we will force you to take some of your compensation in beer, and don't really give a darn if you don't like the beer we provide or are even a recovering alcoholic
This may explain why free beer is more of a rarity in the Valley these days.;-)
The thing that makes my situation ironic is that I hate FPS games
I seriously thought I was the only Slashdot member who felt this way. Every time I bring up the idea that video game developers are stuck in an utterly non-creative rut (hey, how about another game where people with big guns run around and blast the shit out of things?), people jump on me as if I've called the Pope the Anti-Christ in the middle of Vatican Square.
The problem is that the industry is really very much like the movie industry now. Creativity is being stifled as the big money dictates that developers stay safe, doing the same things that have made money before. I'm not interested in FPS games, I think guns & tits games like GTA are an embarassment to humanity, and I'm not interested in spending two hours learning the intricacies of the F-117 cockpit in order to play a game for 15 minutes.
In the early days of video games, designers had to do with far fewer resources (RAM, hard drive capacity, chip speed, and development money). The results were uneven, but there was a lot more real creativity (as opposed to polish).
I've only found a couple, but I read both of them frequently now. Of course, these may be of little or no use to anyone else, but I imagine many new sites are like that. Even more so than with the magazine industry, the Web allows for a tremendous level of specialization.
The Huffington Post - a collection of opinionated high-profile bloggers who are already making waves by making the notion of blogs accessible to people outside the "blogosphere"
Bayosphere - citizen journalism in the San Francisco bay area, and noted tech journalist Dan Gillmor's new hangout
MMOG's biggest collective problem is the lack of an ability to be a casual play.
I have some friends who have been into MMOG's for some time and about two years ago they tried to get me into EverCrack. It seemed interesting and all, but I never got into it because I saw what happend to them. One of my friends played so many hours that when he calculated it all, he figured he'd invested one year worth of gaming over a three year span. That is, one third of his time was occupied with EQ. The other two are a couple who played EQ side by side for hours and hours and hours.
All three of these people who are in their 30s were able to devote so much of their time to EQ because they didn't have to worry about money. None of them worked a normal full time job, and none of them had kids. I took one look at their addiction and realized there was no way I could hack it, so I didn't bother with more than a cursory couple of game sessions.
I'm looking for the day when the casual gamer like me has an alternative that's better than a choice beteen time-sucking MMOGs and YAFFPS (Yet Another Fuggin' First Person Shooter). Until then it's Ace Combat for me.
Free beer on Fridays used to be a Silicon Valley tradition at some companies (Apple for one) back in the day, which is probably why people latched onto "free beer" as a way of saying "you get something without paying for it."
"Free as in free speech" makes sense to me, but a replacement for "free as in beer" might be "free as in free contraceptives." Of course, here in the United States that phrase would probably provoke boycotting of Open Source software by enraged fundamentalists.
When you come out with a product or service that just works, and works so well that it changes the way you spend your time (watching TV, renting videos, or listening to music), customers tend to become rabid evangelists.
Trying to position yourself as the Rebel Alliance against the PhD professors in the White Tower won't help you if you can't create products that make customers happy.
The interesting thing to me about reactions to this article is that if just about any other company announced the same thing, most of us would think it was fine.
Microsoft faces a huge credibility gap, which is the result of years and years of ethically questionable business practices. Any company sitting in such a powerful monopoly position would be treated with some skepticism, but phrases like "knife the baby" take a long time to forget. Microsoft's bipolar disorder when it comes to open source doesn't make them any easier to trust.
Hey Ballmer, is open source licensing the scourge of capitalism, is it a tool that can be used in conjunction with closed source, or is it a mechanism you want to subvert and use as yet another means of obstructing competition?
It is humorous to watch Microsoft trying to change its corporate DNA, a task that seems nearly impossible. The stage in Microsoft's lifecycle when they could bully their way to the top is over. Now they're sitting at the top and they have nowhere to go but down. It brings to mind a game of Diplomacy, one in which a player has succeeded in tricking everyone, only to be brought down by their combined wrath.
Neither webmasters nor the browsers should work around and tweak for specific instances of the other, they should just both use the standard.
