If someone says that "Information wants to be free", post your full personal details on Slashdot so we can all share it. After all, it wants to be free, right?
It took only one shot last Friday to cleat up my gonorrhea, but the cytowhatevercyn for the chlamydia is really uncomfortably screwing up my intestinal flora. This while I will have my second driving lesson in less than 6 hours.
And with the preceding paragraph I am either trolling as deep as you can go or advancing the discussion of private/public boundaries. I am not sure, but that's very typical.
"Geek Chic" has actully already been thrown around as a term for certain forms of high-end menswear since the mid-nineties. It consisted of high-water pants, somewhat tight-fitting jumpers, brown shoes, and having the gaunt male models wear black-rimmed glasses on the runway. It only works if you buy into the whole thing and if you have the body of a stick. Otherwise it looks like you are wearing very uncomfortable clothes. Prada especially had a total love-affair with the look for men for a long time.
I hated it. It was very expensive clothing that made you look like a dork from a dsitance.
One word: chatrooms. Especially in the m4m arena, irc just doesn't compare by ten million miles - the avaialable pool is just so big on AOL. Maybe the hook-ups won't be tech-savvy, but quite frankly, tech-talk is not what I am looking for at those times.
I'm serious. I am sure that a little analysis will show that AOL got big enough to buy friggin! Time! Warner! not because of shopping or links to Oxygen pages, but teen chatter about Britney and adults looking for sex.
Now it's gonna be on a stable OS. Who knows, maybe some more geeks will get laid. Can't be a bad thing.
I am glad you are not hypocritical about it. And yes, I too use Napster to download songs I know: I use it to download songs and mixes that are either on sucky compilations or impossible to get.
However, recently I was thinking about it from the artsist's POV. I have a couple of snaps I took up on my website (which, BTW, is being worked on style-sheet wise so is unreadable right now). How would I feel if I had no control over those images? What if I checked the web one day and found some person was using them un-attributed on their personal pages? On on their ad-pages? On their gay-hating propaganda, or Republican anti-choice pages?
I'd be pissed, that's what. I'd be even more pissed if I had no control over it. At least I want to be recognized for making them.
Now, nobody is using these Napster MP3's yet for their personal gain. And my pix are too crappy to be stolen that way. But this did happen to Phil Greenspun of photo.net. So before we all decry copyright as an outmoded anachronism that has no place in this world anymore because of well copying works, do remember what it feels like when your stuff is take from you. And how the next step after losing it is seeing it be misused for somebody else's personal gain.
Yes, this is very much a battle over control. And maybe the RIAA is evil and represents and evil set of businesses, but I think somebody should be fighting it, somebody should be part of the checks and balances, and not let the "everything is for everybody is for free" forces steamroll this alone.
Re:Katz writes about things without having 2 clues
on
Selfish Society
·
· Score: 1
I respect intelligence and skill - at something. If you haven't got either, I'm not going to respect you. That's just the way it goes in my world.
Isn't this a little harsh? The natural gift of intelligence is scarcly different than the gift of athleticism or being attractive.
Oh, the irony. I didn't see any of the "beautiful people" sharing their social networks - I still don't.
If we don't learn from our hardships, we never move forward. You say that the socially-connected people once excluded you in hurtful ways. Since you learned first hand that being excluded and disrespected for things beyond your control sucks, I don't know why you'd wish to propagate these same attitudes.
I know people who always have been and always be mediocre. Many of them have been very kind to me. Maybe they will never find that one elusive thing they're supposed to be good at. They still deserve respect and inclusion. Being good at hacking or running doesn't mean your views and opinions outside hacking or running are any better or worse.
Why did we think public-comment websites would be substantially different from Usenet? The only real social diff here is that Usenet has a much bigger group of volunteers trying to keep it working (cancelbots, etc.). It seems like the experiments in trust-based submission networks haven't given use the best answer yet.
I feel really bad for Kuri5hin. But as a denizen of one of the hotter parts of Usenet for the last decade, it is all eerily familiar, and in these web-spaces there are no killfiles to adjust.
