I'm sorry but from a developer's perspective the fact that I can create an application on the PC (.NET) and also run it on a Windows Mobile device without modification, means the Microsoft's mobile solution is not going away anytime soon.
And from a user's perspective you're part of the problem. Cramming PC apps onto 3-inch screens leads to a sucky user experience. Mobile usage on a small screen requires original thinking.
My Windows Mobile phone did me a huge favor when it died. Never, never, never again will I go down that road.
No one elected the leaders in these groups to decide "the party line", to pressure senators to vote a certain way, to hide emails, and whatever else they do.
This is just over-the-top misinformed.
Parties exist because leadership requires supportive followership, and a political party is a solution to that problem. You don't have to affiliate with a party to run for an office at any level. Having an organization behind you multiplies your chances of winning. Are you proposing to abolish organization? That would leave politics the exclusive domain of superrich individuals. If you think it's bad now, you have no idea how bad it could get.
Party leadership is elected. Parties have meetings and caucuses down to the precinct level, and just because you're not informed or involved doesn't mean there is no process behind them, or that the process is closed. In fact, parties tend to welcome anyone who will show up and pitch in to do the grunt work of organizing, soliciting contributions, canvassing, driving people to the polls on election day, et cetera.
No party has the power to keep anyone off the general election ballot for any position. The South Carolina party decision was a party decision, having to do with the party's primary, which will decide the candidate to receive the support of that state's delegates to the national party convention. It's not a vote in the presidential election.
Parties are not required to hold primaries; in fact, in states such as Iowa they do not. Iowa's process involves caucuses at which convention delegates are selected.
I don't think anyone would suggest that processes in either party are consistently above-board or deny that abuses of power happen. But to say, as you do, that "no one elected" party leaders displays a profound ignorance.
And one other thing. The Constitution does not provide for the existence of parties. The Constitution provides for the freedom of assembly, of petition, of expression and other building blocks of personal freedom that allow people to voluntarily organize political movements. It was one such movement that led to the eviction of the British and the establishment of the Constitution in the first place.
$9.99 computer game. Don't think "gamer". Think "lame copy of tetris". Or think of the stuff off gamehippo.com.
You're thinking like a Windows user.
With Linux, the "lame copy of tetris" is included in the distribution, and it's free, along with clones of a couple of dozen other games, so there's little reason to be prowling through the $9.99 closeout bin at Wal-Mart.
And since Ubuntu includes Wine, there's a possibility that the $9.99 game will run anyway. Maybe even a higher probability than with Vista.
0. Dress properly. Leave the metal and piercings at home; you'll just make your security check worse.
1. Travel light. If you're crossing the ocean for two weeks, plan to use a laundry.
2. Avoid connections. If at all possible, drive to a hub airport.
3. Planeside check on your outward trip. This ensures the baggage monkeys don't lose your luggage. If you failed to follow tip #1, and you must check your bag, be sure you carry with you the basics for an overnight stay.
4. Check your heavy baggage on the return trip. Barcode scanners track everything in a database in Atlanta. Airlines don't actually lose your luggage, they just misroute it. On the way home that's a benefit: You don't have to carry your bags to your car! They'll deliver to your home, eventually.
5. Eat a good breakfast. You're not getting fed on the plane unless you're crossing an ocean.
6. Bring your own entertainment -- a book, videogame, etc. Unless you're crossing the ocean on one of those new 767s with the cool Linux personal entertainment system, you're going to be on your own. On most flights, even if they're showing a movie, you won't be able to see it.
7. Noise-suppression headphones really do work.
8. Book early, book online, and select an exit-row seat. Legroom and laptop space will be adequate for a change.
The parent item is absolutely right. Softpedia has no actual data on Linux installations. The data doesn't exist.
Here are three use cases that would show up as Microsoft customers in any Softpedia data:
My elderly mother finally bought a Vista laptop -- a $400 bargain Toshiba. Very nice dual-core Intel laptop, excellent for the price. Half a gig of RAM rendered Vista unusable. Rather than spend more money, I installed Ubuntu Linux on it, and she's off like a rocket. Everything Just Works.
My mother-in-law's old eMachines desktop blew a hard drive. Oops... no XP install disk, so we can't just stick in a new hard drive. I inserted an Ubuntu live CD and she ran with that (no HD) for a month. Worked great! So I installed a $75 hard disk and loaded Linux onto it. It took 30 minutes, no problems, and everything Just Works.
My middle daughter just turned 15. For her birthday we gave her a $400 Acer laptop. I put Linux on a partition. By the end of the month I'm confident she'll have abandoned Vista. Too slow, too annoying with its constant security warnings and popups.
(There are only two problems with the Linux setup for her. One is hardware-based. I'd say the installation Just Works except that it doesn't quite; the Atheros wi-fi is broken, and I'll probably have to buy her a d-Link PCMCIA card. The second is the lack of iTunes, and I'll have to introduce her to a DRM-free music store.)
Linux on the desktop is more than viable, and it's installed in a lot more places than "experts" like those at Softpedia know. Even the ditzy kid over at the Wal-Mart electronics section is dual-booting.
