I've noticed an odd effect, roughly for the past two or three years, prior to watching a movie, I've been a little exited by the hype, then while watching the movie, I'm usually really digging it. Then, anywhere from a couple of hours to maybe a day later, I'm thinking about it and going, "man, that movie actually kinda sucked".
Funny, I had the exact opposite reaction to The Matrix. I walked out of the theatre feeling somewhat 'blah', but after having some time to digest it, and seeing it a bunch of times on TV, I did a 180 and loved the movie. Maybe it was the fact that at first I was turned off by the silliness of the idea that we're used as batteries ('CPU' power would've been so much better), but once I got past that, the movie really rocked.
There have been some articles here in the past that discussed the habits of software houses that build software that can not afford to fail. We need the tools to build all software like that.
The only tools that these shops have is strict discipline, methods, and protocols. Take the company that wrote the space shuttle software. They have something like 10 pages of documentation for _every single line_ of the half-million lines of code in the system. No tools will help make you that meticulous, only your dedication will.
Alas, as you can imagine it would be rather impractical to apply this methodology to common applications, because of time and/or money.
Re:How does they know these things are unphysical?
on
Physics in the Movies
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· Score: 2
The slow blade penetrates the shield. --Gurney Halleck
Odd, I rented Memento from Blockbuster shortly after it came out on DVD, and it had the chronological order feature in plain sight in the extra features menu...
Now/. has another guy to have a love/hate relationship with.
Anyways, he's not trying very hard. All information that could be shared should be opt-out. Sharing very private information, like medical histories, is already well protected, and people's tendency to not notice opt-out options for buying habits and such will do nothing to stem the flow of spam and junk mail. Oh well.
"Has anyone figured out how to uninstall Flash from Internet Explorer"
The easiest way, aside from following the instructions on macromedia's website, is to simply delete everything in C:\WinNT\System32\Macromed. I think the macromedia method of uninstallation would actually let the system know that flash had been uninstalled, and so IE would ask you if you want to reinstall it on every flash page. When you just delete the macromed folder, flash never shows up and never asks to be installed either. Simply beautiful. Now if I could only figure out how to make QuickTime plugin stop asking to install, cuz I don't want it!
"Seriously, the key here is the ability to turn it off if you don't want it."
Yeah, but you should be able to turn it off by disabling the browser's ability to be reconfigured remotely, not by having them set a cookie that'll turn off the customizations, but follow you everywhere. And I'm pretty sure that's how they plan on allowing you to disable it. Nevermind that this would force people to start allowing 3rd party cookies, and the ability to disable those alone makes IE6 worth it.
People are right about "optional" not really giving you much of a choice about being exploited *somehow*.
"With an open standard at least you know there is a chance some third-party enhancement that survives in the marketplace because people want to use it will get into the standard. And MS can only extend the standard with their own proprietary enhancements. They have limited control the standard as it exists now and (with the exception of patented stuff) cannot keep us from adding the enhancements to the standard if we like them."
Perhaps this is MS learning from Sun's mistakes. Even though Java is successful in certain applications, it would most likely be used for a wider range of applications if Sun hadn't been so harsh in keeping absolute control of their standard.
Microsoft must know by now that good things come from the programming community, therefore having the community suggest (and even implement) useful enhancements to their standard only helps them gain popularity.
"what about Servlet programming and JSP for dynamic web pages and database connectivity? These are desktop applications! They just run in a browser; on the desktop"
Very true..jsp pages seem to be by far the most common dynamic pages seen on bank and investment websites. I'd say that seeing such heavy use in such demanding environments speaks quite well to how successful java's been.
If Larry Ellison were a lawyer, he'd be the epitome of ambulance chasers. I saw this guy on TV a day or two after the attack (or possibly even the very same day), on a news program no less, and what he had to say amounted to "I feel sorry for all those people, this is terrible, blah blah, ORACLE ROCKS!, this is such a national tragedy."
Now, I can understand that there's some unsavory individuals who, for example, looted stores near ground zero in the midst of all the chaos. But to have one of the richest men on earth hawking his warez under the guise of offering insightful commentary on how the WTC attacks affected the tech sector is just sick beyond belief.
Say what you will about evil corporate bosses, but at least Billy G had the good sense to keep his mouth shut.
And now, of course, he is further attempting to turn the situation to his advantage. The man has no shame.
Apparently building 7 caught fire after the collapse of the towers, and like the towers, burned 'till it dropped. Some gas leaks from the mangled underground piping probably had something to do with it.