PC getting slow or out of date? Add a new processor brick, that gets detected and used with just a reboot.
Any operating system that requires a reboot to detect a new config is not worthy to ever be called a Server OS. Uptime is uptime, even when memory needs to be swapped or a disk added.
We will only come out of these dark ages of clunky cumbersome computing is we insist on it. Requiring reboots is evil, and should be minimized, whether for hard or software. Architect for it.
Copyright is a good thing, but I don't believe that it should be used to keep creative effort away from the public. Case in point: GO's Pen Point. This was the last real innovation in GUI interface (you may disagree, but check it out and really consider the implications of it's design before you judge). But still, long after Bill FUDded it to death with the idiotic "Pen for Windows" it's unavailable. If GO had placed it into the public domain, or it if had reverted to it by no longer being available, we would all benefit.
Yes, but what about the creditors? Suppose GO had placed their intellectual property in the public domain when they realized they had to fold, wouldn't that have been a form of fraud from the creditor's point of view? I mean, they were taking the intellectual property they had created over the years, and had suddenly made it impossible to charge for, effectively destroying it for purposes of resale and recovery of debt.
The reason I ask is because a company I know, that has made this kickass abstract product that is so new that VC's don't Get It in one sentence or less - like spreadsheets when they were introduced in 1981 - that they cannot secure funding. The crators want to Open SOurce their product so that they can at least keep developing it and use it in their new gigs, but they are worried that the institutions the company is in debt to will not look kindly upon having this piece of value taken away.
Maybe it is me, but Russia is starting to sound more and more like a perfect liberterian society: a tiny government that has pulled back significantly, leaving the free market to govern itself.
And market it did, everything it could, at maximum profit and perfect prices. Suddenly a database of private lives is only worth 50k, and no pesky law telling you what you can sell or not.
Funny enough, it just doesn't sound like a place to raise children or grow old in.
CDNOW and Amazon use something like that, but it doesn't seem to work very well.
Understatement of the month. I can't believe the crap those filters have recommended.
I really don't think that taste-matching should be done by largest common denominator. It sucks, you only get the blandest, worst, recommendations. It has to be done better, maybe by matching you to very specific people with pattenrs like yours, not whole groups.
This is a very interesting problem to solve. There's tons of stuff I'd buy if I only knew about it, and I don't have time to scour eBay and Amazon and MP3 all the time. If somebody can really nail taste-modelling, we've got a winner.
Glad to hear that the IETF is not responsible for that document. I understand that some people are uncomfortable with WAP from a free protocol point of view, but quite frankly, this document does not seem to understand the realities of the WAP space.
One of them is that the browser is going to go into the phone, it is going to be fixed in there as firmware, and nobody will be able to just change it. Such is the nature of making a consumer product like mobile phones. That threshhold is already there for academia and small shops, regardless of what 'hurdles' WAPforum's fees seem to bring up. So you can bitch and moan about the 27k to join, but if a potential contributor can't cough up dough or play the patent playing cards, they sure as hell wouldn't be able to add anything to the devices. It's not like you can make a new implementation and distribute it like you can make a new browser or messager on a computer and have people install it - you will have to go through device makers. WAPforum doesn't really add a hurdle to a space that is already closed by its very nature.
Then there's the little issue of over and over moaning that existing protocols should be used, while claiming that the user experience is going to be significantly different that big-screen browsing. If the authors think the Internet is an unsuitable experience for the devices, why are they so insitent on reusing the technology instead of creating better suited technology? IP numbers on devices. Yeah right. By 2003 there'll be more enhanced computing net-connected mobile phones than there are connected computers. Think IPv6 will be in place then? I don't think so.
d+d -> 3He+n or p+t) nice idea, but notice that neutron... (d+t -> 4He + n) this is an easy to produce reaction, but notice the neutron again. (t+t -> 4He +n+n) argh, two neutrons now.
And the problem with this is?
Well, in case you missed it.
