I just gotta say it anyway: some of Jacob Nielsen's more obvious tips have been good, but cases like this shows the man's a hack. It's just one too many paranoid Alertbox articles than I'm ready to take.
Search engines are what binds the Internet together, and this is what makes them so successful. But as a victims of their success, now everyone wants a piece of their pie.
The music and video industry wants royalties from music/video search, ISP wants to tax them for "using their pipes", newspapers wants to tax them for posting short snippets with links to their sites.
Now Jacob Nielsen comes here and makes it not better like he's supposed to, but worse. Thanks, dude!
Also they used to brag they're not like Yahoo, turning their portal into a mish-mash of all things, but now we have Picasa, Google Racks, GMail, Video/TV Shop, Google Pack, GTalk and what not.
It's just becoming a large company and doing lots of less coordinated stuff than before - let's face it.
That doesn't mean it will become worse as a product, but it's not going to surprise me if it does.
Excuse me "Penguin Not Taking Flight Down Under"? What happened with us agreeing with usability experts that news titles in the Internet should be self-descriptive and less abstract?
How am I to guess the article was about OSS adoption in New Zealand being low..? It could be about pengiuns having problem swimming for all stuff I've read on Slashdot.
"Of course, rape victims will be made victims twice because they will not be able to both use this pill to prevent the psychological damage"
I realize this will be taken wrong but an interesting fact is that a major contribution to the stress of rape victims plays the way rape is accepted in our culture. We're being told daily that rape is horrible, leaves you marked for life, and so on and so on.
This is the point I don't want taken wrong: it's not as if I'm saying rape is something normal, not at all.
But how do you explain the research done some time ago about PTSD being several times less prominent in less developed cultures than in modern society?
On the other hand of course we can't just have someone explain on TV "hey dudes, it's the culture so rape is fine" as it'll result in a disaster.
So pills it is... Nice to live in a modern society, isn't it.
Who knew "Opposites Attract" was written about Google & Microsoft? There we go, read and compare:
Baby seems we never ever agree You like the movies And I like T.V. I take things serious And you take 'em light I go to bed early And I party all night Our friends are sayin' We ain't gonna last Cuz I move slowly And baby I'm fast I like it quiet And I love to shout But when we get together It just all work out
I take-2 steps forward I take-2 steps back We come together Cuz opposites attract And you know-it ain't fiction Just a natural fact We come together Cuz opposites attract
"Philip K. Dick, "We Can Remember it For You Wholesale". They didn't use pills, but the idea was that you could pay to have positive memories implanted. Don't buy the vacation, buy the memory of the trip."
What they didn't tell you is you'll have to be putting out tracking chips through your nose afterwards.
"Printing it out on pages of A4 would produce a stack of paper two-and-a-half times as high as Mount Everest."
Holly shit batman! Just imagine if instead we chisel it on stone plates! It might go to the moon and back.
"The Archive is 22 Terabytes in size and doubling every ten months."
22 Terabytes, i.e. if written on a holodisk (coming: 2007 - 2008) it'll be about 22 if em. That would produce a stack about the height of my home scanner.
"Multitasking. It actually works and you can do multiple CPU intensive tasks at once. I can compile something and browse the Web. Amazing! Some day Windows will catch up."
The day Windows caught up was the day NT was released, i.e. dunnno, like 20 years ago? And even if it wasn't the case back then, now NT based OS is in common usage (2000, XP and 2003).
Or can you actually name one specific instance where Windows fails and OSX excels at multitasking? I never stop my mp3 player and sometimes even watch DVD's on my second screen, while coding Flash / doing 3D / audio editing and the most I ever needed if I really run CPU intensive tasks was bump the priority of the video player up a notch.
I also run MySQL/PHP/Apache for development purposes and never felt performance degradation because of it.
What is this magical multitasking enhancement OSx has that we don't?
"Also, downloads don't count all the uses, I know in my work enviroment, we downloaded it once, but its on over 500 machines."
To point out the obvious, but it works the other way too: I downloaded it 5-6 times to get the updates throughout the releases, downloaded it when I reinstalled Windows after major PC upgrade, downloaded separate copies for my Linux and so on and so on.
