What does it mean to "conform to my UI"? Why are you listing rendering engines (which, apart from Firefox, are literally not involved in windowing UI at all)? Are you just talking about adopting appearance characteristics of a windowing theme? Because if that's the case, I definitely misunderstood. I was talking about browsers (all of them) adopting UI conventions that are at odds with (every) environment, often for the better but sometimes not so much.
But basically, I wasn't talking about appearance convention... and if that's what we're supposed to be talking about, I can single out Firefox\ as far and away the worst offender on the Mac, and pretty much guaranteed never to look or feel native in any way. It probably feels just as foreign as Chromium does on whatever WM you use. The damn thing has never even used native menus EVER, and they're just there, free for the taking!
Taking your price comparison claim for granted (which is not a safe bet, but one I'm willing to indulge for the sake of making a point)...
Plenty of people find a reason to pay extra for a mostly-equivalent product. Some people buy Coke or Pepsi versus RC; some buy Crown Royal versus whatever the other one is that CR rebrands; some buy Acura versus Honda or Toyota or whatever. In all of the cases where this happens, a price comparison will be convincing (pretty much) only for people on the economic margins of the target market. It turns out people are willing to pay more for perceived quality or even for differences you do not yourself find substantial even if they do.
I have a number of reasons to prefer OS X versus competing operating systems, and I have a number of reasons that I'd "pay more" to continue using it. Some of them are deeply subjective (I prefer the way OS X works versus Windows or Linux, in a lot of ways) and some of them are pure balance sheet (I spend less on software I already licensed, I spend less on hardware that either I know how to maintain or I can trust won't require maintenance). Those reasons are, to me, worth a very large chunk of a price comparison between computers which, on the whole, cost nearly nothing compared to how much they provide to me in income.
If you don't feel the same way? If you'd rather purchase based on price-to-spec alone? Sure, go for it. Why does this need to be a battleground? Why do you need to convince me to spend my money differently (or vice versa)?
I provided a bunch of reasons. Tab behavior, toolbar behavior being the most substantial.
Maybe we're talking past each other. I'm not aware of any Blink or WebKit browser that isn't heavily customized from its native environment (including Safari, which has the fewest excuses). Can you say more about what you expect and what violates those expectations?
My biggest gripe with Chromium is that it does not conform to my UI.
That's a good gripe. It's mine too. My gripe isn't so much about appearance (which is increasingly familiar on the Mac) as it is about behavior and interaction expectations. I expect certain behavior of tabs ("move tab to new window"), keyboard (including accessing keyboard shortcuts and the rest of the document even if currently focusing a plugin "frame"), find (Chrome stops highlighting found results after a refresh, unless you cancel and reopen the find panel). I'm fine with the visual differences—in fact, there are good innovations I wish the Mac would adopt, like spoof-proof warnings/notifications. I just can't use Chrome without thinking about how Chrome is different, and that's a sign of a bad UI citizen.
There is no reason it should not appear just as every single other window does.
Now this... of course there is. There are a lot of reasons. Few applications have to serve the needs a browser does, and no pre-mobile/pre-ChromeOS operating systems were built with those needs in mind. That isn't to say a good browser can't fit in, but we're far from a point in time where a browser simply has to implement some library features to do everything it needs to do. No OS/WM (as far as I'm aware) implements a tab system with the features any modern browser provides. Every major browser implements toolbar features not available in the core OS/WM. Some are better at fitting in than others (Chrome/Chromium probably being the best, despite being highly customized). But asking for a completely non-descript UI from a browser, at this point, is asking for something akin to IE 6's UI: plenty familiar and native, but barely able to fill the needs of browser users (and IE 6 had the benefit of a Windows task bar that was basically its "tab manager"... this is basically no longer a possibility for any browser).
Governments do not deserve trust, but it has nothing to do with "evil". No institution should be trusted, it should be evaluated according to its purpose, actions and outcomes; whenever any of those is inappropriate, insufficient, or inefficient, the institution should either be altered to better serve people, or it should be eliminated and if necessary replaced.
This is true for governments, bureaucracies, businesses, trade unions, religions and religious organizations, even book clubs. The concept of trust is incompatible with institutions, because they are not people.
So by your reasoning... either you are an elected official anonymously trolling nerds on the internet, or you are perfectly happy with everything the government is doing and have no desire to see it changed. Which is it?
There is no market, at least not in the "free" sense that people tend to mean. The ISP landscape is a patchwork of franchises, gentleman's agreements, or both. There is nothing resembling a competitive market where consumers may choose a provider based on price, or quality, or any other vector; or where competitors can reasonably be expected to enter.
Technology isn't neutral. And some technologies are not positive. And some otherwise-positive technologies can be abused in ways or on scales which couldn't be achieved in their absence. Any so-called "nerd" or enthusiast of technology who is not also cautious of technological advancements and their uses is a zealot.
