No kidding! Imagine surfing to a web page selling something, only to find a comment telling you can get something cheaper elsewhere. Or any other similar type of thing.
Considering wikipedia is absolutely stuffed full of astroturf, why does anyone think this will end up any different?
Looks like just another of these ideas that will start off nobly, but rapidly descend into commercial Hell and lawsuits.
Anything and everything that can be done to reduce user stress and increase user experience should be done. Old School menu bars and the xerox way of thinking is outdated and underachieved.
No. We've had this argument for decades with keyboard layouts. The cost of retraining and adjustment is far, far too high.
This move kills Firefox stone dead. Mozilla can kiss its market share goodbye. Why would anyone choose to use a browser that's increasingly overshadowed by Chrome IE and Safari that requires a completely new way of interacting with it? It's just too hard to overcome that entropy. You have to really, really want to use it.
Personally, I will never use this as long as I live. I've already become jaded with Firefox over the awfulbar debacle, and the fact that Firefox really doesn't work well on a Mac.
I'll stick with Firefox 3.0 until such time as Chrome is available for Mac.
Firefox is the new Netscape. It will end up exactly the same way.
Isn't the very act of scanning and printing using a computer a digital modification?
Yes, they are. And they pretty much always have been. All photos are pretty much artifact to a greater or lesser degree.
It used to be done in the studio and the darkroom in the early days of photography. See Ansel Adams pics for expert darkroom manipulation.
Models have always been shot with artificial make-up, hair, fans blowing their hair and carefully controlled lighting to create an artificial image of the person.
But most of all -- all food photography is pretty much fake. It's near impossible to shoot food realistically. So there's always been cold tea replacing whisky, mashed potato replacing ice cream and many other tricks of the trade. That's why your restaurant food looks much better in a photo than in real life -- because it rarely ever is the same food. It's fake.
Almost every photo needs to be flagged, which makes the whole exercise completely and utterly pointless.
Yeah, everyone in the world knows their legal system is busted. Why do they even have free speech, if they can silence people with lawsuits?
Who said Britain has free speech? It doesn't. It very prominently silenced politicians from Northern Ireland in the 1990s. You do not have the right of free speech in the UK, you do not have the right to silence either, as your silence can be assumed to be an admission of guilt.
You must be confusing Britain with a free, democratic country governed by a written constitution.
They just virtually banned the current Darwin inspired film in the US.
That's just not true. That is what the producers are claiming, however. But that's just propaganda, and an attempt to raise publicity. The truth is that the movie had bad reviews at festivals, and thus distributors didn't pick it up for the US market. Perhaps, potential evolutionist backlash may have played some very small part in that, but controversial movies like "The Last Temptation of Christ" have thrived on the negative publicity. The movie didn't get picked up primarily, because it was regarded as pedestrian, uninspired filmmaking.
I always wonder how so many people have issues with firefox.
Try it on a Mac. If you can get it to run without issue for more than 6 hours, then you deserve a medal.
But the fact that "so many" people do, in fact, have issues with Firefox is a question for Mozilla. Rather than add in yet more features, would their time not be better spent in stabilizing the core of the browser? Leave the features to add-ins.
I don't there's one reason to switch that fits all situations. For me, there's different reasons for wanting to switch away from FOSS, or not use it in the first place. For example:
1. Firefox -- Stability: horrendous on a Mac, and the memory leaks. Bloat: awfulbar and other "features" that should be addins. There appears to be very little understanding in Mozilla about what users needs are.
2. GIMP -- Features: is nowhere near up to professional standards.
3. VLC -- User Experience: fantastic engine -- but horrific interface, and arrogant unhelpful developers. (I switched to Mplayer and never looked back)
4. Open Office -- Pretty much all of the above.
5. Joomla -- Ridiculously complex, documentation is gawdawful. And that for modules is often worse and invariably written in English by those whose command of the language is very tentative.
6. Celtx -- Usability. Has better features than Final Draft, however the need to be online to save as a pdf renders it pretty much worthless.
