1) This headline is pretty much the opposite of what you're saying... how is saying that Silverlight has yet to attract a following pro-Microsoft exactly? It sounds anti-Microsoft to me.
2) Editors choose the stories, idiot. For all you know, inbetween those (chosen) pro-Microsoft stories are 500 (rejected) anti-Microsoft stories. It's not like ericatcw can control which of his submissions get published on the site.
5) Flash has ExternalInterface which provides 100% seamless interaction between Flash and JavaScript, and is hardly "heavy".
I can't comment on the rest of your post, because I don't have enough experience with Silverlight, but this part of it I have worked on, and let me tell you that Silverlight is better than the current Flash solution.
Silverlight media resides in a DOM that is 100% accessible by from the web page's DOM. And it works the other way, as well... the page DOM is accessible from Silverlight code. It's a brilliant and simple solution, and it's a lot better than Adobe's equivalent.
I know nobody's going to admit it on Slashdot, but Silverlight is plain better than Flash. And even if you don't agree, you have to agree that it's about goddamned time that someone competed with Flash, since it sucks in many, many ways. Competition will make Flash better, even if you never even think about using Silverlight.
The UI is the "public face" of the operating system. That one billion users world-wide have settled on the Windows GUI with minimal customization ought to tell him something.
And the OS most celebrated for the quality of its GUI is OS X, which has barely any customization options compared to Windows or anything else. You're exactly right, and I hope that someday the open source community will all collectively read "Don't Make Me Think" or some other good text on usability and take the lessons to heart.
I'm still waiting for outlook to pop up with a "You got your latest installement of pr0n" email over a powerpoint presentation. I don't know how the h*ll people get anything done with the constant annoying whining that windows does about *everything* it does.
It took them awhile, but (the vast majority) of Windows developers have finally seen the light on that issue, I think. At least, I don't notice many more pointless dialogs on my Windows computer than on my Macintosh-- except, ironically perhaps, in Open Source products. Pidgin, for instance, is constantly annoying me with dialogs for stupid things like "can't reconnect to server". (Is it really so difficult to put an icon in the UI to communicate that and let me click to reconnect? Look to Live Messenger for an example of how this could work.)
Of course, there will always be *some* software on Windows with terrible UIs, just like even OS. (Remember, even the sublime MacOS GUI had that horrible "Font/DA Manager" in its golden age.) But there's not much Microsoft or Apple can do about that, except education and setting a good example.
Here's one area where Linux's development paradigm is actually superior, and yet open source programs generally have worse UIs than closed-source programs on Windows or OS X. Go figure.
Yes, but you're also posting on Slashdot. Which puts you way out of the norm... people here don't go out and see movies because they're too busy raiding with their Warcraft guild, or spending 40 hours over the weekend writing a webcam driver for FreeBSD.
This study doesn't take you into account; you're way out of the average.
For the record, yes, there were good films in 2007, and lots of people went to theaters, paying the ridiculous (in your opinion) prices. I would bet a large portion of the reading audience here, in fact, went to see Cloverfield alone, which means you might be out of the norm even for Slashdot.
If they actually lost money when I downloaded a movie, I can honestly say that I would keep azureus going all day, every day, downloading every movie I could get my hands on. Twice. I hate those money grubbing, lying, cheating scumbags so much.
Hi, could we stop posting this same goddamned post every single goddamned time there's a story about the MPAA or RIAA?
Obviously, whether or not you consider most popular films (or music) "good" or not, millions of people do-- otherwise there wouldn't be popular! Der.
Of course, the whole reason you're posting this is, as a Slashdot hipster, you're required by contract to hate everything that the average American likes. Make sure you also go into Games posts and rant about how shitty Halo and Madden are. Oh, and while you're at it, go ahead and make a post in the Apple section about how OS X users are so hip and cool compared to Windows users.
Or do everyone a favor and don't fucking post until you have an original thought. How about that?
Haha, I was gonna say. 1929 is the oldest they could find? Pneumatics (this same concept, minus the electric motor) go back to the mid 19th century; I think London had one in place for mail delivery by 1870, IIRC.