If technological zealotry is indeed a waning trend on Slashdot, so much the better.
In other words, you made up a strawman to attack, and didn't really take the OP's intent at all into account. You're projecting all of your feelings about the subject into it, which is fine but isn't actually a discussion. Done here.
Is lying about downloading infringing copyrighted content moral? I'll agree that it's probably not morally justified for companies to not make it reasonably available in the first place, but in what way does that justify having to lie about it if they ever confront a person about the matter just to avoid having their ISP disconnect them for violating their TOS, which probably prohibits such activity?
OP never talked about doing any of this. You just made up a strawman and started attacking it. Go back and read the thing you responded to.
... Bearing in mind that saying that it does somehow justify it also suggests that one has a sense of entitlement to the content they would want to pirate in the first place.
Go back and read it *again*. OP was clearly stating that they would gladly pay for a service, and currently do. You attacked them for expressing regret that that option is being taken away.
Wait. You're being a moralizing prick, then chastising a person for doing the thing you consider moral? When that person expressed *wanting* to do the thing you consider moral? I'm lost.
Frankly, for anything I don't already have in my laptop, it's easier to click a YouTube link than to do pretty much any other action. I don't even bother downloading anymore. It's just there because I'm on the Internet.
I do care about audio quality. Generally if I'm going through this process for an album more than once or twice, I'll find a lossless or high-bitrate copy for sale and buy it. But for casual listening of whatever, pretty much nothing beats the search engine's media player.
Do they, necessarily? I've suggested that it is understandable but evidently imperfect—the evidence being the consequence that good non-incumbent content is often unseen. In fact, Slashdot's entire moderation approach reinforces that consequence.
I'm not saying Slashdot should abandon its approach, I'm not even saying that it doesn't work somewhat well. But it has a cost and that cost is much higher for a large community with a large volume of user-generated content. And I think that is worth discussing.
I'm trying to provide some insight into the rough edges of Slashdot's management of user-generated content. If you aren't interested in discussing those rough edges (and so far you have not done so at all), I'm not sure what you are trying to do. Game the incumbent advantage by getting your comment close to another one with a higher mod score? Doesn't that just underscore the problem?
And some of the most interesting, insightful, informative and funny comments go on forever underrated, and mostly unseen. This is caused in part by an understandable but evidently imperfect bias in Slashdot's design, where incumbent posts (posted earliest, posted by trusted users) are given greater visibility.
Like peer review in journals, it is possible that mostly-positive solutions can have negative consequences as well.
For fuck's sake really? You're shitting all over people who work hard to make ends meet because they're talking about current events to the extent anyone has bothered to inform them? Because, what, they aren't as astute as you think you are with all your disposable income and taste in booze? As if that even makes any kind of sense.
Maybe if you weren't such a tiny, miserable, elitist prick you'd take some time to politely engage your kith, maybe even educate them, hell maybe even yourself. Instead you're bragging to Internet strangers about how much better you are than the shithole you obviously never *really* escaped.
But that's not a problem with taxes, that's a problem with how people are chosen to use tax revenue, and with accountability generally. And it's also a problem with living in a society where people have conflicting interests.
The cause of your crumbling infrastructure in the US is largely people not paying taxes.
This is a more than just a little overstated and misleading (and I am taking the assumption that you are talking about tax policy allowing such; if you're talking about illegal tax dodging, you're off your nut). US infrastructure is in the state it is because of a confluence of gross mismanagement (often intentional); incredibly effective self-destructive propaganda; and a culture of punitiveness, resentment and retaliation; at least as much as it's caused by budget shortfalls. And the whole thing is a dog chasing its own tail, constantly producing reinforcing incentives.
As much as I wish there were budget for the infrastructure and services we actually accept as a society, throwing more money into it will only preserve the services and infrastructure that are functioning and uncontroversial. Which is a terrifyingly small subset, and doesn't even speak to services and infrastructure we have so far rejected.
I'd love to be proven wrong by some miraculous arrival of leadership we don't deserve (or making better of some inevitable disaster, but I couldn't even finish writing that with a straight face), but I'd go so far as to say that the US and all its factors and conditions are basically unmanageable, with nowhere left to go but decline.
You think rape and death threats are about hurt feelings. You obviously have never been a victim of such threats.
If you don't want to read about the social aspects of technology, you have a perfectly reasonable alternative to whining about it: scroll past it. Some of us actually take it seriously when proposals are made to reduce or eliminate the most egregious forms of online harassment, and want to have a real discussion. Go play with your toys, or whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
Evidently there's going to be a HP Z27q for about half the price of the 5k iMac. Glad to see Apple driving prices down though.