I've been on a lot of painfully long international flights this year -- Paris, Prague, Tokyo, Seoul, Istanbul, etc. From Frankfurt to Atlanta I had a shiny-new Boeing 767 (it still had that "new plane" smell) running Linux on its entertainment system. From Kuala Lumpur to Tokyo I had an older 767 running Windows CE on its system.
On other long flights, I couldn't tell. I mean, the reality is that the custom UI is what the user experiences. Typically these things "crash" only when the power is abruptly yanked just before pushback. I am puzzled as to why they don't have a UPS -- battery weight, maybe. They work better than the PA systems.
The systems all work pretty much the same, which I suppose puts the lie to the Microsoft astroturfers who are constantly posting here about how Linux won't succeed because Grandma can't use it.
The only downside I've found (with either software) is that I don't get any sleep. Too many good movies to watch, games to play, and so on.
Someday I hope to fly Singapore -- their reputation is the best in the sky.
Coinciding with this announcement is the launch of a campaign to switch major PHP-based Web applications to PHP5-only support. The GoPHP5.org website has details.
Projects supporting this move have pledged that by Feb. 5, 2008, they will no longer accept PHP4-specific changes in their codebase and that all future upgrades will assume PHP5 availability.
This doesn't mean they are rewriting all their code to OOP-style, or that they will end legacy version support for security patches, et cetera. What it means is that the developers are liberated from having to code around PHP4's limitations and can take advantage of PHP5 features for all future enhancements.
Often something that might require hundreds of lines of code in PHP4 can be done with just a few in PHP5. The SimpleXML parser is probably the best example.
Application teams already on board for this switch include Drupal, phpMyAdmin, Typo3, Symphony, Gallery, DeskPRO, and many others. Several major projects not yet committed are known to be preparing to do so.
This is most important to hosting companies as a signal that robust PHP5 support is a requirement going forward.
Everyone talks about newspapers going under, but you never hear anyone (seriously) talking about the AP or UPI going under.
UPI went bankrupt years ago and has changed hands several times. The company that now owns the UPI brand actually is an agent of the Unification Church (also known as "the Moonies"). Hardly any newspapers use UPI these days.
The Associated Press is a cooperative owned and controlled by American newspapers. The AP has gone through a massive restructuring over the last several years as it scrambles to adjust to the realities of news distribution in an age when distribution is near-free. Demand for its core services from its owner-members is declining as those newspapers themselves shift from global to local content focus. Many editors of smaller newspapers are contemplating dropping the AP entirely. They're not ready to do that, but they're thinking about it.
As for the Wall Street Journal's economic model, it's not relevant to a discussion of general-circulation newspapers.
WSJ sells essential business information to subscribers who don't pay with their own money (they typically use company expense accounts). No general-interest local newspaper anywhere in the world has been able to make such a model work in its own market. Local civic news may be essential to the function of a democracy, but that doesn't mean anybody wants to pay for it.
Old models and old assumptions -- such as those advocated by "reporter" -- do not work today. Newspapers that do not change their fundamental approach to coverage are losing audience to other media choices that didn't exist 20 years ago. Attempting to charge for content only accelerates that loss.
I don't mean that newspapers are doomed, but those that fail to change and adapt to the new environment are doomed. The ones that adapt can thrive. But the necessary changes are not small and a lot of people -- including many older subscribers -- aren't going to like those changes.
Large newspapers are at highest risk, as they are unable for economic and cultural reasons to cover the kind of hyperlocal news that might rescue their falling readership numbers. As their circulations sag they become perilously close to catastrophic failure of their mass-media business model. You can't run a mass medium if you don't have mass.
Small newspapers, neighborhood-level newspapers, are extraordinarily strong. And there's significant growth in free-circulation newspapers both in the U.S. and international markets. So this is not a problem of print versus electronic distribution. Print still works. But old assumptions about content and business models do not work.
I do this for a living. I'm a strategist for a newspaper company, and I do not advocate blocking Google from spidering local content. I do advocate blocking the spiders from wire feeds, which we have done for years using a robots.txt directive.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make but your assertion is not precisely correct.
None of the carriers will "support" a phone you did not buy from them, recently. The general response to any configuration question translates to "go F* yourself." I have an unlocked GSM Windows phone (Voq) and have never been able to get MMS working because T-Mobile will not provide the necessary info.
On the other hand, an unlocked GSM phone like this one at least gives you a choice of carriers.
While Cingular/AT&T and T-Mobile effectively account for nearly all of the GSM network coverage in the United States, you can buy access from a number of "mobile virtual network operators" (even 7-11 and Wal-Mart) and get a SIM card that will work in this phone.
For that matter, any SIM card from a non-US phone company also will work if that company offers U.S. roaming. It would be a dumb way to buy your phone service if you spend all your time in the United States, but it's possible. And if you travel internationally, you can buy a local prepaid SIM card in most countries that will pop right in for cheap local calls.
