Some people don't need a screen, but some people do.
I have a little Creative Muvo flash player that works pretty well. Even though it doesn't hold a ton of audio, having a screen is a big benefit to me because:
1) I have multiple folders setup on it. I'll typically have a "standard" playlist of songs that I'll keep on there for weeks, and then a folder with new songs that I want to be able to get to quickly. This could be done without a screen, but not as easily.
2) Sometimes I'll put old radio shows on the player, which I put in a seperate folder like I mentioned above. The quality of these recordings are often very poor, and I use the player's EQ to filter out some of the muck. I definately need a screen for this purpose.
3) Battery indicator. Having a USB-rechargable battery would be cool, but I just use 15 minute rechargable AAA batteries. One battery lasts 10-15 hours.
I think what I like most about the player I have is that it works just like a thumb drive. I can copy whatever I want to it however I want to copy it. I can use software to sync or I can just drag & drop from any machine.
I was considering an iPod Shuffle because of the sound quality and cool factor, but opted against it because there was no screen, and I refuse to install iTunes (or QT) on my Windows machines.
I just uninstalled the QFA and some other extensions I wasn't using. Also uninstalled the Google toolbar that I installed a while ago out of curiosity. I've been browsing around for a bit now with multiple windows/tabs, and memory usage *seems* to be about 40MB less now.
I thought it was bunk at first too, but I just checked and with only three firefox (1.5) windows open, including this one, it's using 90MB on my system. That seems a bit excessive for a web browser.
I'm going to start watching this thing. There are times when I'm working in Photoshop or Illustrator when I have to start shutting things down to free up memory. I never really bothered to close out browsers though because I didn't think they'd use much.
I do agree with you that the Windows ACL is much more advanced than the old school *nix system.
However:
1) A lot of new windows machines I'm getting in are still formatted with FAT32. (why oh why? FYI: convert/?)
2) Until very recently the default permissions on a Windows machine were poor (e.g. Win2k Server, C:\ - everyone, full control).
3) The old beat to death fact that most windows users are running as administrator, power users have too much power, and regular users can't run half the crap out there. This is very important no matter what excuse you find to downplay it. Yes, trying to do something as simple as install flash on a Linux machine *sucks* compared to the same task on Windows from the end user perspective. This doesn't validate either system, it only exposes a weakness in both approaches.
4) Default shares are scarey business (e.g. C$).
These problems are the fault of both Microsoft and developers of Windows software. Will it ever change? Dunno. Are there ways to make a secure system easy to use? Sure.
There is one additional thing that I'd like to point out: it's still common for "typical" Linux distributions to come with way too much stuff enabled. You plug an outdated Linux box into the net without a good firewall and a bunch of servers wide open, and you will be rooted. This is still one of the bigger problems facing novice Linux users. I really don't think that running as root is much of a problem, most distributions really nag the shit out of you if you try to do anything but run a shell as root.
The problem is the Malicious Software Removal Tool itself. It's a half-assed product that just sort of does "some stuff." I'm not sure who it's intended for. As someone in IT I certainly have never once used it professionally. There's no point because we're already using better tools. As a PC user at home I have never bothered to use it because, again, there are already better (& free) tools out there.
A program that removes some stuff that Microsoft decides is significant enought to be called "malicious" isn't much of a tool to begin with, and then to factor in that it's only updated once per month makes it even less valuable. Oh, I might also mention that the program only detects an underwhelming 54 "malicious programs?" Wow, gimme summa that.
There's really no issue with Microsoft not releasing an update for the removal tool. It's expected, standard behavior. It's right there in the documentation, second paragraph. This is not an anti-virus program that updates daily, this is some kind of other tool that exists in an awkward dimension all of its own.
I still have vivid memories of Wolfenstein 3D looking so amazing. The same with Doom and Duke Nukem 3D. But load one up right now and there's no comparison with today's graphics. Heck, you don't even have to go that far back. Even Unreal and Quake II look silly compared to games coming out today. The graphics we'll be seeing five years from now will make today's games look corny. That's the way it goes.
The problem here for people like us who have been around this long is that we're, ahem, growing up. I've really started to notice that the older I get, the more it takes from a game to hold my interest. It's an odd moment when you're playing Monopoly with your kids and you suddenly realize: "what the hell did I ever like about this game?"
