Yeah, I can't think of anything *really* exciting about firefox. Yes, it works, and it does what many of us *expect* from a browser. Blocks pop-ups. Blocks cookies. But are they something to lose your head over? Maybe if they showed an IE user next to the FF user, and the IE user's head blowing up or screaming because he keeps trying to close pop-ups that just opens more. Or if they showed an IE user with a machine so slowed by spyware they just sit and chat on the phone and the FF user busy surfing and then eating the phone because she's so distracted by being able to do something (probably hard get the point across without some narration), then the videos would be somewhat meaningful.
I think most people's expectations are different from yours. Most people don't blame IE for the pop-up windows they get. They think that's just how the internet works. They think computers slow down as the "machinery" gets old, and that's why people think their computers are running slow (when it's actually viruses and spyware).
So for the masses, Firefox probably should pretend like it's doing amazing things. It's "blocking" pop-ups, and "oiling the machinery of your computer" by not installing spyware.
Ok, so I agree that it's still not doing anything exciting, but since when has that mattered for advertisements? Like the AOL commercials with the little yellow guy running on a treadmill-- what improvements were they selling with that one? Oh, but whatever it was, people bought into it.
Welcome to advertising in the 21st century. No ads these days explain what a product does or why it's better than competing products. Too much research has shown that the rational appeals of a "superior product" are pretty ineffective.
Most ads these days don't even talk about the product, maybe don't even show the product. Think about a coffee commercial: In the '50s, coffee commercials talked about how their coffee was deeper, darker, and more delicious than their competition. Maybe there was a little jingle to go along with it. Now, they have some attractive couple sitting around having a sweet romantic conversation. Maybe someone in the commercial is drinking coffee, but that's about as much reference to the product as you get.
I'd guess these commercials will probably be pretty effective at generating hype, and tech products live off of hype.
The only thing is, insofar as they're using the same code, it's in Apple's best interest to "shape" development toward being "better". So... it's probably not that bad a thing.
The truth is, this (or something like it) has been happening with OSS all along. Don't you think companies like Redhat, IBM, and Novell are "shaping" FOSS development toward their own goals? Of course they have, but fortunately their goals for Linux are to have it be a solid, complete, and advanced desktop and server OS.
The difference, of course, is that not all of Apple's OS is FOSS. So it's possible that they might find ways to put their more advanced features in the non-open-sourced sections of their software, and not contribute them back. However, if anyone could demonstrate that Apple had done this in a way that violates licensing, it could cause them quite a bit of trouble, so it seems like it'd be pretty stupid to try. Insofar as they do this without violating licensing... well, it seems fair to me, until someone comes up with a counter-example.
Re:This sounds normal
on
Safari vs. KHTML
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The fact that Apple is suggesting a KDE backport of WebCore is pretty amazing. How many corporations do we see telling an OSS group, "Why don't you just take our code and use it for your project whole-hog"? My guess is not many.
Maybe not, but why wouldn't Apple do this? Of course they want Konquerer to use the same rendering engine as Safari. First of all, it increases the user-base, which increases the chance that web developers will test for their rendering engine. Second, every improvement that the KDE team makes to the engine amounts to Apple getting a developer to work for free.
My general understanding (guess?) is that the divergence is a result of Apple and the KDE team having different methods and using different tools and such. The idea that Apple would specifically avoid being able to work with the KDE team seems unlikely. It doesn't really gain them anything.
Well, I don't think it's as simple as that. They make money primarily from their hardware and pro apps. From what I understand, MacOS isn't much of a cash cow.
However, the way they sell their hardware is by making terrific software that only works on their hardware. You want to listen to iTunes music on a portable device? Better buy an iPod. You want to run OSX, better buy a Mac. Still, (and I'll again condition this by saying, "from what I understand") it's their hardware that makes money. They don't mind so much if you buy an Apple computer and run Linux/KDE on it. As long as you buy an Mac, they're happy. They don't mind you buying an iPod and filling it with MP3s. Apple doesn't make much off of iTMS anyway, but you've bought the iPod, which is one of their cash cows right now. It's running OSX on x86 or iTunes AAC files on a Dell music player that Apple is more likely to be upset about, and I suspect that's exactly why they don't open-source all of their OS.