"On the other hand, the reason online sites are always looking for new ways to insert advertising in the user experience is because, although they might make enough to be profitable, they still aren't raking in "buy your own country" money."
Google is.
And this makes me wonder what the disconnect is. Since it's correct that Network television has much higher costs than any website, and yet in many cases has fewer advertising eyes than major websites. (Especially when you consider tivo and people wandering off to get a coffee in ad breaks)
Which leads me to consider that TV advertising is probably vastly over inflated, and overrated, and that web advertising -- should someone take the time to do it in a contextual, non-invasive and entertaining way -- it vastly undervalued and underrated.
I suspect the advertising industry itself is really to blame for its own shortsightedness. It really should be possible, and easy for anyone with a reasonably successful website to hook up with advertisers with ease and fear of annoying their site visitors, and transforming their website into a flashing, flickering spawn of hell.
But as long as the industry is trusting flawed rankings like Nielsen and Alexa, there won't be much change.
This change needs to happen - urgently. By making this happen, it will help end piracy and the ridiculous cartel that is the music industry and film distribution. Content can be set free.
Anyone wanna take bets on how long until Leader Technologies comes out with their own social networking site that looks very similar to Facebook, and gets sued for having some technology that infringes on a Facebook patent?
It really doesn't matter if they do develop a social network site or not. There's been dozens of Myspace and Facebook clones out there. None have particularly succeeded. The underlying tech isn't what drives their success. It's the ability of their Marketing Droids to convince people that the emperor is really not, in fact, stark naked.
Too bad, I wouldn't have minded too much if their Hollywood Accounting had backfired on them.
If there's one wikipedia page (and in reality there's 10,000s), that sums up the inadequacies of wikipedia, it's that Hollywood Accounting one. That page is 100% hearsay, gossip column and TMZ-esque gossip presented as fact and wikiality.
While there are (likely) many instances of creative accounting practices in Hollywood, the truth is very guarded. And the truth is NOT displayed on that wikipedia page. There is nothing to see on that page that's of any value to the human race.
War is probably the greatest catalyst for change and technological advancement. The period from 1880 to 1960 was one of the most turbulent in World history. Both the Great War and WWII spurred a lot of tech, not just killing machines, but also in medicine and materials sciences amongst many other things.
I guess it is a good thing that we have lived in relatively-speaking peaceful times in comparison. However, hopefully there is a way of humanity getting its act together to precipitate change without the need for life and death conflict. The cynic in me however, suggests that maybe war is a necessary mechanism for social change. Kind of like forest fires, plagues, etc, in the ecosystem.
"Almost commented before I saw it was under Idle."
I thought Idle had died. It's mercifully kept a low profile for a few months. (Although, sadly samzenpus has occasionally been polluting regular/. with Idle articles.)
Again, for the love of all things sacred, please take IDLE our of the main/. RSS feed.
That is only fair. Those that like Idle can read it, those of us who cannot stand it, need never waste our time with it.
The fact is that the BBC is known for its objectivity.
No, not in the UK it isn't. That's absolutely nothing like a "fact". The BBC's long been criticized for having a a pro-Labour party bias, as well as a few other biases. It does have also a virtual monopoly on UK broadcasting, with very little to challenge its practices.
Murdoch is correct in some ways. He's obviously saying it for his own nefarious ends. And the large percentage of the UK media his company owns is also a very big part of the problem too. Reverting to charging for online news isn't a good idea -- for anyone. But more competition is a VERY good idea.
However, there are many, many issues with the way the BBC behaves, it does need to be examined more closely. It's news reports are not as trustworthy as you seem to think.
You have higher cognitive ability, you realize how the world runs, you get depressed. Not the other way 'round.
I think that's true. It's a Doestoevskian state really. The problem with depression isn't depression, it's dealing with the idiots that aren't depressed.
I often wonder if it's the depressed people that are the sane ones and that it's the "sane" majority who are really crazy.
Which leads me to the fact that depression is improperly handled by medicine, by society, and economics too. Depressed people don't necessarily need medication nor counseling, what they really need is a whole other system of society away from the people who seem to enjoy "normal" things.
