So clearly the best idea is to visit each site you visit using BOTH browsers so one will likely catch the phishing mechanism! Ah, safety has never been so simple!
It took me twenty minutes to figure out how to drill down into the working groups and find one about User Interface. It's very, very poorly laid out. Without the search everyone wants, it's functionally useless. Maybe this kind of thing works for social networking where it's just as valuable to "run into" someone as it is to be able to find them with some precision, but to also put this forth as a useful resource for IT pros is silly.
This is not to say that if they can add a search I won't try it out in earnest -- I think MS is doing a lot to embrace the Linux and Mac communities, and I for one want to encourage that. MS has a lot of very intelligent people working for them -- they just need a bit more exposure to how the other 20% lives.:)
Indeed. And what really chaps my butt is that a year from now, a Treo is going to cost me $50 more than it otherwise would have because Palm has to figure out how to pay the lawyers they'll need to defend against this silliness. I think a lot of people (not so many here on Slashdot, but people in general) forget about that aspect of the frivolous lawsuit -- no matter who wins or loses, the attorneys get paid. And this creates higher prices, wipes out the companies with tighter margins (but possibly better products), and generally winnows everything down to our products being available only from the companies with the most lawyers (design and product relevance be damned).
I agree, too, with other posters here -- it's a stumper when there's nothing to boycott. It would sure be nice to do something to protest their behavior, but we're down to TP and flaming poop bags on the doorstep -- they don't DO anything (outside of file lawsuits). To paraphrase Say Anything (a good John Cusack movie from 1989) -- they don't buy anything sold or processed, sell anything bought or processed, or process anything bought or sold.
Oh, I'm not suggesting they would care because of the economy -- much more that we'd find out who was in whose pockets. For example, you don't see this administration doing much that takes AWAY business from Halliburton. Which airlines are heavy hitters when it comes to be donation time?
Don't try to outcynic me! Don't worry, I got it covered.;)
If this is true and threatens to go into effect, we'll find out how strong the airlines' lobby is. This would kill a stack of business for them, I'd think.
Sure, but it's the suddeness and the efficiency of the attack. I have no problem with keeping 9/11 in perspective, but to take out 2973 people, many of whom fought smoke and flames and fiery stairwells only to die a violent death anyway, in the course of a couple hours can't be seen as just another batch of natural deaths.
WHICH IS NOT TO SAY that the current lionization of the whole 9/11 mess isn't terribly and irresponsibly overblown. I simply mean to say that there really was terror here, and it affected a lot of people in their offices before they died very unpleasant deaths. This, not the headcount death toll, is meant to scare us.
Might be because each browser comes with a set home page (MSN, Netscape, whatever), and some of those have stacks of high-paying ads. I can't imagine it's a standards war (if we get the highest market share and hold it everyone will have to use our hackneyed standards, woo-ha-ha), as that doesn't really make them any money, either. Good question. Dumb pride? Maybe for some of them (Firefox) market share affects their ability to get and keep investors/financial support? And some do have paid versions (Opera) that offer additional features that you'd want people to see the advantages of. Just speculating here, of course...
The Do Not Call List doesn't apply to most telemarketers. Churches, Nonprofits, political organizations, brotherhoods of benevolent amputee police orphans, and so on are all able to continue calling. They are obliged to take you off their list if you ask, but that rarely happens. And for the political stuff, it's so time-sensitive, that the two weeks it takes to scratch your name off a list is typically longer than the time left to the election. The only people who can't call you, as near as I can tell, are the timeshare folks and Sony. And I get enough faxes from the timeshare folks that they don't need to call me.
Still, I agree -- I wish I had the kind of time and energy to devote to negotiating settlements out of small claims court cases. I don't generally have time to talk to these chuckleheads in the first place, let alone stick it to them. I guess I don't have what it takes.
Hm... perhaps because fighting the "good fight" means working with no backing, no funding, and no support. Maybe, just maybe, Microsoft employees want to develop things from within Microsoft, allowing them to break down some of the barriers. I know my two friends think that way.