So no, I don't think Apple has much need to sabotage OSS projects (if that's the implication here).
With all of the Spyware utilities out there, I am surprised that Symmantec would waste their time with this one.
Symantec sells themselves as a total security company. You have a security problem, they have a solution (at least that's the general idea of their marketing). So what's really silly is that it took them this long to address spyware. For years, it's like they just pretended it didn't exist. People would buy Norton Internet Security, think their machines were safe and fine, meanwhile getting overloaded with spyware. How do you think spyware became so prevalent? It's because people would say, "Oh, but I have Norton Antivirus installed. I don't have to worry about downloading and installing things. I have Norton Internet Security. I'm safe." And they'd go ahead and download and install whatever, thinking it couldn't hurt them.
Besides that, though you already have anti-spyware solutions, you don't have any enterprise level solutions for well known and trusted vendors. You know, like something that will let you push definition updates to several hundred clients with a single click, run automated scans, and generate reports on a central server? There's still room in that market. That market has pretty much been sitting around waiting for Symantec to take over.
Anyway, don't kid yourselves. Google is really an advertisement vendor...
You're absolutely right, they do sell advertisements. But do you really think we're getting rid of advertising on the web? [looks up at the ThinkGeek banner at the top of this page]
The truth is, if you want people to be able to devote themselves to building web pages and writing content full time, paying for bandwidth and all, those sites are going to have to make money. Either they have to sell something, show ads, or live off of donations. If you come up with another way, let us know.
But I think there's one big reason why people can tolerate google's ads-- they're small plain text. No flash, no animated gifs, no big ugly banners... [looks again at the ThinkGeek banner at the top of the page]
Anyway, it Google could be worse. They don't seem to be doing too much evil so far. Still, we should keep an eye on that.
At least they'll do something like, when you open it, Clippy will say, "You're using a strange format for this document. Do you want to upgrade it?" and 'yes', of course, will make it a DOC file.
If there were, say, three competing office suites each with 33% of the market share, then you could understand them wanting to include support for this format - companies would demand that the app supported them or switch to an alternative.
First, I don't think it would need to be 33% market share for this new format for Microsoft to be sufficiently pressured. 10-20% might do it. Second, because it's an open format, you don't need any SINGLE product to reach very high usage, you just need the sum of all the products who use this format to become sufficiently high. So we already have OOo and KOffice. Maybe we'll see Abiword supporting it. Maybe if Apple sees enough requests (hint, hint) it'll see some support in Pages and Keynote. Still not enough, but hopefully this format will be versitile enough that other apps will use it too, and every little bit will help.
But everyone write a letter to your congressman and tell them we need open formats for governmental documentation. And if you include a $5 bill, they might actually read it!
I don't think people are claiming that that's what's slowing down the Longhorn release, but Apple certainly can provide greater integration and stability with hardware due to the fact that they have control over the hardware.
Yeah, you're right that Microsoft isn't writing drivers for all these different devices, but let's look at a couple things. First, I never need to load drivers when I'm using my Mac. The drivers are pretty much always included in the OS. Working on a Mac, you'd hardly know there's such a thing as a "video card driver". Why? It's in the OS. You get updates with the OS updates. After all, Apple is only including a couple different graphic chipsets from 2 different vendors in their systems. There aren't a lot of drivers to include before you have drivers for every possible video card.
And when there is a problem with the drivers, if there's some instability or performance, whether it's the OS's fault or the video driver's fault, Apple can just work either ATI or Nvidia to fix it. With all the different possible configurations of Intel/AMD with Intel/Nvidia/ATI on god-knows-whose vid card and motherboard, it's a little harder to track down the problem, reproduce it, convince the party at fault that they need to fix it, and push the patch down to everyone's local computer.
I don't know if that's a clear explanation, and maybe I'm missing some things.
