sorry, I replied to the ""how do we make Firefox more appealing to non-technical users?" before I continued reading.
introducing some functionality that Internet Explorer doesn't have might be the only way to accomplish that.
Are you kidding? The extensions bring so much extra functionality to the table that there's no comparison. True, the potential for security vulnerabilities increases if you install extensions willy-nilly, but the most popular ones are vetted for security. Perhaps the average browsing public can't grok mouse gestures, but once you start using them it's hard to go back to mousing up to the back button or using the keyboard. The session saving capabilities of Tabmix Plus would become immediately useful once introduced to any user. And if you need IE, there's always IE Tab. ; )
I could go on, but those right there should be enough to convince anybody of all the extra functionality of Firefox.
Myspace is driven and pushed by "old media", not "new media". It is old media's way of saying, well if people must bypass our traditional control over information and content for the internet - let's try to make it our internet and not someone elses.
I'm sorry but this is not accurate. Myspace did a complete end run around the "old media" record companies. There are thousands of artists on there that would never have a shot at traditional distribution that are now leveraging the fact that they can be discovered, heard and shared with others. Perhaps you're refering to News Corp.'s recent acquisition, or the new Wired cover. It's not quite clear.
For example, their obsession with "child predators" as of late probably has little to do with protecting children and everything to do with making sure that their system is fenced off from "that big nasty mean world out there".
I'm not sure if I understand you here. Are you implying that people on myspace don't share links to the rest of the internet?
They are the "bread and circuses" of the information age. Feed em crap, keep em happy, and most of all keep their eyes and ears distracted from political and financial issues of the real world.
I believe this a valid criticism of The Spectacle at large and it's unfair to level this complaint solely at Myspace. I mean really, what distinguishes Myspace from NBC? Or nearly any other facet of popular American culture for that matter. I'm surprised how blindly biased the supposedly scientific Slashdot community is towards Myspace. This is generally without even trying the site out and is often based on a simplified caricature of the typical user profile. It's a meme run amok. Not everyone on the site is in high school.
Well, I'm 27 and I have several friends 28-30 something on the site. I don't use it all too often but is useful to get announcements of local shows, or other bulletins from friends. I also have gotten friend requests from other designers and musicians who share similar interests. It really can be a good networking tool. I would use the site more if the markup wasn't so atrocious and I could export/migrate my data. Ads that hurt my eyeballs and brain aren't a problem thanks to Adblock.
A friend got me to sign up for friendster a few years ago. I never really used it although I did run into a couple of folks I hadn't seen in years. We've now pretty much switched to Myspace but re-entering all the information was an annoyance.
Which brings up the big issue in my head: when will we have an open XML schema so migrating between different sites is a bit more seemless. Sorry, but FOAF and XFN just don't cut it. So far the closest thing I've seen to a workable solution is the XDI initiative(Web 3.0?). The W3C has passed on the proposal so far but I see something like it as an inevitable development of the Net. The closest analogy I can think of at the moment is a turbocharged vCard.
I've been researching Drupal and Wordpress in depth for a while now. These packages can offer many features of Myspace if you install the right modules . . . or you could hold your nose, join myspace and try to make the best of it.
And we really need to get radical governments like Iran, and North Korea to stop wasting their money on arms and military and focus on raising the standard of living in their country.
The same could probably be said about the US. Disclaimer: I am an American
Youngins are extremely fickle but recreating friend lists, repopulating interests, etc. is a tedious and thankless process. People have too much invested in myspace. Now, if there was some type of myspace scraperbot that took your info and friends and ported that info into an open XML doc--that would be cool. I've wished for a while that there was some type of basic standard XML doctype for containing basic profile information and perhaps relationships as well. Then, in much the same way Flickr allows use of its APIs to export albums to other services as long as the other services allow the same, people could migrate across different social networks without losing everything. Different social sites could differentiate themselves with service, layout and perhaps extensions to the basic doctype. Now THAT's web 3.0. Google? Bueller?
And I would like to opt out of national defense spending and interest on the national debt. If this were allowed my tax bill would be considerably less than yours.
a sarcasm meter. oh that's a useful invention. [head esxplodes]
now that I got that out of the way, I just wanted to check and see if your post is completely delusional or intentionally inverted. Seriously, I can't tell. Everything changed after 9/11.
We want to have so much power that the rest of the world is FORCED to follow our lead or pay the price for getting in front.
So basically, you're saying that the US is a greedy bully. Look, I appreciate the advances that military spending has given the general population (DARPA, avionics, TANG) but this is ridiculous. It is this attitude that imperils our safety more than anything. Guerilla techniques render much of our military infrastructure obsolete. Do you think the Chinese don't realize this? I expect since this thread seems to be moderated by the pro-war crowd, this comment will be below the threshhold. It's too bad, because I happen to be right.