You don't get that kind of flexibility from CDMA carriers like Sprint and Verizon, which are notorious for crippling phones in order to charge extra for functionality like moving your photos from your phone to your computer, or changing ring tones.
I have eight or nine applications open at once, spread out across two widescreen monitors. And like it or not, that's becoming a fairly common configuration where Macbooks are used in offices.
It's an annoyance when the menu related to the thing I'm doing is several thousand pixels away and possibly on a different display screen. UI theories and studies may say otherwise, but those theoreticians and studies must have been using a 9-inch monitor.
I never much cared for the NeXT's convention of popup menus, but they were way better for big screens and multiheaded displays.
My biggest single Mac UI complaint is this: Application menus belong with the application. Not at the top of the physical screen.
Apple's failure to recognize this is simple arrogance. A design decision that was made for a 1985 single-tasking system with a 9-inch monochrome display just doesn't make sense in the 21st century. I have two monitors, including a 21-inch widescreen display. All too often I find the menubar for the application to be inconveniently distant from what I'm doing. I shouldn't have to rev up my mouse like a toy race car.
This should have been fixed with the jump to OS X.
I actually find the ugly X.11 ports to be easier to use in such situations.
The system is actually more app-centric and less task-centric than Windows. To create a document (of any type) I have to first dig around in sucky Finder to find the app, then create the document, then navigate using a poorly designed popup file chooser to locate the project folder where I want to save the file. On Windows, I just right-click on the Desktop or in Explorer to create the empty file exactly where I want it, then double-click to open it.
Other gripes: Finder, Mail.app and iPhoto are primitive relative to their Linux and Windows counterparts. Not having a functional right mouse button on the Macbook Pro is crippling. The filesystem layout is braindamaged. The Unix tools are only half-assed installed.
On the whole, it still beats Windows hands down. Buying anything from Microsoft is like buying a suit of clothing, then discovering the next day that one pants leg is sewed on inside-out, the zipper is in the back, and the jacket has three arms, and if you don't immediately acquire and install 39 upgrades, a horde of pickpockets will steal your wallet and your car keys.
The locate utility exists in OS X, but locatedb is not built or maintained by default, so it doesn't work. This is just one of hundreds of examples of how Apple has done a half-assed job of embracing the power of the underlying toolkit. Yes, you can fix it yourself, eventually, but the whole point of the Mac is that things are supposed to Just Work. If I wanted it to be broken when delivered, I'd be using Windows.
I'd count this as a non-issue. It's perfectly possible to make a non-admin account for most stuf under Windows XP too.
I wish this were true, but it's not. And that may be the single real advantage of Vista, if it works as described.
Non-admin accounts have been broken on XP since Day One. Broken in mysterious and unpredictable ways. For example, if I turn on printer spooling on either of my XP machines, peons can't print -- the spooler silently sends the data to/dev/microsoft/innovation. If I turn it off, printing works, but it locks the program until the printing is done. There are complaints about this all over the Web, but I've not discovered a fix.
It'll be interesting to see how many security updates Vista accumulates before it's actually in the hands of consumers. My wife's new XP laptop today required 39 updates before she could start to use it.
Drupal and the codefilter module will do a good job of supporting basic code entry in any arbitrary language. If you want robust support for highlighting for multiple languages, take a look at GeSHIFilter.
Human nature is to compete for scarce resources. Print space is scarce, and people actually compete to get into it. A great example is JPG magazine.
But the Bluffton Today photo galleries are not about that. They're intended to let people share their local, community photos with their physical-space neighbors. I know you can do that with Flickr pools, et cetera, but the local audience there is fairly limited; the newspaper can do a much better job in that particular case.
From my standpoint, facilitating the (visual and text) conversation broadens and improves the net effect. Whether we call it "citizen journalism" or not -- and I have a great deal of discomfort with the limitations implied by that label -- I think the end that is served is producing a more complete reflection of community life.
Professional photographers -- especially photojournalists -- often have a great deal of difficulty understanding why we're doing this. After all, these photos are of "low quality" (not necessarily true by any standard, but they assume such).
But it would be better to think for a minute about what the Innosight people call "jobs to be done." When someone looks in a local media product he or she is looking to see a reflection of self, friends, and family. An "amateur" photo of your kid is more interesting than a "professional" photo of a celebrity, and therefore has more "quality" in relation to the end user's real purpose.
"The problem is that the search engines aren't TRYING to be publishers."
Sorry, but that just isn't true.
Yahoo quite obviously is a publisher. In fact, Yahoo has formal distribution agreements in place with many news providers, including a number of major newspapers, and pays agencies such as Reuters and the Associated Press a considerable amount of money in licensing fees. The same is true of MSN and AOL.
You may not regard Google as a publisher, but it is. The problem is that Google publishes content that belongs to others.
Google scrapes content from websites and constructs news presentations that include headlines, photographs and summaries that do not belong to Google. It does not secure permission to reuse that content. It doesn't pay the writers or the editors or the photographers or the news agencies.
I'm not at all convinced that the Belgian newspapers are responding to the situation in the right way. But a knee-jerk reaction that Google is good and the publishers are bad is very naive.