And yes, of course some of this has to do with the rehashing of old game ideas. If come across another jumping puzzle in an FPS game at this point it'll probably sour me on video games for the rest of my life:) But really, I can enjoy a game that uses the same old FPS model as long as the content is interesting enough.
P.S. - I really wanted to like Second Life, but...what the heck? The ability for the players to create all the content is pretty amazing, but after that it's like a giant chat room with...3D graffiti.
Yes, I can see that being an issue, but only in that it could reduce the amount of time they spend on trying to write secure code. I don't think that Microsoft, regardless of how sleazy they might be, would intentionally create security risks in order to bolster antivirus sales. Maybe if viruses were a new thing and there was no competition in the marketplace already.
Viruses have been a part of personal computing for a very long time, and they will continue to be a problem for a very long time.
I simply don't think that Microsoft would gain as much by writing bad code to profit from sales of its anti-virus program as they would by simply trying to write more secure code. With all of the media pressure over the years and market pressures from competitve products I do think that they might just step up to the plate and try to do the "right" thing. Could be wrong of course. (we could of course argue that there isn't enough competition, and while that's true overall, I do believe that solutions that can tout "better security" like Linux+Apache, Firefox & Thunderbird, etc will have an impact on Microsoft's plan of attack)
I agree. While I do think that certain basic applications such as a web browser and media player should be bundled with any typical "PC" operating system these days, I think that adding antivirus would be going a little too far. Perhaps if there was more competition in the OS market it would be ok, but in this case it would just hinder antivirus competition.
Selling an cantivirus application as an add-on is the way to go, and it looks like that's what they're doing. I still expect to see the other big antivirus companies complaining, especially if MS pimps their product in the OS install/setup procedure or in the help service, which I'm sure they will.
I use the free version of AVG on my PCs. It works well and doesn't dig its heels into places that it shouldn't, like a few of the big brand applications that I won't bother to name do. I'm suprised that there aren't any OSS solutions for antivirus and anti-malware on the PC. They would be very welcome. If there are some, please let me know.
Sorry. I'm on your side to some degree in this argument, but your claim that google isn't gaining financially isn't true.
Google offers its cache as part of its search engine service. The service itself makes money, and is popular for its entire featureset. Just because a specific feature does not itself generate revenue doesn't mean that it doesn't indirectly contribute to financial gain.
A bathroom in a coffee shop is a really nice feature that doesn't itself generate a single dime.
Anyhow, you don't have to be making money from copyright material to be infringing on a copyright, so this whole part of the argument is kind of pointless.
Yeah I got burned by something like this just recently, where Bush apparently helped make it illegal to "annoy" people online according to a supposedly credible blog (online columnist = blogger, right?). I spouted off about how ridiculous and unfair it was, and then had to stick my foot in my mouth when I actually read the damn law, which I now believe the writer had completely misinterpreted.
So I'd like to see a transcript or whatever of RIAA's actual argument. I'm no fan of RIAA, but I'm leary any time somebody claims something this retarded (unless it's regarding SCO, heh).
I like the idea of promoting other content, but I don't like this implementation.
It comes across to me like background noise. Stuff is just "randomly" jammed into the article list and my brain wants to make some sort of correlation between the main content and these new links. "What are all these game links doing under a headline about patents?"
Perhaps if only stories of the same article *category* were promoted under each headline story, and then links to articles in categories not represented on the front page could be promoted at the bottom of the page.
Another thing I've noticed is that Intel's marketing of "Pentium" has in my mind affected even the geek community's view of the Celeron line. It's so common to hear people with some knowledge of processor specifications dog the Celeron because it has limited cache and/or limited bus speed, etc. "It's a crippled Pentium processor!"
I've always felt that you should buy a processor in terms of bang for the buck. Almost every ma & pa home user would be totally happy with a Celeron processor, and save themselves a hundred bucks or more on a purchase that starts depreciating rapidly as soon as they leave the store. I've gotten tons of use out of Celeron processors for everything from gaming to office work to medium access web servers. But again, it's Intel's fantastic marketing of the Pentium trademark that makes them so much more desirable. Strange to me that they would drop the name and go with such generic branding. There must be more to it.
True, but they are not marketed in any way as Pentium processors, and we are talking about marketing. A PC with a Celeron will have an Intel Inside sticker that says "Celeron" on it.
I agree with those who are saying that dropping Pentium is a mistake. Even my boss who knows absolutely nothing about computers uses the term "Pentium" every time we discuss new workstation purchases.