Sure, I'd like to get a clue on how the accompanying Mac software which represent mediocre family album organiser, DVD video burner and a calendar (basically) impacts the daily work of artificial intelligence researchers, security experts and so on.
"I'm sure it will surprise many slashdotters to find out that Jobs' statements were a bit too optimistic"
Think about it, how can anyone be surprised when the same happens every year at MacWorld.
Though can you blaim him? He sells to artists and casual users. Most of them will dispute "2x to 4x" as long as it's white shiny box with the Apple logo on it.
At least half the value a Mac has is design and perceived value (former of course for a reason, while the latter is rarely based on reality).
"So people never save and open WMFs? Gee, never knew that."
FYI what made this bug so bad is that you could just visit a page and you're infected. If you download WMF from suspicious source and run it, how is it better than running a suspicious EXE and urn it, especially tha you know your windows runs binary code from a WMF.
Errr. I give up. Case closed.
PS: You probably hate that I "defend" MS so much. I'm neither an employee of MS, neither a die-hard fan. Truth is that when you're on top and everywhere, people naturally develop habbit to bad-mouth you (just watch as this happens to Google, like it happened to Yahoo... trust me). The company has to hire plenty of lawyers and perform lots of qyuestionable activites that seem "evil", to stay in business.
Well I'm just a happy Windows user that believes to have a balanced view of things. Over here though, everyone is eager to demonstrate how much they hate MS, so my opinions naturally seem extreme and biased.
I've never seen someone bash Linux when it turned out that WINE has the same vulnerability ported 1:1 and it even stayed unpatched longer than Windows.
First they felt bad US owns the backbone of Internet so they stepped up to control it and/or make their own "European Internet".
Now that it didn't quote work our, they decided to settle for the next big thing, which is have their own "European Search Engine".
What the hell is that? A joke? And I actually live in Europe so it hurts to say this. I'd be proud if an European company comes up with "the next Google" but coming from the French government it comes up as a "me too" behaviour.
"May I bring to your attention that my response was irt your assertion that "Vista has whole new ways of battling malware"? I contend that the presence of this security flaw in the Vista design suggests that Vista's new ways of battling malware are questionable."
If you open a malicious WMF while browsing in Vista (with IE7) the malicious code will run, but not have the privilege to read and/or change files, settings and so on. So in a way you'd be protected since the code will run but it can't harm you.
Now if you choose to deliberately save the WMF and open it, that's another question.
"Basically watching MS' corporate behavior wrt to the.wmf exploit was like catching a glimpse of goatse or tubgirl."
Do you remember the "Microsoft releases faulty patch" headlines from not long ago? No? MS remembers them. This is what happens when you release without testing well enough.
This is not a hack like a "neutral 3rd party" can afford. It's an official patch MS is held accountable for and which becomes an integral part of the system when applied.
But of course, with MS it's damned if you do, damned if you don't. In this particular instance, the issue was acknowledged and scheduled accordingly so it can be properly tested, there was a tech note that the offending DLL can be unregistered in the meantime.
And was still released sooner than announced.
Reaction? MS sucks anyway.
--------
"But Vista retained this back door-- until the critical patch was issued to the Vista beta boys a few days ago."
May I remind you that Vista is a beta software which, when you install you agree to a EULA with huge letters written that it's a beta, and NOT to be used on mission critical machines?
They could've just left it like this and patched it in the next beta, which would be understandable, but instead they did the better thing and released a patch for the existing beta.
Reaction? MS sucks anyway.
------
"I also don't find any logic that ties that presumption of belief to Microsoft's success or failure, but perhaps these words were offered as an appeal to the reader's emotions rather than any kind of reasoning."
Yea, if I want to talk with a robot next time I'll know who to turn to.
"What message am I trying to get across to Mac users? First, realize you're not invulnerable."
You may as well give up. Noone hears what most of us were telling to Mac users for the past 20 years so why would they hear now.
In their world, OSX is incredibly advanced, incredibly fast, indestructible, and Mac trojans and virii don't exist. Not to forget that they truly believe our PC days are riddled with frequent BSOD-s, bad performance and random restarts which we accept for given.
Nothing will teach them better than leaving them alone until it bites them in the ass.
