The suggestions involved are klunky and the idea of splitting it into 3 OSes is going the wrong way.
I'd agree that there's no point in splitting it into 3 different OSes, but I think a better solution is to have the Metro stuff be an optional installation (similar to the Media Center stuff) for desktop computers. The insistance on pushing touchscreen UI elements onto the desktop is a fundamental problem. You can reorganize the start menu and change the look, but having a full-screen menu that obscures your desktop and currently running applications causes a context shift which is needlessly disorienting.
It's silly to think that in a modern business, you would have only one (or even two or three) applications open at the same time, and not get some backlash. Looking at my computer that I'm working on right now, I have 8 applications open, 5 of them visible. While I type this in my web browser, I'm monitoring several different things. If a new email or IM pops in, it will get my attention. Meanwhile, I'm watching two processes complete. I resize and move windows as I need to get whatever I need to be visible on the screen, and the only way that Metro can achieve this level of flexibility is to reintroduce individual resizable windows, which brings them immediately back to the old "Desktop" model.
In short, Windows 8 was designed by someone who didn't understand what they were doing.
Well it is a little more annoying than you're making it out to be. Not only does the Start Menu bring you back into Metro, but a lot of the default applications are Metro apps. It's nothing that can't be dealt with, but it's a bit of a pain.
Apple seems to be more about the rumours and the stories about their products nowadays...
I sense you must not be familiar with the Mac community. Rumors are the norm.
You can spin that to be a bad thing, saying, "They have rumors because there's nothing of substance." You could spin it to be a positive, saying, "The market is so excited about Apple's products that they engage in wild speculation." Regardless, the Mac rumor mill has been spinning for decades, and this is not something that has emerged "nowadays".
I think this is a more appropriate way of looking at things. If you want to keep valuable employees happy, it helps to show them that they're appreciated. That might mean giving them free candy and soda, but there are many other options. It might mean that you let them leave a little early or have an extra day off. It might mean that you give them a more flexible schedule or let them work from home. It might mean that you give them more interesting and more challenging projects. It might mean that you make a point to say "Thank you. Job well done."
The ways of showing people that they're important and appreciated are varied, and part of how you show someone that you appreciate them is by bothering to figure out what makes them feel appreciated.
Soda and candy? That wouldn't make me feel appreciated, and I wouldn't worry about a company that cut those. I'd be more concerned about a company that treats its employees badly but hopes to buy them off with soda and candy.
I don't think this is a trojan horse to force you to use Google+. I think it's the beginning of Google trying to position Hangouts as a more major project in its own right, rather than a small offshoot of Google+.
I think there is a large question in there: To what degree do we feel like we can forego the standard educational requirements and simply allow people to learn by whatever methods, and take tests to prove knowledge/ability?
To take it to an extreme, should we allow anyone to become a lawyer if they can pass a Bar exam? How about allowing someone to be a doctor just by passing a series of medical exams, but without going to med school?
Is there a value to sending people to school beyond testable knowledge? That's a big question.
It doesn't really change the basic idea. In fact, I think it makes my point even stronger.
If it's Java 1.7, why refer to a version as 7u40-3 version 1.0? Are you ever going to have a version of Java 1.7 that you're calling 7u40-3 version 2.0? That's insane.
Just call it 1.7.40.3. Or really, make it simpler than that.
Why not just do a normal numbering scheme? If you dig into their packages, they sometimes claim stupidly to be version 1 of Java 7 update 17. WTF? Instead of that, how about Oracle just acts with some sanity and call it v. 7.17?
If you need sub versions of 7.17, then call it 7.17.1 and 7.17.2. You know, a sane person might do.
Or how about we all just drop Java since it's terrible and the cause of too many security problems?
What's powerful about it?... My wife uses it but mostly because her friends are on it.
I love when people answer their own questions.
The GP post said Facebook had "powerful networking effects", which means, as explained by the Wikipedia:
In economics and business, a network effect (also called network externality or demand-side economies of scale) is the effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product to other people. When network effect is present, the value of a product or service is dependent on the number of others using it.
Gates's magnanimity toward his former rival and Apple is a reflection, perhaps, of his current position in life: it's been nearly five years since his last full-time day at Microsoft, and all of his efforts seem focused on his philanthropic endeavors. He simply has no reason to rip a rival limb from limb in the same way he did as Microsoft CEO.