Agreed. Standards are good. The problem is definining what standard you're talking about, and balancing functionality against standards support.
Unfortunately browser support for standards is wildly uneven, and in many cases portions of W3C standards are not ever adopted. The flip side is that some browser-specific features become de facto standards because they work better than the W3C-approved method.
It is also important to remember that many webmasters are being pushed by internal or external bosses who demand features on the basis of perceived business needs. As most Slashdotters have likely learned by personal experience, knowing that a particular approach will cause pain in the long run is no guarantee that you won't be forced to use said approach.
Yep, it was. We all know that the US was guilty of all kinds of human rights violations 35+ years ago, but the protests in Seattle have to do with what's going on now in Vietnam
You're fighting assumptions here. There seem to be a lot of people out there who figure that Apple is just being coy, and that eventually they'll sell a version of OS X that will run on non-Apple hardware, despite the fact that such a plan would be rife with pitfalls for Apple.
When I see comments that confuse what Apple has actually stated with what wild-eyed pundits have said, I just smile and nod.
its just a long series of shots of a storm trooper putting on his body armor followed by a couple of quick cuts of storm troopers standing around in various environments (snow, desert etc.).
You know the difference between a trailer and a feature, right?
It's "Hi. I have a BS in Liberal Arts. Would you like Fries with that?"
Yes, yes. A Liberal Arts degree is horrible. You'll never get a job with one, you'll never get anywhere. However, in my group of college friends, only one of the six of us obtained a CS degree, another a biology degree, and the remaining four obtained degrees in Archeology, Political Science + Economics, International Relations, and Business. Fifteen years later three of us work in the computer industry (in a technical capacity, not as marketers), one is a doctor, one runs a construction business, and one is a real estate agent. None of us has ever beeen involuntarily out of work for more than a month or two.
Your mileage may of course vary, but the idea that a Liberal Arts degree instantly leads to a job at the Golden Arches is a bit overdone in my opinion.
Several DoD entities have been using WO since its inception. Some of NeXT's best customers came from the DoD. The problem with DoD clients is that they're not exactly going to partner with your marketing department and help you create case studies.;-)
Boxen is an absurd word to describe multiple stand-alone desktop computer systems, which have no relationship to monstrous VAX machines that 90% of Slashdotters have never even seen.
there was the ugly beast called "AppleWorks"... which clearly couldn't compete with MS Word.
AppleWorks (née ClarisWorks) was actually a counterpart to MicrosoftWorks. I'd hazard to guess that there may actually be as many or more active AppleWorks users than there are MicrosoftWorks users. Obviously AppleWorks is woefully outdated and suffers from a heinous interface. But for years it was a great app that did 95% of what most home users needed from an office program.
I think they're trying to cover their asses in case Microsoft pulls the MS Office rug out from under them.
Agreed. I'd go further, though, and say that Apple sees the bloataciousness of MS Office as its Achilles Heel. Seriously, why is it so freakin' difficult to do the most common 90% of tasks in Office? It is so complex that it tries to "help" you do things that should be simple and intuitive. In the mean time, the bloat factor is so enormous that most of the tools go unused.
If Apple can put all of the pieces together in a lean and mean fashion, they may be able to convince a lot of people that instead of another Office suite, they a slender but competent set of tools that work together in an intuitive and unintrusive manner.
iTunes optionally uses 1-click shopping. So when's the court date, and can I get a seat? Amazon suing Apple for something so trivial should be amusing.
The Apple Store uses Amazon's One-Click system under license, so my guess is that any use of one-click by Apple in the iTMS is covered by the terms of that licensing arrangement.
How does one go about finding useful blogs when the blog listings are full of garbage?
I think the problem lies in the definition of the term "garbage". I definitely hear what you're saying, but my guess is that my definition of "good blogging" is slightly different than yours, which is slightly different from that of your neighbor, and so on.
But to me this is an issue that could be dealt with through a variety of means. For one thing, blog indexes are becoming more useful. I find a lot of really useful information with Technorati. For example, I was interested in reading a variety of opinions about the concept of peak oil. So I ran this search and quickly found The Oil Drum, a site full of information on the topic.
