It's probably safe to assume you are just a bit more tech saavy than your average office worker. Changes that seem minor or trivial to the majority of people that read slashdot are things that would very likely throw your average user for a loop.
Good luck searching the site. Unless I'm missing something on how to use their search engine, the results are wildly inaccurate on some searches.
I did a search by artist for "Tool", and it says it found more than 50 matches which struck me as somewhat odd. Clicking "See top 50 matches" returns a list headed by ZZ Top and that includes Tom Jones, Jelly Roll Morton, and 47 other artists that come nowhere close to matching what I searched for. I'll grant some of them have "to" in their names, but if I wanted to search for "to" I would have. I also searched by album for "Aenima" which produced similarly horrible results.
Now, I'll admit that I didn't expect Wal-mart's online store to carry Tool, but I do expect a search by artist to return either results with Tool actually in the name or no results at all. If they want to include things they feel are "close", then they should state so clearly somewhere and not claim they actually matched what I was searching for when they clearly didn't.
Despite some issues with the search facilities, I do like the simplicity of the store front.
Madonna did start her own record label. Plenty of other artists have too, although I doubt they are much different than the big boys when it comes to contracts and what not. It's a business, and everybody is out to get whatever they can.
What exactly is the legal burden for proof of child pornography? I mean some of the cases they mentioned were obvious if he had pictures and movies of babies, but in cases where the subject looks to be in the 13-14 year old range. Is it enough that they look that age, or is there some burden to prove that they are indeed underage?
Walter Nowakowski, 33, of Delhi, is charged with two counts of possession of child pornography, accessing child porn, distributing child porn, and making child porn for allegedly burning images onto CDs. He's also charged with theft of communications.
On another note, I found it kind of odd that they could charge him for "making child porn" for burning the stuff to CDs. Even distribution doesn't seem to follow without some proof that he was distributing those CDs or had plans to do so, perhaps he had multiple copies of each CD.
I think the problem with the article is that the title is the typical sensationalistic title stuck on stories.
With everybody raving about the iPod being the end all be all for portable music players, I think pointing out that it might not suit some people is a reasonable article to write. Each alternative he points out may be worse than the iPod on a whole, but not everybody is looking for the same things in a portable player. If my primary reason for buying a portable music player is to be able to listen to music without access to a recharger for the unit for 15 hours straight and that need outweighs everything else a player has to offer, then the iPod in its current format doesn't fit my needs and something like the Dell player does. That's what he's saying. I don't think it's a negative view of the iPod, it's just pointing out that some specialized needs are not met by the iPod and giving people the alternatives that meet those needs.
After reading further, I can see where the ambiguity you are referring to comes in. I found another article here. But it really doesn't seem to clear up whether the device will be branded MS or not. Although the following would lead me to believe it will be:
Portable Media Center, Microsoft's answer to Apple's iPod digital music player, will be able to play MP3 files as well as audio and video content recorded in Microsoft's own digital format.
The devices, which will be built by various manufacturers, including Tatung, Creative Technology, Sanyo Electric, and Samsung Electronics, are set to hit store shelves during the second half 2004, Microsoft said.
The first statement seems to indicate an MS device, although the inclusion of multiple manufacturers a few of whom already have offerings in the market seems to cloud the intent a bit.
The italisized text is directly from the article. Unless they are using the word devices in a very odd way, then Microsoft devices would seem to be pretty clearly hardware.
I understand what you are saying, but produce the same situation for Linux as OS X has and then see if you have problems. With OS X, you either had a machine custom built by Apple to run with Apple's OS or you bought one. Now, to my knowledge there is no Linux distribution offering custom built computers, but you could sit down and build a machine based on hardware that you know Linux supports well. Then you'd have a fair situation to compare it to if you still had problems.
LOL, nice link. I can almost feel your frustration.
Look on the bright side, it's a LOT better than the export to HTML feature in MS Publisher. I dealt with a customer one time who was wondering why her pages were loading so slow. Turns out it was producing pages in excess of 1 meg that could all be reduced to something in the neighborhood of 100k. Truly a scary experience.
