Irony alert: you're accusing me of arguing against points that were never made while acting as if I had taken any part in the discussion about XP's installation process. I never said anything about it.
Here is the post to which you replied: http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=617555&cid=24232709. Go back, read it again, and then examine your post in which you clip the tail end of the overview of the install process and start spouting a bunch of horseshit about operating systems reading minds. You are in fact replying to remarks on the install process and as such are taking part in that discussion. Fact is that there was never an implication that either install process mentioned did not involve some degree of configuration by the user, but rather that one centralized a lot of the options and made the short amount of time spent hanging around during the install process at least somewhat useful, vs. the other which involved baby-sitting for multiple hours just to strike enter.
When you finally get the OS installed you have to go into Control Panel to configure it like you want it (standard Windows or new kindergarten Crayon style, should the start menu pop up or cover part of the screen, etc.)
Then you have to install all your applications.
Are you expecting Windows to read your mind and then autoconfigure itself and install all the software you use?
With Linux (with Suse or Mandriva, ymmv on other distros) you insert the first CD, choose how you want it to act in a single screen (LILO or GRUB, KDE or Gnome, etc)
Some of us like to configure our operating systems in very, very specific ways instead of just choosing from a few presets. Unless Linux can read your mind, it's no better than XP.
The point being made is that the Windows XP install process requires input from the user for mere reboots at multiple stages, between some of which there's little to no actual configuration options that have to be set by the user. In other words, "The computer's going to work for a while, and then stop, and so you have to go check on it just to tell it to continue doing what it's doing, and it'll do it a few more times." If you weren't busy stripping away the context of his/her posts for the sake of setting up baseless counter-arguments against points he/she didn't even make, you'd understand this and agree that it's a valid complaint.
For example: I just took 45 minutes today to check out the current range of music players. Sony, Archos, TrekStore, you name it. People, the utter pieces of pure shit folks put out to sale for MP3 players nowadays is un-f*cking-believable. Believe it or not, the iPod line of music players is actually *really* among the top of the line. No replaceable battery and no OGG support be damned. There is not *one* f*cking player where you can see that some CEO with balls and brains actually took a look at the iPod and then simply built a player that was better. Where is the player that supports all formats, has a replaceable battery, better sound processing, is water-resistant and has firmware that just works?
Remaining undeveloped because no company with any sense about them has the balls to challenge the iPod. To unseat it, you'd have to do more than have a cooler and/or more practical feature set - you'd you'd have to establish an immensely popular integrated music manager/online music store, and you'd have to chip away at mindshare. The latter is the hard part: the average fanboi and general consumer alike are going to bristle at anything that *isn't* an iPod. Partly because the iPod is good feature-wise, partly because it's slick, partly because it's a component in an intended integrated system, but also because Apple's marketing encourages a sense of superiority among its userbase. Sure, alright, maybe *you*, random reader, are not at point X between smug and cocky, but that's where Apple wants you to be.
So: you'd not only have to get the product right, but you'd have to blast away something you can't kill with features. Good fucking luck.
Jobs is a lucky man in a lucky position, and he happens to have enough life and business experience not to screw it up.
I'd put it more along the lines of "he's a smart guy who has already had enough experience in screwing up to make fewer mistakes than before", because let's face it, his company's mistakes in the past few years are nowhere near the crippling blunder territory surrounding things like Lisa and Apple III. He now also has the added benefit of having decades of mythology to help obscure or otherwise alter interpretations of his flaws. People joke about his "reality distortion field", but this is pretty much how it works.
Re:It only works in the top slot
on
Inside Steve's Brain
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm sure many of my own subordinates have plotted by demise but I usually pose it to them as follows. I can bring you donuts and call you buddy, or I can whip you into an outstanding worker. Which do you think will look better on you rresume?
That depends. If they fit into the all-whip all-the-time culture, they'll flourish. If not, it'll look worse, because their work will ultimately suffer under the tremendous amounts of stress induced by being left on pins and needles all the time. In this case, it'll look better if they acknowledge the management style wasn't effective and they left for somewhere else where they meshed with the culture better. Assuming they're competent, of course.
We all know the word. We all have an idea of what it means. But is there a legal definition of "terrorism" already? Something that clearly defines what a terrorist is, and under which someone can be charged for being terrorist?
