However, they shouldn't get undeserved praise for correcting something that was a bad decision in the first place and was undermining their own platform.
halo
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The second Seinfeld and Gates Microsoft ad
(youtube.com)
cached 19 days ago
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cached about 1 month ago
Good.
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cached 15 days ago
No. That's missing the point. It's got to stop. Social features are great for some things. Social features are not great if you shoe-horn them in a totally inappropriate way that doesn't add value. Life is better for me and the vast majority of its users if FireFox doesn't add pointless social features that I won't use anyway. I don't want to see people's ratings for sites, see grouped recommendations or communicate with other FireFox users. The people who do want this functionality can install extensions, and those extensions largely already exist. Besides, this may mean I need to rewrite Halo's Law ("Every site expands until it becomes a social network, those that don't are replaced by those that do"). |
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cached about 1 month ago
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cached 29 days ago
A few miscellanea you may have missed:
* JavaScript is lightning fast. 3x faster than FireFox 3 on the Dromaeo test suite. * JavaScript compatibility isn't 100%. Fails in RaphaelJS, apparently Facebook and probably more. I'm unsure why. * The download bar is interesting and different. Opens a bar at the bottom, defaults to Downloads in My Documents. Can drag elsewhere when done. * It includes sleek a Firebug-esque tag inspector. Right click and inspect element. * Scrolling up doesn't work on my trackpad. Middle clicking and scrolling up/down doesn't work. I hope this is fixed soon * The drop-down search bar is neat. Press Ctrl+F to open it. It doesn't work in textareas. * You can hide the bookmarks bar via Ctrl+B. * You can drag tabs in and out of the window to form new windows. There's also a lovely animation when you move tabs around. * There's a task manager for Chrome alone - right click on the main bar and click task manager. 'Stats for nerds' for more info which takes you to about:memory - also shows you memory usage for IE and Opera. * You can add keywords in the search bar by going to Options, Manage and changing the default keyword. * Passes Acid2 test. On Acid3, gets a respectable 78/100 on the JS tests, but has a few rendering bugs and linktest failed. Both tests are currently getting hammered - I'm not sure whether this changes the result for the latter. * You can resize textareas using the bottom-right hand corner * It includes a spell checker. You can't seem to add new words to it though. * It supports other search engines other than Google out of the box. It asked me what default to use on startup. It imported my info from FireFox. * On clicking a link it only changes the status bar to indicate you've done so - other browsers make it more obvious. * Source is available at http://dev.chromium.org/ - seems to be largely BSD licensed. I haven't downloaded it as it's almost 500mb. |
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cached 16 days ago
This sort of post is one of the great failures in social news sites. 7 upvotes, 13th on the front page, zero interesting content. The cause is the plague of feel-good "me too"-ism, groupthink and lowest-common-denominator-ism that causes people to upvote things uncritically and eventually leads to the mass-upvoting of poor articles and comments (especially the immortal "[pic]", agreeable question/'vote up if' or 'hilarious' YouTube video) over good more thought-provoking, challenging and nuanced ones. I think it's a big flaw in the concept of social news sites ala Hacker News, Reddit and Digg.
Relevant to the topic, I've been moving towards MetaFilter lately as it doesn't suffer from this problem as much due to the design of the site, has the bonus of hand-moderation and the $5 entrance fee is a surprisingly good way of limiting membership. The flip side of this is that the content is a very mixed bag in terms of submission quality and topic due to the hugely different styles and interests of submitters - even more so than other social news sites. The comments there are often unparalleled in terms of quality, however, and Ask MeFi is an invaluable resource. I poked around with Planets (blog aggregators on one topic) for a while but the amount of content is generally overbearing to make it impractical to read them for any great length of time. I'm slowly but surely warming to the idea that old-style blogs that link to the other content may be a good idea but the question is finding a good ones that are regularly updated, whose moderation you can trust and whose interests align with yours. I do read Boing Boing, Ajaxian and Engadget who follow this format, but I think Slashdot has suffered from it over time by deviating from its core subject matter, has become a caricature of itself especially with regards to its biases and suffered from dumbing down over time. Of course, it's still an open problem as to where they get their content from and how they filter the good from the bad. Perhaps the conclusion is that the whole concept of a link-driven news site is still largely an open problem - and I'm certainly not sure what the solution is. |
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cached about 1 month ago
I apologise in advance as this is probably quite a controversial rant, but this sort of thing has always really frustrated me.
I guess it comes down to this: I don't see how sex matters when you're a business person, when you're programming, when you're building things. The sex of the person rightfully shouldn't come into it - it's their skills that matter. The interpreter, afterall, doesn't spit out a different result depending the sex of the coder - a computer is ultimately a great leveller. It has been a long fought battle to try and gain equality between the sexes and I firmly believe society is increasingly heading towards that goal. And then when I read things like this it feels like a punch-in-the-face, as though it's saying "equality doesn't matter when it helps women". Or, even worse, there's perhaps an implication that women /need/ the help of other women to succeed and deserve special treatment. Or should I get ideas that there is some sort of conspiracy to form the inverse to the stereotype sexist "men's-only club" boardroom and there's some sort of attempt to reverse that through a "women's-only club". I loathe all these implications. I've often wondered about this curious double-standard. There's previously been women-only discussions by Google in Computer Science at my University, but I bet there isn't men-only discussions in the psychology department, languages or other women-dominated social sciences and I think they'd be highly controversial if they did. Often an eyelid isn't blinked when someone offers something exclusively for women, but there'd rightly be uproar if someone offered it for men-only. I often wonder if the fact that men do significantly worse than women in exams (and as such University admissions) in this country would be quite such a footnote if the shoe was on the other foot. |
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cached about 1 month ago
Non-Scribd link: http://www.deer-run.com/~hal/UnixCommandLineKungFu.pdf
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cached 18 days ago
I've been thinking about it lately and I've decided the problem isn't inherently DRM itself. The problem is that when companies use DRM without giving back and, in particular, use horrible invasive DRM that is a pain for the genuine customer.
Case in point: Steam. Steam is basically one big DRM wrapper that also prevents resale. However, one key difference is that it offers multiple advantages to users in the form of unlimited redownloads, community features, not requiring a CD, no DRM driver ugliness, banning hackers in multiplayer games, works as a decent launcher and also has an extremely convenient online marketplace. The end result is that it has been given a much warmer reception than the typical DRM scheme - people are willing to give up some of their rights in exchange for the added convenience which is a much fairer trade. I'm not saying Steam is perfect but it seems like the direction companies like EA should be going. |
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cached 17 days ago
Having checked the T&Cs, this is US only
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