If you look at Google's scattered EULAs and TOS documents you'll discover that they are very one-sided. Google can take your content and make pages containing ads. You can not take Google's content (RSS feeds, for instance) and make pages containing ads. If you sign up for Google's advertising programs you're not allowed to disclose certain information about the program to others. You can't put Google Adsense on the same page as any other content-targeted advertising. And so on.
Sauce for the goose is apparently not for the gander. From the Google News terms of service: "For example, you may not use the Service to sell a product or service; use the Service to increase traffic to your Web site for commercial reasons, such as advertising sales; take the results from the Service and reformat and display them, or use any robot, spider, other device or manual process to monitor or copy any content from the Service."
Google has made great hay out of its "Do No Evil" slogan, but some of its practices, such as collaborating with governments that do not recognize the fundamental human right of freedom of speech, make me wonder.
The argument that search indexing is good for publishers has also several problems.
First of all, whether it's good or bad for the publisher isn't relevant to the question of legality. If I steal an apple and tell 40 friends how good it is, the market may actually gain new customers and come out ahead. But I'm still stealing an apple. The question of whether Google's screen-scraping amounts to apple-stealing is one for the courts to resolve, and apparently the Belgian courts have taken a position not friendly to Apple.
Second, the typical Slashdot poster's naive assumption that traffic == wholesome goodness isn't true. It doesn't work that way.
Most newspapers, for historical reasons, have an economic model that is built on advertising by businesses that are trying to reach specific customers in a highly restricted geographic region. This is particularly true in the United States; models vary in other countries, but most have a strong regional press.
Because of the global nature of the Internet, the vast majority of traffic brought in by search engines is of no interest to local and regional advertisers.
"Noise" traffic actually works against the site by depressing clickthrough rates and lowering the apparent effectiveness of CPM-based advertising.
As I said, I'm not jumping onto the Belgian publisher's bandwagon, but I'm also not jumping onto Google's. This is not so simple as that.
> Interestingly, frequent Internet use is associated with a
> decline in local knowledge and interest in living in
> the local area."
I don't think it's inherent in the technology. There's a dearth of local Internet resources. I have to give local media a D- overall when it comes to using the Internet effectively.
You can participate in a conversation about nearly anything on the net... except what's happening in your own town, your own neighborhood, your own school district.
It's not that nobody wants to talk about these things. It's a general failure of leadership by people who are supposed to be community leaders.
Of the more than 1,400 daily newspapers in the United States, a majority don't even have a forum on their website. TV stations are even worse.
When they do have online discussions, the general pattern is to set up the technology and let a few jackasses drive reasonable people away. Running an effective local forum is very possible, but it requires leadership and moderation.
The situation is improving on two fronts. Independent local websites like iBrattleboro and Baristanet are popping up as entrepreneurs take advantage of the low barrier to entry provided by blogging technology. (They generally underestimate the promotion and marketing challenge, though.) And a small number of local media sites are doing extraordinary work facilitating community conversations and social networking. (I have helped create some of them. I won't link, since they're intended to be local.)
I expect the numbers of such projects to grow exponentially over the next three or four years.
With all of them, you can usually tell which CMS a site uses, e.g. a Drupal site looks like a Drupal site.
Don't confuse stylistic influence with capability. Drupal (and other platforms) have a family of prebuilt templates that were designed by a small group of people whose work influenced each other's.
There is nothing in the platform that says a site has to have any particular look, as evidenced by sites as varied as The Onion,BroadbandSports,Ruby Baboon and SavannahNow all coming out of the same core technology.
I saw this device last month in Moscow at the World Editors Forum, where Dr. Caroline Pauwels of the Free University of Brussels discussed a field test being conducted in conjunction with De Tijd, a daily newspaper published in Antwerp, which produced a daily e-paper edition. They gave the device to 200 people, both print and online readers. The test was continuing but she talked about some preliminary results:
* Slow. * No search. * Difficulty setting up wifi connections. * Good quality display, easy to read.
The bigger picture: She called it an "evolution of paper" but not an evolution of newspapers, and raised questions about whether editors are prepared to evolve into a medium where RSS feeds/aggregation, interconnections with other resources, and conversation are expected and demanded.
I briefly examined the device, which seems a bit larger than the e-paper device Sony has been selling in Japan for a couple of years now.
That's not how local property taxation works in the United States.
Local tax districts set a budget based on some assumptions about the tax base (the amount of taxable real property). After the budget is approved, bureaucrats in the taxation department compute the actual rate by dividing the budgeted revenue / taxable base. Generally there's a legal limit on the rate, but the actual rate that is charged is based on that computation and somewhat lower.
So your property tax rate isn't static (like sales tax, for instance), but rather dynamic from year to year.
In this scenario, the governing board sets a budget based on an assumption of base B.
But when the bills are generated, they're computed on a base of roughly B + 400 million.
As a result, everybody else in the county is just slightly underbilled... and when the mistake in the database is discovered, it's too late to do anything about it.