Can't we give both teams credit? Obviously the team working on Konquerer gave Apple a great head-start, and they have continued working with Apple to make KHTML better. I'm assuming Konquerer will also be getting the update to pass the Acid2 test soon.
So what's the problem? Can't we all just get along?
Gentoo must be the greatest distro ever. Why? Because any linux install that uses the word "nazi-ish" has gotta be fun. Just check out the section on Portage:
Wenrsync- this will download a portage snapshot from a Gentoo mirror and sync it locally. Use this option if you are behind a nazi-ish firewall that blocks outgoing rsync traffic.
Apparently, if you have any anti-Semitic firewalls, Gentoo is the distro for you!
if microsoft makes a metro document editor included in ms word, which almost all businesses have, then most businesses will have no need to ever use adobe again. All they need is for metro to be almost as good and then creatively get it on every computer out there. Then everyone will be able to read and edit the document.
You think the people you're talking about use PDF as a document format for documents that they want to "read and edit"? Of course not. They have DOC files for that. When the sort of businesses you're talking about (all MS corporate shops) use PDFs, it's because they want a read-only document format that anyone will be able to open, read, and print. They use it for things like instruction manuals and maybe inter-office memos. Or else they use PDFs for workflow things, like comments and signatures and such, which is a whole different ball of wax.
One of the big uses of PDF is in print media, and a lot of these people use Macs anyhow. What makes you think Microsoft will be able to strong-arm Apple into dropping PDF support (which they have built in to the OS) for the sake of Microsoft's format? What makes you think they'll be able to convince designers to stop using Adobe products, and really, what do you think their alternatives are? Maybe you could have argued designers could have used Macromedia instead, but since the buyout, no deal. And Macromedia didn't even make their products for print designers. All their products were focussed on web designers, which if you don't know, it's a very different thing.
Sorry, but Microsoft doesn't have much of a hope of "killing" Adobe, if that is in fact what they're trying to do. Along with everything else, Linux and Apple are becoming stronger competitors, so if Microsoft tries to leverage their market position any more than they currently do, they're likely to alienate more users and lose them to other platforms. Consider of Microsoft really tried to screw over Adobe: Adobe could port their software portfolio to Linux in response. Think that through, and you'll see that Adobe on Linux would mean a lot of bad things for Microsoft. If Adobe even lightened their support for Windows and focused more on Macs, what progress Microsoft had made in the design world would completely dry up.
The PDF format is cumbersome to parse and cumbersome to manipulate; that's why there are few PDF viewers and even fewer PDF editors.
I thought there were few PDF viewers because we had enough, or something to that effect. I mean, I don't really have any problem reading or writing PDFs on any platform I use, and I use Mac, Windows, and Linux. In fact, I read and write PDFs for free (as in beer) on each platform, and I have no complaints.
I thought the reason there weren't a lot of PDF editors was mainly because, the way people use it, they aren't expecting to edit it. I mean, when I'm working on a document, I don't write a PDF until I have a final copy that I want to send to someone in a universally viewable read-only form. I always thought that was the purpose of a PDF. If I want it editable, I keep it in the format of whatever editor I'm working in.
And though I don't really like the idea of one company (Adobe) having so much control over such a common format, I dislike it in principle only. By that, I mean that there don't seem to be any huge practical problems as far as I'm aware.
I didn't know the guy or his wife. I have no idea of the situation. I didn't want to know about the affair. So I just ignored it, figuring it's not my place to interfere.
But I sent out a notice reminding people that their work e-mail account isn't private and we can and do occasionally read messages, and I updated our handbook that we give new users to include sterner warnings.
Microsoft touted Longhorn's features such as WinFS however they have failed to appear in this, the first Longhorn "release". It seems like Microsoft is simply releasing an OS as quickly as possible as opposed to checking it thoroughly for bugs (I know, I know, it's a beta release, but beta with MS = pretty close to the real thing).
Well, in general, a "beta" should be feature complete. Yeah, it's sort of arbitrary terminology, but, as you said, Microsoft betas tend to follow that rule as well.