I'm against Clinton because she's been very vocal about government censorship of video games.
Look at her husband's V-chip legislation. Have you ever been to a house with the V-chip activated? And yet every single person in the US pays more for their living room TV because the government decided to tell you you have no choice in the matter. (Don't get me wrong; I'm all for television networks being required to send the V-chip signal down the wire. But requiring the chip itself to be in every TV is just pointless, let people choose which TV features to buy.)
I see the video game thing as the same, but more so. It's especially harsh considering that the video game industry is already doing a pretty damned good job of regulating itself-- "The Passions Of The Christ", basically a full-length snuff film, was rated R while "While Rider", an inspirational family-friendly movie for pre-teens was rated PG-13. The MPAA makes two boners with GTA and Oblivion, and suddenly the government needs to take over? Christ, I can't stand that sort of meddling.
No matter what Microsoft does, they just make things worse.
Ok; you're Microsoft. You're working on a new version of IE that's capable of both standards mode, and capable of rendering all existing pages designed for IE 5/6 in a compatible way... how do you solve the problem?
It's really easy to say something like "no matter what they do, they make things worse" without actually coming up with a solution yourself. I don't mind the anti-Microsoft rants on this site, as long as they're at least vaguely rational and have a little bit of thinking behind them... I'd like to hear how this plan is "making things worse" more-so than the other. I'd also like to hear what you think Microsoft could do to "make things better."
Do you know why Lotus 1-2-3 lost out to Excel? Because while Lotus was busy adding in all kinds of advanced mathematical and financial functions, alternate layouts, and basically tons of things for the super-advanced Lotus user, Microsoft decided to go a different route and actually ask people what they used Excel for.
The answer? People used Excel for making lists. So instead of adding all the difficult, prone to bugginess, and hard-to-user features that Lotus was working on, Excel added features to make creating lists easier. Autofill, for instance, and Auto-Format.
Because Microsoft learned this lesson, people use Excel every day (both for lists, and the advanced stuff 1-2-3 was doing), and Lotus 1-2-3 is in the history books.
The instant the open source community figures out that THE USER IS KING, the sooner open source will become popular with the general public.
1) A usability problem is a bug. Period. 2) It doesn't matter whether a user is using your program for the "right" purpose (doing large complex spreadsheet), or for the "wrong" purpose (creating lists, as a mini-database), it should work for them. I can't tell you how many times I've asked "what's why can't open source product A do X?" only to get the reply "you shouldn't be doing X." (Most recently, when I asked about a open source alternative to Microsoft Project.)
There's a long way to go. That Inkscape bug (the SourceForge "artifact" has been made private, whatever the fuck an "artifact" is) is a good example of a huge "wow this computer's stupid" bug that has been around for ages.
Don't tell people that something is supported if it's not 100% supported. For example, if Ubuntu doesn't support the wireless card in some model of laptop (like my 14" iBook), remove that model from your supported list. Or if Ubuntu doesn't support sleep mode (like my 14" iBook), remove that from the list.
All of my bad Linux experiences have been from Linux/open source projects that claimed to support X, but didn't actually support X.
but I was curious to see if Vista would finally fix the spyware situation for MS.
What do you want Microsoft to do? Make it impossible to install any software whatsoever?
Spyware installations *require user approval*, in Vista as they do in XP... like all software installs. The problem here is that users like your neighbor are hitting "yes". No amount of software can solve a social problem. Period.
there has not been one single self-replicating in-the-wild virus for Mac OS X in the (checks Wikipedia) seven years it has been out. Not one. Ever. Period. *
When was the last one for Windows? Code Red in 2001 is the last one I remember, but that only affects Windows installs with IIS running.
Bill Gates said that spam would be solved by 2006.
I use a decent webmail service, so spam was "solved" for me by 2006.
Vista runs Windows XP drivers, it just gripes at you a lot when you install them. My USB wifi network adapter has only XP drivers, and I've been using it successfully on Vista for months.