The big obstacle was that most hackers and malware writers just have PC-s themselves, so they naturally target Windows and Linux more than Mac.
With the widespread distrubution of OSX86 on all kinds of P2P networks, this might very soon change.
"a name change will be good to make the Mac users feel like they're recieving the new improved intel?"
Hahah, you know Apple users better than they know themselves:) I believe Apple played at least a small part in the shift of the marketing strategy Intel uses.
You can bet that Jobs and Otellini had lots of conversations about how you can't sell "Pentiums" to Mac users when they've been brainwashed (well let's face the facts for once) for long years that G5's are "the fastest computers in the world" and Pentiums suck.
If you watch all those "Apple vs PC" ads, you'll notice they never directly flame "Intel processors". Instead they flame on "Pentium chips".
I doubt this was a random decision at Apple, especially if you notice how consistent it is through their avdertising campaigns.
So you're saying it's not costs that matter for a government, it's abstract values.
Also, who said Linux is freedom*. The value of open source depends largely on what you want to use it for. The value of being able to tinker with your OS is as much of value to a businessman/clerk as it is to you to tinker with your internal organs for the fun of it.
If you want freedom throw your PC through the window and run naked in the park.
*I suppose that'd be my karma suicide for daring to flame on linux:)
Not only is Intel dropping their famous trademarks in favor of crypting moden numbers and letter sequences, but they've also decided to drop English and use Perl and Assembler to catter better to their core* audience.
Slashdot Mirror
I just gotta say it anyway: some of Jacob Nielsen's more obvious tips have been good, but cases like this shows the man's a hack.
It's just one too many paranoid Alertbox articles than I'm ready to take.
Search engines are what binds the Internet together, and this is what makes them so successful. But as a victims of their success, now everyone wants a piece of their pie.
The music and video industry wants royalties from music/video search, ISP wants to tax them for "using their pipes", newspapers wants to tax them for posting short snippets with links to their sites.
Now Jacob Nielsen comes here and makes it not better like he's supposed to, but worse. Thanks, dude!
I'd say it changed a lot:
http://www.machinehasnoagenda.com/images/my_googl
Also they used to brag they're not like Yahoo, turning their portal into a mish-mash of all things, but now we have Picasa, Google Racks, GMail, Video/TV Shop, Google Pack, GTalk and what not.
It's just becoming a large company and doing lots of less coordinated stuff than before - let's face it.
That doesn't mean it will become worse as a product, but it's not going to surprise me if it does.
Excuse me "Penguin Not Taking Flight Down Under"? What happened with us agreeing with usability experts that news titles in the Internet should be self-descriptive and less abstract?
How am I to guess the article was about OSS adoption in New Zealand being low..? It could be about pengiuns having problem swimming for all stuff I've read on Slashdot.
"Of course, rape victims will be made victims twice because they will not be able to both use this pill to prevent the psychological damage"
I realize this will be taken wrong but an interesting fact is that a major contribution to the stress of rape victims plays the way rape is accepted in our culture. We're being told daily that rape is horrible, leaves you marked for life, and so on and so on.
This is the point I don't want taken wrong: it's not as if I'm saying rape is something normal, not at all.
But how do you explain the research done some time ago about PTSD being several times less prominent in less developed cultures than in modern society?
On the other hand of course we can't just have someone explain on TV "hey dudes, it's the culture so rape is fine" as it'll result in a disaster.
So pills it is... Nice to live in a modern society, isn't it.
Last time tried that with magazines, but I swear all the links I clicked on were broken.
""we come together"? could a google/MS merger be in the works?"
0 0164
Nah, Paula really meant the resolution to the Kai-Fu argument (a.k.a. popularly the Kung Fu argument).
http://internetweek.cmp.com/internetbusiness/1754
Who knew "Opposites Attract" was written about Google & Microsoft? There we go, read and compare:
Baby seems we never ever agree
You like the movies
And I like T.V.
I take things serious
And you take 'em light
I go to bed early
And I party all night
Our friends are sayin'
We ain't gonna last
Cuz I move slowly
And baby I'm fast
I like it quiet
And I love to shout
But when we get together
It just all work out
I take-2 steps forward
I take-2 steps back
We come together
Cuz opposites attract
And you know-it ain't fiction
Just a natural fact
We come together
Cuz opposites attract
If those are the full sequences, and the bio technology evolves enough so that build the full sequence out of digital data...