This is the kind of nose-in-the-air statement that gets me frothing (and, when I respond to it, gets me tagged as flamebait, kind of proving my point). It's not black and white -- Microsoft is not simply big and evil, despite the fact that they might not do things the way you think they should be done. But for sake of argument, let's pretend they ARE evil. They're still the biggest show in town and, from a practical standpoint, unbeatable. Apple has thrown millions of dollars and thousands of great developers and deeply talented designers at the task of cutting them down and has hardly made a dent. If you want Microsoft to play ball, you need to work with them, not against them. They are too powerful to take down if you fight them -- you can get them to soften up if you work with them and within them. This, by the way, is the way to change government, too. I think the correlation is quite clear.
But that's the argument if MS is uniformly evil. I don't think they are. I think they used to be closer to evil, but that they've changed. But I think the insular, must-smother-all mentality just doesn't work anymore, and I think they know that. OpenXML is one attempt at working with the larger world (I know, the standards fight is in high gear and MS can look like the same old mess, but I don't recall them wasting any time on standards organizations before except perhaps the w3 Consortium, and that was grudgingly at best). Apparently there are other projects involving extending VirtualPC that are getting a lot of support from MS management that allow for other OS options -- an interesting new idea that admits the existence of other OS's, considering how hard it has been in the past to even get a boot manager to play nice with Windows (and from a business standpoint, an admission that the Mac and Linux dual-boot options are getting harder and harder to ignore). Baby steps, but steps. So I think they're seeing the world coming, and they have enough people working there who want to be part of the world and not king of the world that it may just work.
Just my.02 -- obviously I have access to only a few MS people, and I have no access to management types. But having been to Redmond and seen what a lot of very smart people are working very hard to accomplish, I get a bit tired of the constant, ivory tower (as phrased by another poster) attitudes around here. It sells everyone there short -- if MS came out with some statement about being a directionless geek living in your mother's basement if you work with Linux, we'd all be outraged. But apparently such broad strokes can be made in the other direction all the time.
Let's all be calm for a bit, and see what this next flavor of Microsoft has to offer. I afford you the right to say "I told you so" if they continue to screw up. I'm not thrilled with Vista so far, but it's stability stuff more than basic stuff (in fact, I very much like the new interface -- takes a lot of getting used to, but it's more generally intelligent than the piecemeal stuff from XP). Anyhow, stability gets fixed, and I can wait (it's still in RC form now, anyway).
I agree -- I have a couple of friends who work in Redmond and are just as fed up with the corporate BS as any Slashdotter. But they're working on things that deeply interest them, and they (as yet) believe that they and the other very sharp people on their teams can produce better stuff than Microsoft has in the past (besides, it's apparently a great place to work, if you can get past the corporate sellout thing that so many of us have a problem with). So I'm not at all surprised about the cake -- you have to figure that the IE folks and the Firefox folks are in contact from time to time and are watching each other carefully all the time, and the IE team at MS is going to be just as interested as Firefox in getting something cool out for the public.
The problem with Microsoft is not bad coders. I'm sure they have some, but I bet the percentage is no different from other companies. The problem is when upper management starts making coding decisions based on shareholders' concerns, or when marketing starts making standards decisions and passing them down to coders. One of the friends at MS said that pretty much all the coders he knows would much rather be working with accepted standards instead of hackneyed MS pseudo-standards.
Anyhow, I agree completely that this was a classy move. I would still have some marketing intern taste it before the whole team digs in (lest today be remembered as the day Firefox development froze forever at 2.0!), but I think most in-the-trenches coders would be happy to pat a rival on the back for something cool.
Unless it's dark. And where I live, it's dark about half the time. Farther north, planetary motion is even less compliant with readers' needs. Fix that, and you've got something!
I happen to split my time between web development and book design and typesetting, and I can't imagine that the old, er, analog format can't live in harmony with the new digital formats. I prefer to read print on paper, but I do keep several reference and classic books on my PDA. I don't find them as easy on the eyes, but that's details -- the fact is, I have more data than I could ever carry in print form in a little box the size of my wallet, and I can refer to it when the chips are down (the U.S. Constitution is getting quite a workout these days, for example). And if I have something digitally that I'm reading at home on paper, I can wait out a dentist or something and just move my physical bookmark when I get home. Moreover, you can't run a global search on a hardcover from the library. But you can hold it and smell it and enjoy all the tactile magnificence of a well-manufactured book.
