and works as an ODBC data source." type thing.
No, it makes sense to me. It means that you have a lighter load on the (already overloaded for the number of people managing it) airport security system, which I'm sure makes the airlines safer in an indirect way - much more so than a lot of other things they do for 'security."
It reminds me of when my town's high school started making kids wear their sudent ID's around their necks in response to Columbine, with the stated purpose of trying to prevent such a situation in our town by discouraging unauthorized people from entering the school.
Only problem is, there has not been a school shooting I know if that was not perpetrated by a student who is authorized to be at that school.
Same thing with airplanes. "Ha ha, you dumb terrorists! Now you have to prove you bought the ticket to get on the airplane!" I'm sure this inconveniences them much more than it inconveniences me when getting on an airplane. In fact, I bet it inconveniences them so much that they would scrub years or decades of planning. Sure, I get on an airplane once every couple months, and it hasn't made life too much harder for me, but somehow it's magically different for terrorists.
But guh-noo-slash-lih-nucks makes it sound like there's some new FSF distribution called Slash Linux!
You pronounce the G? Then what's this "New Linux" I keep hearing about all the time?
In the end a gnu, a penguin and a daemon can sometimes be noisy neighbourghs, but in the end they stick together to defend their building.
They may be friends, but that doesn't change the fact that nobody has a &@$% clue how to pronounce 'gnu'.
Given that broadcasters run the gamot from large TV networks to small community radio stations, I think that this proportional fining is still not proportional.
I would much rather see proportional fining implemented as a range of percentages of some measure of the violator's financial status. (income, worth, something.)
It's why we need much smarter credit cards. Under the current system, all you need to fake a credit card is its number, person's name, and expiration date - all of which are read every time you use the card.
We need to update cards to include some type of authentication that includes a code that will work only once, and have the information required to generate new codes be encoded in the card in such a way that it is all but impossible to read those values back out of it. That way, you have to physically lose your card for someone else to be able to use it.
Or in some other way make it so that you can make purchases without having to give some random jerk all the information he needs to clean you out.
Grandparent wasn't talking about file formats. Similarly, I was talking about Microsoft deliberately making early versions of Windows not work with a competitor's DOS, and making their version of DOS not work with GEM, and so on and so on. It's not a matter of simple incompatibilities - in each of these cases, the software was designed to detect whether or not it was working with Microsoft software or not, and then behave poorly if it was working with a competitor's software. It wasn't an issue of compatibility - if you tricked Windows into thinking it was running in MS-DOS, it would behave perfectly, because the alarm that would make it not work never got tripped.
Given Microsoft's history of deliberately making their products not work with other companies' products at least once every couple of years, I wouldn't be inclined to think it's a coincidence at all.
Heh, they lost me and a few of my friends to Linux long before I started formally studying how to program.
But I would love to see Microsoft start giving free copies of VisualStudio to high school freshmen.
I would suggest that any move that Microsoft makes to combat piracy is a shot in its own foot.
." If Microsoft tightens down on Office too much, people just go to OO.o. And if Microsoft tightens down on VisualStudio much at all, the start hemmorhaging future developers - their lifeblood, since application support is (I think) the core of Windows's market dominance - over to Linux and OS X, where the dev tools come for free with the OS.
The simple fact of the matter is that Microsoft software, compared to its competitors, is far and away the most expensive desktop software ever. Most people I know who pirate Windows do so because they simply can't afford to buy a copy. Granted, that's not many people since Windows comes with the computer, but I can say that I only know two people who have paid for their copies of MS Office - everyone else either pirates it or uses OpenOffice because they aren't at liberty to drop over half a week's pay on it. And in college I didn't know a single person who actually paid for a legal copy of VisualStudio - the unscrupulous pirated, and the scrupulous moved to *nix.
Which leads me to my point - if Microsoft tightens Windows down too much, people are going to start thinking, "Holy shit, this is expensive, and I'm sick of hunting for friends with Windows CDs. Hey, my Mac using friend never has to reinstall his OS, and a Mac Mini only costs an extra two hundred. .
I honestly don't think Microsoft is free to get too strict with its licensing policies. Piracy is the only thing that is keeping skads of mildly dissatisfied people in their camp where they might not be contributing to M$'s coffers directly, but they aren't working against Microsoft's stranglehold on the market, either.
Gads, I'm annoyed that FireWire can't seem to catch on with PC users. I realize that it's mostly because most PCs castrate FireWire by using the 4-pin version, but I would seriously be after 6-pin firewire in a PC. With how much I travel for work and how much crap I already have, the fact that I can use one less cable for every device that I have which is FireWire rather than USB, combined with not having to carry a hub with me everywhere (daisychaining), and I don't see why FireWire isn't more popular.
Besides, FireWire 800 just kicks ass. I mean, I know that I'm a special case since I have to push tens of gigabytes around on a daily basis, but my god, 800mbit is just so awesome. And I don't even need to buy an expensive Fiber Channel card to do it!
For me, it's that I consider myself a Capitalist rather than a Monopolist. The guys who thought up capitalist economic theory did _NOT_ have the USA's current economy in mind when they thought of capitalism, and many of them even wrote about the need for people to be vigilant because of the constant danger of a capitalist economy turning into a monopolist or oligopolist economy like we have now.
I honestly believe that a true capitalism is better for consumers. You don't have monopolies like Microsoft stifling innovation and price-gouging. You don't have cartels like the RIAA stifling innovation and price-gouging. You don't have oligopolies like the big cable TV providers stifling innovation and price-gouging.