(although I almost always go Athlon, I just call them "Pentium 4" because she understands speed in terms of Pentium generation. Thus if we have an older Athlon 1Ghz machine, I'd refer to it as a Pentium III and somehow we'd understand eachother. What kind of sucks is that the P4 has a range from what, 1.2Ghz all the way up to almost 4Ghz over several different underlying bus technologies, so she still considers a P4 1.5Ghz machine with 256MB of 133Mhz SDR memory a new machine).
"Needless to say, Windows was designed as a non-networked, single user system. While they have cobbled together multiuser and network features, the history of Windows continues to plague the platform. Anyway you slice it, the optimal choice would have been to sandbox backwards compatibility and rebuild Windows from scratch (or from a solid network/multiuser code base).. sure the transition period might be painful, but I don't think it would have been nearly as painful as the continued security issues of the current code base."
Actually, that's kind of what they did ala Windows 2000 and beyond.
Granted I'm not going to argue about how well it may have worked out or what "from scratch" really means, hehe:)
Are you trying to say that a software program is analogous to the result of a mathematical equation? If I know that the answer to X+10=20 is "10", and I make you pay me to tell you the answer, and don't allow you to tell anybody else, then I am restricting the flow of information. But, as far as I know there is no equation for which the answer would be the machine code for a word processing program. Software is not information. Software is a tool that is the result of information, and is often used to produce information. Difference.
RedHat makes money by intentionally holding back information about what is essentially free software. I don't see how that bolsters your argument.
And the fact that duplicating software is virtually free does not imply that the software itself should be free. Producing and maintaining software is costly.
I'm thankful that there are people out there who are willing to give their time and energy to produce free software tools, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I think that others should have the same philosophy. I do think that the big software guys are charging way too much money for some of their basic products. I'd like to see more full-featured home applications with sub $100 price tags...and not watered down "here's every feature you need except that ONE thing" versions.
Haha...um...I actually did that once. The drive spins too fast of course for it to look cool. Doh.
(not on a working hard drive...but as part of my "hard drive freak show"...I had a bunch of garbage drives with no covers hooked up to a power supply and a toggle switch, so that people could come in to my office and hit the button to watch the drives spin up. Unfortunately, I was the only person who thought it was neat.)
I have an email address that I only use for domain contact purposes, and it I started getting spam to it within weeks. At this point it's basically useless. Whois harvesting is very popular.
Man I agree totally. I usually won't install HP software if there's already a driver with the OS. My last annoyance: I picked up several networkable HP deskjets (forget the model number) that we use at the office here. They're very nice printers for $150, actually. But the driver installation also installs HP's crappy "check for updates" program which launches a HUGE popup every time a user logs on. There is a little setting that allows you to disable the check, BUT it doesn't work unless the user is a local administrator, AND turning it off as a local admin user doesn't turn it off for all users. I don't know how the rest of the world does it, but my domain users are restricted to being regular users. Since these printers are designed specifically to be used in a network environment, I would have expected a little bit more than this...having to manually hack the crap out of the registry when I do an install. And when was the last time you actually went out looking for updates for a stupid printer driver anyhow?
As far as digital cameras go, I simply don't install the software that comes with them. In most cases when plugged in they'll show up as removable media in XP which makes retrieving images easy enough. The worst software I've come across was from Kodak, but it's all pretty bad really. It's like they assume that you're going to be dedicating your entire PC to nothing but this fancy new camera you just brought home, so let's just take over the entire OS to give you the best experience possible. Ack.
I agree with you to some degree, but you're not entirely correct IMO.
An example: I manage one particular corporate website where the content couldn't be any more relevant. Nothing spammy or light-weight about it really - no tricks. Prior to my "optimization", the site was a page or two back on google for several very important key-phrases. After optimization, the site rose to the first page. I was able to achieve this without cheating, but simply being a little smarter about how the page was coded...paying more attention to tags and page titles. The content isn't any "better" now for the end user, nor is it any worse, but google and the other major engines like it more. Due to the unique nature of the content of this site, it's extremely likely that a person searching for these key-phrases would be looking for this very content, so I didn't do anything annoying either.
It's also important to me that I didn't have to reword the copy of the site to the point where it read poorly. "Here is some information about KEYWORD. KEYWORD is very important. If you want to know about KEYWORD, then this is the place to be for information regarding KEYWORD. That's because we specialize in KEYWORD. If you have any question about KEYWORD, please ask and we'll answer your KEYWORD questions.":)
Anyhow, I do agree with you that optimization, if done poorly and/or excessively, can be bad for both the users who find the content relevant, and people searching for something a little different.