Hey now, what's with the rational talk? 'sides, the war isn't on terrorism, it's the war on *terror*. Shadowy amorphous indistinct horror, dig?
Odd, I've run beta v24 for a good 8 months on the WRT54GL (v1.1 hardware) and have only restarted the router when re-arranging furniture has necessitated unplugging. Are you sure the problem's with the router and not with the network interfaces connecting to it? And you're not, say, blocking the vents on the router, or anything like that which might result in overheating? If it's not either of these, I'd look for any issues with your particular version of the router as there are some minor hardware differences between versions. If there aren't any, maybe you've got a defective unit?
As much as I am not a Windows fan, I have to say I'm glad to see one manager who understands that one of the biggest aspects of their job is keeping their underlings productive and happy. So many times, in so many varying places, I've seen managers equate "management" with "being a boss", with no consideration of the fact that "making things go" includes "giving the employees something to go on beyond not getting fired."
Seriously: thank you.
The overall user experience sucks at best. Go ahead and flame me.
Flame you because...what, you're spouting a lot of unfocused hyperbolic blanket statements, or because you're asking to be flamed?
Last week's installs left a lot to be desired. We started with Fedora core 9 and and had all sorts of video and lock up problems. We abandoned it after three days of trying. The install disk wouldn't even run without a resolution parameter.
Without much in the way of context or so much as a mention of why you chose Fedora to begin with, I'm going to believe you had some free time to futz about with random distros and chose Fedora because it's one of the more popular ones. At this point, instead of messing around with these mysterious unsubstantiated video and lock-up issue, why not just try a different one on day one?
We moved to Ubuntu. Much better but Gnome is 5 years behind OS/X (Forget about KDE 4).
Behind OS/X...how? And why the comparison to OS/X in the first place? If you're expecting one thing and you load up something else, it's fairly ridiculous to assert that B sucks because it's not exactly like A. Really, what were you expecting, and more importantly, why?
Sound still is an issue with Sound Blaster but at least we have something much more usable than Fedora.
So it's better but there's still some undefined 'issue' with your sound card. Thanks for letting anyone know what that issue is so they might help you or attempt a fix if it's an over-arching flaw with some aspect of the distro or one of the packages contained therein.
I wish the effort is spent on making installs a breeze. The desktop panels do not span multiple monitors
Awesome! Finally! Look, this is *exactly* what's needed: worthwhile feedback! Now tell people working on Ubuntu what you found challenging about the install process, and also let them know that easy-to-configure association between desktop panels and multiple displays would be a positive boon in your opinion (maybe to the point of suggesting what would, in your opinion, make sense in regards to setting this up).
and the default install still ships with many useless apps.
...and back to unhelpful, non-pointed kvetching. What you mean is useless to you, and yet you don't say what, why, or what would be more useful for these unstated purposes of selecting a Linux-based desktop-centric distro in the first place. But say, maybe you're just not seasoned. Maybe you don't know how to talk about stuff and your frustration is rooted in that.
We use Linux for all of our production JBOSS servers and it has been absolutely wonderful. One day (I hope) the user experience will be as good. Windows and Mac OS/X have nothing to fear on the desktop for now.
On second thought, looks like you've got some idea of what you're doing.
Really: li'l help? Seriously, I get your frustration, and you're allowed to complain, but for cryin' out loud, *be specific* so that your complaints are useful and not easily taken as cranky bitching. After all, these things don't fix themselves.
How would they know if the user interface makes no distinction?
A visual distinction imparts little to no knowledge without context. If the end user doesn't understand what an executable is, the user interface making a distinction becomes meaningless. "There's a red ring around these pictures that launch my word processor, image editor, and web browser. Those all do different things. How are they similar? What gives?" is a more likely reaction.
If it turns out to have anti-competitive effects, then the government can punish Microsoft for it. Everyone may say that would be too little, too late, but preemptive strikes are un-American. (And besides, we can always break MS up if it keeps pushing out monopolistic products.)
And a fine "wokka-wokka" at the overloading of "preemptive strike". And the joke about the telecom industry. And so on and so on and so on.;P
Seriously though. With Ballmer's at the helm after his statements over the past few years, what other direction is Microsoft heading in *but* behaving in anti-competitive ways? And how awesome *would* it be to see them shift their focus away from competition and towards real honest-to-goodness innovation? Pardon me, but I've just got this strange notion that some folks there may have, you know, been hired on the merits of their programming chops rather than their ability to rim the living daylights out of a few upper-management wackos...
