And at the end of the day these people will weed themselves out of the business gene pool. Those who refuse to consider a useful tool because of purely ideological issues will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage. It is as simple as that.
Groove is indeed, an interesting case it point. I attempts to be simple, and provide a clean modular architecture. However, in practice it is (or was, when I used it a couple of years ago) a huge, slow memory hog that almost, but didn't quite work correctly.
It was, in other words, a lovely idea - but the implementation was poor.
Of course, you are absolutely right; no trade magazine ever gives Microsoft a hard time about its security record, its delay in shipping Vista or... to pluck a recent example out of the air... the Spyware-esque attributes of the WGA validation tool.
What do you think you're doing writing cogent, informative and amusing explanations of what's going on? Away with you, before you ruin the neighbourhood.
When I was young, I had to be home by 17:30. No excuse of not having a watch. No excuse of forgetting the time, because I had fun. And obvious punishment when I came home late (again).
Well, that certainly sounds like a tool of control to me.
I'm sure that I will use pretty much that line with my kids too, but that's not the point I was making. In the circumstances where it is possible - but not certain that the child will be needed at home early, the phone gives you the choice of saying "sure you can go out, I'll give you a buzz if need-be". The alternative may be "No, you can't go out." In that case, the phone is a tool of liberation, not control.
Also worth pointing out that the v4 Beta of Google Earth is much, much faster than v3. The previous version was virtually unusable on this 800MHz G4 iMac. The new beta is in the 'snappy' ballpark.
You make good points. I am the primary carer for my to children (my wife works 4 days a week, I work one day a week, and a couple of hours via e-mail and IM each evening) and we do all those things - have meals together do lots of activities, read etc.
My kids are much too young for this - the oldest is three, and yet I am interested in this service. Let's face it - it's absolutely no good as tool to attempt enforcement - any smart kid will simply circumvent it.
But it may (I haven't decided yet) be a useful tool to allow the kids a bit more freedom where there is a good degree of trust between child and parent.
So, for example if my kids, when they are 8 or so want to go and play in the park by themselves or go to a friends house just down the road, I may sit them down and say 'yes, but with one condition - I'm going to worry about you, so please take this with you and keep it switched on. That way if I need you back home, I can call you, if you have a problem you can call me, and it will also let me know where it is roughly, so don't leave it lying around. Do you agree?'
Playing with your kids is great, letting them explore by themselves is important too. Personally, I like the idea of them being able to play and make dens in the woods near our house, but I'm a worrying dad. This technology used wisely might be able to help us all out, we'll see.
The two examples are as different as chalk and cheese, and I really don't think there's much to be gained from attempting to find an overarching theme.
Mini-Microsoft clearly tapped several seams of unhappiness within Microsoft and found him/herself with an immensely popular blog on his/her hands. After a while, however it became pretty clear that there was only so much that could be written about on those topics, and the blogger clearly didn't relish the idea of being seen as an all-purpose internal Microsoft kicker. Couple that with the suggestions that the anonymous cover had been broken and it is fairly obvious why the fun might have gone out of the venture.
But Scoble? I mean what was the point? The guy never actually seemed to have anything interesting to say; usually it was faintly masterbatory stuff about the power of blogging or how tough it was being Scoble, I took him off my RSS reader after a couple of months when it was clear it was pointless. I would have thought he was simply irrelevant to Microsoft, which is why they aren't too sad to see if off the pay-roll. He came across as a man supremely interested in his own words, but not too bothered about making them particularly interesting to anyone else.
As a UK-based ex IT journalist - no. In my first job back in the 80's there was a large sign attached to the wall saying "Companies are singular". That remains the style for the majority of papers - a company is a single corporate entity.
I expect you are just using Visio as an example, but if if Visio is what you are after, in particular, it's worth having a look at Omnigraffle The pro version imports and exports Viso files and it is certainly nicer to use. I haven't used Visio for a couple of years, so Graffle may even be more powerful.
Considering the common wisdom that the paying client wants the site ready tomorrow, the cost of the maintenance is something they can start worrying about after they've paid you.
Now, your average trendy lefty authority distrusting person, and I've been reading a number of the comments here, about how dreadful this is and we should leave law enforcement to the police.
And yet, and yet. They are meant to be our laws, if I saw someone being mugged, I hope I would have the courage to step in and help. I think ultimately laws only succeed where they have the approval and support of the community. In the UK the concept of 'Neighbourhood Watch' where people look out for criminal or suspicious behaviour in their street has made a big difference to some people's lives and made communities safer. Shrugging shoulders and saying its the polices job is a pretty shoddy denial of responsibility
So what is actually wrong with the proposal of letting any citizen 'twitch the net curtain'? Is it that the border/immigration laws themselves are unpalatable? If so they should be changed. If not, what's wrong with this as a mechanism of enforcement. It works for the back yard, why not for the Texas border?