I much prefer the video game market of the early 1990s, where there were lots of games being put out by small start-ups, and they could get attention. The simple fact of the matter was there was a lot of variety on the market because you had a lot of people taking risks to try to break into the market rather than a lot of people churning out the same tired old shite in order to protect their market dominance.
As for your crap about helping disadvantaged youths, how do you think they got to be disadvantaged? Maybe because the middle class works for chicken-feed at massive companies like EA, and their relatively low income drives down the price of low-income services and such, which drives down the pay of the parents of those disadvantaged kids. Or maybe because big companies like EA like to work with as few employees as possible, which increases unemployment and competition for other jobs, which drops pay, which also leads to those disadvantaged kids being poor.
As a TiVo user and someone who has seen Cable DVR, here's what I can tell you:
Compared to TiVo, Cable-provided DVR just plain sucks. The interfaces are generally nightmarish, and they are lacking featuers that TiVo has. The difference is so great that I dropped digital cable shortly after getting a TiVo. I mainly had digital cable for the channel guide, but the channel guide on TiVo is so vastly superior to the one that comes with digital cable in every way, that I fail to get any real value for my money with digital cable anymore.
Given that the cable company provided ones had plenty of time to sit back, take a look at TiVo, and consider what they would improve and what they wonldn't, and that they quite obviously didn't do this, I think it is quite obvious that Comcast et al have no interest in providing a superior product. They simply plan on letting vendor lock-in win the day in this market.
I think that TiVo is a better buy than people realize, too. Going back to digital cable, it cost me about 13 bucks a month to get digital cable. Digital cable is a product that provides you with a channel guide, video on demand, and a solution to the "nothing's on" problem in the form of a huge mess of channels with lower quality programming.
TiVo gives you a channel guide, a sort of video on demand in the form of playing back stuff you've recorded, and a solution to the "nothing's on" problem in the form of being able to record stuff on the channels you already have at times when you can't normally watch TV.
In that respect, digital cable brought me about 60 or 70 per cent more content, while TiVo more than quadrupled the amount of content that is available to me. For the same price. With overall higher quality additional content, too.
There have already been opening salvos of FUD fired at the Open Source movement for not having a "certified" credential system for contributing programmers and writers.
I can give anyone a certificate right now. Just give me some scrap paper and a green crayon, and I'll certify you for anything. Heck, I'll even ask you a few lame questions first to make sure you're qualified.
And that's about how I'll feel about certificates for as long as there are VeriSign certificates for spyware companies, MCSEs, and the like.
Being a research participant in the phase 1 human trials for Ritalin probably helped, too.
These guys are slow on the uptake. I think the rest of us had it figured out about the same time E.T. kiled Atari.
On-click popups annoy me, anyway. If I want a webpage to open in a new window or a new tab, I have key combinations designed to do that for me. If I want it to open in the same window, I have a click for that, two. I would prefer if webmasters wrote webpages that respect my wishes about what window a page appears in.
These on-click ads are just the final straw in convincing me that a webpage should never be allowed to open new windows.
If Firefox doesn't quickly add a feature to block all on-click popups except for websites that I specifically allow to do it, I'll likely be hacking the feature in myself.
Still not buying stuff from Amazon.com.
It is them trying to say they've changed when they haven't. It takes more fossil fuel (and creates more emissions) to keep a hydrogen fuel cell car on the road than it does to keep a normal gasoline car on the road. The only reason hydrogen fuel cells are being pushed so hard is because it is the only change anyone has suggested that doesn't require the energy industry to make any overly large changes to their business model. The hydrogen future is a future where we will still be pumping oil out of the ground and burning it at an ever-increasing rate until we finally run out and end up royally fucked. (It certainly helps that the vast majority of Americans don't know the law of conservation of energy or the second law of thermodynamics when it comes to getting them to believe all this bullshit, too.)
If folks were really interested in making cars cleaner, maybe they would pay attention to the research showing a few simple changes you can make to a diesel engine and its exhaust system to make a diesel car cleaner and more fuel efficient than a gas-electric hybrid. There would also be some more interest put into biodiesel.
If folks were really interested in being environmentally responsible, they would be moving the hell out of the suburbs and living in cities so they can sell their cars, take the bus or the train, walk to the grocery that's only two blocks away, and ride bikes to work. That simple change is going to do more for your childrens' future than all the hydrogen powered SUVs in the world.
Is the 'retail price' they charge really the retail price, and, if so, is this the price Blockbuster is charging in their store, or the price that the most expensive video store in town is charging? Or is it the price that Blockbuster pays for the video, which is probably upwards of $100? I figure Blockbuster can take advantage of the fact that they are a retailer to set their 'retail price' at whatever they want.
I'm just remembering when I was a kid and had rented a video game from Blockbuster, and my dog tore up the crappy photocopy of the manual. They charged my parents $100 for that photocopy.
There are also a lot more things you can do with physical devices than you can do with a GUI.
There is not a single widget that annoys me more than the twisty-knob, and the only reason I can see for its existence is that some UI people who spend more time talking about how to use computers than they do using computers think that we need to have twisty-knob widgets because real devices have jog dials and volume knobs and the like.
The "UI should mimic real life" idea was obviously designed by people who don't realize just how different "four articulated fingers with an opposable thumb" is from "tiny little clicky arrow."