I very much doubt that Google are paying new grads $110K+.
Google's, where, San Jose/San Fran area?
$110k there barely buys ramen for dinner. The average home price is somewhere around $600k, and my buddy who lives there tells me that that cost of living difference isn't just in one area, but all the way down to the pound of hamburger he buys at the grocery store.
Can it cope with that shitty DICE ad that shoots my CPU usage up to 100% and no doubt drain the hell out of my battery life?
Slashdot: Seriously, PLEASE give HALF A SHIT about the quality of your site, and pull that fucking ad, it's pissing me off and it's been in rotation for MONTHS!
And if someone reading this works at DICE, please shoot your Flash developer immediately.
I don't block ads generally (being in an company that benefits from web advertising), but I've never been SO tempted before to block an ad server.
IIRC, Netscape basically unilaterally decided to implement Javascript and IE was basically stuck reverse-engineering it before the standards were published/released. I think Microsoft gets a lot of blame for stuff they, frankly, shouldn't. Mostly their "crimes" consist of: 1) Implementing standards too early, when the standards are vague or incorrect 2) Maintaining backwards compatibility with themselves
Slashdot Mirror
This is stupid for two reasons:
1) This headline is pretty much the opposite of what you're saying... how is saying that Silverlight has yet to attract a following pro-Microsoft exactly? It sounds anti-Microsoft to me.
2) Editors choose the stories, idiot. For all you know, inbetween those (chosen) pro-Microsoft stories are 500 (rejected) anti-Microsoft stories. It's not like ericatcw can control which of his submissions get published on the site.
5) Flash has ExternalInterface which provides 100% seamless interaction between Flash and JavaScript, and is hardly "heavy".
I can't comment on the rest of your post, because I don't have enough experience with Silverlight, but this part of it I have worked on, and let me tell you that Silverlight is better than the current Flash solution.
Silverlight media resides in a DOM that is 100% accessible by from the web page's DOM. And it works the other way, as well... the page DOM is accessible from Silverlight code. It's a brilliant and simple solution, and it's a lot better than Adobe's equivalent.
I know nobody's going to admit it on Slashdot, but Silverlight is plain better than Flash. And even if you don't agree, you have to agree that it's about goddamned time that someone competed with Flash, since it sucks in many, many ways. Competition will make Flash better, even if you never even think about using Silverlight.
The UI is the "public face" of the operating system. That one billion users world-wide have settled on the Windows GUI with minimal customization ought to tell him something.
And the OS most celebrated for the quality of its GUI is OS X, which has barely any customization options compared to Windows or anything else. You're exactly right, and I hope that someday the open source community will all collectively read "Don't Make Me Think" or some other good text on usability and take the lessons to heart.
Not holding my breath though.
I'm still waiting for outlook to pop up with a "You got your latest installement of pr0n" email over a powerpoint presentation. I don't know how the h*ll people get anything done with the constant annoying whining that windows does about *everything* it does.
It took them awhile, but (the vast majority) of Windows developers have finally seen the light on that issue, I think. At least, I don't notice many more pointless dialogs on my Windows computer than on my Macintosh-- except, ironically perhaps, in Open Source products. Pidgin, for instance, is constantly annoying me with dialogs for stupid things like "can't reconnect to server". (Is it really so difficult to put an icon in the UI to communicate that and let me click to reconnect? Look to Live Messenger for an example of how this could work.)
Of course, there will always be *some* software on Windows with terrible UIs, just like even OS. (Remember, even the sublime MacOS GUI had that horrible "Font/DA Manager" in its golden age.) But there's not much Microsoft or Apple can do about that, except education and setting a good example.
Here's one area where Linux's development paradigm is actually superior, and yet open source programs generally have worse UIs than closed-source programs on Windows or OS X. Go figure.
Yes, but you're also posting on Slashdot. Which puts you way out of the norm... people here don't go out and see movies because they're too busy raiding with their Warcraft guild, or spending 40 hours over the weekend writing a webcam driver for FreeBSD.