I can kind of see it for HBO in that it's a promotion of upcoming/current programs generally. I've never quite understood why Time Warner Cable will advertise on their cable service. I'm pretty sure the payment I send to them each month will keep me from forgetting them, and I don't see how flashing their name up on the screen could really disuade people from leaving them. I'm sure there's some benefit to it that I'm totally missing though.
Efficiency in terms of speed of production it is fine in. Presentation is what I was referring to with that comment. It wasn't meant to be as sweeping as it may have sounded. I'm not saying nothing good can come from Frontpage, but Frontpage attracts a lot of first time web page creators or people who are just looking to churn out a quick page for something, and the majority of those pages tend to be pretty bad from a presentation stand point for obvious reasons. You don't have as many novices or quick fix types messing around with tools like Dreamweaver although it happens.
As for the extraneous markup (and recent versions of FP may have improved upon this), you are right in most cases it won't make a difference, I just don't really like having extraneous information in HTML if I'm going to bother writing it, and every little bit helps if you're dealing with dial-up customers.
Frontpage is great for what it is, which is a dumbed down web development tool. That's not meant to call someone dumb for using it, but it is what it is. It allows novices to easily create (generally bad) web content. I won't argue that doing it the handwritten way is more efficient, but it usually is better if you actually look at the content produced. Most WYSIWYG editors add a lot of uncessary tags into what they produce which just results in larger pages which isn't a desireable effect for a web page. That's something you generally don't see with pages handwritten by somebody that has a clue.
I'm all for user-friendly tools, but generally, people have their reasons for not using the ones that are available.
Sorry I didn't catch the joke. There are a lot of zealots on/., and most of them are quite serious when they make statements like "x is the only reasonable choice". Anyway, sorry if I took your comment in the wrong light.
In all seriousness, you honestly believe that Windows serves you better?
I don't believe it I KNOW it. I've messed around with the alternatives, and they all come up lacking for me. I'll grant that's at least partially due to my comfort with Windows, but that's not something I'm going to discount for the sake of fairness. If it suits me then it suits me. I actually used a Linux desktop for a few years exclusively on my home computer, and I went back to Windows b/c I got tired of always fucking with configurations to get things the way I wanted. I dual boot Gentoo now, but frankly, things seem so patchwork that it bothers me. Running KDE I've got a lot of nice KDE apps at my disposal, but I always end up finding a need for something that only Gnome has a mature answer for, or visa versa if I run Gnome. They have at least gotten a lot of the old configuration problems out of the way, I don't have to spend hours messing with text files anymore, but they still need some polishing. That said, I do boot into Linux for a good bit of development work because it provides a similar platform to what my web applications will be running in. The Mac desktop has ALWAYS felt counter intuitive to me despite what everybody seems to claim. OS X is the first time I've considered it a serious alternative, but I've already got a laptop, and OS X won't run on it, so it's not viable for me due to that.
That not having to update your OS's security holes five times a week and constantly sorting out what e-mails are good and what are viruses doesn't count as a beneficial "thing"?
Well, there's this crazy thing called Windows Update that will actually download updates automatically. It handles all those updates without much effort. Viruses in email aren't a problem for anybody who uses a decent mail client and has some common sense. I haven't had a virus on my computer in probably 5 years or more, and when I did have one it was b/c of something stupid that I installed.
Mac's are beautiful machines, and their operating system is extremely nice as well. That said, it is not the end all be all answer for everybody. Some people have used alternatives and *gasp* continue to use Windows. Whether it be for something as "unfair" as familiarity or lack of a certain application or for any number of reasons, it is their choice and a perfectly valid one. It gets old hearing "you need a Mac" everytime I turn around because no I really don't.
# Easier access to IO - just try it in Java and see. It's much faster in C#
I'm not the original poster obviously, but I THINK he's referring to coding speed when he says it's faster given the first part of that statement. I don't code in either language, so I have no idea if that's actually the case.
The rest of the comments you address are basically referencing language tools. I understand where you are coming from with all your points, but the thread was started by somebody asking about language use. In a discussion regarding language use, I think the tools available i.e. libraries, help systems, IDEs, etc. all become very relevant to the discussion as they all play a role in the use of the language.