I think your fears of spill-over will be eased as search filtering capabilities become more robust and long, undifferentiated blogrolls on the more useful sites become replaced by shorter lists of related blogs. Just as the early days of "web pages" were a morass of links to other lists of links, many bloggers are still giddy about linking to as many other blogs as possible. This will die down in time, as they realize that the quality of the links matters more than their number.
I still think that even if filtering mechanisms don't improve much more and it remains a bit more difficult to find "quality" (as defined by me) blog content, I'd rather have that than a blogosphere controlled solely by the usual suspects. To me, avoiding consolidation of media ownership is worth a little inconvenience. The last thing I want is all of the best blogs to be bought out by Big Media and unpopular views (be they about kitty litter or peak oil) utterly marginalized.
Lord, I hope the majority are leaving the Internet.
I've never really understood this sentiment. Blogs aren't like TV. They're not pushed to you. If you like someone's "What Scruffy the Cat Did Today" blog, you can grab the RSS feed and get your daily dose of Scruffy amusement. But if you don't like it, it's not like there's nothing else on the Internet.
The beauty of the blogging medium is that what you read is up to you. You can go with soley corporate-sponsored blogs. You can read obscure rants from marginally intelligent blogs that have only three readers. You can concoct your own mix. However you choose to make use of blogs, the tremendous variety of thoughts, opinions, and stories is what makes the phenomenon so powerful.
I'd hate to see blogging become just another means of obtaining pre-vetted "useful" (as defined by whom?) information from the usual sources.
I'm not going to be reading the Scruffy the Cat blog any time soon, but I'm happy it's out there.
Amazon, Google, Yahoo, and eBay are the survivors from the original Dot Bomb Era. They've learned, adapted, and are no longer just examples of the new Internet sector of the economy. They are strong companies in their own right. You can argue about whether Google's valuation is correct, or whether eBay will continue to grow, but these companies are delivering services that people want to use.
The automobile industry in the United States took off at a rapid clip, and there were dozens of manufacturers in the early days. It took time for the market to consolidate, which is when the real growth of the automobile took off. Now there are only a few major players in the market worldwide, but thousands of parts suppliers, distribution companies, niche manufacturers, and so on.
Growth rates for Internet-oriented companies will likely never match those of the late 1990s, as the industry matures, there will be dominant players that will continue to thrive. The churn at the top that characterized the Dot Bomb Era is gone, and that's a good sign.
Apple is about one and only one thing. That is a 25+% profit margin on computer sales.
First, "computers" are no longer Apple's sole determinant of success. The iPod/iTMS combination has proven that Apple is pushing into new markets. The digital hub concept isn't just hot air - Apple has been moving in that direction for some time now and doesn't look like it's going to stop any time soon. Apple's profits no longer come purely from Macs, and their overall strategy of late reflects this change.
Second, Apple's profit margins with the Mac have fluctuated over the last 20 years depending on the model and the market situation, so there's no strict Apple mantra that margins on their computers have to be at a certain level. In particular, the Steve II Era of Apple has shown that Apple is far more business-savvy than it was in the past. My take is that Apple is serious about expanding marketshare, and is willing to go through another big transition in order to hit Microsoft while they're having difficulty delivering on promises.
Given that Apple has been secretly keeping OS X up to date on Intel processsors for the last five years makes me think that blanket statements about Apple based on what they did 10 or 15 or even five years ago make little sense.
The article itself is completely factless, and appears to be completely hearsay from "insider sources." There's nothing official about it. Heck, it could even be an Apple ploy to drum up interest in the WWDC, and C|Net is stupidly playing into it.
Even if Apple does announce a move to Intel, it's still not official at this point, and the C|Net articcle amounts to one more in a series of rumors.
a large part of the socialist system in the US is specifically designed to raise the barrier of entry in most major markets so high that common people can't compete.
So you're saying that Europe is a better place for entrepreneurs? Is that why we've seen so many world-beating new companies coming out of France and Germany lately?
Yours is definitely the better take. Now I guess we know what Kazaa looks like. He's a muscled old dude who takes on The Man and sells cars featuring "fine Corinthian leather" in his spare time.