Regarding the content of TFA, I found it to be a very nice overview with enough detail to be effective. It's pretty comprehensive compared to a lot of SEO articles online.
"Like DHTML, LAMP, or SPA, Ajax is not a technology in itself, but a term that refers to the use of a group of technologies together. In fact, derivative/composite technologies based substantially upon Ajax, such as AFLAX, are already appearing."
File transfer is actually a pretty important feature. Many people have email service that won't receive (and sometimes send) attachments larger than, say, 2MB.
The only time I use email to send a file to somebody that I'm chatting with is if the file transfer through the IM service won't work because of a firewall. In these cases I find it rather irritating to have to use two applications when normally I would just drag a file into the IM window and be done with it.
I've always found it strange how so many anti-Microsoft arguments will include some reference to PowerPoint and how it is somehow responsible for bad presentations.
PowerPoint is a fine program for what it does, which is probably why it's so popular. Yes, it can be used poorly, so what. It's not Microsoft's fault. Microsoft didn't invent presentation software, and isn't forcing people to give bad presentations. Other programs like Impress serve the same function, and can be misused just as easily. Used properly, these tools can be very beneficial for both the presenter and the audience.
Adding poor arguments like this one into the mix with good arguments only weakens the better arguments. There are plenty of valid reasons out there for disliking Microsoft and Microsoft software - PowerPoint is not one of them. It doesn't help spread viruses or introduce malware, it doesn't hinder workflow, and it doesn't seem to have as many irritating stability issues as the other programs in the Office suite.
Many types of "enhanced CDs" have been around for a long time now, and contain both audio that will play on a standard CD player, and data that can be read by your computer. There have been numerous approaches: mixed mode, blue book/cd plus, etc.
It would be quite possible for your computer to play back pre-compressed versions with DRM protection without your knowledge, given proper OS and/or player support. Hence this entire discussion....
Slashdot Mirror
Until she has to go back out into the real world with this at the top of her resume:
2006 - 2008, Played Video Games
Some people don't need a screen, but some people do.
I have a little Creative Muvo flash player that works pretty well. Even though it doesn't hold a ton of audio, having a screen is a big benefit to me because:
1) I have multiple folders setup on it. I'll typically have a "standard" playlist of songs that I'll keep on there for weeks, and then a folder with new songs that I want to be able to get to quickly. This could be done without a screen, but not as easily.
2) Sometimes I'll put old radio shows on the player, which I put in a seperate folder like I mentioned above. The quality of these recordings are often very poor, and I use the player's EQ to filter out some of the muck. I definately need a screen for this purpose.
3) Battery indicator. Having a USB-rechargable battery would be cool, but I just use 15 minute rechargable AAA batteries. One battery lasts 10-15 hours.
I think what I like most about the player I have is that it works just like a thumb drive. I can copy whatever I want to it however I want to copy it. I can use software to sync or I can just drag & drop from any machine.
I was considering an iPod Shuffle because of the sound quality and cool factor, but opted against it because there was no screen, and I refuse to install iTunes (or QT) on my Windows machines.
I just uninstalled the QFA and some other extensions I wasn't using. Also uninstalled the Google toolbar that I installed a while ago out of curiosity. I've been browsing around for a bit now with multiple windows/tabs, and memory usage *seems* to be about 40MB less now.
117K, or 117,000K?
I thought it was bunk at first too, but I just checked and with only three firefox (1.5) windows open, including this one, it's using 90MB on my system. That seems a bit excessive for a web browser.
I'm going to start watching this thing. There are times when I'm working in Photoshop or Illustrator when I have to start shutting things down to free up memory. I never really bothered to close out browsers though because I didn't think they'd use much.
I do agree with you that the Windows ACL is much more advanced than the old school *nix system.
/?)
However:
1) A lot of new windows machines I'm getting in are still formatted with FAT32. (why oh why? FYI: convert
2) Until very recently the default permissions on a Windows machine were poor (e.g. Win2k Server, C:\ - everyone, full control).
3) The old beat to death fact that most windows users are running as administrator, power users have too much power, and regular users can't run half the crap out there. This is very important no matter what excuse you find to downplay it. Yes, trying to do something as simple as install flash on a Linux machine *sucks* compared to the same task on Windows from the end user perspective. This doesn't validate either system, it only exposes a weakness in both approaches.