Yes, I'd prefer an inside job to restructure the company, but Ozzie's dropped into his shell since coming on board. What else is going to fucking do it?
While we're on the topic, someone with a clue should point us to literature about interpreting there clues, I for one could use that, as I'm trying to determine whether the cute Irish cashier in the deli I go to makes such large smiles because she's on Prozac or because she thinks I'm cute.
Third possibility: it's friendly, professional customer service. Doesn't always have to be about sex and drugs, you know.
I don't understand the specifics of your OpenOffice example. To move a selection to a new location on a spreadsheet, you make your selection, then click the selection and drag it to the desired location. While the behavior may not be the same as in MS Office, it's not as though this is a completely counter-intuitive aspect of the interface; indeed, it probably makes more sense to click on the selection and drag to move it than the grab the edge. What am I missing about your example?
I ask because I largely agree: investing time to learn a different interface for the sake of difference alone is a bit hard to justify. Unless I'm missing something here, I'd guess you could use a better example. But your overall point is spot-on.
According to the same Wikipedia article, Kacynski killed 3 people, and wounded 23. What's a guy got to do to get the quote-marks removed from the word "terrorist?"
Kaczynski was a terrorist, no question. I wouldn't argue that someone who has killed people or destroyed property in the name of a particular ideology is not a terrorist. What I was referring to were the following words:
After reading up on that, take a moment to observe that many of the terrorist
groups, and activities, in the US are related to environmentalist groups.
That's about as sound a statement as saying that right-wing Christian groups are terrorist groups because a few imbalanced, literally militant pro-lifers decided to bomb abortions clinics; it doesn't add up.
This has already happened. Remember the uni-bomber? In all, the guys writings were right in there with main stream environmentalism. After reading up on that, take a moment to observe that many of the terrorist groups, and activities, in the US are related to environmentalist groups.
I am not saying that they are wrong; but, to deny that they exist is just plain dishonest.
Industrial Society and Its Future, the Unabomber's infamous manifesto, is one man's screed on how he believes technology will eventually result in the loss of basic freedoms long taken for granted. Suggesting that it concerns itself predominantly with environmentalist issues illustrates either ignorance of the piece or dishonesty on your behalf. You further undermine your argument by implying that a violent nutjob operating independently speaks for activist causes that haven't done shit in the way of murdering people.
Big, loaded words like "terrorist" get thrown around so much thanks to (often incorrectly) implied affiliation/association such as this, and it's why they lose their meaning over time. We'll all have the wolf-crying likes of you to thank for people not giving a damn if and when a genuine threat is imminent.
a complete and holistic set of rules which stretch across diet, fashion, pets, transportation, and commerce; and now more and more, really scary and dangerous zealot foot-soldiers and crusaders.
C'mon yourself. That last bit is a hyperbolic reduction meant to provoke a negative response and justify the whole "religious fanatic" analogy. I'll take it otherwise the day somebody sets off a bomb, tortures someone, or mandates genital mutilation in the name of curbing human-exacerbated global warming.
It's up to the marketing folks to decide which is more beneficial - do that want to go with a name reminiscent of a pedophilic fetish for the nether regions of a sprightly lass, or a flaccid but sizable penis?
As an overnight worker I can not tell you how many times I've had to sit at a red light twice because the sensor didn't want to trigger for just one car - and I know the one time I decide to go on a red arrow there is going to be a cop right around the corner.
So call the appropriate office of your local government and complain until they adjust the sensitivity of the induction loop(s) at each problem intersection. In my experience as a transportation-oriented bicyclist (very subject to bad sensor settings), explaining that the current settings indirectly encourage dangerous and law-breaking behavior will get you results; bitching about the inconvenience of the wait will tend to get you ignored.
What a decidedly non-insightful and rather old hat piece of generalization.
Investment does not equate with value; you also have to figure in return of investment. In the end, the platform that provides the greatest degree of flexibility of the particular tasks the user or admin needs to accomplish and requires the lesser over-all investment wins out. Like all else, things vary in terms of specifics. For certain things, one platform is the right choice; for others, it's another. Anyone suggesting that there are clear-cut universal absolutes in platform choice is full of shit.
This exemplifies what I hate about many open source projects. If you want me to try it, don't make me work for it.