Woa.. Just imagine the possibilities.
We won't have to feel guilty for extinct species anymore!
PS.: Anyone wanna join my safari party next weekend?
"Philip K. Dick, "We Can Remember it For You Wholesale". They didn't use pills, but the idea was that you could pay to have positive memories implanted. Don't buy the vacation, buy the memory of the trip."
What they didn't tell you is you'll have to be putting out tracking chips through your nose afterwards.
"Printing it out on pages of A4 would produce a stack of paper two-and-a-half times as high as Mount Everest."
Holly shit batman! Just imagine if instead we chisel it on stone plates! It might go to the moon and back.
"The Archive is 22 Terabytes in size and doubling every ten months."
22 Terabytes, i.e. if written on a holodisk (coming: 2007 - 2008) it'll be about 22 if em. That would produce a stack about the height of my home scanner.
"You forgot a complete dev environment, e-mail, browser, address book, disk utilities, encryption tools, GUI scripting linking software, etc., etc."
Are we talking a Ubuntu here. Because the description is pretty accurate. Except well that Ubuntu is free, and runs on any PC.
"Multitasking. It actually works and you can do multiple CPU intensive tasks at once. I can compile something and browse the Web. Amazing! Some day Windows will catch up."
The day Windows caught up was the day NT was released, i.e. dunnno, like 20 years ago? And even if it wasn't the case back then, now NT based OS is in common usage (2000, XP and 2003).
Or can you actually name one specific instance where Windows fails and OSX excels at multitasking? I never stop my mp3 player and sometimes even watch DVD's on my second screen, while coding Flash / doing 3D / audio editing and the most I ever needed if I really run CPU intensive tasks was bump the priority of the video player up a notch.
I also run MySQL/PHP/Apache for development purposes and never felt performance degradation because of it.
What is this magical multitasking enhancement OSx has that we don't?
"Would you really want your memory erased with a pill?"
Well, ya. But what'd be cooler is if I can imprint random memories on me with a pill.
- A Casual Technology Whore
"Also, downloads don't count all the uses, I know in my work enviroment, we downloaded it once, but its on over 500 machines."
To point out the obvious, but it works the other way too: I downloaded it 5-6 times to get the updates throughout the releases, downloaded it when I reinstalled Windows after major PC upgrade, downloaded separate copies for my Linux and so on and so on.
"Get a clue."
Sure, I'd like to get a clue on how the accompanying Mac software which represent mediocre family album organiser, DVD video burner and a calendar (basically) impacts the daily work of artificial intelligence researchers, security experts and so on.
"I'm sure it will surprise many slashdotters to find out that Jobs' statements were a bit too optimistic"
Think about it, how can anyone be surprised when the same happens every year at MacWorld.
Though can you blaim him? He sells to artists and casual users. Most of them will dispute "2x to 4x" as long as it's white shiny box with the Apple logo on it.
At least half the value a Mac has is design and perceived value (former of course for a reason, while the latter is rarely based on reality).
"So people never save and open WMFs? Gee, never knew that."
FYI what made this bug so bad is that you could just visit a page and you're infected.
If you download WMF from suspicious source and run it, how is it better than running a suspicious EXE and urn it, especially tha you know your windows runs binary code from a WMF.
Errr. I give up. Case closed.
PS: You probably hate that I "defend" MS so much. I'm neither an employee of MS, neither a die-hard fan. Truth is that when you're on top and everywhere, people naturally develop habbit to bad-mouth you (just watch as this happens to Google, like it happened to Yahoo... trust me). The company has to hire plenty of lawyers and perform lots of qyuestionable activites that seem "evil", to stay in business.
Well I'm just a happy Windows user that believes to have a balanced view of things. Over here though, everyone is eager to demonstrate how much they hate MS, so my opinions naturally seem extreme and biased.
I've never seen someone bash Linux when it turned out that WINE has the same vulnerability ported 1:1 and it even stayed unpatched longer than Windows.
First they felt bad US owns the backbone of Internet so they stepped up to control it and/or make their own "European Internet".