To be honest, I'm not sure what the advantage of Longhorn is supposed to be at this point. It kind of seems like the release keeps getting delayed while they drop features. If Microsoft's history is any indicator, we'll end up spending $300 for a release for bug-fixes, a new theme, some new eye-candy, and all the controls moved to new places.
I'm actually hoping that won't be the case, but as more news comes out, it keeps looking that way.
...except without the ability to connect to other IM networks. Really, why should I use an IM client that doesn't allow me to connect to people on other networks, and forces ads down my throat?
However, don't you think it is a bit unnecessary to actually read people's conversations and emails? Preventing abuse of company resources is one thing but actually reading the content of my emails is another. I could very well be talking about something that is work related but that I do not want certain people to read. Is that really so wrong?
I work in IT, and I always tell everyone, if you don't want me reading it, don't send it through company e-mail. I tell everyone up-front. Just don't.
Now the reason for this isn't because I like to snoop. In fact, if I wanted to snoop, I wouldn't tell anyone, I'd just snoop around reading e-mail. However, other things come up. For example, I once ended up catching an e-mail about an extra-marital affair an employee was having. I wasn't looking for it, but I was browsing our spam filter to make sure we weren't getting false positives, and the mistress used a dirty word, which meant she got caught in the filter. By the time I was sure it was a personal e-mail and not spam, it was too late. I already knew too much.
Or some more examples:
I've had people ask that I find an e-mail sent to them that they've lost.
I've had situations where I've had to search e-mail of ex-employees for business-related information.
I've had a mail server go down due to lack of hard drive space in the middle of the night, and I've had to sort through mail of people with big attachments, save the attachments to another disk, and remove them from the mail server.
I've sat down in front of someone's machine to fix something only to find that they've left very personal e-mail opened in the front window.
I could probably come up with more situations where an IT guy might be in a position to read your e-mail without intentional monitoring. Hell, I've caught people visiting naughty websites because I was monitoring traffic for unrelated security purposes.
My point is, it's not all snooping. I'm not the sort to want to stick my nose in other people's business, and in fact, when I stumble across some personal information, I generally wish I hadn't. I don't want to know, so please, everyone, for the sake of your IT guys who don't want to know about your personal lives, don't send revealing personal e-mail through your company's servers.
As much as I like the form factor I would have a real hard time buying one of these, but if I did it would have to be the 250. Can you stack 'em and get an extra 100GB + twice the ports for $500?
I don't see why not. The Mac mini has 1 firewire + 2USB ports. Assuming 1 USB port is used for keyboard/mouse, that means you can connect 2 directly to your Mac mini. Additionally, each of these "Mini Mates" has 2 extra firewire ports and 3 extra USB ports, so I don't see any reason why you couldn't chain them.
What I'm suggesting is, you should be able to attach quite a few of these to one mini if you chose.
That can probably be attributed to two factors: a bombardment of advertising encouraging private motor vehicles as status objects and the government deciding top-down that car manufacture and sales will be part of the new economy
...and you think that's an aberration, that with "higher standards of living" come "advertising bombardments" for products we don't really need? Funny, I thought having more products you don't need is what most people meant when they said "higher standard of living".
I don't think "foolish" is the right word, they're just doing something that the technology isn't ready to be cost effective-- but it doesn't get to be cost-effective until someone works on some over-expensive version for a while first.
But think ahead, after a few years of R&D, the general idea is you get a nice little PDA that you dock and have a full-blown computer. You work in your home you have all your apps/files/etc, you get on the train and you have all the same apps/files/etc, and you get to work and you still have all the same apps/files/etc. No syncing, no crappy-PDA-versions of your apps that don't work properly-- you're computer just goes with you. If the idea/design is finessed a bit, it might actually end up being cheaper than buying a laptop, PDA, and desktop, because of bunch of the components are only purchased once (hard drive, processor, RAM, etc.). You'd just be buying keyboards/mice/monitors.
