I love AD, but I am quite ready to be disappointed. I suspect these so-called new "episodes" will just be some kind of mock promotional short content made to create some hoopla and... in short, a publicity stunt. Not real episodes.
Now, are American Idol and DWTS really that cheap to make? I've read that the judges, celebrities either we like it or not, make some pretty high salaries for just sitting there and going all blah blah blah about whatever it is they talk about in these shows. Doesn't seem so cheap to me.
The news for nerds angle: Netflix may kiss my ass until Linux is supported. I will get my copies in teh torrents and watch the episodes for free simply because that will be the only way for me. I wouldn't install Windows just to see Arrested Development, even if Portia de Rossi were completely naked in it.
Thank you for the comments! I think we should discuss this in my journal entry, not here, so I posted your comment and my reply there:
http://slashdot.org/journal/373333
Thank you.
I loved Kmail until KDE 4 was introduced and I decided I didn't want that bloatware anymore and learned the hard way that:
1) You can't have any KDE app without the whole huge crapload of KDE, so it's a major liability
2) Migrating from Kmail to another email client is not a walk in the park.
My advice: even if you use KDE and love it, get a less compromising email client. If you want to leave one day, you won't have to worry about migrating your email.
I need help configuring mine. Mine supports neither UTF-8 nor HTML. I still keep claws mail installed just so I can read the occasional stinky HTML mail I get from my "normal" friends.
The lack of UTF-8 has an advantage, though. One of my mailboxes gets lots of spam that I clean by running capital D then looking for \?\?\?\?. That deletes more than 90% of the junk. Now if those characters ever become real characters... I'll be in trouble.
Look, people need some kind of incentive to use anything, and first impressions are critical. When people see an OS that looks like it's 18 years old, they will not like it, they will most certainly not find any reason to use it.
Even if they do, what about hardware and drivers? Linux fights an uphill battle to support as much hardware diversity as possible, and pretty much succeeds because there is a lot of people working on it. Haiku has a very small community, badly understaffed already. They can't afford to support hardware. That is sure to put a terrible hamper on any "year of the Haiku desktop" idea.
Look at the BSD projects. My Wifi NIC works fine on every Linux distro I have tried with this computer (many), but it won't work on NetBSD. NetBSD has been understaffed for a loooong time.
It's just reality: making an OS, as in a really full and complete OS that works and provides a decent user experience, is a gigantic task. Linux does pretty well because it has a very large community.
And, back to first impressions: projects that are constantly focused "on the future" with little regard for the present don't usually get much love as well. We've been hearing nerds say that BSDs are extremely well planned, solid, clean, made by perfectionists, everything else is crap etc... But what happens every time I try a BSD? There is always something that doesn't work, is not supported, is not complete, is being worked on (for many years, mind you). The day I can actually use it and rely on it without hassles never comes. Holy mackarel, that day never comes! It always is, and seems it will always be an endless promise for the future. Maybe Linux's fart doesn't smell like roses, but heck, it works! At this glacial pace, Haiku has been already sending a bad message for a long time, bad enough that many people will not even bother trying it. Why would they? What's the incentive?
Shenanigans. I tested it a couple of years ago and was definitely unimpressed. It's not godawful ugly, but it's not that pretty either. It is in fact clearly outdated, old-fashioned, obsolete. It is clearly based on Windows 95, only worse. Add little choice in applications and obviously poor hardware support, and this will never be anything more than a hobby for lonely nerds with nothing to do on a Saturday night.
QNX is junk, at least in RIM's hands. I've been a BlackBerry user for years, and I got a Playbook recently. It was a gift and I am not in the USA. After one week of very light use, the tablet froze for a couple of minutes. I got tired of waiting and forced a reboot.
The thing never worked again. It kept flashing red for a few days, then it won't even flash anymore. It's dead. Since I don't have the proof of purchase, I get no support unless *I pay* RIM some sort of "incident" fee. They screw up and I have to pay. Right?
I am not the only one. Google for it and you shall find quite a few other people who ran into the same problem. If you have the proof of purchase, you're only eligible for support for 90 days. After that, you're on your own. What a paragon of quality assurance and customer satisfaction.
So THAT is the incredibly amazing rock-stable OS that everyone has been talking about? Really? This paperweight I have here now? Please.
I foresee a string of QNX-based OS10 BB phones going belly up very suddenly, and a legion of irate customers shaking their fists and kicking themselves for still believing in RIM.
And I really raised my eyebrows at this part:
"...which would let them sell devices purely on the strength of the hardware and OS, rather than on the ecosystem."