This study doesn't take you into account; you're way out of the average.
For the record, yes, there were good films in 2007, and lots of people went to theaters, paying the ridiculous (in your opinion) prices. I would bet a large portion of the reading audience here, in fact, went to see Cloverfield alone, which means you might be out of the norm even for Slashdot.
If they actually lost money when I downloaded a movie, I can honestly say that I would keep azureus going all day, every day, downloading every movie I could get my hands on. Twice. I hate those money grubbing, lying, cheating scumbags so much.
Don't hold back, tell us how you really feel.
Hi, could we stop posting this same goddamned post every single goddamned time there's a story about the MPAA or RIAA?
Obviously, whether or not you consider most popular films (or music) "good" or not, millions of people do-- otherwise there wouldn't be popular! Der.
Of course, the whole reason you're posting this is, as a Slashdot hipster, you're required by contract to hate everything that the average American likes. Make sure you also go into Games posts and rant about how shitty Halo and Madden are. Oh, and while you're at it, go ahead and make a post in the Apple section about how OS X users are so hip and cool compared to Windows users.
Or do everyone a favor and don't fucking post until you have an original thought. How about that?
Haha, I was gonna say. 1929 is the oldest they could find? Pneumatics (this same concept, minus the electric motor) go back to the mid 19th century; I think London had one in place for mail delivery by 1870, IIRC.
I'd love to see a Randian country come into being. It'd be like Cambodia in less than a week.
Liberia is pretty close.
Ugh, totally brain-farted that last paragraph.
The MPAA is the organization totally screwing up ratings, the ESRB is doing pretty good-- the only exceptions being GTA and Oblivion.
I'm against Clinton because she's been very vocal about government censorship of video games.
Look at her husband's V-chip legislation. Have you ever been to a house with the V-chip activated? And yet every single person in the US pays more for their living room TV because the government decided to tell you you have no choice in the matter. (Don't get me wrong; I'm all for television networks being required to send the V-chip signal down the wire. But requiring the chip itself to be in every TV is just pointless, let people choose which TV features to buy.)
I see the video game thing as the same, but more so. It's especially harsh considering that the video game industry is already doing a pretty damned good job of regulating itself-- "The Passions Of The Christ", basically a full-length snuff film, was rated R while "While Rider", an inspirational family-friendly movie for pre-teens was rated PG-13. The MPAA makes two boners with GTA and Oblivion, and suddenly the government needs to take over? Christ, I can't stand that sort of meddling.
No matter what Microsoft does, they just make things worse.
Ok; you're Microsoft. You're working on a new version of IE that's capable of both standards mode, and capable of rendering all existing pages designed for IE 5/6 in a compatible way... how do you solve the problem?
It's really easy to say something like "no matter what they do, they make things worse" without actually coming up with a solution yourself. I don't mind the anti-Microsoft rants on this site, as long as they're at least vaguely rational and have a little bit of thinking behind them... I'd like to hear how this plan is "making things worse" more-so than the other. I'd also like to hear what you think Microsoft could do to "make things better."
Congratulations, you've just re-invented the Tablet PC.
I thought they were did. Everyone I know who carried a Swiss Army Knife has moved on to Leatherman tools by now... maybe you're just old-fashioned? :)
Hell, just enjoy the cinematography. It has some truly incredible continuous-shot scenes, regardless of what you think of the rest of the movie.
Firstly, these exceptions are narrow and not relevant to this discussion, bringing them up is immature pedantry.
Without immature pedantry, every Slashdot story would have, at most, 5 posts.
No it didn't. The problem never existed no Mac OS Classic, and never existed on Mac OS X and so it could hardly be called "solved."
I just "solved" the problem of all the world's chickens turning into butterflies, I should get credit for that too, right?
No, you can't change people with software.
Do you know why Lotus 1-2-3 lost out to Excel? Because while Lotus was busy adding in all kinds of advanced mathematical and financial functions, alternate layouts, and basically tons of things for the super-advanced Lotus user, Microsoft decided to go a different route and actually ask people what they used Excel for.