And what is the problems with neutrons you might ask? well , neutrons from fusion do the same thing as neutrons from fission: they activate things and make everything nice and radioactive.
Of course, you don't think radioactivity and radioactive waste is a problem, witness:
This would make fusion reactors as impractical as energy sources as fission reactors are now - which is to say, perfectly usable if you put in the required safety effort.
I keep wondering what the credible safety effort is for a ecological time-bombs that stay armed for a couple of tens of aeons. I haven't heard it yet, I have to say.
Still don't want a "dirty" fusion reactor on earth? Put it in high orbit (above geosynch). The fuel doesn't weight much, so refueling isn't much of a problem, and tidal drag will actually move it _farther_ away from earth as time passes. But I digress.
Just what I always wanted: a big block of hot metal in orbit, harboring a controlled reaction of huge potential, sending down an enormous amount of energy over miles and miles in some concentrated form through the ecosystem. Can't wait.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can call me a Luddite now. Thing is, I haven't been thrilled with the actual real social and ecological problems of our wonderful Atomic age, so I am skeptical to the thought that just throwing more technology at some fundamental problems is going to make things better.
Call me Joe Q. Public. This is who you have to deal with.
Touch screens, the dictionary, people-indepenent recognizers, the whole shebang, is costly to make. Keypads are well-known, easily pumped out, and therefore cheaper. The screen-size with the resolution necessary to give proper feedback to humans writing also makes the unit bigger, and that's a problem. A few phones have the pen-input, but it never seems to take off. I guess the early-adopters don't find them compelling enough to drive down the price enough to compell the standard consumers.
Motorola's latest entry into the Chinese market is, IIRC, pen-input only. It's very expensive, and sold as a high-end gadget.
So all of these perfect people will want a significant other, but everyone else in the world will be exactly like them. Isn't that boring? Would you really want to date and marry yourself?
There are some studies in rats and humans that indicate strongly that certain markers that we look for in a mate are biologically imprinted by our families very early on, if not before birth. Therefore, although modified strongly by the incest taboo, the answer to your question above seems to be "Well, not myself, but somebody quite like me." for most people.
Yeah, it'll take time - but all it takes is a few sites to start using BXXP, a few services, and a few web browsers to support that, and eventually, it can come into it's own right as a internet protocol.
Only if it is compelling for the user experience. From the article it doesn't seem like it will make current transactions better, but make it easier to create future ways of communicating. If it does not provide a compelling experience now, there is no impetus to adopt it to work or replace HTTP. It will be adopted when something new built on BXXP comes along, and that something new will have to be compelling.
I truly wonder if, after having broken down the current reward structure for IP with our shiny toys, we can't come up with anything better than returning to a centuries old model. Did patronage give listeners more choices? I don't know.
And about the whole "Let them play live!" thing, that throwback to ancient times really doesn't work for modern day artists that use the studio as their instrument. The more raves you have to play to make ends meet, the fewer time you have to make new creations. And lord help people whose main talent is not performing in any way, but composing, mixing, or producing. "William Orbit will now play 'Strange Cargo IV' for you. Please turn off all mobile phones." Right.
We've got to do better than making art disposable and hope some rich guy picks up the trash. I am thinking that a connection between PayPal and Napster ("You have listened to this mp3 10 times. Click here to voluntarily pay 50 cents to the artist. Click here to add the original song to your custom mix CD for $1,-. Cancel and keep listening") might go a long way to making us honest again and keeping music afloat.
Most developers I've spoken to say this, though: "It's not worth getting into WAP. Let's wait for 3G".
ANybody who thinks there is going to be significant 3G coverage in Europe and the US before 2005 is being rather optimisitc.
Nokia can't make WAP phones fast enough. But hey, if companies want to stay behind, waiting for the next big thing, because WAP is too hard for their poor programmers, well, I guess someone else will be there to tap that market.