If you're technically inclined enough to be able to wrap your head around the idea of test-driving a completely different desktop GUI on Windows never available before now and feel inclined to do so, you can either do it, or you can be lazy and gripe about how the first release requires following a fairly clear-cut walkthrough explaining exactly what you need to do. If you read through those instruction, the PITA part about the DLLs is only really necessary because Windows doesn't follow the package management paradigm - you've got to go resolve those dependencies yourself. That's not open source's fault by a long shot.
Seriously. First release for a non-*nixy platform. What did you expect?
Seriously, where is the benefit to the web devs to turn on this mode?
Gosh, I don't know, being able to save a fuckton of time and effort by writing code to a known and openly-documented standard *and* being able to have things work fairly reliably almost everywhere without having to poke blindly at shit until it works?:P
This always seems to come up, and I'm bewildered by the fact that it does. Here, once again, is the core issue: IE as it stands right now doesn't suck to write code for just because it doesn't follow a particular set of standards, it sucks because there *isn't* a reliable set of standards to use when coding for it. Writing markup etc. for IE isn't a methodical process, but a series of guess-and-test maneuvers and a lot of F5. There's a degree of this to be expected in generating complicated layouts, but it should be towards the end of the process; doing things for IE, this starts way early in the process. It's a time sink. It's akin to, say, getting a kit for building a shed but there not being any instructions -sure you know what a shed looks like, and the pieces themselves -screws, planks of wood, etc. are known to vaguely work in such-and-such a way, and you put it together mostly on trial-and-error, and as long as it stands up and looks approximately correct, it's done. It's stupid, inefficient, and frustrating.
For a good long while, Microsoft's official solution to the "things render correct in other browsers but not in IE" has been to use conditional comments. While still a bigger pain in the ass than it should be, using conditional comments has allowed a fair deal of flexibility, even with the release of IE7 - specify a separate stylesheet containing styling fixes for IE6 and below, then a stylesheet just for IE7, and then don't worry about it. Doing this saved me from having to commit cryptic, hacky work-arounds to memory and worrying about whether the next iteration of IE has the problem that allows the hack to work in the first place fixed, or just broken differently enough to break the hack. Really, it's the next-best solution to standards compliance, as far as markup and CSS-based styling go.
So: what the fuck's the point of this new meta-tag? If we've been fixing for IE the way they've formally suggested over the past few years, the conditional comments for
The only thing that comes to mind is anything developed exclusively for IE. But beyond some strictly-internal stuff on company intranets and the like, what serious professional has been doing that over the past 3-4 years? It's easier to build to known standards and fix for that one product than it is to build to an unknown mangling of standards.
So the only thing that comes to mind: they're looking to roll this out *fast* and provide an optional as opposed to mandated transition. Hopefully those modes supporting the old busted way of doing things will become deprecated after a few releases. Seriously: who *isn't* looking forward to that day when it gets easier?
now replace "for-profit software giants" with "design-by-committee standards organization" and "stay in business, pay programmers, and make profit" with "stay in charge and not have to get real jobs".
Right. Because the current standards are so flawless and slopping over with intuitiveness that they can't be improved upon, and the needs of developers, content providers, and end users never ever change. If there's anything to love about the web game, it's how it's reliable and rock solid and fantastically static: we can all count on things staying the same, with obvious solutions to all problems already accounted for to pube-thickness precision.
Personally, I like to think of it as a steel industry for the imagination: tons of demand, tons of profit, and stability so profound it gives the guy who came up with the Edsel a run for his money.
It doesn't cost Ubuntu anything (in practical terms) to do that. It does cost Microsoft to do that. Microsoft pays people to work for them. Time absolutely is money.
It absolutely does cost Ubuntu/Canonical, and in very practical terms. The entity controlling the distribution *does* spend money to pay some staff to make it all go, from development to marketing to professionally producing install/live cds to hosting and administration of their central repositories, forums, etc. The "time is money" argument negates the point you're trying to make - they may not pay for *all* of what's getting done, but they do take the time to deal with the folks they're not paying who are contributing to the distro. The fact that they get contributions without directly backing the folks responsible, be they volunteers or people financially compensated for their time by other entities, does not subtract value. The work still gets done.
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Irony alert: you're accusing me of arguing against points that were never made while acting as if I had taken any part in the discussion about XP's installation process. I never said anything about it.