Can somebody please roll that into webwasher so I can use it with ANY browser?
Write them an email - I have. WebWasher is just golden, there's only a couple of sites that I have to disable it for on a regular basis (Windows Update being one). I also suggested that they add hotkeys so you can CTRL-ALT-whatever when you're browsing to temporarily turn the standard filter. It's a nitpick, but I find it annoying having to reach for the mouse, even if all it takes is a click on the systray icon.
THe one thing that I like this over images.altavista.com is a frickin' DIRECT LINK to the image in question
Unless, of course, you have Bork Bork Bork selected as your language. Possibly other foreign languages. In which case the search from images.google.com becomes a regular google search. Beta it is.
Getting caught with one isn't the end of the world, anyway. No points, and they can't even confiscate it.
Unless, of course, you are in Canada, in which case they confiscate it, destroy it, and give your insurance company a call. The insurance company then decides that you must be a chronic speeder and raises your rates.
...a good thing, but only in theory. Companies, no matter how nasty and evil they may be, do not deserve to have some typosquatter leech off their business through exploiting people's tendency to make typos of the company name. But the companies, seeing that they have another precedent that gives them a chance to take away people's domains, will try to abuse this much the same way that etoys did with etoy.
...that they managed to last this long. The idea behind the cuecat and then the TV gadget thingy was so monstrously stupid that it shouldn't have received a penny in VC. Ok, so VC's are known for having given money to some really harebrained schemes in the past, but by the time DC came around, they should've learned their lesson, no?
As for the workers, yeah, it sucks to have lost a job, but they should've seen this coming the minute they found out what sort of company they got hired by, and started looking for a job right then. If they had even the slightest illusion of job security at a company that advertisers didn't give a damn about and whose only business was giving away hardware that appealed to a crowd of hackers, then... well, I suppose numbnuts like them made the company the great big hunk o' crap that it was.
Plus, I hate'em for never offering the cuecats in Canada:)
If it works in such a way, most if not all novice will browse with it on, without having any idea that it is under their control
So the ignorance of newbies makes it the company's responsibility to not add any features which might confuse the poor fool? I see this as somewhat analogous to "ignorance of the law is not an excuse."
Let's say you go to a foreign country with cultural laws such as women not allowing to walk around in shorts. The tourist doesn't know, she didn't bother to do the research prior to taking the trip, and she gets arrested and punished. Is her ignorance an excuse? Not really, she should've done her homework. So why is this kind of ignorance, newbies diving headlong into something they have no experience with, tolerated so lightly when it comes to computers?
If a user is so apathetic to what kind of crap he's being bombarded by that he won't make an effort to find out what he can do about it, then by all means let him click on all the spam in his inbox, let him get brainwashed by ads, and let him be fooled by Smart Tags. After all, companies have been exploiting people's stupidity for profit long before computers ever came along.
Real Fact: Since these filters are XML files on the local user's machine that the user can edit, IE is making the user's hard drive available to third parties!
Oh no, cookies are files on my machine, IE is making my hard drive available to third parties already!
Anyway, nobody's hard drive is being made available to anyone. Since the XML file will be a filter on your machine, it won't be any different from any other config file on the system, i.e. used by the system, not sent out to whatever website requests it.
"The 117 can't even fly without a huge array of computers adjusting its attitude"
This is no different from the B2, since the flying wing concept produces inherently unstable aircraft. Without some serious fly-by-wire, both those planes would never fly.
If MS ships a version that does most everything about as well as the competition bundled with the OS, must people won't look to someone else to write a slightly better version
Well, yeah, I think that's the plan. Who's complaining, really? Take Outlook Express for example. As a mail client, it does everything I want it to. Maybe I'm just not that demanding, but if I was that demanding, I'd do something similar to what I'm about to talk about.
As a news client, OE was "good enough" to get me by, but since since "good enough" doesn't quite satisfy my needs, I moved onto Agent. Perhaps my needs will outgrow Agent one day and I'll be poking around for a new one.
If MS gives people the tools to get the job done, and get it done to the users' satisfaction, then the user will stick with that piece of software until such time as they're forced by the deficiencies of their current software package to look for a better alternative. The point is, this is not a bad thing! It's a bad thing if you're trying to hawk your mail client which is OE's equal, in which case the people will be a) happy with OE and therefore will never hear of you or b) looking for something better, in which case they'll skip over your OE clone. It is a good thing, however, when you consider that this will spur alternative mail client developers to aspire to something truly great so people who have outgrown what MS has handed them will have a clear alternative!