Things like work life balance, 9-5, utility bills, banking rules, corporate hierarchy, living to work, etc will never work for anyone with higher cognitive function. There is no meaning in having a job like that, or living like that. Being a drone does not advance society.
Many depressed people have the skills to change and develop society for the advancement of all. Using the current techniques to force a depressed person to stop being depressed and "fit-in", is actually potentially a bad thing for the species in my opinion.
However...that said, the depressed are dangerous to those who want to maintain the status quo and exploit society. Which may well be the reason that it's easier for society to try keep them medicated and out of the way. Melancholia was actually an admired quality in previous centuries. It's only in the industrial age that it's been frowned upon.
This isn't the 1970s anymore - TV series (well, the upmarket ones) need people who can actually act well, not just stand on their mark looking good.
Well, that is true... but there's some gaps today too -- Tricia Helfer and Grace Park for example. They ain't winning any acting awards this side of hell freezing over. TnA casting all the way.
I have yet to see teens use it. While it seems to be the big craze for midlife-crisis men.;)
I've never seen anyone use it. I hear about it all he time in the media, but no-one, no-one at all I know, or have heard of, has ever used it. But then I don't know many old people, perhaps that explains it.
Linux is superior to Windows in many ways. OSX is also superior in many ways.
It's nothing to do with the OS. There are two factors that drive change. Price, and features (and by features, I actually mean the software you can use on it. The OS is worthless on its own to an end user.)
OSX (or the hardware that runs it) is more expensive, so that keeps many users, and big business out.
Linux may be free, but there's no truly viable MS Office alternative, nothing that matches Exchange, there's no professional level Photoshop, there's nothing to edit videos with, nor post processing, good luck doing complex audio work. Sure you can browse the web, and do many things, but not at the convenience/utility level that you can in Windows. If you work in an office environment, you'd have to be a zealot to use Open Office, and you'd struggle to get your corporate email and meeting system working. If you are a creative professional -- Linux is completely worthless. Sorry, but it is. I wish that were not the case, but there's no professional-level creative apps for Linux.
And that's is why there's been no year of Linux so far. End users don't care about the OS that much, they care about what they can install on it. Of all the programs available for Linux, few are of comparable quality to those available to Windows or OSX.
And this will be the case for Chrome OS too -- at least in the short term.
Slashdot Mirror
No kidding! Imagine surfing to a web page selling something, only to find a comment telling you can get something cheaper elsewhere. Or any other similar type of thing.
Considering wikipedia is absolutely stuffed full of astroturf, why does anyone think this will end up any different?
Looks like just another of these ideas that will start off nobly, but rapidly descend into commercial Hell and lawsuits.
No. We've had this argument for decades with keyboard layouts. The cost of retraining and adjustment is far, far too high.
This move kills Firefox stone dead. Mozilla can kiss its market share goodbye. Why would anyone choose to use a browser that's increasingly overshadowed by Chrome IE and Safari that requires a completely new way of interacting with it? It's just too hard to overcome that entropy. You have to really, really want to use it.
Personally, I will never use this as long as I live. I've already become jaded with Firefox over the awfulbar debacle, and the fact that Firefox really doesn't work well on a Mac.
I'll stick with Firefox 3.0 until such time as Chrome is available for Mac.
Firefox is the new Netscape. It will end up exactly the same way.
Yes, they are. And they pretty much always have been. All photos are pretty much artifact to a greater or lesser degree.
It used to be done in the studio and the darkroom in the early days of photography. See Ansel Adams pics for expert darkroom manipulation.
Models have always been shot with artificial make-up, hair, fans blowing their hair and carefully controlled lighting to create an artificial image of the person.
But most of all -- all food photography is pretty much fake. It's near impossible to shoot food realistically. So there's always been cold tea replacing whisky, mashed potato replacing ice cream and many other tricks of the trade. That's why your restaurant food looks much better in a photo than in real life -- because it rarely ever is the same food. It's fake.
Almost every photo needs to be flagged, which makes the whole exercise completely and utterly pointless.