Absolutely. Mr. You-Don't-Make-Sites-You-Can't-Comment (Ha! Yeah, fucking right). insists that he just has to control sizes and that he just has to control exactly what it all looks like. Perhaps Mr. Zeldman could explore making sites that compromise better with what people want to read than what he thinks his fabulous artistic vision of type should be.
I know what my preferred font size is. He doesn't.
They weren't selling the greatest stuff in their n
on
Boo No More
·
· Score: 1
There are plenty of direct sales clothes retailers, but for specialised niches (extra-large, extra-small) or just cheap, but none selling heighth of fashion stuff.
It isn't the end of e-commerce: it's just yet another bad business idea,
It was also the execution of the idea itself, actually. There is a niche, IMHO, for specialist high-fashion clothing, except that Boo's stuff wasn't it. I scrounge around from eBay to bluefly looking for certain ultra-fashion so-far-out-it's-timeless meanswear, so I have some idea what value there is, and Boo just didn't have it. None of their stuff was exciting enough for me to take a chance of buying it without having had the opportunity to try it on, I couldn't easily flip for items in a certain style or size, and the interface was just plain annoying.
Compared to bluefly that does offer high-end brands at very good value, which lets you make a personalized catalog based on your sizes and wishes, Boo just stunk. Bluefly isn't mega-out-there with their stuff, but their selection and presentation make up for it, and it even gives you the feeling, right or not, that you are getting a bargain.
I'm giving designeroutlet another try again, but for my money I have a btter time on eBay - and now that place is a crap shoot.
You know, it's pretty easy to rag on WAP as not being good enough and not being fast enough and not doing pictures enough, but let's face facts here for a moment: NMP hasn't exactly been delivering anything to the consumer that could even _try_ to support HTML on its screen and battery or IP on current networks.
So as soon as NMP gets off its butt and delivers something that doesn't tout snap-on covers as a great technical innovation, you might have a point. Until then you sound like someone who tells people how awful cars are because people should be using personal flying machines.
What a scummy attitude towards somebody else's work.
This community wouldn't dream of pilfering somebody else's code left and right without proper credit or compensation, yet here you are advocating just treating usability designer's labor as your throw-away project resource.
Yes, the courst ruled that look and feels can't be protected, but that's no reason to be so callous towards other people's livelyhoods. The result of what you advocate is that usability innovations get copied instantly, which means that the company that developed the innovation will not get a loyal following since customers can get the same innovations cheaper. This diminishes significantly the return on investment in usability, since essentially the company ends up subsidizing solutions to the Open Source usability problems. You think they are going to spend that money again?
Yes, the Open Source community has real problems with creating UIs for certain user communities. One would hope that the answer to this would be to find Open Source models to innovate in useful ways, not advocating plagiarism because the original intellectual property is hard to protect. Unless you want crappy untested UIs for us all.
As a usabilty pro I can only say "Thanks a lot, dude."
The Categories back-end server for Ariadne was written in some variant of LISP. It communicates with the rest of the world using CORBA, is pretty tough and solid, and was written by a tiny team in very little time. All info on www.synquiry.com
Slashdot Mirror
It took only one shot last Friday to cleat up my gonorrhea, but the cytowhatevercyn for the chlamydia is really uncomfortably screwing up my intestinal flora. This while I will have my second driving lesson in less than 6 hours.
And with the preceding paragraph I am either trolling as deep as you can go or advancing the discussion of private/public boundaries. I am not sure, but that's very typical.
FJ!!
"Geek Chic" has actully already been thrown around as a term for certain forms of high-end menswear since the mid-nineties. It consisted of high-water pants, somewhat tight-fitting jumpers, brown shoes, and having the gaunt male models wear black-rimmed glasses on the runway. It only works if you buy into the whole thing and if you have the body of a stick. Otherwise it looks like you are wearing very uncomfortable clothes. Prada especially had a total love-affair with the look for men for a long time.
I hated it. It was very expensive clothing that made you look like a dork from a dsitance.
FJ!!One word: chatrooms. Especially in the m4m arena, irc just doesn't compare by ten million miles - the avaialable pool is just so big on AOL. Maybe the hook-ups won't be tech-savvy, but quite frankly, tech-talk is not what I am looking for at those times.