Working in publishing, I hear a lot of either/or -- people strongly believe that the advent of eBooks spells the end of print books. They can live together and compliment each other, as long as the proponents of each don't think the other is a mortal threat to their bottom line. No different from a lot of other digital-vs-analog arguments, really. People freak out far too easily when they think something that will compliment their industry will actually replace it. Whereas the smart people (read: the ones who will still be there at the end) get involved in both.
Thanks for the link. I'm assuming it doesn't amplify strength enough to worry about breaking your wrists beyond the metal sleeve - I wonder, though. Anything that amplifies strength runs the risk of exceeding the limitations of the actual body underneath, you know?
Re:Honestly, this was a long time coming
on
Steve Irwin Dead
·
· Score: 1
I feel for his kids, too. And his wife, and his parents, and his friends, and his fans, and a nation that seemed to have glommed onto his simplified TV persona. Yes, the kids will grow up without their biological father. But no, they won't only know what they see on TV. They'll have all the same stories that other families who lose a father tell each other. They'll have pictures from weddings and birthday parties and day-to-day life. They'll have all the same stuff other kids who have lost parents will have, and additionally the TV stuff.
As far as the TV stuff goes, he was constantly putting himself into harm's way. Not that he deserved to die because of it, but you've got to admit his chances of being stung/gored/eaten by his work were probably significantly statistically higher than yours or mine. And he wasn't a cop, a firefighter, a soldier, a relief worker. He was a TV star who did intentionally dangerous things for ratings. Doesn't mean he should die, but I think some perspective is in order.
Let's not get too dramatic about it - it's a terrible thing that their father died, but I doubt he was in his camera-conscious character every waking moment. This kind of thing happens to kids all the time around the world, and it's personally devastating to them. But don't try to pretend that because he was this wacky character on TV that they won't have real memories and mementos of him. It sucks to be them enough as it is, without a bunch of people trying to advocate on their "pitiful" behalf.
For example, I would imagine that 99.9% of kids who lose their fathers to work-related mortal injuries don't have the financial support that Steve Erwin's kids do. Doesn't mean they won't be terribly hurt by his death, but they'll still eat food and live somewhere. Please, perspective, everyone!
Subject line says it all, really. I've always worked with companies and projects that start out playing catch-up and try too many shortcuts using packaged software, so I don't tend to see things where the philosophy dictates the action (instead of the reverse).
I hear ya, but really, imagine the chaos it would cause with the relatively different sensitivities of tracking devices. Great on your machine, but if you go to the library where it's calibrated differently, your eyeball tracking might be all over the place.
FYI, that article really ID's the SNAFUs with DRM and OSS as pertaining to the GPL. I was KO'd when I read it - IANAL, but I wonder if it's BS or OK. Maybe I'll keep it on the QT until I know. Gotta run - I need to have a BM so I can leave for my AA meeting ASAP.
At risk of picking an unrelated fight here, isn't this exactly what Microsoft does? Channel 9, and all that? MS developers are accessible (one-way, but still) by users, as are their "evangelists," people who act as technically-oriented PR people for individual projects. As a disclaimer, I've historically been anti-Microsoft but now have a buddy who is an evangelist for the Office project, and it really does seem like Microsoft is making an effort (in this area and others) to approach the public (users, developers, whatever) in a more gentle fashion. Not to defend them, but I think they've changed more than a lot of Slashdotters like to think. They're still mostly evil (from a UI standpoint, they're killing us all, for example), but I'm curious about how they will continue to change. And heartened by some of the attempts to reconnect with the end user.
That said, I've seen nothing like this on the Apple site. If it's as visually buried as Channel 9 is, it may be there but indetectable. If it's not there at all, that's too bad - it puts Apple on the same mental track as Microsoft, something they would surely not want people to think (whether it's true or not - personally, I think they're closer in practice than we all like to believe).
Okay, I read the main article but didn't read the India Times one - now I know that the lobby has nothing directly to do with this stuff. Sorry for the uneducated post.
My mother has done several clinical trials of arthritis and related medications - we all have knees of jelly (actually, jelly would feel great compared to the grinding we all have), and she figures she can volunteer her very bad knees and hips for science in hopes that the decibel levels of the flexed knees of future generations will go down.
But you're right - the ONLY thing this kind of behavior produces is fear and tentativeness in possible subjects. Well, that and dead people. My mother would probably keep doing the studies, and I will probably do them later in life when I can afford a bit of downtime here and there. And this really is only one example in a very large list of safe(r) studies going on. But if my understanding of the medication is accurate, the "side-effects" seem to trump exactly what the drug is supposed to do, and now they're playing lawyer ball to pretend they didn't irreparably damage these volunteers.