Slashdot Mirror
And from a user's perspective you're part of the problem. Cramming PC apps onto 3-inch screens leads to a sucky user experience. Mobile usage on a small screen requires original thinking.
My Windows Mobile phone did me a huge favor when it died. Never, never, never again will I go down that road.
This is just over-the-top misinformed.
Parties exist because leadership requires supportive followership, and a political party is a solution to that problem. You don't have to affiliate with a party to run for an office at any level. Having an organization behind you multiplies your chances of winning. Are you proposing to abolish organization? That would leave politics the exclusive domain of superrich individuals. If you think it's bad now, you have no idea how bad it could get.
Party leadership is elected. Parties have meetings and caucuses down to the precinct level, and just because you're not informed or involved doesn't mean there is no process behind them, or that the process is closed. In fact, parties tend to welcome anyone who will show up and pitch in to do the grunt work of organizing, soliciting contributions, canvassing, driving people to the polls on election day, et cetera.
No party has the power to keep anyone off the general election ballot for any position. The South Carolina party decision was a party decision, having to do with the party's primary, which will decide the candidate to receive the support of that state's delegates to the national party convention. It's not a vote in the presidential election.
Parties are not required to hold primaries; in fact, in states such as Iowa they do not. Iowa's process involves caucuses at which convention delegates are selected.
I don't think anyone would suggest that processes in either party are consistently above-board or deny that abuses of power happen. But to say, as you do, that "no one elected" party leaders displays a profound ignorance.
And one other thing. The Constitution does not provide for the existence of parties. The Constitution provides for the freedom of assembly, of petition, of expression and other building blocks of personal freedom that allow people to voluntarily organize political movements. It was one such movement that led to the eviction of the British and the establishment of the Constitution in the first place.
Colbert does step out of character. A very nice interview with Terry Gross:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15116383
You're thinking like a Windows user.
With Linux, the "lame copy of tetris" is included in the distribution, and it's free, along with clones of a couple of dozen other games, so there's little reason to be prowling through the $9.99 closeout bin at Wal-Mart.
And since Ubuntu includes Wine, there's a possibility that the $9.99 game will run anyway. Maybe even a higher probability than with Vista.
That is the primary goal of all organizations.
You are aware, I hope, that the standard printing system used by pretty much all Linux distributions is CUPS.
And that CUPS is owned by Apple.
And that the very same code runs the printing systems on all Mac OSX systems.
0. Dress properly. Leave the metal and piercings at home; you'll just make your security check worse.
1. Travel light. If you're crossing the ocean for two weeks, plan to use a laundry.
2. Avoid connections. If at all possible, drive to a hub airport.
3. Planeside check on your outward trip. This ensures the baggage monkeys don't lose your luggage. If you failed to follow tip #1, and you must check your bag, be sure you carry with you the basics for an overnight stay.
4. Check your heavy baggage on the return trip. Barcode scanners track everything in a database in Atlanta. Airlines don't actually lose your luggage, they just misroute it. On the way home that's a benefit: You don't have to carry your bags to your car! They'll deliver to your home, eventually.
5. Eat a good breakfast. You're not getting fed on the plane unless you're crossing an ocean.
6. Bring your own entertainment -- a book, videogame, etc. Unless you're crossing the ocean on one of those new 767s with the cool Linux personal entertainment system, you're going to be on your own. On most flights, even if they're showing a movie, you won't be able to see it.
7. Noise-suppression headphones really do work.
8. Book early, book online, and select an exit-row seat. Legroom and laptop space will be adequate for a change.
The parent item is absolutely right. Softpedia has no actual data on Linux installations. The data doesn't exist.
... no XP install disk, so we can't just stick in a new hard drive. I inserted an Ubuntu live CD and she ran with that (no HD) for a month. Worked great! So I installed a $75 hard disk and loaded Linux onto it. It took 30 minutes, no problems, and everything Just Works.
Here are three use cases that would show up as Microsoft customers in any Softpedia data:
My elderly mother finally bought a Vista laptop -- a $400 bargain Toshiba. Very nice dual-core Intel laptop, excellent for the price. Half a gig of RAM rendered Vista unusable. Rather than spend more money, I installed Ubuntu Linux on it, and she's off like a rocket. Everything Just Works.
My mother-in-law's old eMachines desktop blew a hard drive. Oops
My middle daughter just turned 15. For her birthday we gave her a $400 Acer laptop. I put Linux on a partition. By the end of the month I'm confident she'll have abandoned Vista. Too slow, too annoying with its constant security warnings and popups.
(There are only two problems with the Linux setup for her. One is hardware-based. I'd say the installation Just Works except that it doesn't quite; the Atheros wi-fi is broken, and I'll probably have to buy her a d-Link PCMCIA card. The second is the lack of iTunes, and I'll have to introduce her to a DRM-free music store.)
Linux on the desktop is more than viable, and it's installed in a lot more places than "experts" like those at Softpedia know. Even the ditzy kid over at the Wal-Mart electronics section is dual-booting.
This is sooooo 1999.
You should be using a CMS/framework where such issues have been resolved, and focus your time/energy on the (few) places where you can create unique value.