The answer? People used Excel for making lists. So instead of adding all the difficult, prone to bugginess, and hard-to-user features that Lotus was working on, Excel added features to make creating lists easier. Autofill, for instance, and Auto-Format.
Because Microsoft learned this lesson, people use Excel every day (both for lists, and the advanced stuff 1-2-3 was doing), and Lotus 1-2-3 is in the history books.
The instant the open source community figures out that THE USER IS KING, the sooner open source will become popular with the general public.
1) A usability problem is a bug. Period.
2) It doesn't matter whether a user is using your program for the "right" purpose (doing large complex spreadsheet), or for the "wrong" purpose (creating lists, as a mini-database), it should work for them. I can't tell you how many times I've asked "what's why can't open source product A do X?" only to get the reply "you shouldn't be doing X." (Most recently, when I asked about a open source alternative to Microsoft Project.)
Since I'm on the topic, here are some recent usability bugs I've entered for a couple open source projects, all of which have been completely ignored:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1865630&group_id=95717&atid=612382
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1865624&group_id=95717&atid=612382
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=391461
There's a long way to go. That Inkscape bug (the SourceForge "artifact" has been made private, whatever the fuck an "artifact" is) is a good example of a huge "wow this computer's stupid" bug that has been around for ages.
http://schend.net/images/screenshots/alphabetical_disorder.png
Cheers.
Category three users are much more likely to report n00b questions than actual bugs/missing features.
What makes you think there's any difference between the two?
If someone says "I can't figure out how to work MySpace," that sounds like either a bug or missing feature to me.
My idea is pretty simple.
Don't tell people that something is supported if it's not 100% supported. For example, if Ubuntu doesn't support the wireless card in some model of laptop (like my 14" iBook), remove that model from your supported list. Or if Ubuntu doesn't support sleep mode (like my 14" iBook), remove that from the list.
All of my bad Linux experiences have been from Linux/open source projects that claimed to support X, but didn't actually support X.
but I was curious to see if Vista would finally fix the spyware situation for MS.
What do you want Microsoft to do? Make it impossible to install any software whatsoever?
Spyware installations *require user approval*, in Vista as they do in XP... like all software installs. The problem here is that users like your neighbor are hitting "yes". No amount of software can solve a social problem. Period.
there has not been one single self-replicating in-the-wild virus for Mac OS X in the (checks Wikipedia) seven years it has been out. Not one. Ever. Period. *
When was the last one for Windows? Code Red in 2001 is the last one I remember, but that only affects Windows installs with IIS running.
Bill Gates said that spam would be solved by 2006.
I use a decent webmail service, so spam was "solved" for me by 2006.
Vista runs Windows XP drivers, it just gripes at you a lot when you install them. My USB wifi network adapter has only XP drivers, and I've been using it successfully on Vista for months.
I very much doubt that Google are paying new grads $110K+.
Google's, where, San Jose/San Fran area?
$110k there barely buys ramen for dinner. The average home price is somewhere around $600k, and my buddy who lives there tells me that that cost of living difference isn't just in one area, but all the way down to the pound of hamburger he buys at the grocery store.
Can it cope with that shitty DICE ad that shoots my CPU usage up to 100% and no doubt drain the hell out of my battery life?
Slashdot: Seriously, PLEASE give HALF A SHIT about the quality of your site, and pull that fucking ad, it's pissing me off and it's been in rotation for MONTHS!
And if someone reading this works at DICE, please shoot your Flash developer immediately.
I don't block ads generally (being in an company that benefits from web advertising), but I've never been SO tempted before to block an ad server.
IIRC, Netscape basically unilaterally decided to implement Javascript and IE was basically stuck reverse-engineering it before the standards were published/released. I think Microsoft gets a lot of blame for stuff they, frankly, shouldn't. Mostly their "crimes" consist of:
1) Implementing standards too early, when the standards are vague or incorrect
2) Maintaining backwards compatibility with themselves