There comes a point where humans have to be test subjects - drugs react differently in different mammals, so you can only be so sure of side-effects before you start on people. Still, this one sounds pretty ridiculous. But as long as the pharmaceutical lobby has such a grip on government, this kind of stuff will continue to happen. And eventually, you're right - it will cause people to stop volunteering for crucial roles in drug testing.
I hate to say it (because it seems off-topic and ranty), but this kind of behavior might have been avoided with some kind of real, substantive campaign finance reform. Take the politicans out of the pockets of these companies, and suddenly laws will change to reflect the needs of the voters. Just a thought.
Okay, am I the only one who thought the video of Woz was ridiculous? I mean, of course it's ridiculous, but more specifically he goes on at limited but noticable length about how he's so good at this that they keep having to change the rules to minimize his dominance. The interviewer goads him on a bit, but really, he seems pretty conceited throughout the whole interview. I haven't had much experience watching him in the past, so it could be that he's always this way. But good God, the man is playing a full-size version of table hockey, more or less, with minimal expenditure of energy and a silly helmet, and all he can do is brag about how much better he is at it than everyone else.
All that said, it DOES look like goofy fun. I guess the contrast between the World Cup (twenty-two guys from all over the world and a ball, running their butts off for close to two hours) and this (a bunch of people with lots of resources riding fabulous machines around and whacking at stuff) got to me, though.
Wait, I just basically described auto racing, too, and I love auto racing. Ah, hells bells, I gotta rethink this one...
I know he's a big name in usability and has some good points, but I take everything he says with a grain of salt. He's disproportionately fixated on self-promotion, I think - I personally feel he gets a little windy sometimes,at the expense of his message or the larger point.
But the point that can be taken from this is still interesting - progression need not be strictly linear. Blogs won't necessarily replace mailing lists, but will serve a different purpose for a different audience.
Slashdot Mirror
So clearly the best idea is to visit each site you visit using BOTH browsers so one will likely catch the phishing mechanism! Ah, safety has never been so simple!
It took me twenty minutes to figure out how to drill down into the working groups and find one about User Interface. It's very, very poorly laid out. Without the search everyone wants, it's functionally useless. Maybe this kind of thing works for social networking where it's just as valuable to "run into" someone as it is to be able to find them with some precision, but to also put this forth as a useful resource for IT pros is silly.
:)
This is not to say that if they can add a search I won't try it out in earnest -- I think MS is doing a lot to embrace the Linux and Mac communities, and I for one want to encourage that. MS has a lot of very intelligent people working for them -- they just need a bit more exposure to how the other 20% lives.
Indeed. And what really chaps my butt is that a year from now, a Treo is going to cost me $50 more than it otherwise would have because Palm has to figure out how to pay the lawyers they'll need to defend against this silliness. I think a lot of people (not so many here on Slashdot, but people in general) forget about that aspect of the frivolous lawsuit -- no matter who wins or loses, the attorneys get paid. And this creates higher prices, wipes out the companies with tighter margins (but possibly better products), and generally winnows everything down to our products being available only from the companies with the most lawyers (design and product relevance be damned).
I agree, too, with other posters here -- it's a stumper when there's nothing to boycott. It would sure be nice to do something to protest their behavior, but we're down to TP and flaming poop bags on the doorstep -- they don't DO anything (outside of file lawsuits). To paraphrase Say Anything (a good John Cusack movie from 1989) -- they don't buy anything sold or processed, sell anything bought or processed, or process anything bought or sold.
Oh, I'm not suggesting they would care because of the economy -- much more that we'd find out who was in whose pockets. For example, you don't see this administration doing much that takes AWAY business from Halliburton. Which airlines are heavy hitters when it comes to be donation time?
;)
Don't try to outcynic me! Don't worry, I got it covered.
If this is true and threatens to go into effect, we'll find out how strong the airlines' lobby is. This would kill a stack of business for them, I'd think.
Sure, but it's the suddeness and the efficiency of the attack. I have no problem with keeping 9/11 in perspective, but to take out 2973 people, many of whom fought smoke and flames and fiery stairwells only to die a violent death anyway, in the course of a couple hours can't be seen as just another batch of natural deaths.