Did Apple really open source the code behind their desktop environment? I didn't realize they had.
Regardless, while open source is very nice from the perspective of geeks and developers, at best it is a very small part of customer satisfaction. Mom and pop could care less if they can sift through thousands of lines of code, for that matter, the vast majority of Linux users will probably never touch the code behind their chosen operating system. It's nice to have that possibility, but customer satisfaction is really built more on listening to customers and trying to give them what they want. I think Apple does a pretty good job of that with OS X.
I'm not so sure that Microsoft's breakup would have the effect you seem to think. The division would probably fall along the lines of the OS, applications, consoles, etc. So you'd still have a company behind Windows, which is still going to maintain it's market share by a wide margin. You'd have the applications company that would have MS Office which isn't going anywhere. XBox without the backing of the large MS pockets might die if they are still selling systems at a loss, but all that will do is piss off some gamers and strengthen Sony's share. So I'm not really seeing where the huge change would come from at least in respect to the major markets that MS has a stranglehold on.
If I recall, Apple made the choice to sell hardware and have their OS run on only their hardware. I don't think it was a matter of technical merit. Regardless of whether it was or not, not creating something that would run on that commodity hardware you mention was a decision that almost killed Apple and in turn created the big boy on the block that is now MS.
So yes, if having a nice GUI means alienating the vast majority of your potential customer base then it's a poor marketing decision. I think Apple's financial history backs that up.
I don't think the Xerox and DEC were aimed at the consumer market which is really what the original poster is talking about when he's refering to first to market. In that case, Apple and Microsoft are the only ones that need to be mentioned from that timeline.
Citing from books becomes plagiarism if you do not credit the source of the citation. In that case, this database could come in fairly handy for discovering said instances.
According to this, Apple was first to market with their first version of MacOS. I think Microsoft's success stems more from poor early marketing decisions by Apple combined with questionable business tactics by Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
It's probably safe to assume you are just a bit more tech saavy than your average office worker. Changes that seem minor or trivial to the majority of people that read slashdot are things that would very likely throw your average user for a loop.
Good luck searching the site. Unless I'm missing something on how to use their search engine, the results are wildly inaccurate on some searches.
I did a search by artist for "Tool", and it says it found more than 50 matches which struck me as somewhat odd. Clicking "See top 50 matches" returns a list headed by ZZ Top and that includes Tom Jones, Jelly Roll Morton, and 47 other artists that come nowhere close to matching what I searched for. I'll grant some of them have "to" in their names, but if I wanted to search for "to" I would have. I also searched by album for "Aenima" which produced similarly horrible results.
Now, I'll admit that I didn't expect Wal-mart's online store to carry Tool, but I do expect a search by artist to return either results with Tool actually in the name or no results at all. If they want to include things they feel are "close", then they should state so clearly somewhere and not claim they actually matched what I was searching for when they clearly didn't.
Despite some issues with the search facilities, I do like the simplicity of the store front.
Madonna did start her own record label. Plenty of other artists have too, although I doubt they are much different than the big boys when it comes to contracts and what not. It's a business, and everybody is out to get whatever they can.
What exactly is the legal burden for proof of child pornography? I mean some of the cases they mentioned were obvious if he had pictures and movies of babies, but in cases where the subject looks to be in the 13-14 year old range. Is it enough that they look that age, or is there some burden to prove that they are indeed underage?
Walter Nowakowski, 33, of Delhi, is charged with two counts of possession of child pornography, accessing child porn, distributing child porn, and making child porn for allegedly burning images onto CDs. He's also charged with theft of communications.
On another note, I found it kind of odd that they could charge him for "making child porn" for burning the stuff to CDs. Even distribution doesn't seem to follow without some proof that he was distributing those CDs or had plans to do so, perhaps he had multiple copies of each CD.
Booker identified the object of his rage as Albion Medical, which claims to produce the "Only Reliable, Medically Approved Penis Enhancement."
That's from the Wired article. It would appear they didn't do much withholding.
The clip looks promising, but good christ did they have to use a Smash Mouth song again? The end of the first one makes me cringe.