Helped *stop* fascism? What fucking planet do you live on dude?
I live on the planet where America waged war against fascist Italy and Nazi Germany and ultimately defeated both of them. Your comparison of IBM and Ford's involvement in Nazi Germany versus the full weight of American military and industrial power, not to mention tens of thousands of American lives, is a case of creating equivalency where it doesn't even remotely exist.
The alignment of corporate interests with government interests is obvious to anyone who is paying attention. But that is not the same thing as "evil", particularly given that in my opinion, corporate interests are not inherently evil. Because corporations have been given so much power, their capacity to fuck things up has become greater. Give anyone (churches, government agencies, corporations, unions) too much power, and bad things will follow. But we still have the capability to reign in corporate power. The American electorate is already starting to realize that the "War on Terror" has been oversold.
By the way, if you are actually trying to convince me of something, don't tell me that I have my head up my ass, particularly if you're posting as an AC. The Far Right has been calling everyone who disagrees with them anti-American idiots, terrorist sympathizers, and worse. My feeling is that when we fall in to that line of base accusatory argumentation, the ability to see nuance and get beyond rhetoric is lost.
Slashdot Mirror
This may explain why free beer is more of a rarity in the Valley these days. ;-)
I seriously thought I was the only Slashdot member who felt this way. Every time I bring up the idea that video game developers are stuck in an utterly non-creative rut (hey, how about another game where people with big guns run around and blast the shit out of things?), people jump on me as if I've called the Pope the Anti-Christ in the middle of Vatican Square.
The problem is that the industry is really very much like the movie industry now. Creativity is being stifled as the big money dictates that developers stay safe, doing the same things that have made money before. I'm not interested in FPS games, I think guns & tits games like GTA are an embarassment to humanity, and I'm not interested in spending two hours learning the intricacies of the F-117 cockpit in order to play a game for 15 minutes.
In the early days of video games, designers had to do with far fewer resources (RAM, hard drive capacity, chip speed, and development money). The results were uneven, but there was a lot more real creativity (as opposed to polish).
The Huffington Post - a collection of opinionated high-profile bloggers who are already making waves by making the notion of blogs accessible to people outside the "blogosphere"
Bayosphere - citizen journalism in the San Francisco bay area, and noted tech journalist Dan Gillmor's new hangout
I have some friends who have been into MMOG's for some time and about two years ago they tried to get me into EverCrack. It seemed interesting and all, but I never got into it because I saw what happend to them. One of my friends played so many hours that when he calculated it all, he figured he'd invested one year worth of gaming over a three year span. That is, one third of his time was occupied with EQ. The other two are a couple who played EQ side by side for hours and hours and hours.
All three of these people who are in their 30s were able to devote so much of their time to EQ because they didn't have to worry about money. None of them worked a normal full time job, and none of them had kids. I took one look at their addiction and realized there was no way I could hack it, so I didn't bother with more than a cursory couple of game sessions.
I'm looking for the day when the casual gamer like me has an alternative that's better than a choice beteen time-sucking MMOGs and YAFFPS (Yet Another Fuggin' First Person Shooter). Until then it's Ace Combat for me.
"Free as in free speech" makes sense to me, but a replacement for "free as in beer" might be "free as in free contraceptives." Of course, here in the United States that phrase would probably provoke boycotting of Open Source software by enraged fundamentalists.
Trying to position yourself as the Rebel Alliance against the PhD professors in the White Tower won't help you if you can't create products that make customers happy.
Microsoft faces a huge credibility gap, which is the result of years and years of ethically questionable business practices. Any company sitting in such a powerful monopoly position would be treated with some skepticism, but phrases like "knife the baby" take a long time to forget. Microsoft's bipolar disorder when it comes to open source doesn't make them any easier to trust.
Hey Ballmer, is open source licensing the scourge of capitalism, is it a tool that can be used in conjunction with closed source, or is it a mechanism you want to subvert and use as yet another means of obstructing competition?
It is humorous to watch Microsoft trying to change its corporate DNA, a task that seems nearly impossible. The stage in Microsoft's lifecycle when they could bully their way to the top is over. Now they're sitting at the top and they have nowhere to go but down. It brings to mind a game of Diplomacy, one in which a player has succeeded in tricking everyone, only to be brought down by their combined wrath.