I'm serious. I am sure that a little analysis will show that AOL got big enough to buy friggin! Time! Warner! not because of shopping or links to Oxygen pages, but teen chatter about Britney and adults looking for sex.
Now it's gonna be on a stable OS. Who knows, maybe some more geeks will get laid. Can't be a bad thing.
Fur? Try a feather boa.
Pink Hello Kitty Laptop
I still regularly get mail from users on AOL with names like KyutGrrrl or SparkleChick who want to know where they can buy it.
I am glad you are not hypocritical about it. And yes, I too use Napster to download songs I know: I use it to download songs and mixes that are either on sucky compilations or impossible to get.
However, recently I was thinking about it from the artsist's POV. I have a couple of snaps I took up on my website (which, BTW, is being worked on style-sheet wise so is unreadable right now). How would I feel if I had no control over those images? What if I checked the web one day and found some person was using them un-attributed on their personal pages? On on their ad-pages? On their gay-hating propaganda, or Republican anti-choice pages?
I'd be pissed, that's what. I'd be even more pissed if I had no control over it. At least I want to be recognized for making them.
Now, nobody is using these Napster MP3's yet for their personal gain. And my pix are too crappy to be stolen that way. But this did happen to Phil Greenspun of photo.net. So before we all decry copyright as an outmoded anachronism that has no place in this world anymore because of well copying works, do remember what it feels like when your stuff is take from you. And how the next step after losing it is seeing it be misused for somebody else's personal gain.
Yes, this is very much a battle over control. And maybe the RIAA is evil and represents and evil set of businesses, but I think somebody should be fighting it, somebody should be part of the checks and balances, and not let the "everything is for everybody is for free" forces steamroll this alone.
If we don't learn from our hardships, we never move forward. You say that the socially-connected people once excluded you in hurtful ways. Since you learned first hand that being excluded and disrespected for things beyond your control sucks, I don't know why you'd wish to propagate these same attitudes.
I know people who always have been and always be mediocre. Many of them have been very kind to me. Maybe they will never find that one elusive thing they're supposed to be good at. They still deserve respect and inclusion. Being good at hacking or running doesn't mean your views and opinions outside hacking or running are any better or worse.
I would hope that the owners of the boxes have at least been warned that their stuff has been cracked.
And that they'd get the damn things fixed.
Why did we think public-comment websites would be substantially different from Usenet? The only real social diff here is that Usenet has a much bigger group of volunteers trying to keep it working (cancelbots, etc.). It seems like the experiments in trust-based submission networks haven't given use the best answer yet.
I feel really bad for Kuri5hin. But as a denizen of one of the hotter parts of Usenet for the last decade, it is all eerily familiar, and in these web-spaces there are no killfiles to adjust.
Any operating system that requires a reboot to detect a new config is not worthy to ever be called a Server OS. Uptime is uptime, even when memory needs to be swapped or a disk added.
We will only come out of these dark ages of clunky cumbersome computing is we insist on it. Requiring reboots is evil, and should be minimized, whether for hard or software. Architect for it.
Yes, but what about the creditors? Suppose GO had placed their intellectual property in the public domain when they realized they had to fold, wouldn't that have been a form of fraud from the creditor's point of view? I mean, they were taking the intellectual property they had created over the years, and had suddenly made it impossible to charge for, effectively destroying it for purposes of resale and recovery of debt.
The reason I ask is because a company I know, that has made this kickass abstract product that is so new that VC's don't Get It in one sentence or less - like spreadsheets when they were introduced in 1981 - that they cannot secure funding. The crators want to Open SOurce their product so that they can at least keep developing it and use it in their new gigs, but they are worried that the institutions the company is in debt to will not look kindly upon having this piece of value taken away.
Has anyone else dealt with this before?
Maybe it is me, but Russia is starting to sound more and more like a perfect liberterian society: a tiny government that has pulled back significantly, leaving the free market to govern itself.