Or they could also modularize the laptop "shell" itself. I remember IBM was working on something recently (I don't know if it was ever released). It was a Thinkpad where the screen and full-sized keyboard detached from each other somehow, and the screen could be elevated.... I don't remember exactly how it worked, but the idea was that you could separate the laptop out to be like a desktop PC.
Or how about this: have something like a PDA/iPod, where is carries one limited OS/interface for portable purposes, but hard-drive-based. The hard drive doesn't have the OS and the device doesn't have all the GPU/ports/whatever, but it has your/home folder and applications. So you plop this device into whatever computer, and you get all the same apps/documents/whatever.
So you would achieve something similar, except the device, by itself, would have limited capabilities until it was put into a "shell". However, it seems like you need a specialized OS/interface for small devices anyway, so it might not be such a downside. Plus, it'd be easier to engineer an effective and small device this way.
So what I'm talking about in general is, the more people play with these ideas, the more likely someone will make a device that is practical, so it's not "foolish" to make an attempt. Imagine 5 years from now, and imagine Apple keeps shrinking the mini to the point that it'll fit in an iPod. Wouldn't you want someone working on these things?
On the other hand, I know that a lot of the more dedicated Thief players consider it to be utterly against the spirit of the game to kill anyone.
AKA "ghosting". If you open a door, you have to close it. If you unlock a door, you have to re-lock it before you complete the level. If you extinguish a candle or torch, you need to re-ignite it. You can't kill anyone or knock anyone out. You can only move or take object of value that you're stealing (money or mission items)-- otherwise, you must leave everything as you found it. For more specifics, read here.
It's hard, it's fun, and it's the sort of mentality that makes a stealth game a stealth game.
I'm not claiming that "Thief" was the first game to employ any stealth techniques into the gameplay. Many games had some instances where the character could be hidden, or certain techniques that could be used to avoid triggering an enemy attack. However, as far as I can remember, "Thief" was the first game to do something comparable to "Splinter Cell". It put you into a 3D world with gameplay resembling a FPS or TPS, except the enemy AI had defined [semi-]realistic senses of sight and hearing which were limited in various ways by the environment and exploited for the sake of sneaking through the entire game unnoticed.
So was "Thief" the first game to allow the player to avoid the notice of enemy AI? No. Was it the origin of the modern First/Third-Person-Sneaker? I'd say yes. That it uses magic instead of night-vision-goggles is inconsequential. Think look-and-feel. Think gameplay conventions.
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I think most people's expectations are different from yours. Most people don't blame IE for the pop-up windows they get. They think that's just how the internet works. They think computers slow down as the "machinery" gets old, and that's why people think their computers are running slow (when it's actually viruses and spyware).
So for the masses, Firefox probably should pretend like it's doing amazing things. It's "blocking" pop-ups, and "oiling the machinery of your computer" by not installing spyware.
Ok, so I agree that it's still not doing anything exciting, but since when has that mattered for advertisements? Like the AOL commercials with the little yellow guy running on a treadmill-- what improvements were they selling with that one? Oh, but whatever it was, people bought into it.
Most ads these days don't even talk about the product, maybe don't even show the product. Think about a coffee commercial: In the '50s, coffee commercials talked about how their coffee was deeper, darker, and more delicious than their competition. Maybe there was a little jingle to go along with it. Now, they have some attractive couple sitting around having a sweet romantic conversation. Maybe someone in the commercial is drinking coffee, but that's about as much reference to the product as you get.
I'd guess these commercials will probably be pretty effective at generating hype, and tech products live off of hype.
The truth is, this (or something like it) has been happening with OSS all along. Don't you think companies like Redhat, IBM, and Novell are "shaping" FOSS development toward their own goals? Of course they have, but fortunately their goals for Linux are to have it be a solid, complete, and advanced desktop and server OS.
The difference, of course, is that not all of Apple's OS is FOSS. So it's possible that they might find ways to put their more advanced features in the non-open-sourced sections of their software, and not contribute them back. However, if anyone could demonstrate that Apple had done this in a way that violates licensing, it could cause them quite a bit of trouble, so it seems like it'd be pretty stupid to try. Insofar as they do this without violating licensing... well, it seems fair to me, until someone comes up with a counter-example.