Now that it didn't quote work our, they decided to settle for the next big thing, which is have their own "European Search Engine".
What the hell is that? A joke? And I actually live in Europe so it hurts to say this. I'd be proud if an European company comes up with "the next Google" but coming from the French government it comes up as a "me too" behaviour.
"May I bring to your attention that my response was irt your assertion that "Vista has whole new ways of battling malware"? I contend that the presence of this security flaw in the Vista design suggests that Vista's new ways of battling malware are questionable."
If you open a malicious WMF while browsing in Vista (with IE7) the malicious code will run, but not have the privilege to read and/or change files, settings and so on. So in a way you'd be protected since the code will run but it can't harm you.
Now if you choose to deliberately save the WMF and open it, that's another question.
"Basically watching MS' corporate behavior wrt to the .wmf exploit was like catching a glimpse of goatse or tubgirl."
Do you remember the "Microsoft releases faulty patch" headlines from not long ago? No? MS remembers them.
This is what happens when you release without testing well enough.
This is not a hack like a "neutral 3rd party" can afford. It's an official patch MS is held accountable for and which becomes an integral part of the system when applied.
But of course, with MS it's damned if you do, damned if you don't. In this particular instance, the issue was acknowledged and scheduled accordingly so it can be properly tested, there was a tech note that the offending DLL can be unregistered in the meantime.
And was still released sooner than announced.
Reaction? MS sucks anyway.
--------
"But Vista retained this back door-- until the critical patch was issued to the Vista beta boys a few days ago."
May I remind you that Vista is a beta software which, when you install you agree to a EULA with huge letters written that it's a beta, and NOT to be used on mission critical machines?
They could've just left it like this and patched it in the next beta, which would be understandable, but instead they did the better thing and released a patch for the existing beta.
Reaction? MS sucks anyway.
------
"I also don't find any logic that ties that presumption of belief to Microsoft's success or failure, but perhaps these words were offered as an appeal to the reader's emotions rather than any kind of reasoning."
Yea, if I want to talk with a robot next time I'll know who to turn to.
"What message am I trying to get across to Mac users? First, realize you're not invulnerable."
You may as well give up. Noone hears what most of us were telling to Mac users for the past 20 years so why would they hear now.
In their world, OSX is incredibly advanced, incredibly fast, indestructible, and Mac trojans and virii don't exist.
Not to forget that they truly believe our PC days are riddled with frequent BSOD-s, bad performance and random restarts which we accept for given.
Nothing will teach them better than leaving them alone until it bites them in the ass.
The big obstacle was that most hackers and malware writers just have PC-s themselves, so they naturally target Windows and Linux more than Mac.
With the widespread distrubution of OSX86 on all kinds of P2P networks, this might very soon change.
"a name change will be good to make the Mac users feel like they're recieving the new improved intel?"
:)
Hahah, you know Apple users better than they know themselves
I believe Apple played at least a small part in the shift of the marketing strategy Intel uses.
You can bet that Jobs and Otellini had lots of conversations about how you can't sell "Pentiums" to Mac users when they've been brainwashed (well let's face the facts for once) for long years that G5's are "the fastest computers in the world" and Pentiums suck.
If you watch all those "Apple vs PC" ads, you'll notice they never directly flame "Intel processors". Instead they flame on "Pentium chips".
I doubt this was a random decision at Apple, especially if you notice how consistent it is through their avdertising campaigns.
"VIA and any other CPU manufacturers"
Well.. any CPU is better than VIA CPU..
Oh the horrors I have to tell..
"Who said freedom was cheap?"
:)
So you're saying it's not costs that matter for a government, it's abstract values.
Also, who said Linux is freedom*. The value of open source depends largely on what you want to use it for.
The value of being able to tinker with your OS is as much of value to a businessman/clerk as it is to you to tinker with your internal organs for the fun of it.
If you want freedom throw your PC through the window and run naked in the park.
*I suppose that'd be my karma suicide for daring to flame on linux
Not only is Intel dropping their famous trademarks in favor of crypting moden numbers and letter sequences, but they've also decided to drop English and use Perl and Assembler to catter better to their core* audience.
*Pardon for the pun.