Strength of the hardware???!!! Look, I've always enjoyed the excellent approach that RIM has always had to certain things, like the keyboard or email. But RIM has a notable history of skimping on hardware. I've ALWAYS had friends and other people around me have phones that had much better camera, better sound and more storage capacity. In fact, everything in other people's phones is usuallly better than my BlackBerry, except email. And those phones range all the way from the expensive iPhone to ridiculously cheap Chinese spin-offs sporting brands llike "Sumsang," "BleckBerry," or "HiPhone," whose operating system no one knows for sure what it is. Strength of the hardware? Please, don't write '"RIM" and "strength of the hardware" on the same sentence.
I'm not here to defend Apple or Jobs, quite the contrary, I am glad that mofo's finally gone (there, I said it). But how did you get modded up so high with such a misguided comment? Apple imposes a lot of lock-in, but that has nothing to do with DRM. In fact, Apple fought against DRM in the iTunes store. And won. Apple never inspired any company to use DRM, companies use DRM because people steal software, resort to piracy, etc. Companies put DRM in their products for the same reason that we all put locks in our doors.
Ah, yes. Android does all that through GMail. Email, calendar and contacts. Excellent! And all your business data is belong to Google. Cos you know, privacy is dead. Schmidt said so. Thanks, but no, thanks.
"I, and many others, could not care less about being the most popular OS in the world- in fact, that'd take the fun out."
You are a fucking mindless idiot. You and everyone who modded you up. I want Linux to be a lot, lot more popular, so:
- more software companies will make versions of their software for it (like TextMaker);
- my bank will make their extra security module available for Linux so I can do online banking like normal people;
- my smartphone manufacturer will make its support applications available on Linux, so I can backup and restore at least my contact data, not type all my 100+ contacts manually when I buy a new phone because some basement-dwelling dipshit thinks that using an unpopular OS is l33t and kewl;
- hardware manufacturers will have more interest in offering drivers for Linux.
Ah yes, recording "What you hear" from the sound system is not "locked down" on Linux. Except it doesn't work. One has to deal with the intrincacies of JACK, which never worked for me on any of the three distros where I tried it.
In fact, any sound working on Linux at all is almost a miracle considering how confusing and feeble all the Linux sound architectures are. Even so, it works, but the last second of a song will be clipped, and you're lucky if you can have two sounds playing at the same time. And it all makes perfect sense, since Linux has always been, still is and shall always be designed for SERVERS. Why in the world would anyone need sound output in a server?
I love the CLI and use the terminal all day every day, but in essence, I have to agree with hairyfeet's assessment wholeheartedly.
Just instead of lashing out at the CLI, I complain that sound in Linux is clumsy and flawed, I still have trouble configuring Wifi, Bluetooth is almost impossible to be made to work decently, clipboard management STILL is an absolute pile of shit, Web browsing is noticeably slower than on Windows, Kon Colivas' patch set is refused over some silly technicality, and most window managers are installed with such abysmally lacking default configurations that I can't deny the whole Free Software case is just hopeless. This thing has always been, still is and shall ever be designed for servers. It is all downright hostile to anyone intending to run a desktop/workstation. If I really want to be honest, I have to admit: I use Linux because I am a hobbyist.
Post a story about computer security and people will crack jokes to make fun of Windows right in one of the first comments. Like clockwork. Windows 7 is reported to be pretty secure, but Microsoft can't seem to shake off the bad reputation.
Anyone who has a stake at Apple, the company, should seriously weigh how much actual benefit and damage Steve Jobs' cavalier attitude has been causing to Apple over the last few years. The company's financial health is great, sure, but so is Microsoft's. Its health in terms of reputation, however, isn't so good, and it is likely to get worse over the next few years. Then we will see Apple dealing with whatever reputation it has built, that will be coming back to bite Apple in the ass.
Yes, that is what software is supposed to do: make up for defective hardware.
Please call me back when this overrated editor acquires the ability to make up for a defective processor, motherboard and monitor. Now I have to run and learn Vim and prepare for the ever likely event of a nuclear holocaust, in which case all Control keys would certainly be swept off the face of the Earth.
"Without these standard, safe, time tested technologies, a lot of the web would just be, well, boring. Imagine google maps without JavaScript."
Fine if some feature in the site really requires it. But Orkut (just to name a famous site) is full of buttons that are based on Javascript and can't be "pressed" with the keyboard. Users are forced to use the mouse. That's just stupid.