4) Default shares are scarey business (e.g. C$).
These problems are the fault of both Microsoft and developers of Windows software. Will it ever change? Dunno. Are there ways to make a secure system easy to use? Sure.
There is one additional thing that I'd like to point out: it's still common for "typical" Linux distributions to come with way too much stuff enabled. You plug an outdated Linux box into the net without a good firewall and a bunch of servers wide open, and you will be rooted. This is still one of the bigger problems facing novice Linux users. I really don't think that running as root is much of a problem, most distributions really nag the shit out of you if you try to do anything but run a shell as root.
The problem is the Malicious Software Removal Tool itself. It's a half-assed product that just sort of does "some stuff." I'm not sure who it's intended for. As someone in IT I certainly have never once used it professionally. There's no point because we're already using better tools. As a PC user at home I have never bothered to use it because, again, there are already better (& free) tools out there.
A program that removes some stuff that Microsoft decides is significant enought to be called "malicious" isn't much of a tool to begin with, and then to factor in that it's only updated once per month makes it even less valuable. Oh, I might also mention that the program only detects an underwhelming 54 "malicious programs?" Wow, gimme summa that.
There's really no issue with Microsoft not releasing an update for the removal tool. It's expected, standard behavior. It's right there in the documentation, second paragraph. This is not an anti-virus program that updates daily, this is some kind of other tool that exists in an awkward dimension all of its own.
Agreed!
:) But really, I can enjoy a game that uses the same old FPS model as long as the content is interesting enough.
I still have vivid memories of Wolfenstein 3D looking so amazing. The same with Doom and Duke Nukem 3D. But load one up right now and there's no comparison with today's graphics. Heck, you don't even have to go that far back. Even Unreal and Quake II look silly compared to games coming out today. The graphics we'll be seeing five years from now will make today's games look corny. That's the way it goes.
The problem here for people like us who have been around this long is that we're, ahem, growing up. I've really started to notice that the older I get, the more it takes from a game to hold my interest. It's an odd moment when you're playing Monopoly with your kids and you suddenly realize: "what the hell did I ever like about this game?"
And yes, of course some of this has to do with the rehashing of old game ideas. If come across another jumping puzzle in an FPS game at this point it'll probably sour me on video games for the rest of my life
P.S. - I really wanted to like Second Life, but...what the heck? The ability for the players to create all the content is pretty amazing, but after that it's like a giant chat room with...3D graffiti.
Yes, I can see that being an issue, but only in that it could reduce the amount of time they spend on trying to write secure code. I don't think that Microsoft, regardless of how sleazy they might be, would intentionally create security risks in order to bolster antivirus sales. Maybe if viruses were a new thing and there was no competition in the marketplace already.
Viruses have been a part of personal computing for a very long time, and they will continue to be a problem for a very long time.
I simply don't think that Microsoft would gain as much by writing bad code to profit from sales of its anti-virus program as they would by simply trying to write more secure code. With all of the media pressure over the years and market pressures from competitve products I do think that they might just step up to the plate and try to do the "right" thing. Could be wrong of course. (we could of course argue that there isn't enough competition, and while that's true overall, I do believe that solutions that can tout "better security" like Linux+Apache, Firefox & Thunderbird, etc will have an impact on Microsoft's plan of attack)
I agree. While I do think that certain basic applications such as a web browser and media player should be bundled with any typical "PC" operating system these days, I think that adding antivirus would be going a little too far. Perhaps if there was more competition in the OS market it would be ok, but in this case it would just hinder antivirus competition.
Selling an cantivirus application as an add-on is the way to go, and it looks like that's what they're doing. I still expect to see the other big antivirus companies complaining, especially if MS pimps their product in the OS install/setup procedure or in the help service, which I'm sure they will.
I use the free version of AVG on my PCs. It works well and doesn't dig its heels into places that it shouldn't, like a few of the big brand applications that I won't bother to name do. I'm suprised that there aren't any OSS solutions for antivirus and anti-malware on the PC. They would be very welcome. If there are some, please let me know.
Sorry. I'm on your side to some degree in this argument, but your claim that google isn't gaining financially isn't true.
Google offers its cache as part of its search engine service. The service itself makes money, and is popular for its entire featureset. Just because a specific feature does not itself generate revenue doesn't mean that it doesn't indirectly contribute to financial gain.