Well... there's not much of a reason to rip a rival limb from limb when he's already dead. It'd be in pretty poor taste, actually, and I'd expect Gates to avoid badmouthing Jobs if only to avoid looking like an asshole.
Also, their relationship was reportedly far less adversarial than people tended to assume. Most of the people who were supposedly in-the-know claimed that they were friends to some extent, and got along pretty well in spite of disagreeing on a lot of things.
Honestly, this single statement by what appears to be a spokesperson discredits their entire ramblings: "it was unhelpful to see mental health issues as illnesses with biological causes".
I'm not sure why. I would definitely say it's unhelpful at times to see them as "illness with biological causes", though I wouldn't go as far as to say generalize and say it's always unhelpful. I also wouldn't go as far as to say that biology doesn't factor in on some level in all cases, but that's not really the point.
I think the point being made, rather, is that something happens when you start labeling all these things as "illnesses" and setting the expectation that they will be "cured". The truth is that many of these psychological processes and behaviors are within the range of what "normal people" experience. Nobody goes through life being happy, functional, and productive at all times, but we've gotten into treating every moment of dysfunction and unhappiness as a distinct disease. Taking these huge lumps of people and labeling them as suffering from depression, bipolar disorder, AD&D, OCD, and schizophrenia might be a bit like taking everyone over 6' tall and saying that they have hyper-tallness syndrome and treating that as a disease, and then everyone under 6' as suffering from the disease of hypo-tallness syndrome.
At some level, these things may not be diseases to be cured, but different personalities and ways of thinking that could be understood and granted some space for expression. Of course in very extreme cases where there's some kind of danger, some kinds of medical intervention may be necessary. However, there seems to be a very real danger of us creating a Procrustean bed of "mental health", trying to stretch and chop everyone to fit.
You'd have to be a complete moron to claim that there is no evidence for medical and pharmacologic treatment of schizophrenia: the evidence is almost 60 years old. The only conclusion to draw from this is that the British Psychological Society is, in fact, composed of vast groups of complete morons who do not believe in science or the scientific method.
Why should one have to "believe in" science? I thought the deal with science is that it was a process of constantly questioning, developing, and attempting to disprove poor theories. I'm not sure I'm interested in your faith-based reasoning.
More directly to the point, science itself comes up short on determining what "mental health" is. Once we classify a set of symptoms and label it as an "illness", we can test whether a particular medication seems to improve the "illness" by whether it diminishes the symptoms, but that's just about the limit of science. So once you assume that hallucinations are "illness", then science can be used to determine whether a given medication diminishes hallucinations.
But it's not quite science that tells us that the medication "cures schizophrenia". It's like if you go hit by a car and your leg hurt afterwards. You could call that pain an "illness" and then science can determine that morphine is effective at treating the "illness". You can run thousands of studies that prove that morphine will remove the "illness" of leg pain, but it won't ever tell you whether that's an appropriate treatment until you redefine the illness to downplay the pain and focus instead on the broken leg.
If anything, sometimes you want people who *don't understand* what you do for a living to do the jobs that are supporting you because they will not gloss over things that you take for granted.
It's also nice because sometimes, people who don't understand what your job instead understand other things. Sometimes they understand how to do their own jobs, and that sure is handy.
Sometimes the problem is just that everyone likes to believe that they themselves are very important. If you're a sloppy thinker, this might lead you to believe that your skills are the most useful skills, and that the things you know are things that everyone should know. For most of us, we aren't actually that important.
Yes, but since most currencies are not generated by an encryption scheme, they're arguably not quite as subject to software bugs and upgrade incompatibilities. Not in the same way.
When you come up with an answer like this, it raises the question, "What is the causal link?"
They dismiss both intelligence and socioeconomic status, and yet I would guess that there's some connection between reading/math ability and intelligence/socioeconomic status. Dumb children with poor uneducated parents are probably not doing well on these tests. Also they seem dismissive of the role of later education, though I'm sure that early test performance affects subsequent educational opportunities.
It seems like they may have found a statistical correlation without explaining what it actually means.
When it does pass, it'll be too little too late. A few years ago, I really wished my cable company would let me subscribe to only the channels I wanted. I thought, "Why should I have to pay for all these channels? Why can't I just pay for the channels I want?"
Now I think, "Why should I have to pay for a whole channel? Why can't I just pay for the shows I want?"