Does it infringe on rights, lead to unfair treatment or a minority or stoke prejudice? Not that I can see. If people think that they can help an over-stretched PD somewhat by sitting at their computers, is this a problem? Is it worse than running folding@home?
I think people are being overly harsh on Google with the NoFollow business. I doubt Google ever though that NoFollow would cure the comment spam problem, I certainly didn't see any claims to that affect.
What NoFollow was designed to do, I suspect, was ensure that Google's Pagerank algorithm wasn't exacerbating the problem. Page rank may have have only been a marginal driver of comment spam, but Google was attempting to ensure that that particular margin was removed.
So the article says " but please submit bug reports "and I troll around the slashcode site for a while, but I can't see a place to file bugs about the Slashdot CSS.
A scan does not identify a baby's 'gender' - it can identifies its sex. Pedantic, I know, but I get irritated by the confusion between these two terms.
Actually I am going to disagree with you. I found the Chevron menu system execrable, I turned it off immediately, functions that Microsoft thought I might not want disappeared. It was patronising, comfusing and slowed down my work.
However, with the ribbons (which I have not used, I'm on a Mac here) they might have got it right. Whereas the chevrons left you with a 'where have my menu items gone' feel, the contextual ribbon changes should be instantaneous, and pretty intuitive - you click on a table and instantly the table-relevant tools appear in ribbon. There is no way a user can really miss, or misunderstand what happened. Interestingly MS introduced something akin to this in Office for Mac OS X in 2001 - the formatting palette is context sensitive.
Likewise, the format preview thing sounds eminently discoverable and understandable to me - not to mention a timesaver.
There will be plenty of opportunities for MS to shoot itself in the usability foot, but I don't think these are them.
Why stop at saying the e-mail should be plain text only? Clearly the e-mail should only be allowed to contain URLs. The entirety of the message should sit on the "senders" server. Much more elegant and secure.
Slashdot Mirror
And at the end of the day these people will weed themselves out of the business gene pool. Those who refuse to consider a useful tool because of purely ideological issues will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage. It is as simple as that.
Bravo. You have demonstrated that there is at least one poor journalist at work in the world.
Actually, you haven't demonstrated that since you were unable to cite the actually remarks, or context - but I'll give you some slack.
Groove is indeed, an interesting case it point. I attempts to be simple, and provide a clean modular architecture. However, in practice it is (or was, when I used it a couple of years ago) a huge, slow memory hog that almost, but didn't quite work correctly.
It was, in other words, a lovely idea - but the implementation was poor.
Of course, you are absolutely right; no trade magazine ever gives Microsoft a hard time about its security record, its delay in shipping Vista or ... to pluck a recent example out of the air... the Spyware-esque attributes of the WGA validation tool.
What do you think you're doing writing cogent, informative and amusing explanations of what's going on? Away with you, before you ruin the neighbourhood.
There appear to be a number of reports that the discolouration comes off just fine if you clean the machines with alcohol wipes.
When I was young, I had to be home by 17:30. No excuse of not having a watch. No excuse of forgetting the time, because I had fun. And obvious punishment when I came home late (again).
Well, that certainly sounds like a tool of control to me.
I'm sure that I will use pretty much that line with my kids too, but that's not the point I was making. In the circumstances where it is possible - but not certain that the child will be needed at home early, the phone gives you the choice of saying "sure you can go out, I'll give you a buzz if need-be". The alternative may be "No, you can't go out." In that case, the phone is a tool of liberation, not control.
Also worth pointing out that the v4 Beta of Google Earth is much, much faster than v3. The previous version was virtually unusable on this 800MHz G4 iMac. The new beta is in the 'snappy' ballpark.
You make good points. I am the primary carer for my to children (my wife works 4 days a week, I work one day a week, and a couple of hours via e-mail and IM each evening) and we do all those things - have meals together do lots of activities, read etc.
My kids are much too young for this - the oldest is three, and yet I am interested in this service. Let's face it - it's absolutely no good as tool to attempt enforcement - any smart kid will simply circumvent it.
But it may (I haven't decided yet) be a useful tool to allow the kids a bit more freedom where there is a good degree of trust between child and parent.
So, for example if my kids, when they are 8 or so want to go and play in the park by themselves or go to a friends house just down the road, I may sit them down and say 'yes, but with one condition - I'm going to worry about you, so please take this with you and keep it switched on. That way if I need you back home, I can call you, if you have a problem you can call me, and it will also let me know where it is roughly, so don't leave it lying around. Do you agree?'
Playing with your kids is great, letting them explore by themselves is important too. Personally, I like the idea of them being able to play and make dens in the woods near our house, but I'm a worrying dad. This technology used wisely might be able to help us all out, we'll see.
But as a tool of control? Stupid idea.
The two examples are as different as chalk and cheese, and I really don't think there's much to be gained from attempting to find an overarching theme.