A bathroom in a coffee shop is a really nice feature that doesn't itself generate a single dime.
Anyhow, you don't have to be making money from copyright material to be infringing on a copyright, so this whole part of the argument is kind of pointless.
Yeah I got burned by something like this just recently, where Bush apparently helped make it illegal to "annoy" people online according to a supposedly credible blog (online columnist = blogger, right?). I spouted off about how ridiculous and unfair it was, and then had to stick my foot in my mouth when I actually read the damn law, which I now believe the writer had completely misinterpreted.
So I'd like to see a transcript or whatever of RIAA's actual argument. I'm no fan of RIAA, but I'm leary any time somebody claims something this retarded (unless it's regarding SCO, heh).
I like the idea of promoting other content, but I don't like this implementation.
It comes across to me like background noise. Stuff is just "randomly" jammed into the article list and my brain wants to make some sort of correlation between the main content and these new links. "What are all these game links doing under a headline about patents?"
Perhaps if only stories of the same article *category* were promoted under each headline story, and then links to articles in categories not represented on the front page could be promoted at the bottom of the page.
Another thing I've noticed is that Intel's marketing of "Pentium" has in my mind affected even the geek community's view of the Celeron line. It's so common to hear people with some knowledge of processor specifications dog the Celeron because it has limited cache and/or limited bus speed, etc. "It's a crippled Pentium processor!"
I've always felt that you should buy a processor in terms of bang for the buck. Almost every ma & pa home user would be totally happy with a Celeron processor, and save themselves a hundred bucks or more on a purchase that starts depreciating rapidly as soon as they leave the store. I've gotten tons of use out of Celeron processors for everything from gaming to office work to medium access web servers. But again, it's Intel's fantastic marketing of the Pentium trademark that makes them so much more desirable. Strange to me that they would drop the name and go with such generic branding. There must be more to it.
True, but they are not marketed in any way as Pentium processors, and we are talking about marketing. A PC with a Celeron will have an Intel Inside sticker that says "Celeron" on it.
I agree with those who are saying that dropping Pentium is a mistake. Even my boss who knows absolutely nothing about computers uses the term "Pentium" every time we discuss new workstation purchases.
(although I almost always go Athlon, I just call them "Pentium 4" because she understands speed in terms of Pentium generation. Thus if we have an older Athlon 1Ghz machine, I'd refer to it as a Pentium III and somehow we'd understand eachother. What kind of sucks is that the P4 has a range from what, 1.2Ghz all the way up to almost 4Ghz over several different underlying bus technologies, so she still considers a P4 1.5Ghz machine with 256MB of 133Mhz SDR memory a new machine).
"Needless to say, Windows was designed as a non-networked, single user system. While they have cobbled together multiuser and network features, the history of Windows continues to plague the platform. Anyway you slice it, the optimal choice would have been to sandbox backwards compatibility and rebuild Windows from scratch (or from a solid network/multiuser code base).. sure the transition period might be painful, but I don't think it would have been nearly as painful as the continued security issues of the current code base."
:)
Actually, that's kind of what they did ala Windows 2000 and beyond.
Granted I'm not going to argue about how well it may have worked out or what "from scratch" really means, hehe
Maybe I'm completely misunderstanding you...
Are you trying to say that a software program is analogous to the result of a mathematical equation? If I know that the answer to X+10=20 is "10", and I make you pay me to tell you the answer, and don't allow you to tell anybody else, then I am restricting the flow of information. But, as far as I know there is no equation for which the answer would be the machine code for a word processing program. Software is not information. Software is a tool that is the result of information, and is often used to produce information. Difference.
RedHat makes money by intentionally holding back information about what is essentially free software. I don't see how that bolsters your argument.
And the fact that duplicating software is virtually free does not imply that the software itself should be free. Producing and maintaining software is costly.
I'm thankful that there are people out there who are willing to give their time and energy to produce free software tools, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I think that others should have the same philosophy. I do think that the big software guys are charging way too much money for some of their basic products. I'd like to see more full-featured home applications with sub $100 price tags...and not watered down "here's every feature you need except that ONE thing" versions.
Haha...um...I actually did that once. The drive spins too fast of course for it to look cool. Doh.