But they're already on the verge of missing that boat, too. I'm starting to think, "Why should I have to pay for all these shows? Why can't they just put everything on Netflix?" Strangely, it's circular, since we started at "Why should I pay for a whole big package instead of only paying for what I want?" and by the end of the process I'm heading back towards, "Why should I pay for individual shoes instead of putting them all together in one big package?" The big difference is that now the market expects the "Whole big package" to be around $10-$20 per month instead of $100.
that's easily done with a configuration file that lists the "packages" to install... I guess I underestimated the effect of the windows mindset
No, you misunderstand the nature of the problem that is being solved. You're a managing windows and want to push out a standard set of packages to environments where you don't necessarily have complete control. Given the option of telling a user to download and install a package manager and write an appropriate config file vs. download an.EXE and run it, I'd choose the latter.
Now obviously I would prefer a package manager with a standard packaging format, but you can't blame Ninite for servicing a need. For the environment that they're operating in, they provide something meaningfully close to the functionality of a package manager for a series of disparate apps that aren't packaged in standard ways. I don't think the "pro" version will accept a config file per se, but there are various options in the command line, so you can still script it and have it select which applications you want to install/update.
It's not perfect, but trying to get Adobe to adhere to the same package standard as Oracle is a fool's errand.
Though I believe Apple should open their platform up more, I would argue that the Apple situation is very different. They're offering a storefront and distribution for 30%, which really wouldn't be too bad if it weren't mandatory that you use their storefront. At least Apple is hosting things, designing the store, developing software, handing credit cards, etc.
Now imagine that, in addition to Apple taking their 30%, your ISP charged app distributors an additional 20% because the app was downloaded over their network. Seems particularly unfair, doesn't it? Well how is that different from ISPs wanting a cut of Netflix's profits?
Even that, however, is not charging a percentage of profits *in addition* to the licensing fee. Besides, I'm sure that licensing arrangement was completely optional. Those businesses could still buy Microsoft products from the store according to normal licensing terms, but they got a better deal through this per-seat licensing.
I agree. To create an analogous situation with something other than Internet service, imagine Microsoft started going around to every business running Windows/Exchange, saying, "Hey, we deserve some of your profits. You're using our products to make money, and it's totally unfair that we don't get a cut." That'd be ridiculous,right? Microsoft offered a product, and you bought it according to their terms. If you think they deserve a percentage simply because you use their product to make money, then where does it end? Why can't 3M come after you for a percentage because you use post-its.
Even in talking about Internet service, why aren't ISPs going after every company with a website? I work for a company with a website, and we get business through the internet. We use our Internet connection to conduct our business. Should our ISP be able to come after us for a percentage of profits, just because we make money by using out Internet connection?
No. We pay for out internet connection. We pay for our hosting. Our customers pay for their internet connections. That's all the ISPs can lay claim to: the charges for providing Internet service.
Really, the only difference with Netflix is they end up being a competitor to ISPs who also provide Cable service. Well boo-fricking-hoo.
Even my son while in high school was a part of the generation that got homework dumped on them. sometimes he'd be up until 11 or 12 at night doing it. In your world we made him do that homework because4 we didn't "give a fuck".
One of many things I've never understood about highschool: Make teenagers wake up at 6am to get to school on time. Keep them in school until 3pm. Encourage them to go to football practice after school. Give them 5 hours of homework. Wonder why they fall asleep in class.
nice starting idea, but the implementation is idiotic. Why not just have one Ninite app that fetches a list of available apps and installer URLs and whatever custom installer scripts ninite needs for them) and allow the user to select which apps whenever they run it?
Well the idea is that if you need to deploy the same package on a bunch of different computers, you grab that one install package, and then run it anywhere, and it will apply a consistent set of installs/updates. The website is really just a way to generate the configuration. They could have had the same setup/configuration in a local application instead of the Ninite website, but I'm not sure that really helps you much.
Second, you can hold onto that installer and re-run it at any time, and it should update all of your existing installs. Third, they have "Ninite Pro" which lets you script out what to install better, and offers more management options.
Not that it isn't a little backwards. I think both Apple and Microsoft should create package managers that would let you simply add repositories, so that their "software update" and "windows update" would be able to fetch updates from other vendors without needing to be in some kind of walled garden.
Slashdot Mirror
The suggestions involved are klunky and the idea of splitting it into 3 OSes is going the wrong way.