I've been on a lot of painfully long international flights this year -- Paris, Prague, Tokyo, Seoul, Istanbul, etc. From Frankfurt to Atlanta I had a shiny-new Boeing 767 (it still had that "new plane" smell) running Linux on its entertainment system. From Kuala Lumpur to Tokyo I had an older 767 running Windows CE on its system.
On other long flights, I couldn't tell. I mean, the reality is that the custom UI is what the user experiences. Typically these things "crash" only when the power is abruptly yanked just before pushback. I am puzzled as to why they don't have a UPS -- battery weight, maybe. They work better than the PA systems.
The systems all work pretty much the same, which I suppose puts the lie to the Microsoft astroturfers who are constantly posting here about how Linux won't succeed because Grandma can't use it.
The only downside I've found (with either software) is that I don't get any sleep. Too many good movies to watch, games to play, and so on.
Someday I hope to fly Singapore -- their reputation is the best in the sky.
S3Fox:4 7
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/32
Integrates an upload/download interface for Amazon S3 into Firefox. Very slick and very free.
Coinciding with this announcement is the launch of a campaign to switch major PHP-based Web applications to PHP5-only support. The GoPHP5.org website has details.
Projects supporting this move have pledged that by Feb. 5, 2008, they will no longer accept PHP4-specific changes in their codebase and that all future upgrades will assume PHP5 availability.
This doesn't mean they are rewriting all their code to OOP-style, or that they will end legacy version support for security patches, et cetera. What it means is that the developers are liberated from having to code around PHP4's limitations and can take advantage of PHP5 features for all future enhancements.
Often something that might require hundreds of lines of code in PHP4 can be done with just a few in PHP5. The SimpleXML parser is probably the best example.
Application teams already on board for this switch include Drupal, phpMyAdmin, Typo3, Symphony, Gallery, DeskPRO, and many others. Several major projects not yet committed are known to be preparing to do so.
This is most important to hosting companies as a signal that robust PHP5 support is a requirement going forward.
UPI went bankrupt years ago and has changed hands several times. The company that now owns the UPI brand actually is an agent of the Unification Church (also known as "the Moonies"). Hardly any newspapers use UPI these days.
The Associated Press is a cooperative owned and controlled by American newspapers. The AP has gone through a massive restructuring over the last several years as it scrambles to adjust to the realities of news distribution in an age when distribution is near-free. Demand for its core services from its owner-members is declining as those newspapers themselves shift from global to local content focus. Many editors of smaller newspapers are contemplating dropping the AP entirely. They're not ready to do that, but they're thinking about it.
As for the Wall Street Journal's economic model, it's not relevant to a discussion of general-circulation newspapers.
WSJ sells essential business information to subscribers who don't pay with their own money (they typically use company expense accounts). No general-interest local newspaper anywhere in the world has been able to make such a model work in its own market. Local civic news may be essential to the function of a democracy, but that doesn't mean anybody wants to pay for it.
Old models and old assumptions -- such as those advocated by "reporter" -- do not work today. Newspapers that do not change their fundamental approach to coverage are losing audience to other media choices that didn't exist 20 years ago. Attempting to charge for content only accelerates that loss.
I don't mean that newspapers are doomed, but those that fail to change and adapt to the new environment are doomed. The ones that adapt can thrive. But the necessary changes are not small and a lot of people -- including many older subscribers -- aren't going to like those changes.
Large newspapers are at highest risk, as they are unable for economic and cultural reasons to cover the kind of hyperlocal news that might rescue their falling readership numbers. As their circulations sag they become perilously close to catastrophic failure of their mass-media business model. You can't run a mass medium if you don't have mass.
Small newspapers, neighborhood-level newspapers, are extraordinarily strong. And there's significant growth in free-circulation newspapers both in the U.S. and international markets.
So this is not a problem of print versus electronic distribution. Print still works. But old assumptions about content and business models do not work.
I do this for a living. I'm a strategist for a newspaper company, and I do not advocate blocking Google from spidering local content. I do advocate blocking the spiders from wire feeds, which we have done for years using a robots.txt directive.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make but your assertion is not precisely correct.
None of the carriers will "support" a phone you did not buy from them, recently. The general response to any configuration question translates to "go F* yourself." I have an unlocked GSM Windows phone (Voq) and have never been able to get MMS working because T-Mobile will not provide the necessary info.
On the other hand, an unlocked GSM phone like this one at least gives you a choice of carriers.
While Cingular/AT&T and T-Mobile effectively account for nearly all of the GSM network coverage in the United States, you can buy access from a number of "mobile virtual network operators" (even 7-11 and Wal-Mart) and get a SIM card that will work in this phone.
For that matter, any SIM card from a non-US phone company also will work if that company offers U.S. roaming. It would be a dumb way to buy your phone service if you spend all your time in the United States, but it's possible. And if you travel internationally, you can buy a local prepaid SIM card in most countries that will pop right in for cheap local calls.