Agreed. Standards are good. The problem is definining what standard you're talking about, and balancing functionality against standards support.
Unfortunately browser support for standards is wildly uneven, and in many cases portions of W3C standards are not ever adopted. The flip side is that some browser-specific features become de facto standards because they work better than the W3C-approved method.
It is also important to remember that many webmasters are being pushed by internal or external bosses who demand features on the basis of perceived business needs. As most Slashdotters have likely learned by personal experience, knowing that a particular approach will cause pain in the long run is no guarantee that you won't be forced to use said approach.
Yep, it was. We all know that the US was guilty of all kinds of human rights violations 35+ years ago, but the protests in Seattle have to do with what's going on now in Vietnam
You're fighting assumptions here. There seem to be a lot of people out there who figure that Apple is just being coy, and that eventually they'll sell a version of OS X that will run on non-Apple hardware, despite the fact that such a plan would be rife with pitfalls for Apple.
When I see comments that confuse what Apple has actually stated with what wild-eyed pundits have said, I just smile and nod.
You know the difference between a trailer and a feature, right?
Yes, yes. A Liberal Arts degree is horrible. You'll never get a job with one, you'll never get anywhere. However, in my group of college friends, only one of the six of us obtained a CS degree, another a biology degree, and the remaining four obtained degrees in Archeology, Political Science + Economics, International Relations, and Business. Fifteen years later three of us work in the computer industry (in a technical capacity, not as marketers), one is a doctor, one runs a construction business, and one is a real estate agent. None of us has ever beeen involuntarily out of work for more than a month or two.
Your mileage may of course vary, but the idea that a Liberal Arts degree instantly leads to a job at the Golden Arches is a bit overdone in my opinion.
Boxen is an absurd word to describe multiple stand-alone desktop computer systems, which have no relationship to monstrous VAX machines that 90% of Slashdotters have never even seen.
AppleWorks (née ClarisWorks) was actually a counterpart to MicrosoftWorks. I'd hazard to guess that there may actually be as many or more active AppleWorks users than there are MicrosoftWorks users. Obviously AppleWorks is woefully outdated and suffers from a heinous interface. But for years it was a great app that did 95% of what most home users needed from an office program.
I think they're trying to cover their asses in case Microsoft pulls the MS Office rug out from under them.
Agreed. I'd go further, though, and say that Apple sees the bloataciousness of MS Office as its Achilles Heel. Seriously, why is it so freakin' difficult to do the most common 90% of tasks in Office? It is so complex that it tries to "help" you do things that should be simple and intuitive. In the mean time, the bloat factor is so enormous that most of the tools go unused.
If Apple can put all of the pieces together in a lean and mean fashion, they may be able to convince a lot of people that instead of another Office suite, they a slender but competent set of tools that work together in an intuitive and unintrusive manner.
The Apple Store uses Amazon's One-Click system under license, so my guess is that any use of one-click by Apple in the iTMS is covered by the terms of that licensing arrangement.
I think the problem lies in the definition of the term "garbage". I definitely hear what you're saying, but my guess is that my definition of "good blogging" is slightly different than yours, which is slightly different from that of your neighbor, and so on.
But to me this is an issue that could be dealt with through a variety of means. For one thing, blog indexes are becoming more useful. I find a lot of really useful information with Technorati. For example, I was interested in reading a variety of opinions about the concept of peak oil. So I ran this search and quickly found The Oil Drum, a site full of information on the topic.
I think your fears of spill-over will be eased as search filtering capabilities become more robust and long, undifferentiated blogrolls on the more useful sites become replaced by shorter lists of related blogs. Just as the early days of "web pages" were a morass of links to other lists of links, many bloggers are still giddy about linking to as many other blogs as possible. This will die down in time, as they realize that the quality of the links matters more than their number.