I'd agree that there's no point in splitting it into 3 different OSes, but I think a better solution is to have the Metro stuff be an optional installation (similar to the Media Center stuff) for desktop computers. The insistance on pushing touchscreen UI elements onto the desktop is a fundamental problem. You can reorganize the start menu and change the look, but having a full-screen menu that obscures your desktop and currently running applications causes a context shift which is needlessly disorienting.
It's silly to think that in a modern business, you would have only one (or even two or three) applications open at the same time, and not get some backlash. Looking at my computer that I'm working on right now, I have 8 applications open, 5 of them visible. While I type this in my web browser, I'm monitoring several different things. If a new email or IM pops in, it will get my attention. Meanwhile, I'm watching two processes complete. I resize and move windows as I need to get whatever I need to be visible on the screen, and the only way that Metro can achieve this level of flexibility is to reintroduce individual resizable windows, which brings them immediately back to the old "Desktop" model.
In short, Windows 8 was designed by someone who didn't understand what they were doing.
Well it is a little more annoying than you're making it out to be. Not only does the Start Menu bring you back into Metro, but a lot of the default applications are Metro apps. It's nothing that can't be dealt with, but it's a bit of a pain.
Apple seems to be more about the rumours and the stories about their products nowadays...
I sense you must not be familiar with the Mac community. Rumors are the norm.
You can spin that to be a bad thing, saying, "They have rumors because there's nothing of substance." You could spin it to be a positive, saying, "The market is so excited about Apple's products that they engage in wild speculation." Regardless, the Mac rumor mill has been spinning for decades, and this is not something that has emerged "nowadays".
I think this is a more appropriate way of looking at things. If you want to keep valuable employees happy, it helps to show them that they're appreciated. That might mean giving them free candy and soda, but there are many other options. It might mean that you let them leave a little early or have an extra day off. It might mean that you give them a more flexible schedule or let them work from home. It might mean that you give them more interesting and more challenging projects. It might mean that you make a point to say "Thank you. Job well done."
The ways of showing people that they're important and appreciated are varied, and part of how you show someone that you appreciate them is by bothering to figure out what makes them feel appreciated.
Soda and candy? That wouldn't make me feel appreciated, and I wouldn't worry about a company that cut those. I'd be more concerned about a company that treats its employees badly but hopes to buy them off with soda and candy.
I don't think this is a trojan horse to force you to use Google+. I think it's the beginning of Google trying to position Hangouts as a more major project in its own right, rather than a small offshoot of Google+.
I think there is a large question in there: To what degree do we feel like we can forego the standard educational requirements and simply allow people to learn by whatever methods, and take tests to prove knowledge/ability?
To take it to an extreme, should we allow anyone to become a lawyer if they can pass a Bar exam? How about allowing someone to be a doctor just by passing a series of medical exams, but without going to med school?
Is there a value to sending people to school beyond testable knowledge? That's a big question.
"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."
-Wayne Gretzky
-Michael Scott
-The Dutch
It doesn't really change the basic idea. In fact, I think it makes my point even stronger.
If it's Java 1.7, why refer to a version as 7u40-3 version 1.0? Are you ever going to have a version of Java 1.7 that you're calling 7u40-3 version 2.0? That's insane.
Just call it 1.7.40.3. Or really, make it simpler than that.
Why not just do a normal numbering scheme? If you dig into their packages, they sometimes claim stupidly to be version 1 of Java 7 update 17. WTF? Instead of that, how about Oracle just acts with some sanity and call it v. 7.17?
If you need sub versions of 7.17, then call it 7.17.1 and 7.17.2. You know, a sane person might do.
Or how about we all just drop Java since it's terrible and the cause of too many security problems?
What's powerful about it?... My wife uses it but mostly because her friends are on it.
I love when people answer their own questions.
The GP post said Facebook had "powerful networking effects", which means, as explained by the Wikipedia:
In economics and business, a network effect (also called network externality or demand-side economies of scale) is the effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product to other people. When network effect is present, the value of a product or service is dependent on the number of others using it.
Gates's magnanimity toward his former rival and Apple is a reflection, perhaps, of his current position in life: it's been nearly five years since his last full-time day at Microsoft, and all of his efforts seem focused on his philanthropic endeavors. He simply has no reason to rip a rival limb from limb in the same way he did as Microsoft CEO.