You don't get that kind of flexibility from CDMA carriers like Sprint and Verizon, which are notorious for crippling phones in order to charge extra for functionality like moving your photos from your phone to your computer, or changing ring tones.
I have eight or nine applications open at once, spread out across two widescreen monitors. And like it or not, that's becoming a fairly common configuration where Macbooks are used in offices.
It's an annoyance when the menu related to the thing I'm doing is several thousand pixels away and possibly on a different display screen. UI theories and studies may say otherwise, but those theoreticians and studies must have been using a 9-inch monitor.
I never much cared for the NeXT's convention of popup menus, but they were way better for big screens and multiheaded displays.
My biggest single Mac UI complaint is this: Application menus belong with the application. Not at the top of the physical screen.
Apple's failure to recognize this is simple arrogance. A design decision that was made for a 1985 single-tasking system with a 9-inch monochrome display just doesn't make sense in the 21st century. I have two monitors, including a 21-inch widescreen display. All too often I find the menubar for the application to be inconveniently distant from what I'm doing. I shouldn't have to rev up my mouse like a toy race car.
This should have been fixed with the jump to OS X.
I actually find the ugly X.11 ports to be easier to use in such situations.
The system is actually more app-centric and less task-centric than Windows. To create a document (of any type) I have to first dig around in sucky Finder to find the app, then create the document, then navigate using a poorly designed popup file chooser to locate the project folder where I want to save the file. On Windows, I just right-click on the Desktop or in Explorer to create the empty file exactly where I want it, then double-click to open it.
Other gripes: Finder, Mail.app and iPhoto are primitive relative to their Linux and Windows counterparts. Not having a functional right mouse button on the Macbook Pro is crippling. The filesystem layout is braindamaged. The Unix tools are only half-assed installed.
On the whole, it still beats Windows hands down. Buying anything from Microsoft is like buying a suit of clothing, then discovering the next day that one pants leg is sewed on inside-out, the zipper is in the back, and the jacket has three arms, and if you don't immediately acquire and install 39 upgrades, a horde of pickpockets will steal your wallet and your car keys.
The locate utility exists in OS X, but locatedb is not built or maintained by default, so it doesn't work. This is just one of hundreds of examples of how Apple has done a half-assed job of embracing the power of the underlying toolkit. Yes, you can fix it yourself, eventually, but the whole point of the Mac is that things are supposed to Just Work. If I wanted it to be broken when delivered, I'd be using Windows.
I'd count this as a non-issue. It's perfectly possible to make a non-admin account for most stuf under Windows XP too.
/dev/microsoft/innovation. If I turn it off, printing works, but it locks the program until the printing is done. There are complaints about this all over the Web, but I've not discovered a fix.
I wish this were true, but it's not. And that may be the single real advantage of Vista, if it works as described.
Non-admin accounts have been broken on XP since Day One. Broken in mysterious and unpredictable ways. For example, if I turn on printer spooling on either of my XP machines, peons can't print -- the spooler silently sends the data to
It'll be interesting to see how many security updates Vista accumulates before it's actually in the hands of consumers. My wife's new XP laptop today required 39 updates before she could start to use it.
Drupal and the codefilter module will do a good job of supporting basic code entry in any arbitrary language. If you want robust support for highlighting for multiple languages, take a look at GeSHIFilter.
http://drupal.org/
http://drupal.org/project/codefilter
GeSHIFilter: http://drupal.org/node/65961 and demo: http://www.ubisum.com/node/27
Human nature is to compete for scarce resources. Print space is scarce, and people actually compete to get into it. A great example is JPG magazine.
But the Bluffton Today photo galleries are not about that. They're intended to let people share their local, community photos with their physical-space neighbors. I know you can do that with Flickr pools, et cetera, but the local audience there is fairly limited; the newspaper can do a much better job in that particular case.
From my standpoint, facilitating the (visual and text) conversation broadens and improves the net effect. Whether we call it "citizen journalism" or not -- and I have a great deal of discomfort with the limitations implied by that label -- I think the end that is served is producing a more complete reflection of community life.
Professional photographers -- especially photojournalists -- often have a great deal of difficulty understanding why we're doing this. After all, these photos are of "low quality" (not necessarily true by any standard, but they assume such).
But it would be better to think for a minute about what the Innosight people call "jobs to be done." When someone looks in a local media product he or she is looking to see a reflection of self, friends, and family. An "amateur" photo of your kid is more interesting than a "professional" photo of a celebrity, and therefore has more "quality" in relation to the end user's real purpose.
"The problem is that the search engines aren't TRYING to be publishers."
Sorry, but that just isn't true.
Yahoo quite obviously is a publisher. In fact, Yahoo has formal distribution agreements in place with many news providers, including a number of major newspapers, and pays agencies such as Reuters and the Associated Press a considerable amount of money in licensing fees. The same is true of MSN and AOL.
You may not regard Google as a publisher, but it is. The problem is that Google publishes content that belongs to others.
Google scrapes content from websites and constructs news presentations that include headlines, photographs and summaries that do not belong to Google. It does not secure permission to reuse that content. It doesn't pay the writers or the editors or the photographers or the news agencies.