WHICH IS NOT TO SAY that the current lionization of the whole 9/11 mess isn't terribly and irresponsibly overblown. I simply mean to say that there really was terror here, and it affected a lot of people in their offices before they died very unpleasant deaths. This, not the headcount death toll, is meant to scare us.
Might be because each browser comes with a set home page (MSN, Netscape, whatever), and some of those have stacks of high-paying ads. I can't imagine it's a standards war (if we get the highest market share and hold it everyone will have to use our hackneyed standards, woo-ha-ha), as that doesn't really make them any money, either. Good question. Dumb pride? Maybe for some of them (Firefox) market share affects their ability to get and keep investors/financial support? And some do have paid versions (Opera) that offer additional features that you'd want people to see the advantages of. Just speculating here, of course ...
The Do Not Call List doesn't apply to most telemarketers. Churches, Nonprofits, political organizations, brotherhoods of benevolent amputee police orphans, and so on are all able to continue calling. They are obliged to take you off their list if you ask, but that rarely happens. And for the political stuff, it's so time-sensitive, that the two weeks it takes to scratch your name off a list is typically longer than the time left to the election. The only people who can't call you, as near as I can tell, are the timeshare folks and Sony. And I get enough faxes from the timeshare folks that they don't need to call me.
Still, I agree -- I wish I had the kind of time and energy to devote to negotiating settlements out of small claims court cases. I don't generally have time to talk to these chuckleheads in the first place, let alone stick it to them. I guess I don't have what it takes.
Hm ... perhaps because fighting the "good fight" means working with no backing, no funding, and no support. Maybe, just maybe, Microsoft employees want to develop things from within Microsoft, allowing them to break down some of the barriers. I know my two friends think that way.
.02 -- obviously I have access to only a few MS people, and I have no access to management types. But having been to Redmond and seen what a lot of very smart people are working very hard to accomplish, I get a bit tired of the constant, ivory tower (as phrased by another poster) attitudes around here. It sells everyone there short -- if MS came out with some statement about being a directionless geek living in your mother's basement if you work with Linux, we'd all be outraged. But apparently such broad strokes can be made in the other direction all the time.
This is the kind of nose-in-the-air statement that gets me frothing (and, when I respond to it, gets me tagged as flamebait, kind of proving my point). It's not black and white -- Microsoft is not simply big and evil, despite the fact that they might not do things the way you think they should be done. But for sake of argument, let's pretend they ARE evil. They're still the biggest show in town and, from a practical standpoint, unbeatable. Apple has thrown millions of dollars and thousands of great developers and deeply talented designers at the task of cutting them down and has hardly made a dent. If you want Microsoft to play ball, you need to work with them, not against them. They are too powerful to take down if you fight them -- you can get them to soften up if you work with them and within them. This, by the way, is the way to change government, too. I think the correlation is quite clear.
But that's the argument if MS is uniformly evil. I don't think they are. I think they used to be closer to evil, but that they've changed. But I think the insular, must-smother-all mentality just doesn't work anymore, and I think they know that. OpenXML is one attempt at working with the larger world (I know, the standards fight is in high gear and MS can look like the same old mess, but I don't recall them wasting any time on standards organizations before except perhaps the w3 Consortium, and that was grudgingly at best). Apparently there are other projects involving extending VirtualPC that are getting a lot of support from MS management that allow for other OS options -- an interesting new idea that admits the existence of other OS's, considering how hard it has been in the past to even get a boot manager to play nice with Windows (and from a business standpoint, an admission that the Mac and Linux dual-boot options are getting harder and harder to ignore). Baby steps, but steps. So I think they're seeing the world coming, and they have enough people working there who want to be part of the world and not king of the world that it may just work.
Just my
Let's all be calm for a bit, and see what this next flavor of Microsoft has to offer. I afford you the right to say "I told you so" if they continue to screw up. I'm not thrilled with Vista so far, but it's stability stuff more than basic stuff (in fact, I very much like the new interface -- takes a lot of getting used to, but it's more generally intelligent than the piecemeal stuff from XP). Anyhow, stability gets fixed, and I can wait (it's still in RC form now, anyway).