Here is the post to which you replied: http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=617555&cid=24232709. Go back, read it again, and then examine your post in which you clip the tail end of the overview of the install process and start spouting a bunch of horseshit about operating systems reading minds. You are in fact replying to remarks on the install process and as such are taking part in that discussion. Fact is that there was never an implication that either install process mentioned did not involve some degree of configuration by the user, but rather that one centralized a lot of the options and made the short amount of time spent hanging around during the install process at least somewhat useful, vs. the other which involved baby-sitting for multiple hours just to strike enter.
When you finally get the OS installed you have to go into Control Panel to configure it like you want it (standard Windows or new kindergarten Crayon style, should the start menu pop up or cover part of the screen, etc.)
Then you have to install all your applications.
Are you expecting Windows to read your mind and then autoconfigure itself and install all the software you use?
With Linux (with Suse or Mandriva, ymmv on other distros) you insert the first CD, choose how you want it to act in a single screen (LILO or GRUB, KDE or Gnome, etc)
Some of us like to configure our operating systems in very, very specific ways instead of just choosing from a few presets. Unless Linux can read your mind, it's no better than XP.
The point being made is that the Windows XP install process requires input from the user for mere reboots at multiple stages, between some of which there's little to no actual configuration options that have to be set by the user. In other words, "The computer's going to work for a while, and then stop, and so you have to go check on it just to tell it to continue doing what it's doing, and it'll do it a few more times." If you weren't busy stripping away the context of his/her posts for the sake of setting up baseless counter-arguments against points he/she didn't even make, you'd understand this and agree that it's a valid complaint.
For example: I just took 45 minutes today to check out the current range of music players. Sony, Archos, TrekStore, you name it. People, the utter pieces of pure shit folks put out to sale for MP3 players nowadays is un-f*cking-believable. Believe it or not, the iPod line of music players is actually *really* among the top of the line. No replaceable battery and no OGG support be damned. There is not *one* f*cking player where you can see that some CEO with balls and brains actually took a look at the iPod and then simply built a player that was better. Where is the player that supports all formats, has a replaceable battery, better sound processing, is water-resistant and has firmware that just works?
Remaining undeveloped because no company with any sense about them has the balls to challenge the iPod. To unseat it, you'd have to do more than have a cooler and/or more practical feature set - you'd you'd have to establish an immensely popular integrated music manager/online music store, and you'd have to chip away at mindshare. The latter is the hard part: the average fanboi and general consumer alike are going to bristle at anything that *isn't* an iPod. Partly because the iPod is good feature-wise, partly because it's slick, partly because it's a component in an intended integrated system, but also because Apple's marketing encourages a sense of superiority among its userbase. Sure, alright, maybe *you*, random reader, are not at point X between smug and cocky, but that's where Apple wants you to be.
So: you'd not only have to get the product right, but you'd have to blast away something you can't kill with features. Good fucking luck.
Jobs is a lucky man in a lucky position, and he happens to have enough life and business experience not to screw it up.
I'd put it more along the lines of "he's a smart guy who has already had enough experience in screwing up to make fewer mistakes than before", because let's face it, his company's mistakes in the past few years are nowhere near the crippling blunder territory surrounding things like Lisa and Apple III. He now also has the added benefit of having decades of mythology to help obscure or otherwise alter interpretations of his flaws. People joke about his "reality distortion field", but this is pretty much how it works.
I'm sure many of my own subordinates have plotted by demise but I usually pose it to them as follows. I can bring you donuts and call you buddy, or I can whip you into an outstanding worker. Which do you think will look better on you rresume?
That depends. If they fit into the all-whip all-the-time culture, they'll flourish. If not, it'll look worse, because their work will ultimately suffer under the tremendous amounts of stress induced by being left on pins and needles all the time. In this case, it'll look better if they acknowledge the management style wasn't effective and they left for somewhere else where they meshed with the culture better. Assuming they're competent, of course.
We all know the word. We all have an idea of what it means. But is there a legal definition of "terrorism" already? Something that clearly defines what a terrorist is, and under which someone can be charged for being terrorist?
Hey now, what's with the rational talk? 'sides, the war isn't on terrorism, it's the war on *terror*. Shadowy amorphous indistinct horror, dig?