Who said Britain has free speech? It doesn't. It very prominently silenced politicians from Northern Ireland in the 1990s. You do not have the right of free speech in the UK, you do not have the right to silence either, as your silence can be assumed to be an admission of guilt.
You must be confusing Britain with a free, democratic country governed by a written constitution.
That's just not true. That is what the producers are claiming, however. But that's just propaganda, and an attempt to raise publicity. The truth is that the movie had bad reviews at festivals, and thus distributors didn't pick it up for the US market. Perhaps, potential evolutionist backlash may have played some very small part in that, but controversial movies like "The Last Temptation of Christ" have thrived on the negative publicity. The movie didn't get picked up primarily, because it was regarded as pedestrian, uninspired filmmaking.
Try it on a Mac. If you can get it to run without issue for more than 6 hours, then you deserve a medal.
But the fact that "so many" people do, in fact, have issues with Firefox is a question for Mozilla. Rather than add in yet more features, would their time not be better spent in stabilizing the core of the browser? Leave the features to add-ins.
I don't there's one reason to switch that fits all situations. For me, there's different reasons for wanting to switch away from FOSS, or not use it in the first place. For example: 1. Firefox -- Stability: horrendous on a Mac, and the memory leaks. Bloat: awfulbar and other "features" that should be addins. There appears to be very little understanding in Mozilla about what users needs are. 2. GIMP -- Features: is nowhere near up to professional standards. 3. VLC -- User Experience: fantastic engine -- but horrific interface, and arrogant unhelpful developers. (I switched to Mplayer and never looked back) 4. Open Office -- Pretty much all of the above. 5. Joomla -- Ridiculously complex, documentation is gawdawful. And that for modules is often worse and invariably written in English by those whose command of the language is very tentative. 6. Celtx -- Usability. Has better features than Final Draft, however the need to be online to save as a pdf renders it pretty much worthless.
Yes... especially since this announcement comes a day after Twitter planning to start monetizing the site.
There was never any point suing Twitter until such day as the site actually made any money (if it ever does).
Google is.
And this makes me wonder what the disconnect is. Since it's correct that Network television has much higher costs than any website, and yet in many cases has fewer advertising eyes than major websites. (Especially when you consider tivo and people wandering off to get a coffee in ad breaks)
Which leads me to consider that TV advertising is probably vastly over inflated, and overrated, and that web advertising -- should someone take the time to do it in a contextual, non-invasive and entertaining way -- it vastly undervalued and underrated.
I suspect the advertising industry itself is really to blame for its own shortsightedness. It really should be possible, and easy for anyone with a reasonably successful website to hook up with advertisers with ease and fear of annoying their site visitors, and transforming their website into a flashing, flickering spawn of hell.
But as long as the industry is trusting flawed rankings like Nielsen and Alexa, there won't be much change.
This change needs to happen - urgently. By making this happen, it will help end piracy and the ridiculous cartel that is the music industry and film distribution. Content can be set free.
It really doesn't matter if they do develop a social network site or not. There's been dozens of Myspace and Facebook clones out there. None have particularly succeeded. The underlying tech isn't what drives their success. It's the ability of their Marketing Droids to convince people that the emperor is really not, in fact, stark naked.
If there's one wikipedia page (and in reality there's 10,000s), that sums up the inadequacies of wikipedia, it's that Hollywood Accounting one. That page is 100% hearsay, gossip column and TMZ-esque gossip presented as fact and wikiality.
While there are (likely) many instances of creative accounting practices in Hollywood, the truth is very guarded. And the truth is NOT displayed on that wikipedia page. There is nothing to see on that page that's of any value to the human race.
War is probably the greatest catalyst for change and technological advancement. The period from 1880 to 1960 was one of the most turbulent in World history. Both the Great War and WWII spurred a lot of tech, not just killing machines, but also in medicine and materials sciences amongst many other things.
I guess it is a good thing that we have lived in relatively-speaking peaceful times in comparison. However, hopefully there is a way of humanity getting its act together to precipitate change without the need for life and death conflict. The cynic in me however, suggests that maybe war is a necessary mechanism for social change. Kind of like forest fires, plagues, etc, in the ecosystem.