BTW, I'm American. I just happen to have a strong grasp of history.
The current group of fanatics we are fighting feels anyone who is not a member of their culture/religion is not worthy to live and must be killed. They would be trying to destroy us even if we stood in the corner with our hands in our pockets, and they are doing this even to people who sympathize with them.
This is complete and utter bullshit. While I imagine there are some fanatics out there who feel that people who are not a member of their culture/religion must be killed, I would wager that a good number of them live in the US. The primary beef folks in the Midle East have with American policy is that we blatantly and unreasonably yield to Israeli policy at the expense of the Arab population. The western world considers the Arab world with general contempt stretching back to the time after WWI when the west drew up borders and established puppet leaderships. The global population in general rejects the strong brand of American superiority and cultural hegemony that is imposed by fiat on what are supposed to be locally-goverened democracies. Funny thing--many Americans are fed up with this too, albeit on subtler levels.
As for the government spending money on R&D and production, every penny of your money the government spends on R&D and production ends up in the paychecks of the employees and shareholders associated with the companies that got the contracts.
Aside from the fact that most of the money for these contracts DOES NOT EVEN EXIST AND IS MERELY DEBT TO BE PASSED ON TO FUTURE GENERATIONS, money could still be spent on R&D for peaceful purposes. You know, things like shelter and food. Buckminster Fuller's vision of a world without material need is a technological possibilty. Unfortunately it's not politically as profitable as war. Profiting from war is a true moral low, but quite beneficial for the Inner Party.
I was just thinking about this subject the other day as I perused the BMG catalog. If you're not familiar, BMG are the folks behind the "Get 11 records free when you purchase one" gimmick. The way they are able to offer this is by licensing the music from the record labels and pressing CDs themselves. You'll see some type of disclaimer printed on the disc to that effect. While I managed to find a number of discs I wanted (sonic youth, ween, helmet . ..) I was dismayed their catalog lacked depth. For instance, I've been listening to some BIlly Cobham lately (a phenomenal drummer sampled by DJ Shadow, Massive Attack and others) and would love it if I could get one of his records through a service like this.
Of course, manufacturing costs would probably be prohibitive for large pressings but with digital distribution and one-off pressing, there's some money to be made. Incidentally, I checked on iTunes music store and was surprised to find a large part of his discography available. To boot, most of the albums were less than $8, a surprise considering I thought all albums were at least 9.99. I also was surprised by their "collections" service, which is a type of curated playlist. The breakbeat collection, at least was fairly extensive. I may wind up going with iTMS but would prefer unencumbered Mp3s. Actually, considering I've already downloaded most of the MP3s, I just wish there was a simple escrow service where I could toss some bucks directly to the artist--consider it a hat on a digital street ; )
. Everytime someone spends several pounds on a copy of the CD, Shakira herself -- the one truly indispensable person in the equation -- receives a few pence out of this money.
I dig what you're saying but you're wrong. I'm not familiar with this track, so I could be wrong, but the producer of the track often has considerable influence over the final product. Additionally, if someone other than Shakira wrote the track, they are also indispensible. Honestly, do you think she is the ONLY person who could sing the music. There are hundreds of others who could do at least as well. Just thought I'd chime in with some perspective.
but I doubt he's using much bandwidth, and it's not COSTING them any extra.
Dude, he's using up a parking place. Probably a parking place right in front of the shop! Maybe it is fair that he assumed, that since he had been parking and surfing for MONTHS, that it was free and OK. However, when the coffee shop employees told him it was NOT OK, he could no longer assume that. It's that simple.
Now patrons have an extra spot available when they visit and don't have to worry about whether that guy out in the car with a laptop is sniffing their traffic.
if your significant other is watching a video about how to boil water on water on youtube i think you should forget about net neutrality and consider filing for divorce.
IIRC, the method for extracting O2 from lunar soil is not quite known yet. Even so, perhaps we should demonstrate, here on earth, that we can produce a biosphere. Perhaps harvesting oxygen out of the soil (or simulated moon soil) in a terra-bound biosphere should come first. GP is correct.
I've got to say I agree with you here. Your follow up post in many ways echoes my own situation. Most likely, your mental "problems" are an acute reaction to your heightened awareness. I find it's best to avoid labeling things as "good" or bad" and simply take action. I might even suggest amending your old saying to this: "Strive for the best. Expect nothing." That's what really matters.