Odd, I've run beta v24 for a good 8 months on the WRT54GL (v1.1 hardware) and have only restarted the router when re-arranging furniture has necessitated unplugging. Are you sure the problem's with the router and not with the network interfaces connecting to it? And you're not, say, blocking the vents on the router, or anything like that which might result in overheating? If it's not either of these, I'd look for any issues with your particular version of the router as there are some minor hardware differences between versions. If there aren't any, maybe you've got a defective unit?
As much as I am not a Windows fan, I have to say I'm glad to see one manager who understands that one of the biggest aspects of their job is keeping their underlings productive and happy. So many times, in so many varying places, I've seen managers equate "management" with "being a boss", with no consideration of the fact that "making things go" includes "giving the employees something to go on beyond not getting fired." Seriously: thank you.
The overall user experience sucks at best. Go ahead and flame me.
Flame you because...what, you're spouting a lot of unfocused hyperbolic blanket statements, or because you're asking to be flamed?
Last week's installs left a lot to be desired. We started with Fedora core 9 and and had all sorts of video and lock up problems. We abandoned it after three days of trying. The install disk wouldn't even run without a resolution parameter.
Without much in the way of context or so much as a mention of why you chose Fedora to begin with, I'm going to believe you had some free time to futz about with random distros and chose Fedora because it's one of the more popular ones. At this point, instead of messing around with these mysterious unsubstantiated video and lock-up issue, why not just try a different one on day one?
We moved to Ubuntu. Much better but Gnome is 5 years behind OS/X (Forget about KDE 4).
Behind OS/X...how? And why the comparison to OS/X in the first place? If you're expecting one thing and you load up something else, it's fairly ridiculous to assert that B sucks because it's not exactly like A. Really, what were you expecting, and more importantly, why?
Sound still is an issue with Sound Blaster but at least we have something much more usable than Fedora.
So it's better but there's still some undefined 'issue' with your sound card. Thanks for letting anyone know what that issue is so they might help you or attempt a fix if it's an over-arching flaw with some aspect of the distro or one of the packages contained therein.
I wish the effort is spent on making installs a breeze. The desktop panels do not span multiple monitors
Awesome! Finally! Look, this is *exactly* what's needed: worthwhile feedback! Now tell people working on Ubuntu what you found challenging about the install process, and also let them know that easy-to-configure association between desktop panels and multiple displays would be a positive boon in your opinion (maybe to the point of suggesting what would, in your opinion, make sense in regards to setting this up).
and the default install still ships with many useless apps.
...and back to unhelpful, non-pointed kvetching. What you mean is useless to you, and yet you don't say what, why, or what would be more useful for these unstated purposes of selecting a Linux-based desktop-centric distro in the first place. But say, maybe you're just not seasoned. Maybe you don't know how to talk about stuff and your frustration is rooted in that.
We use Linux for all of our production JBOSS servers and it has been absolutely wonderful. One day (I hope) the user experience will be as good. Windows and Mac OS/X have nothing to fear on the desktop for now.
On second thought, looks like you've got some idea of what you're doing.
Really: li'l help? Seriously, I get your frustration, and you're allowed to complain, but for cryin' out loud, *be specific* so that your complaints are useful and not easily taken as cranky bitching. After all, these things don't fix themselves.
How would they know if the user interface makes no distinction?
A visual distinction imparts little to no knowledge without context. If the end user doesn't understand what an executable is, the user interface making a distinction becomes meaningless. "There's a red ring around these pictures that launch my word processor, image editor, and web browser. Those all do different things. How are they similar? What gives?" is a more likely reaction.
If it turns out to have anti-competitive effects, then the government can punish Microsoft for it. Everyone may say that would be too little, too late, but preemptive strikes are un-American. (And besides, we can always break MS up if it keeps pushing out monopolistic products.)
And a fine "wokka-wokka" at the overloading of "preemptive strike". And the joke about the telecom industry. And so on and so on and so on. ;P
Seriously though. With Ballmer's at the helm after his statements over the past few years, what other direction is Microsoft heading in *but* behaving in anti-competitive ways? And how awesome *would* it be to see them shift their focus away from competition and towards real honest-to-goodness innovation? Pardon me, but I've just got this strange notion that some folks there may have, you know, been hired on the merits of their programming chops rather than their ability to rim the living daylights out of a few upper-management wackos...
Yes, I'd prefer an inside job to restructure the company, but Ozzie's dropped into his shell since coming on board. What else is going to fucking do it?