What does it mean to "conform to my UI"? Why are you listing rendering engines (which, apart from Firefox, are literally not involved in windowing UI at all)? Are you just talking about adopting appearance characteristics of a windowing theme? Because if that's the case, I definitely misunderstood. I was talking about browsers (all of them) adopting UI conventions that are at odds with (every) environment, often for the better but sometimes not so much.
But basically, I wasn't talking about appearance convention... and if that's what we're supposed to be talking about, I can single out Firefox\ as far and away the worst offender on the Mac, and pretty much guaranteed never to look or feel native in any way. It probably feels just as foreign as Chromium does on whatever WM you use. The damn thing has never even used native menus EVER, and they're just there, free for the taking!
Taking your price comparison claim for granted (which is not a safe bet, but one I'm willing to indulge for the sake of making a point)...
Plenty of people find a reason to pay extra for a mostly-equivalent product. Some people buy Coke or Pepsi versus RC; some buy Crown Royal versus whatever the other one is that CR rebrands; some buy Acura versus Honda or Toyota or whatever. In all of the cases where this happens, a price comparison will be convincing (pretty much) only for people on the economic margins of the target market. It turns out people are willing to pay more for perceived quality or even for differences you do not yourself find substantial even if they do.
I have a number of reasons to prefer OS X versus competing operating systems, and I have a number of reasons that I'd "pay more" to continue using it. Some of them are deeply subjective (I prefer the way OS X works versus Windows or Linux, in a lot of ways) and some of them are pure balance sheet (I spend less on software I already licensed, I spend less on hardware that either I know how to maintain or I can trust won't require maintenance). Those reasons are, to me, worth a very large chunk of a price comparison between computers which, on the whole, cost nearly nothing compared to how much they provide to me in income.
If you don't feel the same way? If you'd rather purchase based on price-to-spec alone? Sure, go for it. Why does this need to be a battleground? Why do you need to convince me to spend my money differently (or vice versa)?
I provided a bunch of reasons. Tab behavior, toolbar behavior being the most substantial.
Maybe we're talking past each other. I'm not aware of any Blink or WebKit browser that isn't heavily customized from its native environment (including Safari, which has the fewest excuses). Can you say more about what you expect and what violates those expectations?
Use Netscape Communicator, for bonus retro points!
My biggest gripe with Chromium is that it does not conform to my UI.
That's a good gripe. It's mine too. My gripe isn't so much about appearance (which is increasingly familiar on the Mac) as it is about behavior and interaction expectations. I expect certain behavior of tabs ("move tab to new window"), keyboard (including accessing keyboard shortcuts and the rest of the document even if currently focusing a plugin "frame"), find (Chrome stops highlighting found results after a refresh, unless you cancel and reopen the find panel). I'm fine with the visual differences—in fact, there are good innovations I wish the Mac would adopt, like spoof-proof warnings/notifications. I just can't use Chrome without thinking about how Chrome is different, and that's a sign of a bad UI citizen.
There is no reason it should not appear just as every single other window does.
Now this... of course there is. There are a lot of reasons. Few applications have to serve the needs a browser does, and no pre-mobile/pre-ChromeOS operating systems were built with those needs in mind. That isn't to say a good browser can't fit in, but we're far from a point in time where a browser simply has to implement some library features to do everything it needs to do. No OS/WM (as far as I'm aware) implements a tab system with the features any modern browser provides. Every major browser implements toolbar features not available in the core OS/WM. Some are better at fitting in than others (Chrome/Chromium probably being the best, despite being highly customized). But asking for a completely non-descript UI from a browser, at this point, is asking for something akin to IE 6's UI: plenty familiar and native, but barely able to fill the needs of browser users (and IE 6 had the benefit of a Windows task bar that was basically its "tab manager"... this is basically no longer a possibility for any browser).
Governments do not deserve trust, but it has nothing to do with "evil". No institution should be trusted, it should be evaluated according to its purpose, actions and outcomes; whenever any of those is inappropriate, insufficient, or inefficient, the institution should either be altered to better serve people, or it should be eliminated and if necessary replaced.
This is true for governments, bureaucracies, businesses, trade unions, religions and religious organizations, even book clubs. The concept of trust is incompatible with institutions, because they are not people.
So by your reasoning... either you are an elected official anonymously trolling nerds on the internet, or you are perfectly happy with everything the government is doing and have no desire to see it changed. Which is it?
There is no market, at least not in the "free" sense that people tend to mean. The ISP landscape is a patchwork of franchises, gentleman's agreements, or both. There is nothing resembling a competitive market where consumers may choose a provider based on price, or quality, or any other vector; or where competitors can reasonably be expected to enter.
Technology isn't neutral. And some technologies are not positive. And some otherwise-positive technologies can be abused in ways or on scales which couldn't be achieved in their absence. Any so-called "nerd" or enthusiast of technology who is not also cautious of technological advancements and their uses is a zealot.