Maybe not, but why wouldn't Apple do this? Of course they want Konquerer to use the same rendering engine as Safari. First of all, it increases the user-base, which increases the chance that web developers will test for their rendering engine. Second, every improvement that the KDE team makes to the engine amounts to Apple getting a developer to work for free.
My general understanding (guess?) is that the divergence is a result of Apple and the KDE team having different methods and using different tools and such. The idea that Apple would specifically avoid being able to work with the KDE team seems unlikely. It doesn't really gain them anything.
However, the way they sell their hardware is by making terrific software that only works on their hardware. You want to listen to iTunes music on a portable device? Better buy an iPod. You want to run OSX, better buy a Mac. Still, (and I'll again condition this by saying, "from what I understand") it's their hardware that makes money. They don't mind so much if you buy an Apple computer and run Linux/KDE on it. As long as you buy an Mac, they're happy. They don't mind you buying an iPod and filling it with MP3s. Apple doesn't make much off of iTMS anyway, but you've bought the iPod, which is one of their cash cows right now. It's running OSX on x86 or iTunes AAC files on a Dell music player that Apple is more likely to be upset about, and I suspect that's exactly why they don't open-source all of their OS.
So no, I don't think Apple has much need to sabotage OSS projects (if that's the implication here).
Symantec sells themselves as a total security company. You have a security problem, they have a solution (at least that's the general idea of their marketing). So what's really silly is that it took them this long to address spyware. For years, it's like they just pretended it didn't exist. People would buy Norton Internet Security, think their machines were safe and fine, meanwhile getting overloaded with spyware. How do you think spyware became so prevalent? It's because people would say, "Oh, but I have Norton Antivirus installed. I don't have to worry about downloading and installing things. I have Norton Internet Security. I'm safe." And they'd go ahead and download and install whatever, thinking it couldn't hurt them.
Besides that, though you already have anti-spyware solutions, you don't have any enterprise level solutions for well known and trusted vendors. You know, like something that will let you push definition updates to several hundred clients with a single click, run automated scans, and generate reports on a central server? There's still room in that market. That market has pretty much been sitting around waiting for Symantec to take over.
You're absolutely right, they do sell advertisements. But do you really think we're getting rid of advertising on the web? [looks up at the ThinkGeek banner at the top of this page]
The truth is, if you want people to be able to devote themselves to building web pages and writing content full time, paying for bandwidth and all, those sites are going to have to make money. Either they have to sell something, show ads, or live off of donations. If you come up with another way, let us know.
But I think there's one big reason why people can tolerate google's ads-- they're small plain text. No flash, no animated gifs, no big ugly banners... [looks again at the ThinkGeek banner at the top of the page]
Anyway, it Google could be worse. They don't seem to be doing too much evil so far. Still, we should keep an eye on that.
At least they'll do something like, when you open it, Clippy will say, "You're using a strange format for this document. Do you want to upgrade it?" and 'yes', of course, will make it a DOC file.
First, I don't think it would need to be 33% market share for this new format for Microsoft to be sufficiently pressured. 10-20% might do it. Second, because it's an open format, you don't need any SINGLE product to reach very high usage, you just need the sum of all the products who use this format to become sufficiently high. So we already have OOo and KOffice. Maybe we'll see Abiword supporting it. Maybe if Apple sees enough requests (hint, hint) it'll see some support in Pages and Keynote. Still not enough, but hopefully this format will be versitile enough that other apps will use it too, and every little bit will help.
But everyone write a letter to your congressman and tell them we need open formats for governmental documentation. And if you include a $5 bill, they might actually read it!
Yeah, you're right that Microsoft isn't writing drivers for all these different devices, but let's look at a couple things. First, I never need to load drivers when I'm using my Mac. The drivers are pretty much always included in the OS. Working on a Mac, you'd hardly know there's such a thing as a "video card driver". Why? It's in the OS. You get updates with the OS updates. After all, Apple is only including a couple different graphic chipsets from 2 different vendors in their systems. There aren't a lot of drivers to include before you have drivers for every possible video card.