I thought Idle had died. It's mercifully kept a low profile for a few months. (Although, sadly samzenpus has occasionally been polluting regular /. with Idle articles.)
/. RSS feed.
Again, for the love of all things sacred, please take IDLE our of the main
That is only fair. Those that like Idle can read it, those of us who cannot stand it, need never waste our time with it.
No, not in the UK it isn't. That's absolutely nothing like a "fact". The BBC's long been criticized for having a a pro-Labour party bias, as well as a few other biases. It does have also a virtual monopoly on UK broadcasting, with very little to challenge its practices.
Murdoch is correct in some ways. He's obviously saying it for his own nefarious ends. And the large percentage of the UK media his company owns is also a very big part of the problem too. Reverting to charging for online news isn't a good idea -- for anyone. But more competition is a VERY good idea.
However, there are many, many issues with the way the BBC behaves, it does need to be examined more closely. It's news reports are not as trustworthy as you seem to think.
I think that's true. It's a Doestoevskian state really. The problem with depression isn't depression, it's dealing with the idiots that aren't depressed.
I often wonder if it's the depressed people that are the sane ones and that it's the "sane" majority who are really crazy.
Which leads me to the fact that depression is improperly handled by medicine, by society, and economics too. Depressed people don't necessarily need medication nor counseling, what they really need is a whole other system of society away from the people who seem to enjoy "normal" things.
Things like work life balance, 9-5, utility bills, banking rules, corporate hierarchy, living to work, etc will never work for anyone with higher cognitive function. There is no meaning in having a job like that, or living like that. Being a drone does not advance society.
Many depressed people have the skills to change and develop society for the advancement of all. Using the current techniques to force a depressed person to stop being depressed and "fit-in", is actually potentially a bad thing for the species in my opinion.
However...that said, the depressed are dangerous to those who want to maintain the status quo and exploit society. Which may well be the reason that it's easier for society to try keep them medicated and out of the way. Melancholia was actually an admired quality in previous centuries. It's only in the industrial age that it's been frowned upon.
What do you mean? An African or European cockroach?
Not sure if it's a "need" per se... but this app does mean we know where all the stupid people are. That's definitely useful.
Who said it was ok for TV and Movies? Few sequels in those media are any good. As your examples prove.
Well, that is true... but there's some gaps today too -- Tricia Helfer and Grace Park for example. They ain't winning any acting awards this side of hell freezing over. TnA casting all the way.
I've never seen anyone use it. I hear about it all he time in the media, but no-one, no-one at all I know, or have heard of, has ever used it. But then I don't know many old people, perhaps that explains it.
Linux is superior to Windows in many ways. OSX is also superior in many ways.
It's nothing to do with the OS. There are two factors that drive change. Price, and features (and by features, I actually mean the software you can use on it. The OS is worthless on its own to an end user.)
OSX (or the hardware that runs it) is more expensive, so that keeps many users, and big business out.
Linux may be free, but there's no truly viable MS Office alternative, nothing that matches Exchange, there's no professional level Photoshop, there's nothing to edit videos with, nor post processing, good luck doing complex audio work. Sure you can browse the web, and do many things, but not at the convenience/utility level that you can in Windows. If you work in an office environment, you'd have to be a zealot to use Open Office, and you'd struggle to get your corporate email and meeting system working. If you are a creative professional -- Linux is completely worthless. Sorry, but it is. I wish that were not the case, but there's no professional-level creative apps for Linux.
And that's is why there's been no year of Linux so far. End users don't care about the OS that much, they care about what they can install on it. Of all the programs available for Linux, few are of comparable quality to those available to Windows or OSX.
And this will be the case for Chrome OS too -- at least in the short term.
I see you've called Dell's customer support then? Oh, wait... you said "good support"... sorry my mistake.
His novels would still read as though written by a cheap hack, whose best friend is cliché.
Nothing new here. Trumpton had artificial firemen in the 60s. See!
There's also "Reign Over Me"