If technological zealotry is indeed a waning trend on Slashdot, so much the better.
In other words, you made up a strawman to attack, and didn't really take the OP's intent at all into account. You're projecting all of your feelings about the subject into it, which is fine but isn't actually a discussion. Done here.
Is lying about downloading infringing copyrighted content moral? I'll agree that it's probably not morally justified for companies to not make it reasonably available in the first place, but in what way does that justify having to lie about it if they ever confront a person about the matter just to avoid having their ISP disconnect them for violating their TOS, which probably prohibits such activity?
OP never talked about doing any of this. You just made up a strawman and started attacking it. Go back and read the thing you responded to.
... Bearing in mind that saying that it does somehow justify it also suggests that one has a sense of entitlement to the content they would want to pirate in the first place.
Go back and read it *again*. OP was clearly stating that they would gladly pay for a service, and currently do. You attacked them for expressing regret that that option is being taken away.
Wait. You're being a moralizing prick, then chastising a person for doing the thing you consider moral? When that person expressed *wanting* to do the thing you consider moral? I'm lost.
You might want to check your math.
Which most people aren't.
Frankly, for anything I don't already have in my laptop, it's easier to click a YouTube link than to do pretty much any other action. I don't even bother downloading anymore. It's just there because I'm on the Internet.
I do care about audio quality. Generally if I'm going through this process for an album more than once or twice, I'll find a lossless or high-bitrate copy for sale and buy it. But for casual listening of whatever, pretty much nothing beats the search engine's media player.
Do they, necessarily? I've suggested that it is understandable but evidently imperfect—the evidence being the consequence that good non-incumbent content is often unseen. In fact, Slashdot's entire moderation approach reinforces that consequence.
I'm not saying Slashdot should abandon its approach, I'm not even saying that it doesn't work somewhat well. But it has a cost and that cost is much higher for a large community with a large volume of user-generated content. And I think that is worth discussing.
I'm trying to provide some insight into the rough edges of Slashdot's management of user-generated content. If you aren't interested in discussing those rough edges (and so far you have not done so at all), I'm not sure what you are trying to do. Game the incumbent advantage by getting your comment close to another one with a higher mod score? Doesn't that just underscore the problem?
Okay. Pretty sure I made my point. What's yours?
That would basically exaggerate the bias toward incumbent posts.
And some of the most interesting, insightful, informative and funny comments go on forever underrated, and mostly unseen. This is caused in part by an understandable but evidently imperfect bias in Slashdot's design, where incumbent posts (posted earliest, posted by trusted users) are given greater visibility.
Like peer review in journals, it is possible that mostly-positive solutions can have negative consequences as well.
For fuck's sake really? You're shitting all over people who work hard to make ends meet because they're talking about current events to the extent anyone has bothered to inform them? Because, what, they aren't as astute as you think you are with all your disposable income and taste in booze? As if that even makes any kind of sense.
Maybe if you weren't such a tiny, miserable, elitist prick you'd take some time to politely engage your kith, maybe even educate them, hell maybe even yourself. Instead you're bragging to Internet strangers about how much better you are than the shithole you obviously never *really* escaped.
He's definitely a penetration tester.
But that's not a problem with taxes, that's a problem with how people are chosen to use tax revenue, and with accountability generally. And it's also a problem with living in a society where people have conflicting interests.
The cause of your crumbling infrastructure in the US is largely people not paying taxes.
This is a more than just a little overstated and misleading (and I am taking the assumption that you are talking about tax policy allowing such; if you're talking about illegal tax dodging, you're off your nut). US infrastructure is in the state it is because of a confluence of gross mismanagement (often intentional); incredibly effective self-destructive propaganda; and a culture of punitiveness, resentment and retaliation; at least as much as it's caused by budget shortfalls. And the whole thing is a dog chasing its own tail, constantly producing reinforcing incentives.
As much as I wish there were budget for the infrastructure and services we actually accept as a society, throwing more money into it will only preserve the services and infrastructure that are functioning and uncontroversial. Which is a terrifyingly small subset, and doesn't even speak to services and infrastructure we have so far rejected.
I'd love to be proven wrong by some miraculous arrival of leadership we don't deserve (or making better of some inevitable disaster, but I couldn't even finish writing that with a straight face), but I'd go so far as to say that the US and all its factors and conditions are basically unmanageable, with nowhere left to go but decline.
You think rape and death threats are about hurt feelings. You obviously have never been a victim of such threats.
If you don't want to read about the social aspects of technology, you have a perfectly reasonable alternative to whining about it: scroll past it. Some of us actually take it seriously when proposals are made to reduce or eliminate the most egregious forms of online harassment, and want to have a real discussion. Go play with your toys, or whatever.
I'm not sure why I should, we don't claim a "right to life".