And when there is a problem with the drivers, if there's some instability or performance, whether it's the OS's fault or the video driver's fault, Apple can just work either ATI or Nvidia to fix it. With all the different possible configurations of Intel/AMD with Intel/Nvidia/ATI on god-knows-whose vid card and motherboard, it's a little harder to track down the problem, reproduce it, convince the party at fault that they need to fix it, and push the patch down to everyone's local computer.
I don't know if that's a clear explanation, and maybe I'm missing some things.
I like the "They leave in a huff" part. In other words, they think, "Damnit! Dad's such a f^%#ing retarded a$$hole!" and walk away.
So you mean time-travel will be invented as well?
So what's the problem? Can't we all just get along?
Apparently, if you have any anti-Semitic firewalls, Gentoo is the distro for you!
You think the people you're talking about use PDF as a document format for documents that they want to "read and edit"? Of course not. They have DOC files for that. When the sort of businesses you're talking about (all MS corporate shops) use PDFs, it's because they want a read-only document format that anyone will be able to open, read, and print. They use it for things like instruction manuals and maybe inter-office memos. Or else they use PDFs for workflow things, like comments and signatures and such, which is a whole different ball of wax.
One of the big uses of PDF is in print media, and a lot of these people use Macs anyhow. What makes you think Microsoft will be able to strong-arm Apple into dropping PDF support (which they have built in to the OS) for the sake of Microsoft's format? What makes you think they'll be able to convince designers to stop using Adobe products, and really, what do you think their alternatives are? Maybe you could have argued designers could have used Macromedia instead, but since the buyout, no deal. And Macromedia didn't even make their products for print designers. All their products were focussed on web designers, which if you don't know, it's a very different thing.
Sorry, but Microsoft doesn't have much of a hope of "killing" Adobe, if that is in fact what they're trying to do. Along with everything else, Linux and Apple are becoming stronger competitors, so if Microsoft tries to leverage their market position any more than they currently do, they're likely to alienate more users and lose them to other platforms. Consider of Microsoft really tried to screw over Adobe: Adobe could port their software portfolio to Linux in response. Think that through, and you'll see that Adobe on Linux would mean a lot of bad things for Microsoft. If Adobe even lightened their support for Windows and focused more on Macs, what progress Microsoft had made in the design world would completely dry up.
I thought there were few PDF viewers because we had enough, or something to that effect. I mean, I don't really have any problem reading or writing PDFs on any platform I use, and I use Mac, Windows, and Linux. In fact, I read and write PDFs for free (as in beer) on each platform, and I have no complaints.
I thought the reason there weren't a lot of PDF editors was mainly because, the way people use it, they aren't expecting to edit it. I mean, when I'm working on a document, I don't write a PDF until I have a final copy that I want to send to someone in a universally viewable read-only form. I always thought that was the purpose of a PDF. If I want it editable, I keep it in the format of whatever editor I'm working in.
And though I don't really like the idea of one company (Adobe) having so much control over such a common format, I dislike it in principle only. By that, I mean that there don't seem to be any huge practical problems as far as I'm aware.
But I sent out a notice reminding people that their work e-mail account isn't private and we can and do occasionally read messages, and I updated our handbook that we give new users to include sterner warnings.
Well, in general, a "beta" should be feature complete. Yeah, it's sort of arbitrary terminology, but, as you said, Microsoft betas tend to follow that rule as well.
To be honest, I'm not sure what the advantage of Longhorn is supposed to be at this point. It kind of seems like the release keeps getting delayed while they drop features. If Microsoft's history is any indicator, we'll end up spending $300 for a release for bug-fixes, a new theme, some new eye-candy, and all the controls moved to new places.
I'm actually hoping that won't be the case, but as more news comes out, it keeps looking that way.
...except without the ability to connect to other IM networks. Really, why should I use an IM client that doesn't allow me to connect to people on other networks, and forces ads down my throat?
I work in IT, and I always tell everyone, if you don't want me reading it, don't send it through company e-mail. I tell everyone up-front. Just don't.