(not on a working hard drive...but as part of my "hard drive freak show"...I had a bunch of garbage drives with no covers hooked up to a power supply and a toggle switch, so that people could come in to my office and hit the button to watch the drives spin up. Unfortunately, I was the only person who thought it was neat.)
I have an email address that I only use for domain contact purposes, and it I started getting spam to it within weeks. At this point it's basically useless. Whois harvesting is very popular.
Man I agree totally. I usually won't install HP software if there's already a driver with the OS. My last annoyance: I picked up several networkable HP deskjets (forget the model number) that we use at the office here. They're very nice printers for $150, actually. But the driver installation also installs HP's crappy "check for updates" program which launches a HUGE popup every time a user logs on. There is a little setting that allows you to disable the check, BUT it doesn't work unless the user is a local administrator, AND turning it off as a local admin user doesn't turn it off for all users. I don't know how the rest of the world does it, but my domain users are restricted to being regular users. Since these printers are designed specifically to be used in a network environment, I would have expected a little bit more than this...having to manually hack the crap out of the registry when I do an install. And when was the last time you actually went out looking for updates for a stupid printer driver anyhow?
As far as digital cameras go, I simply don't install the software that comes with them. In most cases when plugged in they'll show up as removable media in XP which makes retrieving images easy enough. The worst software I've come across was from Kodak, but it's all pretty bad really. It's like they assume that you're going to be dedicating your entire PC to nothing but this fancy new camera you just brought home, so let's just take over the entire OS to give you the best experience possible. Ack.
I agree with you to some degree, but you're not entirely correct IMO.
:)
An example: I manage one particular corporate website where the content couldn't be any more relevant. Nothing spammy or light-weight about it really - no tricks. Prior to my "optimization", the site was a page or two back on google for several very important key-phrases. After optimization, the site rose to the first page. I was able to achieve this without cheating, but simply being a little smarter about how the page was coded...paying more attention to tags and page titles. The content isn't any "better" now for the end user, nor is it any worse, but google and the other major engines like it more. Due to the unique nature of the content of this site, it's extremely likely that a person searching for these key-phrases would be looking for this very content, so I didn't do anything annoying either.
It's also important to me that I didn't have to reword the copy of the site to the point where it read poorly. "Here is some information about KEYWORD. KEYWORD is very important. If you want to know about KEYWORD, then this is the place to be for information regarding KEYWORD. That's because we specialize in KEYWORD. If you have any question about KEYWORD, please ask and we'll answer your KEYWORD questions."
Anyhow, I do agree with you that optimization, if done poorly and/or excessively, can be bad for both the users who find the content relevant, and people searching for something a little different.
Regarding the content of TFA, I found it to be a very nice overview with enough detail to be effective. It's pretty comprehensive compared to a lot of SEO articles online.
True enough. According to the wiki:
"Like DHTML, LAMP, or SPA, Ajax is not a technology in itself, but a term that refers to the use of a group of technologies together. In fact, derivative/composite technologies based substantially upon Ajax, such as AFLAX, are already appearing."
File transfer is actually a pretty important feature. Many people have email service that won't receive (and sometimes send) attachments larger than, say, 2MB.
The only time I use email to send a file to somebody that I'm chatting with is if the file transfer through the IM service won't work because of a firewall. In these cases I find it rather irritating to have to use two applications when normally I would just drag a file into the IM window and be done with it.
I've always found it strange how so many anti-Microsoft arguments will include some reference to PowerPoint and how it is somehow responsible for bad presentations.
PowerPoint is a fine program for what it does, which is probably why it's so popular. Yes, it can be used poorly, so what. It's not Microsoft's fault. Microsoft didn't invent presentation software, and isn't forcing people to give bad presentations. Other programs like Impress serve the same function, and can be misused just as easily. Used properly, these tools can be very beneficial for both the presenter and the audience.
Adding poor arguments like this one into the mix with good arguments only weakens the better arguments. There are plenty of valid reasons out there for disliking Microsoft and Microsoft software - PowerPoint is not one of them. It doesn't help spread viruses or introduce malware, it doesn't hinder workflow, and it doesn't seem to have as many irritating stability issues as the other programs in the Office suite.
Many types of "enhanced CDs" have been around for a long time now, and contain both audio that will play on a standard CD player, and data that can be read by your computer. There have been numerous approaches: mixed mode, blue book/cd plus, etc.
It would be quite possible for your computer to play back pre-compressed versions with DRM protection without your knowledge, given proper OS and/or player support. Hence this entire discussion....