I think the problem with the article is that the title is the typical sensationalistic title stuck on stories.
With everybody raving about the iPod being the end all be all for portable music players, I think pointing out that it might not suit some people is a reasonable article to write. Each alternative he points out may be worse than the iPod on a whole, but not everybody is looking for the same things in a portable player. If my primary reason for buying a portable music player is to be able to listen to music without access to a recharger for the unit for 15 hours straight and that need outweighs everything else a player has to offer, then the iPod in its current format doesn't fit my needs and something like the Dell player does. That's what he's saying. I don't think it's a negative view of the iPod, it's just pointing out that some specialized needs are not met by the iPod and giving people the alternatives that meet those needs.
The first statement seems to indicate an MS device, although the inclusion of multiple manufacturers a few of whom already have offerings in the market seems to cloud the intent a bit.
The italisized text is directly from the article. Unless they are using the word devices in a very odd way, then Microsoft devices would seem to be pretty clearly hardware.
I understand what you are saying, but produce the same situation for Linux as OS X has and then see if you have problems. With OS X, you either had a machine custom built by Apple to run with Apple's OS or you bought one. Now, to my knowledge there is no Linux distribution offering custom built computers, but you could sit down and build a machine based on hardware that you know Linux supports well. Then you'd have a fair situation to compare it to if you still had problems.
The Microsoft devices will support both the company's Window Media standard and the common MP3 format.
The article talks about them creating both hardware and software.
The Microsoft devices will support both the company's Window Media standard and the common MP3 format.
They are producing both a portable media device and software to work with it and others.
LOL, nice link. I can almost feel your frustration.
Look on the bright side, it's a LOT better than the export to HTML feature in MS Publisher. I dealt with a customer one time who was wondering why her pages were loading so slow. Turns out it was producing pages in excess of 1 meg that could all be reduced to something in the neighborhood of 100k. Truly a scary experience.
I can kind of see it for HBO in that it's a promotion of upcoming/current programs generally. I've never quite understood why Time Warner Cable will advertise on their cable service. I'm pretty sure the payment I send to them each month will keep me from forgetting them, and I don't see how flashing their name up on the screen could really disuade people from leaving them. I'm sure there's some benefit to it that I'm totally missing though.
Granted. I actually like most of the HBO commercials. I was simply pointing out that they still have commercials.
Um, HBO DOES have commercials. They're all commercials for HBO shows, but they still qualify as commercials.
Efficiency in terms of speed of production it is fine in. Presentation is what I was referring to with that comment. It wasn't meant to be as sweeping as it may have sounded. I'm not saying nothing good can come from Frontpage, but Frontpage attracts a lot of first time web page creators or people who are just looking to churn out a quick page for something, and the majority of those pages tend to be pretty bad from a presentation stand point for obvious reasons. You don't have as many novices or quick fix types messing around with tools like Dreamweaver although it happens.
As for the extraneous markup (and recent versions of FP may have improved upon this), you are right in most cases it won't make a difference, I just don't really like having extraneous information in HTML if I'm going to bother writing it, and every little bit helps if you're dealing with dial-up customers.
Frontpage is great for what it is, which is a dumbed down web development tool. That's not meant to call someone dumb for using it, but it is what it is. It allows novices to easily create (generally bad) web content. I won't argue that doing it the handwritten way is more efficient, but it usually is better if you actually look at the content produced. Most WYSIWYG editors add a lot of uncessary tags into what they produce which just results in larger pages which isn't a desireable effect for a web page. That's something you generally don't see with pages handwritten by somebody that has a clue.
I'm all for user-friendly tools, but generally, people have their reasons for not using the ones that are available.
Sorry I didn't catch the joke. There are a lot of zealots on /., and most of them are quite serious when they make statements like "x is the only reasonable choice". Anyway, sorry if I took your comment in the wrong light.
In all seriousness, you honestly believe that Windows serves you better?