Cheers, and good luck,
J
I agree. I was talking about this late last year, while I worked at a multimedia computer lab at a university. We used the FCP suite, macromedia suite and adobe cs. The thing a lot of people are missing is that Macromedia's Flash video, and video confencing/collaboration software like Breeze are going to be huge. I worked a lot on distance learning apps and finding platform agnostic software like flash to present video simplifies the issue greatly. There are so many problems with Quicktime and WMP (end users don't have one or the other, or have the wrong version, etc.) that Flash's >90% penetration mitigate. Additionally, Flash provides the opportunity to integrate chat and other features in a coherent interface ( not that Flash developers have the greatest penchance for coherence;) It would be interesting to see Apple roll out simpler, iLife versions of some of Macrodobia's design products while maintaining the full suites for pro users a la Final Cut Pro. Perhaps make iPhoto a little more robust at image editing, like Photoshop Elements.
I could go on more about this, but I've got to run. Perhaps I'll elaborate more later. Just remember: Education is the key.
The amazing thing about modern society is that it hasn't produced more great art with more people, it's just produced more junk to get in the way.
While modern society has certainly produced more junk, I believe it's disingenuous to say that there isn't an astonishing amount of "good" art these days. Regardless of your taste, there are at least hundreds of people out there making something you will aesthetically appreciate. I doubt this was the case even a hundred years ago.
I can't say I'm terribly surprised by the negative response to the parent's question, but I do know that such knee-jerk responses are an automatic admission that the previous posters have decided that they will be not be thought workers of the future. Oh well . . .
Slashdot Mirror
you smoke crack. you snort coke.
ps- i am not a crack addict
introducing some functionality that Internet Explorer doesn't have might be the only way to accomplish that.
Are you kidding? The extensions bring so much extra functionality to the table that there's no comparison. True, the potential for security vulnerabilities increases if you install extensions willy-nilly, but the most popular ones are vetted for security. Perhaps the average browsing public can't grok mouse gestures, but once you start using them it's hard to go back to mousing up to the back button or using the keyboard. The session saving capabilities of Tabmix Plus would become immediately useful once introduced to any user. And if you need IE, there's always IE Tab. ; )
I could go on, but those right there should be enough to convince anybody of all the extra functionality of Firefox.
Oh, and if you want to Myspace . . .
Having it bundled and configured as the default browser on OEM computer sales would help ;)
I'm sorry but this is not accurate. Myspace did a complete end run around the "old media" record companies. There are thousands of artists on there that would never have a shot at traditional distribution that are now leveraging the fact that they can be discovered, heard and shared with others. Perhaps you're refering to News Corp.'s recent acquisition, or the new Wired cover. It's not quite clear.
For example, their obsession with "child predators" as of late probably has little to do with protecting children and everything to do with making sure that their system is fenced off from "that big nasty mean world out there".
I'm not sure if I understand you here. Are you implying that people on myspace don't share links to the rest of the internet?
They are the "bread and circuses" of the information age. Feed em crap, keep em happy, and most of all keep their eyes and ears distracted from political and financial issues of the real world.
I believe this a valid criticism of The Spectacle at large and it's unfair to level this complaint solely at Myspace. I mean really, what distinguishes Myspace from NBC? Or nearly any other facet of popular American culture for that matter. I'm surprised how blindly biased the supposedly scientific Slashdot community is towards Myspace. This is generally without even trying the site out and is often based on a simplified caricature of the typical user profile. It's a meme run amok. Not everyone on the site is in high school.
Keep that behavior up and you'll probably find yourself alone on the "real" internet.
Weird eh?Strange indeed.
A friend got me to sign up for friendster a few years ago. I never really used it although I did run into a couple of folks I hadn't seen in years. We've now pretty much switched to Myspace but re-entering all the information was an annoyance.
Which brings up the big issue in my head: when will we have an open XML schema so migrating between different sites is a bit more seemless. Sorry, but FOAF and XFN just don't cut it. So far the closest thing I've seen to a workable solution is the XDI initiative(Web 3.0?). The W3C has passed on the proposal so far but I see something like it as an inevitable development of the Net. The closest analogy I can think of at the moment is a turbocharged vCard.
I've been researching Drupal and Wordpress in depth for a while now. These packages can offer many features of Myspace if you install the right modules . . . or you could hold your nose, join myspace and try to make the best of it.
The same could probably be said about the US. Disclaimer: I am an American
nah . . . it's not quite the same.
Youngins are extremely fickle but recreating friend lists, repopulating interests, etc. is a tedious and thankless process. People have too much invested in myspace. Now, if there was some type of myspace scraperbot that took your info and friends and ported that info into an open XML doc--that would be cool. I've wished for a while that there was some type of basic standard XML doctype for containing basic profile information and perhaps relationships as well. Then, in much the same way Flickr allows use of its APIs to export albums to other services as long as the other services allow the same, people could migrate across different social networks without losing everything. Different social sites could differentiate themselves with service, layout and perhaps extensions to the basic doctype. Now THAT's web 3.0. Google? Bueller?