At least you're not claiming that IE is an evil product designed to filter out any competitors software that you might come across on the web, as another post in this thread seems to claim.:)
Internet Explorer, a web browser designed to prevent users from looking at third party products, primarily Netscape
Actually, I believe that IE allows you to look at NS all you want - in fact, it lets you look at just about everything out there on the web, since *that* is what it was designed for.
Outlook Express, an email client, designed to prevent users from looking at many other third party, and standards compliant, email packages
You're starting to sound a a bit off... OE, an email client. That's it. No conspiracies. It complies with mail standards just fine, AND I can check Hotmail without having to use the web interface. Oh no, it's the tool of Satan!
MSN Messenger, an IM client designed to prevent users from using AOL IM, Windows Media Player, a streaming media player, designed to prevent users from looking at RealPlayer, or worse, non-proprietry formats such as MP3, and many others
Good god man, you're so far off your rocker you're beyond help by any modern psychiatric treatments and drugs. MSN Msgr, WMP, a IM client (and that's all, again, no conspiracy) and a Media Player that blows away anything else that's available (or, at least, it blows away the competition you suggested (Real... blech)).
The specific intent of Microsoft's 'add-ons' is to avoid choice
Well, no, actually, their addons don't limit anyone's choice. Unless you feel that if you've already got MSN Messenger then it'd be an unholy act for you to install AIM as well.
By forcing the users to install this software, it becomes inefficient and potentially destructive to the stability of the system, to install third party competitors
Nobody's forcing anything. The software simply comes as part of the OS. Nobody goes out, buys the OS, installs it, only to have the MS Gestapo knocking on their door five minutes later, carrying Uzi's and WMP/IE/MSNM CD's, demanding that the software they bring be put on the machine. If some brave soul decides to take the plunge and sully their machine with RealPlayer or ICQ or some other monstrosity that you advocate as the preferable alternative to the default MS programs for those tasks, these alternatives work just fine and dandy alongside the MS software.
h as Real and AOL, or because they encourage use of commodity protocols
Oh, bravo! Real and AOL, the pioneers of all things good in this MS-dominated world. Great example.
In short, there's no comparison. Microsoft is forcing you to install software you don't necessarily want, in order to cripple the competition.
Again, they're not forcing anything. They are including it for a) their market share (duh) and b) because it actually IS convenient to have all sorts of goodies already installed on the machine without having to hunt around and download'em once you get the machine.
Anyways, yeah, I know, I got trolled, but I'm sure there's some impressionable people out there who might take what you say seriously, and possibly even buy into some of it. It's not very healthy t spread your mentality around like some sort of disease.
In regards to the other comment about the russian KISS principle vs. the US complexity - amen. One section in the article really stood out for me, where they talked about the ground engineers managing to use the computer to switch a light off (a task they couldn't repeat later). What kind of sillyness is it to not have a simple light switch? This is certainly how the Russians would NOT design something they wanted to function with as little hassle as possible.
Slashdot Mirror
I've noticed an odd effect, roughly for the past two or three years, prior to watching a movie, I've been a little exited by the hype, then while watching the movie, I'm usually really digging it. Then, anywhere from a couple of hours to maybe a day later, I'm thinking about it and going, "man, that movie actually kinda sucked".
Funny, I had the exact opposite reaction to The Matrix. I walked out of the theatre feeling somewhat 'blah', but after having some time to digest it, and seeing it a bunch of times on TV, I did a 180 and loved the movie. Maybe it was the fact that at first I was turned off by the silliness of the idea that we're used as batteries ('CPU' power would've been so much better), but once I got past that, the movie really rocked.
There have been some articles here in the past that discussed the habits of software houses that build software that can not afford to fail. We need the tools to build all software like that.
The only tools that these shops have is strict discipline, methods, and protocols. Take the company that wrote the space shuttle software. They have something like 10 pages of documentation for _every single line_ of the half-million lines of code in the system. No tools will help make you that meticulous, only your dedication will.
Alas, as you can imagine it would be rather impractical to apply this methodology to common applications, because of time and/or money.
The slow blade penetrates the shield. --Gurney Halleck
:)
eh?
Odd, I rented Memento from Blockbuster shortly after it came out on DVD, and it had the chronological order feature in plain sight in the extra features menu...
Now /. has another guy to have a love/hate relationship with.
Anyways, he's not trying very hard. All information that could be shared should be opt-out. Sharing very private information, like medical histories, is already well protected, and people's tendency to not notice opt-out options for buying habits and such will do nothing to stem the flow of spam and junk mail. Oh well.