While we're on the topic, someone with a clue should point us to literature about interpreting there clues, I for one could use that, as I'm trying to determine whether the cute Irish cashier in the deli I go to makes such large smiles because she's on Prozac or because she thinks I'm cute.
Third possibility: it's friendly, professional customer service. Doesn't always have to be about sex and drugs, you know.
I don't understand the specifics of your OpenOffice example. To move a selection to a new location on a spreadsheet, you make your selection, then click the selection and drag it to the desired location. While the behavior may not be the same as in MS Office, it's not as though this is a completely counter-intuitive aspect of the interface; indeed, it probably makes more sense to click on the selection and drag to move it than the grab the edge. What am I missing about your example?
I ask because I largely agree: investing time to learn a different interface for the sake of difference alone is a bit hard to justify. Unless I'm missing something here, I'd guess you could use a better example. But your overall point is spot-on.
According to the same Wikipedia article, Kacynski killed 3 people, and wounded 23. What's a guy got to do to get the quote-marks removed from the word "terrorist?"
Kaczynski was a terrorist, no question. I wouldn't argue that someone who has killed people or destroyed property in the name of a particular ideology is not a terrorist. What I was referring to were the following words:
After reading up on that, take a moment to observe that many of the terrorist groups, and activities, in the US are related to environmentalist groups.
That's about as sound a statement as saying that right-wing Christian groups are terrorist groups because a few imbalanced, literally militant pro-lifers decided to bomb abortions clinics; it doesn't add up.
This has already happened. Remember the uni-bomber? In all, the guys writings were right in there with main stream environmentalism. After reading up on that, take a moment to observe that many of the terrorist groups, and activities, in the US are related to environmentalist groups.
I am not saying that they are wrong; but, to deny that they exist is just plain dishonest.
Industrial Society and Its Future, the Unabomber's infamous manifesto, is one man's screed on how he believes technology will eventually result in the loss of basic freedoms long taken for granted. Suggesting that it concerns itself predominantly with environmentalist issues illustrates either ignorance of the piece or dishonesty on your behalf. You further undermine your argument by implying that a violent nutjob operating independently speaks for activist causes that haven't done shit in the way of murdering people.
Big, loaded words like "terrorist" get thrown around so much thanks to (often incorrectly) implied affiliation/association such as this, and it's why they lose their meaning over time. We'll all have the wolf-crying likes of you to thank for people not giving a damn if and when a genuine threat is imminent.
a complete and holistic set of rules which stretch across diet, fashion, pets, transportation, and commerce; and now more and more, really scary and dangerous zealot foot-soldiers and crusaders.
C'mon yourself. That last bit is a hyperbolic reduction meant to provoke a negative response and justify the whole "religious fanatic" analogy. I'll take it otherwise the day somebody sets off a bomb, tortures someone, or mandates genital mutilation in the name of curbing human-exacerbated global warming.
Is it called MicroHoo or YaSoft?
It's up to the marketing folks to decide which is more beneficial - do that want to go with a name reminiscent of a pedophilic fetish for the nether regions of a sprightly lass, or a flaccid but sizable penis?
As an overnight worker I can not tell you how many times I've had to sit at a red light twice because the sensor didn't want to trigger for just one car - and I know the one time I decide to go on a red arrow there is going to be a cop right around the corner.
So call the appropriate office of your local government and complain until they adjust the sensitivity of the induction loop(s) at each problem intersection. In my experience as a transportation-oriented bicyclist (very subject to bad sensor settings), explaining that the current settings indirectly encourage dangerous and law-breaking behavior will get you results; bitching about the inconvenience of the wait will tend to get you ignored.
Linux is only cheaper if your time is worthless.
What a decidedly non-insightful and rather old hat piece of generalization.
Investment does not equate with value; you also have to figure in return of investment. In the end, the platform that provides the greatest degree of flexibility of the particular tasks the user or admin needs to accomplish and requires the lesser over-all investment wins out. Like all else, things vary in terms of specifics. For certain things, one platform is the right choice; for others, it's another. Anyone suggesting that there are clear-cut universal absolutes in platform choice is full of shit.
This exemplifies what I hate about many open source projects. If you want me to try it, don't make me work for it.