I don't believe it I KNOW it. I've messed around with the alternatives, and they all come up lacking for me. I'll grant that's at least partially due to my comfort with Windows, but that's not something I'm going to discount for the sake of fairness. If it suits me then it suits me. I actually used a Linux desktop for a few years exclusively on my home computer, and I went back to Windows b/c I got tired of always fucking with configurations to get things the way I wanted. I dual boot Gentoo now, but frankly, things seem so patchwork that it bothers me. Running KDE I've got a lot of nice KDE apps at my disposal, but I always end up finding a need for something that only Gnome has a mature answer for, or visa versa if I run Gnome. They have at least gotten a lot of the old configuration problems out of the way, I don't have to spend hours messing with text files anymore, but they still need some polishing. That said, I do boot into Linux for a good bit of development work because it provides a similar platform to what my web applications will be running in. The Mac desktop has ALWAYS felt counter intuitive to me despite what everybody seems to claim. OS X is the first time I've considered it a serious alternative, but I've already got a laptop, and OS X won't run on it, so it's not viable for me due to that.
That not having to update your OS's security holes five times a week and constantly sorting out what e-mails are good and what are viruses doesn't count as a beneficial "thing"?
Well, there's this crazy thing called Windows Update that will actually download updates automatically. It handles all those updates without much effort. Viruses in email aren't a problem for anybody who uses a decent mail client and has some common sense. I haven't had a virus on my computer in probably 5 years or more, and when I did have one it was b/c of something stupid that I installed.
Mac's are beautiful machines, and their operating system is extremely nice as well. That said, it is not the end all be all answer for everybody. Some people have used alternatives and *gasp* continue to use Windows. Whether it be for something as "unfair" as familiarity or lack of a certain application or for any number of reasons, it is their choice and a perfectly valid one. It gets old hearing "you need a Mac" everytime I turn around because no I really don't.
# Easier access to IO - just try it in Java and see. It's much faster in C#
I'm not the original poster obviously, but I THINK he's referring to coding speed when he says it's faster given the first part of that statement. I don't code in either language, so I have no idea if that's actually the case.
The rest of the comments you address are basically referencing language tools. I understand where you are coming from with all your points, but the thread was started by somebody asking about language use. In a discussion regarding language use, I think the tools available i.e. libraries, help systems, IDEs, etc. all become very relevant to the discussion as they all play a role in the use of the language.
Did Apple really open source the code behind their desktop environment? I didn't realize they had.
Regardless, while open source is very nice from the perspective of geeks and developers, at best it is a very small part of customer satisfaction. Mom and pop could care less if they can sift through thousands of lines of code, for that matter, the vast majority of Linux users will probably never touch the code behind their chosen operating system. It's nice to have that possibility, but customer satisfaction is really built more on listening to customers and trying to give them what they want. I think Apple does a pretty good job of that with OS X.
I'm not so sure that Microsoft's breakup would have the effect you seem to think. The division would probably fall along the lines of the OS, applications, consoles, etc. So you'd still have a company behind Windows, which is still going to maintain it's market share by a wide margin. You'd have the applications company that would have MS Office which isn't going anywhere. XBox without the backing of the large MS pockets might die if they are still selling systems at a loss, but all that will do is piss off some gamers and strengthen Sony's share. So I'm not really seeing where the huge change would come from at least in respect to the major markets that MS has a stranglehold on.
If I recall, Apple made the choice to sell hardware and have their OS run on only their hardware. I don't think it was a matter of technical merit. Regardless of whether it was or not, not creating something that would run on that commodity hardware you mention was a decision that almost killed Apple and in turn created the big boy on the block that is now MS.
So yes, if having a nice GUI means alienating the vast majority of your potential customer base then it's a poor marketing decision. I think Apple's financial history backs that up.
I don't think the Xerox and DEC were aimed at the consumer market which is really what the original poster is talking about when he's refering to first to market. In that case, Apple and Microsoft are the only ones that need to be mentioned from that timeline.
Citing from books becomes plagiarism if you do not credit the source of the citation. In that case, this database could come in fairly handy for discovering said instances.
According to this, Apple was first to market with their first version of MacOS. I think Microsoft's success stems more from poor early marketing decisions by Apple combined with questionable business tactics by Microsoft.