I still think that even if filtering mechanisms don't improve much more and it remains a bit more difficult to find "quality" (as defined by me) blog content, I'd rather have that than a blogosphere controlled solely by the usual suspects. To me, avoiding consolidation of media ownership is worth a little inconvenience. The last thing I want is all of the best blogs to be bought out by Big Media and unpopular views (be they about kitty litter or peak oil) utterly marginalized.
I've never really understood this sentiment. Blogs aren't like TV. They're not pushed to you. If you like someone's "What Scruffy the Cat Did Today" blog, you can grab the RSS feed and get your daily dose of Scruffy amusement. But if you don't like it, it's not like there's nothing else on the Internet.
The beauty of the blogging medium is that what you read is up to you. You can go with soley corporate-sponsored blogs. You can read obscure rants from marginally intelligent blogs that have only three readers. You can concoct your own mix. However you choose to make use of blogs, the tremendous variety of thoughts, opinions, and stories is what makes the phenomenon so powerful.
I'd hate to see blogging become just another means of obtaining pre-vetted "useful" (as defined by whom?) information from the usual sources.
I'm not going to be reading the Scruffy the Cat blog any time soon, but I'm happy it's out there.
The automobile industry in the United States took off at a rapid clip, and there were dozens of manufacturers in the early days. It took time for the market to consolidate, which is when the real growth of the automobile took off. Now there are only a few major players in the market worldwide, but thousands of parts suppliers, distribution companies, niche manufacturers, and so on.
Growth rates for Internet-oriented companies will likely never match those of the late 1990s, as the industry matures, there will be dominant players that will continue to thrive. The churn at the top that characterized the Dot Bomb Era is gone, and that's a good sign.
First, "computers" are no longer Apple's sole determinant of success. The iPod/iTMS combination has proven that Apple is pushing into new markets. The digital hub concept isn't just hot air - Apple has been moving in that direction for some time now and doesn't look like it's going to stop any time soon. Apple's profits no longer come purely from Macs, and their overall strategy of late reflects this change.
Second, Apple's profit margins with the Mac have fluctuated over the last 20 years depending on the model and the market situation, so there's no strict Apple mantra that margins on their computers have to be at a certain level. In particular, the Steve II Era of Apple has shown that Apple is far more business-savvy than it was in the past. My take is that Apple is serious about expanding marketshare, and is willing to go through another big transition in order to hit Microsoft while they're having difficulty delivering on promises.
Given that Apple has been secretly keeping OS X up to date on Intel processsors for the last five years makes me think that blanket statements about Apple based on what they did 10 or 15 or even five years ago make little sense.
The article itself is completely factless, and appears to be completely hearsay from "insider sources." There's nothing official about it. Heck, it could even be an Apple ploy to drum up interest in the WWDC, and C|Net is stupidly playing into it.
Even if Apple does announce a move to Intel, it's still not official at this point, and the C|Net articcle amounts to one more in a series of rumors.
So you're saying that Europe is a better place for entrepreneurs? Is that why we've seen so many world-beating new companies coming out of France and Germany lately?
Yours is definitely the better take. Now I guess we know what Kazaa looks like. He's a muscled old dude who takes on The Man and sells cars featuring "fine Corinthian leather" in his spare time.
I live on the planet where America waged war against fascist Italy and Nazi Germany and ultimately defeated both of them. Your comparison of IBM and Ford's involvement in Nazi Germany versus the full weight of American military and industrial power, not to mention tens of thousands of American lives, is a case of creating equivalency where it doesn't even remotely exist.
The alignment of corporate interests with government interests is obvious to anyone who is paying attention. But that is not the same thing as "evil", particularly given that in my opinion, corporate interests are not inherently evil. Because corporations have been given so much power, their capacity to fuck things up has become greater. Give anyone (churches, government agencies, corporations, unions) too much power, and bad things will follow. But we still have the capability to reign in corporate power. The American electorate is already starting to realize that the "War on Terror" has been oversold.
By the way, if you are actually trying to convince me of something, don't tell me that I have my head up my ass, particularly if you're posting as an AC. The Far Right has been calling everyone who disagrees with them anti-American idiots, terrorist sympathizers, and worse. My feeling is that when we fall in to that line of base accusatory argumentation, the ability to see nuance and get beyond rhetoric is lost.