If you're technically inclined enough to be able to wrap your head around the idea of test-driving a completely different desktop GUI on Windows never available before now and feel inclined to do so, you can either do it, or you can be lazy and gripe about how the first release requires following a fairly clear-cut walkthrough explaining exactly what you need to do. If you read through those instruction, the PITA part about the DLLs is only really necessary because Windows doesn't follow the package management paradigm - you've got to go resolve those dependencies yourself. That's not open source's fault by a long shot.
Seriously. First release for a non-*nixy platform. What did you expect?
No sir, for you see, my shed was built from meticulously detailed blueprints. But try the neighbors. I hear tell theirs is a real shit--OW!
Seriously, where is the benefit to the web devs to turn on this mode?
Gosh, I don't know, being able to save a fuckton of time and effort by writing code to a known and openly-documented standard *and* being able to have things work fairly reliably almost everywhere without having to poke blindly at shit until it works? :P
This always seems to come up, and I'm bewildered by the fact that it does. Here, once again, is the core issue: IE as it stands right now doesn't suck to write code for just because it doesn't follow a particular set of standards, it sucks because there *isn't* a reliable set of standards to use when coding for it. Writing markup etc. for IE isn't a methodical process, but a series of guess-and-test maneuvers and a lot of F5. There's a degree of this to be expected in generating complicated layouts, but it should be towards the end of the process; doing things for IE, this starts way early in the process. It's a time sink. It's akin to, say, getting a kit for building a shed but there not being any instructions -sure you know what a shed looks like, and the pieces themselves -screws, planks of wood, etc. are known to vaguely work in such-and-such a way, and you put it together mostly on trial-and-error, and as long as it stands up and looks approximately correct, it's done. It's stupid, inefficient, and frustrating.
For a good long while, Microsoft's official solution to the "things render correct in other browsers but not in IE" has been to use conditional comments. While still a bigger pain in the ass than it should be, using conditional comments has allowed a fair deal of flexibility, even with the release of IE7 - specify a separate stylesheet containing styling fixes for IE6 and below, then a stylesheet just for IE7, and then don't worry about it. Doing this saved me from having to commit cryptic, hacky work-arounds to memory and worrying about whether the next iteration of IE has the problem that allows the hack to work in the first place fixed, or just broken differently enough to break the hack. Really, it's the next-best solution to standards compliance, as far as markup and CSS-based styling go.
So: what the fuck's the point of this new meta-tag? If we've been fixing for IE the way they've formally suggested over the past few years, the conditional comments for
The only thing that comes to mind is anything developed exclusively for IE. But beyond some strictly-internal stuff on company intranets and the like, what serious professional has been doing that over the past 3-4 years? It's easier to build to known standards and fix for that one product than it is to build to an unknown mangling of standards.
So the only thing that comes to mind: they're looking to roll this out *fast* and provide an optional as opposed to mandated transition. Hopefully those modes supporting the old busted way of doing things will become deprecated after a few releases. Seriously: who *isn't* looking forward to that day when it gets easier?
now replace "for-profit software giants" with "design-by-committee standards organization" and "stay in business, pay programmers, and make profit" with "stay in charge and not have to get real jobs".
Right. Because the current standards are so flawless and slopping over with intuitiveness that they can't be improved upon, and the needs of developers, content providers, and end users never ever change. If there's anything to love about the web game, it's how it's reliable and rock solid and fantastically static: we can all count on things staying the same, with obvious solutions to all problems already accounted for to pube-thickness precision.
Personally, I like to think of it as a steel industry for the imagination: tons of demand, tons of profit, and stability so profound it gives the guy who came up with the Edsel a run for his money.
It doesn't cost Ubuntu anything (in practical terms) to do that. It does cost Microsoft to do that. Microsoft pays people to work for them. Time absolutely is money.
It absolutely does cost Ubuntu/Canonical, and in very practical terms. The entity controlling the distribution *does* spend money to pay some staff to make it all go, from development to marketing to professionally producing install/live cds to hosting and administration of their central repositories, forums, etc. The "time is money" argument negates the point you're trying to make - they may not pay for *all* of what's getting done, but they do take the time to deal with the folks they're not paying who are contributing to the distro. The fact that they get contributions without directly backing the folks responsible, be they volunteers or people financially compensated for their time by other entities, does not subtract value. The work still gets done.
Find some other examples if you want to prove how stupid and uncreative Americans are.
Or better still, don't believe anybody's bullshit associating nationality with particular types of knowledge or skills.