"Has anyone figured out how to uninstall Flash from Internet Explorer"
The easiest way, aside from following the instructions on macromedia's website, is to simply delete everything in C:\WinNT\System32\Macromed. I think the macromedia method of uninstallation would actually let the system know that flash had been uninstalled, and so IE would ask you if you want to reinstall it on every flash page. When you just delete the macromed folder, flash never shows up and never asks to be installed either. Simply beautiful. Now if I could only figure out how to make QuickTime plugin stop asking to install, cuz I don't want it!
"Seriously, the key here is the ability to turn it off if you don't want it."
Yeah, but you should be able to turn it off by disabling the browser's ability to be reconfigured remotely, not by having them set a cookie that'll turn off the customizations, but follow you everywhere. And I'm pretty sure that's how they plan on allowing you to disable it. Nevermind that this would force people to start allowing 3rd party cookies, and the ability to disable those alone makes IE6 worth it.
People are right about "optional" not really giving you much of a choice about being exploited *somehow*.
"With an open standard at least you know there is a chance some third-party enhancement that survives in the marketplace because people want to use it will get into the standard. And MS can only extend the standard with their own proprietary enhancements. They have limited control the standard as it exists now and (with the exception of patented stuff) cannot keep us from adding the enhancements to the standard if we like them."
Perhaps this is MS learning from Sun's mistakes. Even though Java is successful in certain applications, it would most likely be used for a wider range of applications if Sun hadn't been so harsh in keeping absolute control of their standard.
Microsoft must know by now that good things come from the programming community, therefore having the community suggest (and even implement) useful enhancements to their standard only helps them gain popularity.
"what about Servlet programming and JSP for dynamic web pages and database connectivity? These are desktop applications! They just run in a browser; on the desktop"
.jsp pages seem to be by far the most common dynamic pages seen on bank and investment websites. I'd say that seeing such heavy use in such demanding environments speaks quite well to how successful java's been.
Very true.
If Larry Ellison were a lawyer, he'd be the epitome of ambulance chasers. I saw this guy on TV a day or two after the attack (or possibly even the very same day), on a news program no less, and what he had to say amounted to "I feel sorry for all those people, this is terrible, blah blah, ORACLE ROCKS!, this is such a national tragedy."
Now, I can understand that there's some unsavory individuals who, for example, looted stores near ground zero in the midst of all the chaos. But to have one of the richest men on earth hawking his warez under the guise of offering insightful commentary on how the WTC attacks affected the tech sector is just sick beyond belief.
Say what you will about evil corporate bosses, but at least Billy G had the good sense to keep his mouth shut.
And now, of course, he is further attempting to turn the situation to his advantage. The man has no shame.
Apparently building 7 caught fire after the collapse of the towers, and like the towers, burned 'till it dropped. Some gas leaks from the mangled underground piping probably had something to do with it.
Write them an email - I have. WebWasher is just golden, there's only a couple of sites that I have to disable it for on a regular basis (Windows Update being one). I also suggested that they add hotkeys so you can CTRL-ALT-whatever when you're browsing to temporarily turn the standard filter. It's a nitpick, but I find it annoying having to reach for the mouse, even if all it takes is a click on the systray icon.
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Unless, of course, you have Bork Bork Bork selected as your language. Possibly other foreign languages. In which case the search from images.google.com becomes a regular google search. Beta it is.
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Unless, of course, you are in Canada, in which case they confiscate it, destroy it, and give your insurance company a call. The insurance company then decides that you must be a chronic speeder and raises your rates.
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MSFT: $70.69 (+23%)
LNUX: $3.28 (-74%)
Surely you mean 6/13/2001... or was ESR trying to predict the past?
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As for the workers, yeah, it sucks to have lost a job, but they should've seen this coming the minute they found out what sort of company they got hired by, and started looking for a job right then. If they had even the slightest illusion of job security at a company that advertisers didn't give a damn about and whose only business was giving away hardware that appealed to a crowd of hackers, then... well, I suppose numbnuts like them made the company the great big hunk o' crap that it was.
Plus, I hate'em for never offering the cuecats in Canada :)
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So the ignorance of newbies makes it the company's responsibility to not add any features which might confuse the poor fool? I see this as somewhat analogous to "ignorance of the law is not an excuse."
Let's say you go to a foreign country with cultural laws such as women not allowing to walk around in shorts. The tourist doesn't know, she didn't bother to do the research prior to taking the trip, and she gets arrested and punished. Is her ignorance an excuse? Not really, she should've done her homework. So why is this kind of ignorance, newbies diving headlong into something they have no experience with, tolerated so lightly when it comes to computers?