And the new fear--illegal immigrants.
And I would like to opt out of national defense spending and interest on the national debt. If this were allowed my tax bill would be considerably less than yours.
now that I got that out of the way, I just wanted to check and see if your post is completely delusional or intentionally inverted. Seriously, I can't tell. Everything changed after 9/11.
So basically, you're saying that the US is a greedy bully. Look, I appreciate the advances that military spending has given the general population (DARPA, avionics, TANG) but this is ridiculous. It is this attitude that imperils our safety more than anything. Guerilla techniques render much of our military infrastructure obsolete. Do you think the Chinese don't realize this? I expect since this thread seems to be moderated by the pro-war crowd, this comment will be below the threshhold. It's too bad, because I happen to be right.
BTW, I'm American. I just happen to have a strong grasp of history.
This is complete and utter bullshit. While I imagine there are some fanatics out there who feel that people who are not a member of their culture/religion must be killed, I would wager that a good number of them live in the US. The primary beef folks in the Midle East have with American policy is that we blatantly and unreasonably yield to Israeli policy at the expense of the Arab population. The western world considers the Arab world with general contempt stretching back to the time after WWI when the west drew up borders and established puppet leaderships. The global population in general rejects the strong brand of American superiority and cultural hegemony that is imposed by fiat on what are supposed to be locally-goverened democracies. Funny thing--many Americans are fed up with this too, albeit on subtler levels.
As for the government spending money on R&D and production, every penny of your money the government spends on R&D and production ends up in the paychecks of the employees and shareholders associated with the companies that got the contracts.
Aside from the fact that most of the money for these contracts DOES NOT EVEN EXIST AND IS MERELY DEBT TO BE PASSED ON TO FUTURE GENERATIONS, money could still be spent on R&D for peaceful purposes. You know, things like shelter and food. Buckminster Fuller's vision of a world without material need is a technological possibilty. Unfortunately it's not politically as profitable as war. Profiting from war is a true moral low, but quite beneficial for the Inner Party.
Of course, manufacturing costs would probably be prohibitive for large pressings but with digital distribution and one-off pressing, there's some money to be made. Incidentally, I checked on iTunes music store and was surprised to find a large part of his discography available. To boot, most of the albums were less than $8, a surprise considering I thought all albums were at least 9.99. I also was surprised by their "collections" service, which is a type of curated playlist. The breakbeat collection, at least was fairly extensive. I may wind up going with iTMS but would prefer unencumbered Mp3s. Actually, considering I've already downloaded most of the MP3s, I just wish there was a simple escrow service where I could toss some bucks directly to the artist--consider it a hat on a digital street ; )
Dude, he's using up a parking place. Probably a parking place right in front of the shop! Maybe it is fair that he assumed, that since he had been parking and surfing for MONTHS, that it was free and OK. However, when the coffee shop employees told him it was NOT OK, he could no longer assume that. It's that simple.
Now patrons have an extra spot available when they visit and don't have to worry about whether that guy out in the car with a laptop is sniffing their traffic.
if your significant other is watching a video about how to boil water on water on youtube i think you should forget about net neutrality and consider filing for divorce.
IIRC, the method for extracting O2 from lunar soil is not quite known yet. Even so, perhaps we should demonstrate, here on earth, that we can produce a biosphere. Perhaps harvesting oxygen out of the soil (or simulated moon soil) in a terra-bound biosphere should come first. GP is correct.
I've got to say I agree with you here. Your follow up post in many ways echoes my own situation. Most likely, your mental "problems" are an acute reaction to your heightened awareness. I find it's best to avoid labeling things as "good" or bad" and simply take action. I might even suggest amending your old saying to this: "Strive for the best. Expect nothing." That's what really matters. Cheers, and good luck, J
link to pics,plz ; )
. . . until next year. : )
I could go on more about this, but I've got to run. Perhaps I'll elaborate more later. Just remember: Education is the key.
While modern society has certainly produced more junk, I believe it's disingenuous to say that there isn't an astonishing amount of "good" art these days. Regardless of your taste, there are at least hundreds of people out there making something you will aesthetically appreciate. I doubt this was the case even a hundred years ago.
I can't say I'm terribly surprised by the negative response to the parent's question, but I do know that such knee-jerk responses are an automatic admission that the previous posters have decided that they will be not be thought workers of the future. Oh well . . .