And market it did, everything it could, at maximum profit and perfect prices. Suddenly a database of private lives is only worth 50k, and no pesky law telling you what you can sell or not.
Funny enough, it just doesn't sound like a place to raise children or grow old in.
Understatement of the month. I can't believe the crap those filters have recommended.
I really don't think that taste-matching should be done by largest common denominator. It sucks, you only get the blandest, worst, recommendations. It has to be done better, maybe by matching you to very specific people with pattenrs like yours, not whole groups.
This is a very interesting problem to solve. There's tons of stuff I'd buy if I only knew about it, and I don't have time to scour eBay and Amazon and MP3 all the time. If somebody can really nail taste-modelling, we've got a winner.
Glad to hear that the IETF is not responsible for that document. I understand that some people are uncomfortable with WAP from a free protocol point of view, but quite frankly, this document does not seem to understand the realities of the WAP space.
One of them is that the browser is going to go into the phone, it is going to be fixed in there as firmware, and nobody will be able to just change it. Such is the nature of making a consumer product like mobile phones. That threshhold is already there for academia and small shops, regardless of what 'hurdles' WAPforum's fees seem to bring up. So you can bitch and moan about the 27k to join, but if a potential contributor can't cough up dough or play the patent playing cards, they sure as hell wouldn't be able to add anything to the devices. It's not like you can make a new implementation and distribute it like you can make a new browser or messager on a computer and have people install it - you will have to go through device makers. WAPforum doesn't really add a hurdle to a space that is already closed by its very nature.
Then there's the little issue of over and over moaning that existing protocols should be used, while claiming that the user experience is going to be significantly different that big-screen browsing. If the authors think the Internet is an unsuitable experience for the devices, why are they so insitent on reusing the technology instead of creating better suited technology? IP numbers on devices. Yeah right. By 2003 there'll be more enhanced computing net-connected mobile phones than there are connected computers. Think IPv6 will be in place then? I don't think so.
Well, in case you missed it.
Of course, you don't think radioactivity and radioactive waste is a problem, witness:
I keep wondering what the credible safety effort is for a ecological time-bombs that stay armed for a couple of tens of aeons. I haven't heard it yet, I have to say.
Just what I always wanted: a big block of hot metal in orbit, harboring a controlled reaction of huge potential, sending down an enormous amount of energy over miles and miles in some concentrated form through the ecosystem. Can't wait.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can call me a Luddite now. Thing is, I haven't been thrilled with the actual real social and ecological problems of our wonderful Atomic age, so I am skeptical to the thought that just throwing more technology at some fundamental problems is going to make things better.
Call me Joe Q. Public. This is who you have to deal with.
Touch screens, the dictionary, people-indepenent recognizers, the whole shebang, is costly to make. Keypads are well-known, easily pumped out, and therefore cheaper. The screen-size with the resolution necessary to give proper feedback to humans writing also makes the unit bigger, and that's a problem. A few phones have the pen-input, but it never seems to take off. I guess the early-adopters don't find them compelling enough to drive down the price enough to compell the standard consumers.
Motorola's latest entry into the Chinese market is, IIRC, pen-input only. It's very expensive, and sold as a high-end gadget.
So all of these perfect people will want a significant other, but everyone else in the world will be exactly like them. Isn't that boring? Would you really want to date and marry yourself?
There are some studies in rats and humans that indicate strongly that certain markers that we look for in a mate are biologically imprinted by our families very early on, if not before birth. Therefore, although modified strongly by the incest taboo, the answer to your question above seems to be "Well, not myself, but somebody quite like me." for most people.
Yeah, it'll take time - but all it takes is a few sites to start using BXXP, a few services, and a few web browsers to support that, and eventually, it can come into it's own right as a internet protocol.
Only if it is compelling for the user experience. From the article it doesn't seem like it will make current transactions better, but make it easier to create future ways of communicating. If it does not provide a compelling experience now, there is no impetus to adopt it to work or replace HTTP. It will be adopted when something new built on BXXP comes along, and that something new will have to be compelling.