Well... there's not much of a reason to rip a rival limb from limb when he's already dead. It'd be in pretty poor taste, actually, and I'd expect Gates to avoid badmouthing Jobs if only to avoid looking like an asshole.
Also, their relationship was reportedly far less adversarial than people tended to assume. Most of the people who were supposedly in-the-know claimed that they were friends to some extent, and got along pretty well in spite of disagreeing on a lot of things.
Honestly, this single statement by what appears to be a spokesperson discredits their entire ramblings: "it was unhelpful to see mental health issues as illnesses with biological causes".
I'm not sure why. I would definitely say it's unhelpful at times to see them as "illness with biological causes", though I wouldn't go as far as to say generalize and say it's always unhelpful. I also wouldn't go as far as to say that biology doesn't factor in on some level in all cases, but that's not really the point.
I think the point being made, rather, is that something happens when you start labeling all these things as "illnesses" and setting the expectation that they will be "cured". The truth is that many of these psychological processes and behaviors are within the range of what "normal people" experience. Nobody goes through life being happy, functional, and productive at all times, but we've gotten into treating every moment of dysfunction and unhappiness as a distinct disease. Taking these huge lumps of people and labeling them as suffering from depression, bipolar disorder, AD&D, OCD, and schizophrenia might be a bit like taking everyone over 6' tall and saying that they have hyper-tallness syndrome and treating that as a disease, and then everyone under 6' as suffering from the disease of hypo-tallness syndrome.
At some level, these things may not be diseases to be cured, but different personalities and ways of thinking that could be understood and granted some space for expression. Of course in very extreme cases where there's some kind of danger, some kinds of medical intervention may be necessary. However, there seems to be a very real danger of us creating a Procrustean bed of "mental health", trying to stretch and chop everyone to fit.
You'd have to be a complete moron to claim that there is no evidence for medical and pharmacologic treatment of schizophrenia: the evidence is almost 60 years old. The only conclusion to draw from this is that the British Psychological Society is, in fact, composed of vast groups of complete morons who do not believe in science or the scientific method.
Why should one have to "believe in" science? I thought the deal with science is that it was a process of constantly questioning, developing, and attempting to disprove poor theories. I'm not sure I'm interested in your faith-based reasoning.
More directly to the point, science itself comes up short on determining what "mental health" is. Once we classify a set of symptoms and label it as an "illness", we can test whether a particular medication seems to improve the "illness" by whether it diminishes the symptoms, but that's just about the limit of science. So once you assume that hallucinations are "illness", then science can be used to determine whether a given medication diminishes hallucinations.
But it's not quite science that tells us that the medication "cures schizophrenia". It's like if you go hit by a car and your leg hurt afterwards. You could call that pain an "illness" and then science can determine that morphine is effective at treating the "illness". You can run thousands of studies that prove that morphine will remove the "illness" of leg pain, but it won't ever tell you whether that's an appropriate treatment until you redefine the illness to downplay the pain and focus instead on the broken leg.
If anything, sometimes you want people who *don't understand* what you do for a living to do the jobs that are supporting you because they will not gloss over things that you take for granted.
It's also nice because sometimes, people who don't understand what your job instead understand other things. Sometimes they understand how to do their own jobs, and that sure is handy.
Sometimes the problem is just that everyone likes to believe that they themselves are very important. If you're a sloppy thinker, this might lead you to believe that your skills are the most useful skills, and that the things you know are things that everyone should know. For most of us, we aren't actually that important.
Yes, but since most currencies are not generated by an encryption scheme, they're arguably not quite as subject to software bugs and upgrade incompatibilities. Not in the same way.
When you come up with an answer like this, it raises the question, "What is the causal link?"
They dismiss both intelligence and socioeconomic status, and yet I would guess that there's some connection between reading/math ability and intelligence/socioeconomic status. Dumb children with poor uneducated parents are probably not doing well on these tests. Also they seem dismissive of the role of later education, though I'm sure that early test performance affects subsequent educational opportunities.
It seems like they may have found a statistical correlation without explaining what it actually means.
When it does pass, it'll be too little too late. A few years ago, I really wished my cable company would let me subscribe to only the channels I wanted. I thought, "Why should I have to pay for all these channels? Why can't I just pay for the channels I want?"
Now I think, "Why should I have to pay for a whole channel? Why can't I just pay for the shows I want?"