Even worse, there seems to be a new fad: JS-based hyperlinks that can't be activated with the keyboard or opened in a new tab with the middle button. And I have seen several non-commercial sites that have no login, no shopping cart, no need whatsoever to store anything, but the crash-course Web designer has just learned about sessions and has an uncontrollable urge to make the entire site rely on cookies. Plain stupidity.
"if they don't have cookies and JavaScript enabled, I simply don't let them in."
I have seen sites like that. And I actually go away instead of allowing cookies. Anyone with that kind of mentality is unlikely to have good content to offer. You probably run a Web site only to please your own ego, not to please/serve potential visitors.
"Then some whack job at my company started to tell everyone that cookies were 'dangerous' and they should block them. Of course then I started to get complaints that my systems no longer functioned."
You got a very deserved bite in the ass. XML is a standard. CSS is a standard. Cookies are a standard. But who in the world ever told you that having cookies on is a standard? It is not. You never know if the viewer has cookies on. You have to be either stupid or very stubborn to rely on something that you never know whether it will be there to catch you when you jump and/or demand that the viewers configure their browsers your way.
Stop being lazy and blaming the viewers. Face the truth: demanding cookies (or Flash or Javascript) is more than often just an admission of bad design, like "this page only looks right in Internet Explorer".
"Blindly blocking capabilities because it might be unsafe, without understanding what the dangers are, is often effectively conducting a denial of service on yourself."
"Blindly" who? Where? How? No, we're very selective. Only about a dozen sites are allowed to set cookies in my browser and almost everything works fine.
Except, of course, for some poor excuses for Web designers who just don't know how to do very prosaic things link even a stupid hyperlink without cookies because the "Sessions" chapter of the PHP manual won't teach them how.
Cookies are good for automatic logins. Everything else is purely in the interest of annoying marketing click trackers who want to rub against my nose something I don't want. OK, defending their interest is their role. But not mine! I don't give a damn if my browser's blocking cookies upsets them. I don't give a damn if they live or die. There is no "denial of service" because those morons are doing me no service by sniffing my steps on the WWW.
Slashdot Mirror
I love AD, but I am quite ready to be disappointed. I suspect these so-called new "episodes" will just be some kind of mock promotional short content made to create some hoopla and... in short, a publicity stunt. Not real episodes.
Now, are American Idol and DWTS really that cheap to make? I've read that the judges, celebrities either we like it or not, make some pretty high salaries for just sitting there and going all blah blah blah about whatever it is they talk about in these shows. Doesn't seem so cheap to me.
The news for nerds angle: Netflix may kiss my ass until Linux is supported. I will get my copies in teh torrents and watch the episodes for free simply because that will be the only way for me. I wouldn't install Windows just to see Arrested Development, even if Portia de Rossi were completely naked in it.
Thank you for the comments! I think we should discuss this in my journal entry, not here, so I posted your comment and my reply there: http://slashdot.org/journal/373333 Thank you.
Wow, 20 million. And I can't raise even 0.18% of that for my project. :-(
http://slashdot.org/journal/373333
Mod me down, I deserve it.
If the police can record the hum, so can human beings.
You underestimate the technology and prowess of the extraterrestial police.
23,000 repeats shouldn't mean much in China.
I loved Kmail until KDE 4 was introduced and I decided I didn't want that bloatware anymore and learned the hard way that:
1) You can't have any KDE app without the whole huge crapload of KDE, so it's a major liability
2) Migrating from Kmail to another email client is not a walk in the park.
My advice: even if you use KDE and love it, get a less compromising email client. If you want to leave one day, you won't have to worry about migrating your email.
I need help configuring mine. Mine supports neither UTF-8 nor HTML. I still keep claws mail installed just so I can read the occasional stinky HTML mail I get from my "normal" friends.
The lack of UTF-8 has an advantage, though. One of my mailboxes gets lots of spam that I clean by running capital D then looking for \?\?\?\?. That deletes more than 90% of the junk. Now if those characters ever become real characters... I'll be in trouble.
The road to 2.0 (or will it be 3.0?) will be plagued by unsupported hardware issues. That will be a show stopper.
You post as AC and I am the troll???
Look, people need some kind of incentive to use anything, and first impressions are critical. When people see an OS that looks like it's 18 years old, they will not like it, they will most certainly not find any reason to use it.
Even if they do, what about hardware and drivers? Linux fights an uphill battle to support as much hardware diversity as possible, and pretty much succeeds because there is a lot of people working on it. Haiku has a very small community, badly understaffed already. They can't afford to support hardware. That is sure to put a terrible hamper on any "year of the Haiku desktop" idea.
Look at the BSD projects. My Wifi NIC works fine on every Linux distro I have tried with this computer (many), but it won't work on NetBSD. NetBSD has been understaffed for a loooong time.