FJ!!Mozart died broke.
I truly wonder if, after having broken down the current reward structure for IP with our shiny toys, we can't come up with anything better than returning to a centuries old model. Did patronage give listeners more choices? I don't know.
And about the whole "Let them play live!" thing, that throwback to ancient times really doesn't work for modern day artists that use the studio as their instrument. The more raves you have to play to make ends meet, the fewer time you have to make new creations. And lord help people whose main talent is not performing in any way, but composing, mixing, or producing. "William Orbit will now play 'Strange Cargo IV' for you. Please turn off all mobile phones." Right.
We've got to do better than making art disposable and hope some rich guy picks up the trash. I am thinking that a connection between PayPal and Napster ("You have listened to this mp3 10 times. Click here to voluntarily pay 50 cents to the artist. Click here to add the original song to your custom mix CD for $1,-. Cancel and keep listening") might go a long way to making us honest again and keeping music afloat.
Most developers I've spoken to say this, though: "It's not worth getting into WAP. Let's wait for 3G".
ANybody who thinks there is going to be significant 3G coverage in Europe and the US before 2005 is being rather optimisitc.
Nokia can't make WAP phones fast enough. But hey, if companies want to stay behind, waiting for the next big thing, because WAP is too hard for their poor programmers, well, I guess someone else will be there to tap that market.
And talk of cardinal sins...well folks, how many of you are real working web designers?
We are real working web users.
Since we're the ones who end up paying the bills for web designers, it counts for a hell of a lot more.
I know what my preferred font size is. He doesn't.
There are plenty of direct sales clothes retailers, but for specialised niches (extra-large, extra-small) or just cheap, but none selling heighth of fashion stuff.
It isn't the end of e-commerce: it's just yet another bad business idea,
It was also the execution of the idea itself, actually. There is a niche, IMHO, for specialist high-fashion clothing, except that Boo's stuff wasn't it. I scrounge around from eBay to bluefly looking for certain ultra-fashion so-far-out-it's-timeless meanswear, so I have some idea what value there is, and Boo just didn't have it. None of their stuff was exciting enough for me to take a chance of buying it without having had the opportunity to try it on, I couldn't easily flip for items in a certain style or size, and the interface was just plain annoying.
Compared to bluefly that does offer high-end brands at very good value, which lets you make a personalized catalog based on your sizes and wishes, Boo just stunk. Bluefly isn't mega-out-there with their stuff, but their selection and presentation make up for it, and it even gives you the feeling, right or not, that you are getting a bargain.
I'm giving designeroutlet another try again, but for my money I have a btter time on eBay - and now that place is a crap shoot.
So as soon as NMP gets off its butt and delivers something that doesn't tout snap-on covers as a great technical innovation, you might have a point. Until then you sound like someone who tells people how awful cars are because people should be using personal flying machines.
What a scummy attitude towards somebody else's work.
This community wouldn't dream of pilfering somebody else's code left and right without proper credit or compensation, yet here you are advocating just treating usability designer's labor as your throw-away project resource.
Yes, the courst ruled that look and feels can't be protected, but that's no reason to be so callous towards other people's livelyhoods. The result of what you advocate is that usability innovations get copied instantly, which means that the company that developed the innovation will not get a loyal following since customers can get the same innovations cheaper. This diminishes significantly the return on investment in usability, since essentially the company ends up subsidizing solutions to the Open Source usability problems. You think they are going to spend that money again?
Yes, the Open Source community has real problems with creating UIs for certain user communities. One would hope that the answer to this would be to find Open Source models to innovate in useful ways, not advocating plagiarism because the original intellectual property is hard to protect. Unless you want crappy untested UIs for us all.
As a usabilty pro I can only say "Thanks a lot, dude."
The Categories back-end server for Ariadne was written in some variant of LISP. It communicates with the rest of the world using CORBA, is pretty tough and solid, and was written by a tiny team in very little time. All info on www.synquiry.com