But they're already on the verge of missing that boat, too. I'm starting to think, "Why should I have to pay for all these shows? Why can't they just put everything on Netflix?" Strangely, it's circular, since we started at "Why should I pay for a whole big package instead of only paying for what I want?" and by the end of the process I'm heading back towards, "Why should I pay for individual shoes instead of putting them all together in one big package?" The big difference is that now the market expects the "Whole big package" to be around $10-$20 per month instead of $100.
that's easily done with a configuration file that lists the "packages" to install... I guess I underestimated the effect of the windows mindset
No, you misunderstand the nature of the problem that is being solved. You're a managing windows and want to push out a standard set of packages to environments where you don't necessarily have complete control. Given the option of telling a user to download and install a package manager and write an appropriate config file vs. download an .EXE and run it, I'd choose the latter.
Now obviously I would prefer a package manager with a standard packaging format, but you can't blame Ninite for servicing a need. For the environment that they're operating in, they provide something meaningfully close to the functionality of a package manager for a series of disparate apps that aren't packaged in standard ways. I don't think the "pro" version will accept a config file per se, but there are various options in the command line, so you can still script it and have it select which applications you want to install/update.
It's not perfect, but trying to get Adobe to adhere to the same package standard as Oracle is a fool's errand.
Though I believe Apple should open their platform up more, I would argue that the Apple situation is very different. They're offering a storefront and distribution for 30%, which really wouldn't be too bad if it weren't mandatory that you use their storefront. At least Apple is hosting things, designing the store, developing software, handing credit cards, etc.
Now imagine that, in addition to Apple taking their 30%, your ISP charged app distributors an additional 20% because the app was downloaded over their network. Seems particularly unfair, doesn't it? Well how is that different from ISPs wanting a cut of Netflix's profits?
Even that, however, is not charging a percentage of profits *in addition* to the licensing fee. Besides, I'm sure that licensing arrangement was completely optional. Those businesses could still buy Microsoft products from the store according to normal licensing terms, but they got a better deal through this per-seat licensing.
I agree. To create an analogous situation with something other than Internet service, imagine Microsoft started going around to every business running Windows/Exchange, saying, "Hey, we deserve some of your profits. You're using our products to make money, and it's totally unfair that we don't get a cut." That'd be ridiculous,right? Microsoft offered a product, and you bought it according to their terms. If you think they deserve a percentage simply because you use their product to make money, then where does it end? Why can't 3M come after you for a percentage because you use post-its.
Even in talking about Internet service, why aren't ISPs going after every company with a website? I work for a company with a website, and we get business through the internet. We use our Internet connection to conduct our business. Should our ISP be able to come after us for a percentage of profits, just because we make money by using out Internet connection?
No. We pay for out internet connection. We pay for our hosting. Our customers pay for their internet connections. That's all the ISPs can lay claim to: the charges for providing Internet service.
Really, the only difference with Netflix is they end up being a competitor to ISPs who also provide Cable service. Well boo-fricking-hoo.
class for teenagers should be starting at noon not 9am.
Where you live, it starts at 9am? When I was in high school, you had to be there by 7:15am. 9am would have been amazing.
Even my son while in high school was a part of the generation that got homework dumped on them. sometimes he'd be up until 11 or 12 at night doing it. In your world we made him do that homework because4 we didn't "give a fuck".
One of many things I've never understood about highschool: Make teenagers wake up at 6am to get to school on time. Keep them in school until 3pm. Encourage them to go to football practice after school. Give them 5 hours of homework. Wonder why they fall asleep in class.
nice starting idea, but the implementation is idiotic. Why not just have one Ninite app that fetches a list of available apps and installer URLs and whatever custom installer scripts ninite needs for them) and allow the user to select which apps whenever they run it?
Well the idea is that if you need to deploy the same package on a bunch of different computers, you grab that one install package, and then run it anywhere, and it will apply a consistent set of installs/updates. The website is really just a way to generate the configuration. They could have had the same setup/configuration in a local application instead of the Ninite website, but I'm not sure that really helps you much.
Second, you can hold onto that installer and re-run it at any time, and it should update all of your existing installs. Third, they have "Ninite Pro" which lets you script out what to install better, and offers more management options.
Not that it isn't a little backwards. I think both Apple and Microsoft should create package managers that would let you simply add repositories, so that their "software update" and "windows update" would be able to fetch updates from other vendors without needing to be in some kind of walled garden.
Try to sell them all before the Krayon Kash Krash.