I'm not at all convinced that the Belgian newspapers are responding to the situation in the right way. But a knee-jerk reaction that Google is good and the publishers are bad is very naive.
If you look at Google's scattered EULAs and TOS documents you'll discover that they are very one-sided. Google can take your content and make pages containing ads. You can not take Google's content (RSS feeds, for instance) and make pages containing ads. If you sign up for Google's advertising programs you're not allowed to disclose certain information about the program to others. You can't put Google Adsense on the same page as any other content-targeted advertising. And so on.
Sauce for the goose is apparently not for the gander. From the Google News terms of service: "For example, you may not use the Service to sell a product or service; use the Service to increase traffic to your Web site for commercial reasons, such as advertising sales; take the results from the Service and reformat and display them, or use any robot, spider, other device or manual process to monitor or copy any content from the Service."
Google has made great hay out of its "Do No Evil" slogan, but some of its practices, such as collaborating with governments that do not recognize the fundamental human right of freedom of speech, make me wonder.
The argument that search indexing is good for publishers has also several problems.
First of all, whether it's good or bad for the publisher isn't relevant to the question of legality. If I steal an apple and tell 40 friends how good it is, the market may actually gain new customers and come out ahead. But I'm still stealing an apple. The question of whether Google's screen-scraping amounts to apple-stealing is one for the courts to resolve, and apparently the Belgian courts have taken a position not friendly to Apple.
Second, the typical Slashdot poster's naive assumption that traffic == wholesome goodness isn't true. It doesn't work that way.
Most newspapers, for historical reasons, have an economic model that is built on advertising by businesses that are trying to reach specific customers in a highly restricted geographic region. This is particularly true in the United States; models vary in other countries, but most have a strong regional press.
Because of the global nature of the Internet, the vast majority of traffic brought in by search engines is of no interest to local and regional advertisers.
"Noise" traffic actually works against the site by depressing clickthrough rates and lowering the apparent effectiveness of CPM-based advertising.
As I said, I'm not jumping onto the Belgian publisher's bandwagon, but I'm also not jumping onto Google's. This is not so simple as that.
> Interestingly, frequent Internet use is associated with a
... except what's happening in your own town, your own neighborhood, your own school district.
> decline in local knowledge and interest in living in
> the local area."
I don't think it's inherent in the technology. There's a dearth of local Internet resources. I have to give local media a D- overall when it comes to using the Internet effectively.
You can participate in a conversation about nearly anything on the net
It's not that nobody wants to talk about these things. It's a general failure of leadership by people who are supposed to be community leaders.
Of the more than 1,400 daily newspapers in the United States, a majority don't even have a forum on their website. TV stations are even worse.
When they do have online discussions, the general pattern is to set up the technology and let a few jackasses drive reasonable people away. Running an effective local forum is very possible, but it requires leadership and moderation.
The situation is improving on two fronts. Independent local websites like iBrattleboro and Baristanet are popping up as entrepreneurs take advantage of the low barrier to entry provided by blogging technology. (They generally underestimate the promotion and marketing challenge, though.) And a small number of local media sites are doing extraordinary work facilitating community conversations and social networking. (I have helped create some of them. I won't link, since they're intended to be local.)
I expect the numbers of such projects to grow exponentially over the next three or four years.
Don't confuse stylistic influence with capability. Drupal (and other platforms) have a family of prebuilt templates that were designed by a small group of people whose work influenced each other's.
There is nothing in the platform that says a site has to have any particular look, as evidenced by sites as varied as The Onion, BroadbandSports, Ruby Baboon and SavannahNow all coming out of the same core technology.
I saw this device last month in Moscow at the World Editors Forum, where Dr. Caroline Pauwels of the Free University of Brussels discussed a field test being conducted in conjunction with De Tijd, a daily newspaper published in Antwerp, which produced a daily e-paper edition. They gave the device to 200 people, both print and online readers. The test was continuing but she talked about some preliminary results:
* Slow.
* No search.
* Difficulty setting up wifi connections.
* Good quality display, easy to read.
The bigger picture: She called it an "evolution of paper" but not an evolution of newspapers, and raised questions about whether editors are prepared to evolve into a medium where RSS feeds/aggregation, interconnections with other resources, and conversation are expected and demanded.
I briefly examined the device, which seems a bit larger than the e-paper device Sony has been selling in Japan for a couple of years now.
That's not how local property taxation works in the United States.
... and when the mistake in the database is discovered, it's too late to do anything about it.
Local tax districts set a budget based on some assumptions about the tax base (the amount of taxable real property). After the budget is approved, bureaucrats in the taxation department compute the actual rate by dividing the budgeted revenue / taxable base. Generally there's a legal limit on the rate, but the actual rate that is charged is based on that computation and somewhat lower.
So your property tax rate isn't static (like sales tax, for instance), but rather dynamic from year to year.
In this scenario, the governing board sets a budget based on an assumption of base B.
But when the bills are generated, they're computed on a base of roughly B + 400 million.
As a result, everybody else in the county is just slightly underbilled