Mini-Microsoft clearly tapped several seams of unhappiness within Microsoft and found him/herself with an immensely popular blog on his/her hands. After a while, however it became pretty clear that there was only so much that could be written about on those topics, and the blogger clearly didn't relish the idea of being seen as an all-purpose internal Microsoft kicker. Couple that with the suggestions that the anonymous cover had been broken and it is fairly obvious why the fun might have gone out of the venture.
But Scoble? I mean what was the point? The guy never actually seemed to have anything interesting to say; usually it was faintly masterbatory stuff about the power of blogging or how tough it was being Scoble, I took him off my RSS reader after a couple of months when it was clear it was pointless. I would have thought he was simply irrelevant to Microsoft, which is why they aren't too sad to see if off the pay-roll. He came across as a man supremely interested in his own words, but not too bothered about making them particularly interesting to anyone else.
As a UK-based ex IT journalist - no. In my first job back in the 80's there was a large sign attached to the wall saying "Companies are singular". That remains the style for the majority of papers - a company is a single corporate entity.
Whatever it was that caused this, it doesn't sound like the Genuine Advantage thang. GA just bugs you incessantly, it doesn't 'lock down' anything.
Actually, in the UK a 'chippie' is a carpenter.
I expect you are just using Visio as an example, but if if Visio is what you are after, in particular, it's worth having a look at Omnigraffle The pro version imports and exports Viso files and it is certainly nicer to use. I haven't used Visio for a couple of years, so Graffle may even be more powerful.
Apropos your .sig - actually, DRM manages access in the same way that jail manages access.
Considering the common wisdom that the paying client wants the site ready tomorrow, the cost of the maintenance is something they can start worrying about after they've paid you.
Well, you could argue that it its precisely accurate: They are immeasurably better educated.
Now, your average trendy lefty authority distrusting person, and I've been reading a number of the comments here, about how dreadful this is and we should leave law enforcement to the police.
And yet, and yet. They are meant to be our laws, if I saw someone being mugged, I hope I would have the courage to step in and help. I think ultimately laws only succeed where they have the approval and support of the community. In the UK the concept of 'Neighbourhood Watch' where people look out for criminal or suspicious behaviour in their street has made a big difference to some people's lives and made communities safer. Shrugging shoulders and saying its the polices job is a pretty shoddy denial of responsibility
So what is actually wrong with the proposal of letting any citizen 'twitch the net curtain'? Is it that the border/immigration laws themselves are unpalatable? If so they should be changed. If not, what's wrong with this as a mechanism of enforcement. It works for the back yard, why not for the Texas border?
Does it infringe on rights, lead to unfair treatment or a minority or stoke prejudice? Not that I can see. If people think that they can help an over-stretched PD somewhat by sitting at their computers, is this a problem? Is it worse than running folding@home?
I'm not sure.
I think people are being overly harsh on Google with the NoFollow business. I doubt Google ever though that NoFollow would cure the comment spam problem, I certainly didn't see any claims to that affect.
What NoFollow was designed to do, I suspect, was ensure that Google's Pagerank algorithm wasn't exacerbating the problem. Page rank may have have only been a marginal driver of comment spam, but Google was attempting to ensure that that particular margin was removed.
So the article says " but please submit bug reports "and I troll around the slashcode site for a while, but I can't see a place to file bugs about the Slashdot CSS.
Am I blind?
On the one hand the article summary claims:
"Trouble is, the benefits of open source are not always so clear-cut. Software is too complicated a creation to be captured in rhetoric"
While at the same time giving us a splendidly succinct piece of rhetoric:
Unlike proprietary software, for which the code is kept secret, the open-source variety can be copied, modified, and shared. [...]
A scan does not identify a baby's 'gender' - it can identifies its sex. Pedantic, I know, but I get irritated by the confusion between these two terms.
Actually I am going to disagree with you. I found the Chevron menu system execrable, I turned it off immediately, functions that Microsoft thought I might not want disappeared. It was patronising, comfusing and slowed down my work.
However, with the ribbons (which I have not used, I'm on a Mac here) they might have got it right. Whereas the chevrons left you with a 'where have my menu items gone' feel, the contextual ribbon changes should be instantaneous, and pretty intuitive - you click on a table and instantly the table-relevant tools appear in ribbon. There is no way a user can really miss, or misunderstand what happened. Interestingly MS introduced something akin to this in Office for Mac OS X in 2001 - the formatting palette is context sensitive.
Likewise, the format preview thing sounds eminently discoverable and understandable to me - not to mention a timesaver.
There will be plenty of opportunities for MS to shoot itself in the usability foot, but I don't think these are them.
Why stop at saying the e-mail should be plain text only? Clearly the e-mail should only be allowed to contain URLs. The entirety of the message should sit on the "senders" server. Much more elegant and secure.
I must admit that I was counting ease of use as an element of functionality, and quite an important one at that.