It's just reality: making an OS, as in a really full and complete OS that works and provides a decent user experience, is a gigantic task. Linux does pretty well because it has a very large community.
And, back to first impressions: projects that are constantly focused "on the future" with little regard for the present don't usually get much love as well. We've been hearing nerds say that BSDs are extremely well planned, solid, clean, made by perfectionists, everything else is crap etc... But what happens every time I try a BSD? There is always something that doesn't work, is not supported, is not complete, is being worked on (for many years, mind you). The day I can actually use it and rely on it without hassles never comes. Holy mackarel, that day never comes! It always is, and seems it will always be an endless promise for the future. Maybe Linux's fart doesn't smell like roses, but heck, it works! At this glacial pace, Haiku has been already sending a bad message for a long time, bad enough that many people will not even bother trying it. Why would they? What's the incentive?
Shenanigans. I tested it a couple of years ago and was definitely unimpressed. It's not godawful ugly, but it's not that pretty either. It is in fact clearly outdated, old-fashioned, obsolete. It is clearly based on Windows 95, only worse. Add little choice in applications and obviously poor hardware support, and this will never be anything more than a hobby for lonely nerds with nothing to do on a Saturday night.
In 10 years, nobody will remember what "Haiku" or "BeOS" is all about.
...unlike today, when hordes of people know what "Haiku" and "BeOS" are all about. Right?
"Walls are dense? Where?"
Must be an American.
QNX is junk, at least in RIM's hands. I've been a BlackBerry user for years, and I got a Playbook recently. It was a gift and I am not in the USA. After one week of very light use, the tablet froze for a couple of minutes. I got tired of waiting and forced a reboot.
The thing never worked again. It kept flashing red for a few days, then it won't even flash anymore. It's dead. Since I don't have the proof of purchase, I get no support unless *I pay* RIM some sort of "incident" fee. They screw up and I have to pay. Right?
I am not the only one. Google for it and you shall find quite a few other people who ran into the same problem. If you have the proof of purchase, you're only eligible for support for 90 days. After that, you're on your own. What a paragon of quality assurance and customer satisfaction.
So THAT is the incredibly amazing rock-stable OS that everyone has been talking about? Really? This paperweight I have here now? Please.
I foresee a string of QNX-based OS10 BB phones going belly up very suddenly, and a legion of irate customers shaking their fists and kicking themselves for still believing in RIM.
And I really raised my eyebrows at this part:
"...which would let them sell devices purely on the strength of the hardware and OS, rather than on the ecosystem."
Strength of the hardware???!!! Look, I've always enjoyed the excellent approach that RIM has always had to certain things, like the keyboard or email. But RIM has a notable history of skimping on hardware. I've ALWAYS had friends and other people around me have phones that had much better camera, better sound and more storage capacity. In fact, everything in other people's phones is usuallly better than my BlackBerry, except email. And those phones range all the way from the expensive iPhone to ridiculously cheap Chinese spin-offs sporting brands llike "Sumsang," "BleckBerry," or "HiPhone," whose operating system no one knows for sure what it is. Strength of the hardware? Please, don't write '"RIM" and "strength of the hardware" on the same sentence.
I'm not here to defend Apple or Jobs, quite the contrary, I am glad that mofo's finally gone (there, I said it). But how did you get modded up so high with such a misguided comment? Apple imposes a lot of lock-in, but that has nothing to do with DRM. In fact, Apple fought against DRM in the iTunes store. And won. Apple never inspired any company to use DRM, companies use DRM because people steal software, resort to piracy, etc. Companies put DRM in their products for the same reason that we all put locks in our doors.
Ah, yes. Android does all that through GMail. Email, calendar and contacts. Excellent! And all your business data is belong to Google. Cos you know, privacy is dead. Schmidt said so. Thanks, but no, thanks.
You are a fucking mindless idiot. You and everyone who modded you up. I want Linux to be a lot, lot more popular, so:
- more software companies will make versions of their software for it (like TextMaker);
- my bank will make their extra security module available for Linux so I can do online banking like normal people;
- my smartphone manufacturer will make its support applications available on Linux, so I can backup and restore at least my contact data, not type all my 100+ contacts manually when I buy a new phone because some basement-dwelling dipshit thinks that using an unpopular OS is l33t and kewl;
- hardware manufacturers will have more interest in offering drivers for Linux.
Do a favor to the world: die.
Ah yes, recording "What you hear" from the sound system is not "locked down" on Linux. Except it doesn't work. One has to deal with the intrincacies of JACK, which never worked for me on any of the three distros where I tried it.