If a user is so apathetic to what kind of crap he's being bombarded by that he won't make an effort to find out what he can do about it, then by all means let him click on all the spam in his inbox, let him get brainwashed by ads, and let him be fooled by Smart Tags. After all, companies have been exploiting people's stupidity for profit long before computers ever came along.
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Oh no, cookies are files on my machine, IE is making my hard drive available to third parties already!
Anyway, nobody's hard drive is being made available to anyone. Since the XML file will be a filter on your machine, it won't be any different from any other config file on the system, i.e. used by the system, not sent out to whatever website requests it.
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This is no different from the B2, since the flying wing concept produces inherently unstable aircraft. Without some serious fly-by-wire, both those planes would never fly.
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Well, yeah, I think that's the plan. Who's complaining, really? Take Outlook Express for example. As a mail client, it does everything I want it to. Maybe I'm just not that demanding, but if I was that demanding, I'd do something similar to what I'm about to talk about.
As a news client, OE was "good enough" to get me by, but since since "good enough" doesn't quite satisfy my needs, I moved onto Agent. Perhaps my needs will outgrow Agent one day and I'll be poking around for a new one.
If MS gives people the tools to get the job done, and get it done to the users' satisfaction, then the user will stick with that piece of software until such time as they're forced by the deficiencies of their current software package to look for a better alternative. The point is, this is not a bad thing! It's a bad thing if you're trying to hawk your mail client which is OE's equal, in which case the people will be a) happy with OE and therefore will never hear of you or b) looking for something better, in which case they'll skip over your OE clone. It is a good thing, however, when you consider that this will spur alternative mail client developers to aspire to something truly great so people who have outgrown what MS has handed them will have a clear alternative!
At least you're not claiming that IE is an evil product designed to filter out any competitors software that you might come across on the web, as another post in this thread seems to claim. :)
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Actually, I believe that IE allows you to look at NS all you want - in fact, it lets you look at just about everything out there on the web, since *that* is what it was designed for.
Outlook Express, an email client, designed to prevent users from looking at many other third party, and standards compliant, email packages
You're starting to sound a a bit off... OE, an email client. That's it. No conspiracies. It complies with mail standards just fine, AND I can check Hotmail without having to use the web interface. Oh no, it's the tool of Satan!
MSN Messenger, an IM client designed to prevent users from using AOL IM, Windows Media Player, a streaming media player, designed to prevent users from looking at RealPlayer, or worse, non-proprietry formats such as MP3, and many others
Good god man, you're so far off your rocker you're beyond help by any modern psychiatric treatments and drugs. MSN Msgr, WMP, a IM client (and that's all, again, no conspiracy) and a Media Player that blows away anything else that's available (or, at least, it blows away the competition you suggested (Real... blech)).
The specific intent of Microsoft's 'add-ons' is to avoid choice
Well, no, actually, their addons don't limit anyone's choice. Unless you feel that if you've already got MSN Messenger then it'd be an unholy act for you to install AIM as well.
By forcing the users to install this software, it becomes inefficient and potentially destructive to the stability of the system, to install third party competitors
Nobody's forcing anything. The software simply comes as part of the OS. Nobody goes out, buys the OS, installs it, only to have the MS Gestapo knocking on their door five minutes later, carrying Uzi's and WMP/IE/MSNM CD's, demanding that the software they bring be put on the machine. If some brave soul decides to take the plunge and sully their machine with RealPlayer or ICQ or some other monstrosity that you advocate as the preferable alternative to the default MS programs for those tasks, these alternatives work just fine and dandy alongside the MS software.
h as Real and AOL, or because they encourage use of commodity protocols
Oh, bravo! Real and AOL, the pioneers of all things good in this MS-dominated world. Great example.
In short, there's no comparison. Microsoft is forcing you to install software you don't necessarily want, in order to cripple the competition.
Again, they're not forcing anything. They are including it for a) their market share (duh) and b) because it actually IS convenient to have all sorts of goodies already installed on the machine without having to hunt around and download'em once you get the machine.
Anyways, yeah, I know, I got trolled, but I'm sure there's some impressionable people out there who might take what you say seriously, and possibly even buy into some of it. It's not very healthy t spread your mentality around like some sort of disease.
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When will the Americans learn?
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Indeed... there must be a more worthy (And physically rewarding) pursuit than sitting around a supercooled machine gettin' fat.
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