I agree -- I have a couple of friends who work in Redmond and are just as fed up with the corporate BS as any Slashdotter. But they're working on things that deeply interest them, and they (as yet) believe that they and the other very sharp people on their teams can produce better stuff than Microsoft has in the past (besides, it's apparently a great place to work, if you can get past the corporate sellout thing that so many of us have a problem with). So I'm not at all surprised about the cake -- you have to figure that the IE folks and the Firefox folks are in contact from time to time and are watching each other carefully all the time, and the IE team at MS is going to be just as interested as Firefox in getting something cool out for the public.
The problem with Microsoft is not bad coders. I'm sure they have some, but I bet the percentage is no different from other companies. The problem is when upper management starts making coding decisions based on shareholders' concerns, or when marketing starts making standards decisions and passing them down to coders. One of the friends at MS said that pretty much all the coders he knows would much rather be working with accepted standards instead of hackneyed MS pseudo-standards.
Anyhow, I agree completely that this was a classy move. I would still have some marketing intern taste it before the whole team digs in (lest today be remembered as the day Firefox development froze forever at 2.0!), but I think most in-the-trenches coders would be happy to pat a rival on the back for something cool.
>> pulp books do not need electricity
Unless it's dark. And where I live, it's dark about half the time. Farther north, planetary motion is even less compliant with readers' needs. Fix that, and you've got something!
I happen to split my time between web development and book design and typesetting, and I can't imagine that the old, er, analog format can't live in harmony with the new digital formats. I prefer to read print on paper, but I do keep several reference and classic books on my PDA. I don't find them as easy on the eyes, but that's details -- the fact is, I have more data than I could ever carry in print form in a little box the size of my wallet, and I can refer to it when the chips are down (the U.S. Constitution is getting quite a workout these days, for example). And if I have something digitally that I'm reading at home on paper, I can wait out a dentist or something and just move my physical bookmark when I get home. Moreover, you can't run a global search on a hardcover from the library. But you can hold it and smell it and enjoy all the tactile magnificence of a well-manufactured book.
Working in publishing, I hear a lot of either/or -- people strongly believe that the advent of eBooks spells the end of print books. They can live together and compliment each other, as long as the proponents of each don't think the other is a mortal threat to their bottom line. No different from a lot of other digital-vs-analog arguments, really. People freak out far too easily when they think something that will compliment their industry will actually replace it. Whereas the smart people (read: the ones who will still be there at the end) get involved in both.
Thanks for the link. I'm assuming it doesn't amplify strength enough to worry about breaking your wrists beyond the metal sleeve - I wonder, though. Anything that amplifies strength runs the risk of exceeding the limitations of the actual body underneath, you know?
I feel for his kids, too. And his wife, and his parents, and his friends, and his fans, and a nation that seemed to have glommed onto his simplified TV persona. Yes, the kids will grow up without their biological father. But no, they won't only know what they see on TV. They'll have all the same stories that other families who lose a father tell each other. They'll have pictures from weddings and birthday parties and day-to-day life. They'll have all the same stuff other kids who have lost parents will have, and additionally the TV stuff.
As far as the TV stuff goes, he was constantly putting himself into harm's way. Not that he deserved to die because of it, but you've got to admit his chances of being stung/gored/eaten by his work were probably significantly statistically higher than yours or mine. And he wasn't a cop, a firefighter, a soldier, a relief worker. He was a TV star who did intentionally dangerous things for ratings. Doesn't mean he should die, but I think some perspective is in order.
Let's not get too dramatic about it - it's a terrible thing that their father died, but I doubt he was in his camera-conscious character every waking moment. This kind of thing happens to kids all the time around the world, and it's personally devastating to them. But don't try to pretend that because he was this wacky character on TV that they won't have real memories and mementos of him. It sucks to be them enough as it is, without a bunch of people trying to advocate on their "pitiful" behalf.
For example, I would imagine that 99.9% of kids who lose their fathers to work-related mortal injuries don't have the financial support that Steve Erwin's kids do. Doesn't mean they won't be terribly hurt by his death, but they'll still eat food and live somewhere. Please, perspective, everyone!
cdrecord dev=1,0,0 -eject schilling.iso
Subject line says it all, really. I've always worked with companies and projects that start out playing catch-up and try too many shortcuts using packaged software, so I don't tend to see things where the philosophy dictates the action (instead of the reverse).