Now the reason for this isn't because I like to snoop. In fact, if I wanted to snoop, I wouldn't tell anyone, I'd just snoop around reading e-mail. However, other things come up. For example, I once ended up catching an e-mail about an extra-marital affair an employee was having. I wasn't looking for it, but I was browsing our spam filter to make sure we weren't getting false positives, and the mistress used a dirty word, which meant she got caught in the filter. By the time I was sure it was a personal e-mail and not spam, it was too late. I already knew too much.
Or some more examples:
I could probably come up with more situations where an IT guy might be in a position to read your e-mail without intentional monitoring. Hell, I've caught people visiting naughty websites because I was monitoring traffic for unrelated security purposes.
My point is, it's not all snooping. I'm not the sort to want to stick my nose in other people's business, and in fact, when I stumble across some personal information, I generally wish I hadn't. I don't want to know, so please, everyone, for the sake of your IT guys who don't want to know about your personal lives, don't send revealing personal e-mail through your company's servers.
I don't see why not. The Mac mini has 1 firewire + 2USB ports. Assuming 1 USB port is used for keyboard/mouse, that means you can connect 2 directly to your Mac mini. Additionally, each of these "Mini Mates" has 2 extra firewire ports and 3 extra USB ports, so I don't see any reason why you couldn't chain them.
What I'm suggesting is, you should be able to attach quite a few of these to one mini if you chose.
...and you think that's an aberration, that with "higher standards of living" come "advertising bombardments" for products we don't really need? Funny, I thought having more products you don't need is what most people meant when they said "higher standard of living".
But think ahead, after a few years of R&D, the general idea is you get a nice little PDA that you dock and have a full-blown computer. You work in your home you have all your apps/files/etc, you get on the train and you have all the same apps/files/etc, and you get to work and you still have all the same apps/files/etc. No syncing, no crappy-PDA-versions of your apps that don't work properly-- you're computer just goes with you. If the idea/design is finessed a bit, it might actually end up being cheaper than buying a laptop, PDA, and desktop, because of bunch of the components are only purchased once (hard drive, processor, RAM, etc.). You'd just be buying keyboards/mice/monitors.
Or they could also modularize the laptop "shell" itself. I remember IBM was working on something recently (I don't know if it was ever released). It was a Thinkpad where the screen and full-sized keyboard detached from each other somehow, and the screen could be elevated.... I don't remember exactly how it worked, but the idea was that you could separate the laptop out to be like a desktop PC.
Or how about this: have something like a PDA/iPod, where is carries one limited OS/interface for portable purposes, but hard-drive-based. The hard drive doesn't have the OS and the device doesn't have all the GPU/ports/whatever, but it has your /home folder and applications. So you plop this device into whatever computer, and you get all the same apps/documents/whatever.
So you would achieve something similar, except the device, by itself, would have limited capabilities until it was put into a "shell". However, it seems like you need a specialized OS/interface for small devices anyway, so it might not be such a downside. Plus, it'd be easier to engineer an effective and small device this way.
So what I'm talking about in general is, the more people play with these ideas, the more likely someone will make a device that is practical, so it's not "foolish" to make an attempt. Imagine 5 years from now, and imagine Apple keeps shrinking the mini to the point that it'll fit in an iPod. Wouldn't you want someone working on these things?
AKA "ghosting". If you open a door, you have to close it. If you unlock a door, you have to re-lock it before you complete the level. If you extinguish a candle or torch, you need to re-ignite it. You can't kill anyone or knock anyone out. You can only move or take object of value that you're stealing (money or mission items)-- otherwise, you must leave everything as you found it. For more specifics, read here.
It's hard, it's fun, and it's the sort of mentality that makes a stealth game a stealth game.
So was "Thief" the first game to allow the player to avoid the notice of enemy AI? No. Was it the origin of the modern First/Third-Person-Sneaker? I'd say yes. That it uses magic instead of night-vision-goggles is inconsequential. Think look-and-feel. Think gameplay conventions.