In fact, any sound working on Linux at all is almost a miracle considering how confusing and feeble all the Linux sound architectures are. Even so, it works, but the last second of a song will be clipped, and you're lucky if you can have two sounds playing at the same time. And it all makes perfect sense, since Linux has always been, still is and shall always be designed for SERVERS. Why in the world would anyone need sound output in a server?
I love the CLI and use the terminal all day every day, but in essence, I have to agree with hairyfeet's assessment wholeheartedly.
Just instead of lashing out at the CLI, I complain that sound in Linux is clumsy and flawed, I still have trouble configuring Wifi, Bluetooth is almost impossible to be made to work decently, clipboard management STILL is an absolute pile of shit, Web browsing is noticeably slower than on Windows, Kon Colivas' patch set is refused over some silly technicality, and most window managers are installed with such abysmally lacking default configurations that I can't deny the whole Free Software case is just hopeless. This thing has always been, still is and shall ever be designed for servers. It is all downright hostile to anyone intending to run a desktop/workstation. If I really want to be honest, I have to admit: I use Linux because I am a hobbyist.
I am definitively not impressed.
Post a story about computer security and people will crack jokes to make fun of Windows right in one of the first comments. Like clockwork. Windows 7 is reported to be pretty secure, but Microsoft can't seem to shake off the bad reputation.
Anyone who has a stake at Apple, the company, should seriously weigh how much actual benefit and damage Steve Jobs' cavalier attitude has been causing to Apple over the last few years. The company's financial health is great, sure, but so is Microsoft's. Its health in terms of reputation, however, isn't so good, and it is likely to get worse over the next few years. Then we will see Apple dealing with whatever reputation it has built, that will be coming back to bite Apple in the ass.
"Mouse not found. Click left button to continue."
Yes, that is what software is supposed to do: make up for defective hardware.
Please call me back when this overrated editor acquires the ability to make up for a defective processor, motherboard and monitor. Now I have to run and learn Vim and prepare for the ever likely event of a nuclear holocaust, in which case all Control keys would certainly be swept off the face of the Earth.
No, I am not an emacs fan. Both of them suck.
"Without these standard, safe, time tested technologies, a lot of the web would just be, well, boring. Imagine google maps without JavaScript."
Fine if some feature in the site really requires it. But Orkut (just to name a famous site) is full of buttons that are based on Javascript and can't be "pressed" with the keyboard. Users are forced to use the mouse. That's just stupid.
Even worse, there seems to be a new fad: JS-based hyperlinks that can't be activated with the keyboard or opened in a new tab with the middle button. And I have seen several non-commercial sites that have no login, no shopping cart, no need whatsoever to store anything, but the crash-course Web designer has just learned about sessions and has an uncontrollable urge to make the entire site rely on cookies. Plain stupidity.
"if they don't have cookies and JavaScript enabled, I simply don't let them in."
I have seen sites like that. And I actually go away instead of allowing cookies. Anyone with that kind of mentality is unlikely to have good content to offer. You probably run a Web site only to please your own ego, not to please/serve potential visitors.
"Then some whack job at my company started to tell everyone that cookies were 'dangerous' and they should block them. Of course then I started to get complaints that my systems no longer functioned."
You got a very deserved bite in the ass. XML is a standard. CSS is a standard. Cookies are a standard. But who in the world ever told you that having cookies on is a standard? It is not. You never know if the viewer has cookies on. You have to be either stupid or very stubborn to rely on something that you never know whether it will be there to catch you when you jump and/or demand that the viewers configure their browsers your way.
Stop being lazy and blaming the viewers. Face the truth: demanding cookies (or Flash or Javascript) is more than often just an admission of bad design, like "this page only looks right in Internet Explorer".
"Blindly blocking capabilities because it might be unsafe, without understanding what the dangers are, is often effectively conducting a denial of service on yourself."
"Blindly" who? Where? How? No, we're very selective. Only about a dozen sites are allowed to set cookies in my browser and almost everything works fine.
Except, of course, for some poor excuses for Web designers who just don't know how to do very prosaic things link even a stupid hyperlink without cookies because the "Sessions" chapter of the PHP manual won't teach them how.
Cookies are good for automatic logins. Everything else is purely in the interest of annoying marketing click trackers who want to rub against my nose something I don't want. OK, defending their interest is their role. But not mine! I don't give a damn if my browser's blocking cookies upsets them. I don't give a damn if they live or die. There is no "denial of service" because those morons are doing me no service by sniffing my steps on the WWW.