I hear ya, but really, imagine the chaos it would cause with the relatively different sensitivities of tracking devices. Great on your machine, but if you go to the library where it's calibrated differently, your eyeball tracking might be all over the place.
... one Washington farmer reported a complete loss after IE enthusiasts recreated a blue screen of death across his soybean field.
FYI, that article really ID's the SNAFUs with DRM and OSS as pertaining to the GPL. I was KO'd when I read it - IANAL, but I wonder if it's BS or OK. Maybe I'll keep it on the QT until I know. Gotta run - I need to have a BM so I can leave for my AA meeting ASAP.
At risk of picking an unrelated fight here, isn't this exactly what Microsoft does? Channel 9, and all that? MS developers are accessible (one-way, but still) by users, as are their "evangelists," people who act as technically-oriented PR people for individual projects. As a disclaimer, I've historically been anti-Microsoft but now have a buddy who is an evangelist for the Office project, and it really does seem like Microsoft is making an effort (in this area and others) to approach the public (users, developers, whatever) in a more gentle fashion. Not to defend them, but I think they've changed more than a lot of Slashdotters like to think. They're still mostly evil (from a UI standpoint, they're killing us all, for example), but I'm curious about how they will continue to change. And heartened by some of the attempts to reconnect with the end user.
That said, I've seen nothing like this on the Apple site. If it's as visually buried as Channel 9 is, it may be there but indetectable. If it's not there at all, that's too bad - it puts Apple on the same mental track as Microsoft, something they would surely not want people to think (whether it's true or not - personally, I think they're closer in practice than we all like to believe).
Okay, I read the main article but didn't read the India Times one - now I know that the lobby has nothing directly to do with this stuff. Sorry for the uneducated post.
My mother has done several clinical trials of arthritis and related medications - we all have knees of jelly (actually, jelly would feel great compared to the grinding we all have), and she figures she can volunteer her very bad knees and hips for science in hopes that the decibel levels of the flexed knees of future generations will go down.
But you're right - the ONLY thing this kind of behavior produces is fear and tentativeness in possible subjects. Well, that and dead people. My mother would probably keep doing the studies, and I will probably do them later in life when I can afford a bit of downtime here and there. And this really is only one example in a very large list of safe(r) studies going on. But if my understanding of the medication is accurate, the "side-effects" seem to trump exactly what the drug is supposed to do, and now they're playing lawyer ball to pretend they didn't irreparably damage these volunteers.
There comes a point where humans have to be test subjects - drugs react differently in different mammals, so you can only be so sure of side-effects before you start on people. Still, this one sounds pretty ridiculous. But as long as the pharmaceutical lobby has such a grip on government, this kind of stuff will continue to happen. And eventually, you're right - it will cause people to stop volunteering for crucial roles in drug testing.
I hate to say it (because it seems off-topic and ranty), but this kind of behavior might have been avoided with some kind of real, substantive campaign finance reform. Take the politicans out of the pockets of these companies, and suddenly laws will change to reflect the needs of the voters. Just a thought.
... is admitting you have a problem.
Okay, am I the only one who thought the video of Woz was ridiculous? I mean, of course it's ridiculous, but more specifically he goes on at limited but noticable length about how he's so good at this that they keep having to change the rules to minimize his dominance. The interviewer goads him on a bit, but really, he seems pretty conceited throughout the whole interview. I haven't had much experience watching him in the past, so it could be that he's always this way. But good God, the man is playing a full-size version of table hockey, more or less, with minimal expenditure of energy and a silly helmet, and all he can do is brag about how much better he is at it than everyone else.
...
All that said, it DOES look like goofy fun. I guess the contrast between the World Cup (twenty-two guys from all over the world and a ball, running their butts off for close to two hours) and this (a bunch of people with lots of resources riding fabulous machines around and whacking at stuff) got to me, though.
Wait, I just basically described auto racing, too, and I love auto racing. Ah, hells bells, I gotta rethink this one
Anyone here? Hm ... I guess it's accurate.
I know he's a big name in usability and has some good points, but I take everything he says with a grain of salt. He's disproportionately fixated on self-promotion, I think - I personally feel he gets a little windy sometimes,at the expense of his message or the larger point.
But the point that can be taken from this is still interesting - progression need not be strictly linear. Blogs won't necessarily replace mailing lists, but will serve a different purpose for a different audience.